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Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

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Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#211

Post by fransje26 »

kubb wrote: post #105
beloch wrote: post #94

If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data. Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens. It's a bit…

You could take your analogy further, and consider why the Swiss banking isn’t so opaque anymore. Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.

> Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.

That's a nice re-write of history.

What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#212

Post by MichaelZuo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #179
aembleton wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones? HarmonyOS

Something with ~0% market share outside of China and which trades the US having root for China having root is not a viable alternative. In theory you could have something produced by a country other countries might be willing to trust, but the number of countries that are both trustworthy and large enough to sustain a globally-viable platform is practically the empty set at this point. Which means the thing it calls…

This doesn’t sound well reasoned.

If the USA were to ever weaken into irrelevance then yes messing with foreign HarmonyOS users might have some possibility that can’t be easily dismissed.

As long as the USA doesn’t become completely toothless then the incentives would point in the opposite… as long as Huawei behave scrupulously they are nearly guaranteed to win and dethrone the incumbents for most of the world.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#213

Post by poetaster »

EdiX wrote: post #55

We've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen. After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital soverei…

A museum country like Germany manages to have a larger automitive manufacturer than Ford.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#214

Post by postsantum »

Havoc wrote: post #143
EdiX wrote: post #55

We've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen. After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital soverei…

I don’t think that trust is coming back with a simple president swap.

People still refusing to notice policies don't really change with presidents

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#215

Post by danaris »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #160
pjc50 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff. Yes, this results in enshittification.

The thing that results in enshittification is market consolidation. Notice that Comcast sucks whereas there aren't a lot of complaints about Big Shampoo because that's a fairly competitive market. If the government needs trucks then they should just buy trucks, not build a factory to make trucks and then another factory to make lead acid batteries for the trucks and then start mining lead to make the batteries etc. A…

There's a big difference between physical products, which, once the government has them, it can just use them, and digital infrastructure, which has a number of issues.

The two big ones I see off the top of my head are:

1) Once the government has paid for digital services from some private company, they are then providing those digital services to their country's public.

2) Because of that, they are then also storing their people's data in those systems.

If (say) Ford decides they don't like the government of (say) Belgium, and don't want to sell them any more transit vans (or whatever), that's not really a huge deal. Belgium has the vans already, and they can just get another supplier for the next set.

If Microsoft decides they don't like the government of Belgium, even if they don't decide to do anything nefarious with the data (which is absolutely a real concern, both from malice and incompetence), they can shut off their services overnight and then the people of Belgium have no governmental websites or digital services. (And if they have a contract that says they can't...well, what's Belgium going to do about it? Ask Trump real real nice to make Microsoft keep the lights on?) Or, even if they're perfectly polite and commit to an orderly transition, Belgium still has to put in absolutely massive amounts of time, effort, and money to select a new vendor and migrate all their data and retrain all their people on the completely different interfaces and such.

Whereas when they start buying new vans from Mercedes...the drivers might have to remember that the radio's volume knob is 5cm away from where it was in the Fords...?

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#216

Post by thisislife2 »

Anyone can read your email if it passes through their servers - it's the biggest drawback of email as it is unencrypted. So switching email services (or rolling out your own mail servers) isn't enough. You also need to control how it is delivered (i.e. control the networks / servers it goes through). With the US also treating encryption as a munition with export restrictions, it is also safe to assume that they can already crack any existing encryptions available in the market right now.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#217

Post by mistrial9 »

lII1lIlI11ll wrote: post #203
deaux wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can vouch for GP's exact experience. Facetime does feel much smoother than other videocalling apps for Aus Europe. Of course they don't run their own fiber network. The good engineering is making it feel smooth and good despite that. At its core, nothing about computing is smooth. Everything is based on making it feel that way, using countless techniques.

What "techniques"? Audio/video over high-latency connection is not a computer game where there all all kinds of latency compensation techniques - several meeting participants start speaking at the same time, realize they do only after RTT, stop, then awkwardly wait for a moment and repeat hoping for no "collision", rinse-repeat. Everyone who often has meetings with participants connecting from different continents kn…

the reply here is .. any software can really perform badly.. it takes some effort to not perform badly. the default gravity is to be buggy and bad performance. The parent-post is right there are hundreds of small parts and they all have to do well to accomplish "live video and audio across half the globe"

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#218

Post by preg_match »

tiahura wrote: post #202
usrnm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump was elected . Twice. It was not a fluke, not a once in a lifetime event, he's a symptom of wider processes happening in the US. The world has changed and the old order is not coming back

Mostly it’s a symptom of Democrats nominating the two most unliked people in politics.

When the choices are “unlikable person” and “straight up agent of chaos set on destroying the US in every way he can” and you choose the latter, that’s on you.

I think people like trump because the idea of burning it all to the ground and starting over sounds nice. It’s a very simple solution to a very complex problem, and dumb people really gravitate towards that.

Of course they never really considered what “burn it all down” meant. It meant all, nobody is safe. No business is safe.

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#219

Post by cindyllm »

preg_match wrote: post #218
tiahura wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly it’s a symptom of Democrats nominating the two most unliked people in politics.

When the choices are “unlikable person” and “straight up agent of chaos set on destroying the US in every way he can” and you choose the latter, that’s on you . I think people like trump because the idea of burning it all to the ground and starting over sounds nice. It’s a very simple solution to a very complex problem, and dumb people really gravitate towards that. Of course they never really considered what “burn i…

[dead]

Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails

#220

Post by SidewaysView »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167
ForHackernews wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that, but pieces of paper written by dead white men have remade the world for good and for ill. All of 20th century history stands in the shadow of Das Kapital .

It seems like a specific thing has changed. It used to be that when the US did something bad, people would point to the constitution and the American ideals and say "this isn't living up to our promise". Now instead when people point to the constitution and American ideals people say "those were written by dead white men" as if to justify cynically discarding them in favor of something heinous.

The promise of slavers and slavery? The promise of whiteness and empire? The propaganda of the dying and dead so-called enlightenment?

What other promises have you ever had? What did you think justice meant? You losers talking of WW2 and Rome. Now sit back down.

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