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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

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Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#251

Post by jb1991 »

McDyver wrote: post #170
pzo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he mentioned also Quad9 - Cloudflare DNS replacement. I didn't know about and will probably switch to it. My other picks: SEARCH: qwant (france) LLM: mistral (france), librechat.ai, openwebui VPN: mullvad (sweden), protonVPN (swiss) AUTH: OpenID (sadly seems like not many sevices implement it) CLOUD: Hetzner (germany), OVHCloud (france) MAPS: here wego, openstreetmap EMAIL: protonMail (swiss), fastmail (australia) DN…

For encrypted mail, there is also tuta.com (previously Tutanota), Germany based

Do you know anything about another popular German mail provider, mailbox.org?

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#252

Post by jb1991 »

teamonkey wrote: post #242
reacharavindh wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought fastmail was Australian..

Australia is in Eurovision so it counts

So is Israel, but a lot of people moved away from a popular VPN provider once it was purchased by an Israeli company.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#253

Post by upofadown »

wkat4242 wrote: post #60
noirscape wrote: post #45

A shame that OP recommends Proton. The fact they don't support open email protocols like IMAP/SMTP without an extremely frustrating proxy setup is what ultimately turned me away from their service. Being able to "just" use a native mail client is pretty much a must. The vendor lock-in from something like Proton feels way worse as a result. Can't speak to Proton Pass, but it strikes me as a replacement that seems unne…

Yes I'm not a fan of Proton either. Especially because they hammer so much on their "Encryption" thing while 95% of the mails you get will come unencrypted from one of the big tech parties, Google, Microsoft, Amazon. So what is the point, really? And because of this indeed it is very hard to connect to it. Email is just dead as a tech. It's no surprise nobody uses it for sensitive content anymore but instead just use…

>Email is just dead as a tech.

It's really the only game in town for messaging. Like sure, there are a zillion incompatible alternative systems out there but email is the only system with worldwide adoption. ... and its federated. ... and it actually works somewhat reliably. ... and it's actually fairly secure these days, using a network of trusted email servers.

Like sure, it would be great if we could make end to end encryption usable for regular people for the email case. It would also be equally great if we could make E2EE usable for regular people for all the other cases.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#254

Post by benrutter »

rigdzin wrote: post #233
frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

"there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up" and what would be business model? From tiny fraction of people that care about this - wast majority are also the same types, that are known to be unwilling to pay for any service ever even 1 cent.

I'm not sure that's true - mainly because of some potentially big European customers in government or national infrastructure. They care enough about security and reliability, that they'd very likely choose a European provider over a US one, especially if the existing political climate continues.

Companies don't need anywhere near the profits of Google to cover continuous development and maintenance, so while a European tech giant of the size of Google might not seem that likely, a European office suite certainly is more likely.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#255

Post by chpatrick »

9dev wrote: post #140
rambambram wrote: post #97

Maybe one really needs 'the cloud' (whatever that is) or the accompanying services, I don't know, but I do know that good old webhosting is still around. At least here in The Netherlands. Good for email, good for websites and webapps, good for data storage. There are enough options to choose from the decentralized menu of hosting offerings. Most are cheap enough also, but watch out for the slightly bigger webhosting…

The cloud, speaking for small-to-medium companies, is two things; a directory server with file storage, email, and an attached suite of productivity tools (e.g. Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace), and virtual, distributed infrastructure (e.g. AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure). You can build the offerings commonly sold as "cloud" yourself, but it requires a ludicrously unreasonable amount of engineering work to reinvent th…

I think a ton of services would actually run just fine on a single old fashioned Linux machine without any fancy cloud stuff, we've just been conditioned to think that it's somehow wrong.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#257

Post by microtonal »

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

I agree that some of the hard parts were glanced over. Besides that, everyone seems to talk about the cloud and nobody about the other big, if not bigger, dependency. Our use of Windows and macOS (and Google Android and iOS if you will) on the vast majority of client devices.

If

Time and time again, data-sharing agreements between the EU and the US get busted, showing there's just no legal compatibility between EU privacy rights and US spying laws. [...] With the current political situation in the US, it's also starting to become clear that our entire digital infrastructure is at the mercy of US policies. It is no longer safe to rely on US clouds for our governments and societies, as the US government can shut it down at will.

are your worries, rolling out government-required backdoors, lockouts, etc. in operating systems is going to be a huge issue. To shut down a large portion of Europe's infrastructure, the US government only has to order three companies to do so.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#259

Post by danmaz74 »

frereubu wrote: post #58

> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this - there are gaping holes. Git repos (it's too difficult). NPM (ditto). Startpage uses Google's index. The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. The real takeawa…

> It feels like there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they?

I think that this will depend a lot on expectations about politics in the USA in the medium/long term. Making this kind of investments makes sense if you expect the aggressive hostility that the current administration brought against Europe (and all other US traditional allies) to continue for a long time, and not just a couple years.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#260

Post by schroeding »

jb1991 wrote: post #250
pzo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he mentioned also Quad9 - Cloudflare DNS replacement. I didn't know about and will probably switch to it. My other picks: SEARCH: qwant (france) LLM: mistral (france), librechat.ai, openwebui VPN: mullvad (sweden), protonVPN (swiss) AUTH: OpenID (sadly seems like not many sevices implement it) CLOUD: Hetzner (germany), OVHCloud (france) MAPS: here wego, openstreetmap EMAIL: protonMail (swiss), fastmail (australia) DN…

I’m curious about mailbox.org, which markets themselves as “privacy made in Germany“

Can only recommend them - not too expensive, you can also use your own domains and they support at-rest auto encryption of all incoming mail with a PGP public key you give them (which of course does not prevent them from saving incoming mail as clear text somewhere else, but prevents others from reading all existing mail should they get access to your mailbox later)
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