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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

261–270 of 383 posts

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disagree, some of the EU clouds are already well on their way. Feel free to drop a few links. Digital EU projects tend to be absolute disasters run by bureaucrats. They always result in some 100 page long document, talking about planning a plan for creating a planning framework. Also throw in the words sovereign and digital transformation, for maximum corpo-political bullshit.

Sure there's more bureaucracy here but in the end they work out fine. Galileo works perfectly as a counterpart to GPS. GDPR was also a resounding success.

Is that the GDPR that has polluted the web with cookie notices?

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#262
Yeah the last couple weeks has made me wary of anything US based too. Not just privacy but also just overall risk. They’ve suddenly become very erratic in their decision making.

Quite hard to untangle it though. So much of the internet is US centric unfortunately. And even if you figure out the first layer of vendors they in turn are likely US reliant too

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#263

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…

I am migrating away from Proton. In theory they check all marks, in practice they fail in delivering baseline functionality in all categories. 1. The Web interface email is so-so, but the proxy email bridge is really heavy and takes a huge amount of disk space. It also makes my computer start flying from time to time. The iOS email client(very important as they dont support standard protocols) is just useless. The te…

Have you considered mailbox.org? I rarely hear much about this German mail provider that supposedly prioritizes privacy.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#265
Hot take: If the US and EU secret services stop sharing any intel with each other, wouldn’t it be smarter for Europeans to use American services now more than ever? Because even if they’ll get their hands on your nudes, tax docs, or pirated movies, what could they even do with it? If you use an European company on the other hand and some local government wants to fuck you up, it’s much more easier to get their dirty hands onto you, your family, and your friends.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#266
For the Americans in the room with European customers, this all should be taken very seriously.

From our perspective, the US has just declared itself hostile. No organisation their right mind would use a stack dominated by Russian companies, any organisation not considering the risks of having their tech US-based right now is being careless in the extreme.

Even if Trump goes away tomorrow, this is a long term issue. America has demonstrated that it's an unreliable partner twice now. We can't make our planning on the basis of a dice roll for the Whitehouse.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#267

I would like to see a movement more along the lines of "Moving away from cloud services", not just US services. Our computers are faster than ever, internet bandwidth is not a problem, public IPs affordable. Why not self host when possible?

Why move away though? The cloud subsidizes for "free" a lot of powerful services that the average user can only dream of self-hosting. And the price is what? Your browsing history? Personalized Ad's? Provided you don't AdBlock that is! I like the symbiotic relationship. I do believe in safeguarding yourself from getting locked out of your life due to your Google acc getting banned but outside of that I see no harm in…

Whether the price is fair or not is obviously up to you. I personally don't like the deal, so I would rather use alternatives.

IMO your quotation marks around _free_ do a lot of heavy lifting.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#268
post #7

I find the Proton tools to be a joy to use and I use them for my business. For clients, I can't do that to them. Microsoft completely dominates and people just expect to be able to video call, chat, work on docs, etc. MS365 remains incredible value for money and pretty optimal for normies.

Would you recommend moving from Google Workspace to Proton? Including emails and so on.

I'll give a different point of view.

I switched my personal email from Google Workspace to Proton. My use case wasn't privacy (especially when 99% of my email is sent to and received from people using Gmail, Office 365, etc.) I was interested in trying Proton more to support a plurality of service providers.

As such, I'm probably not Proton's target customer. That means the compromises Proton makes to enable E2E are not worth it to me.

Some examples:

* Search is like going back 20 years.

* The lack of automatic filtering (e.g. Gmail's automatically applied Promotions, Updates, etc labels) has made the signal to noise ratio in my personal inbox so low that I'm considering just taking the app off my phone or suppressing notifications, at least. I don't have the time to set up manual filters for everything that comes in.

* The lack of automatic filtering and decent search means that my personal email is now pretty much useless.

Similarly, it's pretty hard to migrate away from because you can't just use IMAP to shift your email history to another provider.

This isn't a negative review of Proton. This is just to say that choosing Proton Mail means living with the compromises necessary to enable their main feature (privacy) and I don't care enough about that one feature to make those compromises worthwhile (because my email is going through so many non-private services anyway).

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#269

I would like to see a movement more along the lines of "Moving away from cloud services", not just US services. Our computers are faster than ever, internet bandwidth is not a problem, public IPs affordable. Why not self host when possible?

> public IPs affordable

Not until we start considering all non-IPv6-supporting ISPs to be a no-go.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#270
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…

Add Netcup for great and cheap hosting from Germany. I've been a customer for years.

can confirm. Great for small and cheaps VPSes
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