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Fastmail offers EU data region

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Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#231

Post by benj111 »

eastbound wrote: post #192
beezlewax wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The European Parliament is elected by vote and has to ratify the chosen members of the EU council. The president of the council included.

No, he has a point. There are various degrees of democracy, between direct and many degrees of indirection. VDL is certainly not a good level of democracy: - Elections are so rare (every 5 years) and encompass so many huge life-altering choices (VDL being one of the criteria only) that it's not democratic. The Swiss vote every important law, like "Should we buy fighter jets". - De facto, party health is part of democ…

>The EU is too chicken to let citizen vote every 20 years on whether we should stay in Europe, because then answer would be a big NO.

Well us Brits tried that experiment and it isn't seen as a success.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#232

Post by benj111 »

carlosjobim wrote: post #144
sscaryterry wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not nearly the same thing. Trump and his family have made billions. I cannot say the same of von der Leyen.

Which of those two leaders were elected by the people?

So? If you're directly elected by the people you can behave how you damn well please? Except trump isn't because you have the electoral college.

I live in the UK, on paper we have an absolutely terrible version of democracy. No constitution, and un elected head of state. Compared to pre pull out Afghanistan it sucks. And yet we are still here. Perfect on paper democracy isn't the be all and end all. It's about institutional culture. The EU has a much better democratic culture than the US does.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#233

Post by lxgr »

ffsm8 wrote: post #196
dubbel wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insider trading is it course not legal for politicians in Germany, as you could have found out without being a lawyer. That being said, transparency/reporting duties for members of parliament/ministers can and should definitely be improved.

The point was that the definition of insider trading does not extend to politicians buying/selling from their "insider knowledge" as it's not internal business knowledge. Hence it is legal (in Germany) for politicians to buy/sell right before passing laws which influence the valuation of companies. Which I may add: you could've easily found out yourself too if you looked up what I wrote.

> Hence it is legal (in Germany) for politicians to buy/sell right before passing laws which influence the valuation of companies.

Are you sure about that? European legal theory for insider trading implicitly covers more cases than the US without needing to explicitly enumerate them as far as I understand (in a nutshell, trading on insider information is illegal regardless of the source or whether any fiduciary duty was breached), and I'd be surprised if this case were not covered.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#234

Post by leonidasrup »

thisislife2 wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #9

EU data regions are a reflexive action by companies that try to hold on to their EU customers (and more and more are leaving, surprisingly the larger ones seem to be leading here). Realize that as long as you are still hosted on US owned infrastructure or that if there are US (or: five-eyes) owned companies anywhere in the stack your data can still be forcibly pulled and often without you being aware that this happen…

True. Australia is part of the Five Eyes alliance. Fastmail is an Australian company. Australia also has the Assistance and Access Act - https://havenmessenger.com/blog/posts/australia-assistance-a... - which just stops shy of asking Australian tech companies, like Fastmail, to build backdoors into their products so that the government can "legally access" data from them. (When the law passed, Fastmail lost many clie…

Almost any goverment can force any company to build backdoors into it's products, only protection is to use open source (it's much harder to implement backdoor in open source) on own physical hardware, not in cloud (computers owned and controled by some else).

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#235

Post by jacquesm »

usr1106 wrote: post #203
inigyou wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relevant fact about Hetzner is that it's an EU company with US branch, not a US company with an EU branch.

No. Did you read the OVH story linked by user kvemkom? https://www.heise.de/en/news/Canadian-Court-OVHcloud-from-Fr... A difference could be that Germany might not have such blocking law as France. At least I have never heard of it.

Canadian judges can rule whatever they want, it isn't going to make a difference in practice: if Canada or a Canadian entity wants data from an EU company they're going to have to go through the proper channels to do so. Taking shortcuts like this, even with the backing of a judge just isn't going to fly.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#236

Post by pepperoni_pizza »

eastbound wrote: post #192
beezlewax wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The European Parliament is elected by vote and has to ratify the chosen members of the EU council. The president of the council included.

No, he has a point. There are various degrees of democracy, between direct and many degrees of indirection. VDL is certainly not a good level of democracy: - Elections are so rare (every 5 years) and encompass so many huge life-altering choices (VDL being one of the criteria only) that it's not democratic. The Swiss vote every important law, like "Should we buy fighter jets". - De facto, party health is part of democ…

Your username is telling.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#237

Post by Avamander »

tumdum_ wrote: post #108

Or you can just use any of the actual European companies (I’m using Tuta). https://european-alternatives.eu/category/email-providers

Any providers that don't provide SMTP/IMAP/JMAP are just a boring way of giving away control over your mail and the client software you use.

I don't know about Tuta specifically, but Protonmail is practically intentionally hostile against anyone using their own keys. Which is the biggest sign that their marketing and actual intent do not align.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#238

Post by fauigerzigerk »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #208
sph wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I never hear about this ‘feature’ from American products like gmail which 99% of the HN audience is using? Isn’t USA a member of Five Eyes? I admit it is a concern, as a Fastmail user, but this discussion only seems to happen on the Fastmail threads, yet no one bats an eye if one is suggested to open a gmail account like everybody else.

> Why do I never hear about this ‘feature’ from American products like gmail which 99% of the HN audience is using? Isn’t USA a member of Five Eyes? Not sure why you haven’t heard about it but US Cloud Act is a big reason for EU companies not trusting US companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Exactly, and it comes up in every single one of these debates.

Re: Fastmail offers EU data region

#240

Post by inigyou »

izacus wrote: post #230
inigyou wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of parliamentarians voted against it. This was considered a pass, because it didn't meet some arbitrary threshold to block it.

With 276 MEPs in favor. Vote them out in 2029 if you want to change that.

And 314 voted against.

"Chat control 1" is the deliberately misleading name for "Facebook is not banned from using CSAM scanners on your DMs if it wants to" - I don't think it's worth voting someone out based on that. The one that bans encryption is called "chat control 2". I assume they've both got the same name as part of a deception tactic.

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