251–260 of 448 posts
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Should we discuss DNS root servers at some point too?
I've had this thought too - of the 13 root servers, 10 are US or US-based companies. The only exceptions are Netnod (Sweden), RIPE NCC (Netherlands), WIDE Project (Japan). Even ICANN and Internet Systems Consortium are US-based non-profits... How do you even mitigate risk in this case?
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> The “that’s nice but Denmark is small” comment is getting tiresome. The parent comment didn't complain that Denmark or its overall government is small. They complained that this agency represents a small fraction of their government.
Yes. Typically is some town hall shifting to Linux and making a big fuss when literally million others are still running Windows. Seeing an agency doing it is good, but still less than the French ditching Teams and Zoom altogether as country-wide policy.
This is a different - the agency has more scope and with the ridiculous confrontation between the US and Denmark there’s no doubt active espionage targeting Denmark from the US.
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Countries hosting the data centres can make it illegal to allow access from outside their area/EU... or specifically to US entities along with making it illegal to move any data out without customer/local gov approval... This isn't rocket science. The company cannot do business if it doesn't follow the law. There are laws like this in places already. The company's local subsidiary tells the American company to polite…
An American company will always follow US law, no matter the local laws.
This is all well within the realm of what governments can and do regulate. Want to do business in a country with their laws or not is the choice.
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> But that's letting them set the goalposts. This is missed in so, so very many discussions out there. You can reproduce about 50-75% of what MS offers with FOSS and work on writing the rest in-house/in-EU. Would a bunch of workflows suffer initially? Sure, but not even trying is just preseving the status quo.
Today I opened a .docx file on libreoffice on my linux machine. Did a whole bunch of editing and sent back the file for some semi official purpose. And the .docx file behaved as usual on the windows machine of the sender. I mean to say for many many people the workflows will not suffer even one but. It's just too much automated people whose work may suffer initially b cause they are using windows API or something lik…
But yeah, it probably depends on what you're trying to do with any one software package, some people will be affected more than others and sometimes most stuff will just work!
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The US passed the CLOUD Act which subject all those sovereign clouds run by US companies completely subject to US spying and hijack. Those offerings are garbage for anyone outside the US.
Countries hosting the data centres can make it illegal to allow access from outside their area/EU... or specifically to US entities along with making it illegal to move any data out without customer/local gov approval... This isn't rocket science. The company cannot do business if it doesn't follow the law. There are laws like this in places already. The company's local subsidiary tells the American company to polite…
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An American company will always follow US law, no matter the local laws.
It isn't usually an American company doing the local operations, but a local subsidiary. Like Walmart Canada telling Walmart corporate to pound sand in the 1990's over Cuban pajamas. It's illegal for Canadian companies to participate in the US embargo of Cuba. This is all well within the realm of what governments can and do regulate. Want to do business in a country with their laws or not is the choice.
Google, AWS & Microsoft all nullroute the countries of Cuba, Iran and North Korea. Google also nullroutes Crimea.
So by using a cloud provider, you are participating in the embargo of Cuba.
That's great, but it's always just one agency, or one very local bit of government. If we (Europeans) really mean it - and we should - the top level of government just needs to make the declaration: as of X, all Microsoft licenses will be terminated. No exceptions. Adapt or die. According to the CLOUD act, the US government can demand access to data from US companies, regardless of where that data is stored. That mus…
Yeah, no. That's not how government works - thankfully. I don't want my water to stop flowing just because someone decided to be drastic about software changes.
I agree with you in that all governments should be using open source software, for the record.
But governments are big machines and you can't steer them like a sports car. In some cases, the massive inertia they have can even be a good thing - a crazy guy can't just be elected one day, start issuing presidential mandates, and then expect them to happen immediately, for example.
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> This is symbolism It is probably unintentional. I work and worked in such projects (in The Netherlands), and the process is -rightfully- chaotic. Governments typically don't have a central single team that builds all their android apps. They usually write a tender with loads of requirements and app-agencies will then build it. Or freelancers. Or volunteer teams. Or all of that. So there's no central team governed b…
As someone in the Netherlands, and also with a company in this space, could you point me to some relevant resources (like ongoing projects)? I'd love to help our country get more sovereign (in small steps). Btw, NRC has a nice podcast series on the topic. One thing hampering the sovereignty effort is the enormous amounts of Azure/AWS/GCP certified people. Their career is build on these platforms.