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Moving away from US cloud services

martijnhols.nl

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Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#281

Post by hnbad »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #90
cbg0 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is less of an issue than people actually think - if it gets to the point where this becomes a real problem, individual EU countries can force the datacenter owners like Google/MS to change ownership structure for these datacenters to EU-based subsidiaries or completely new companies if they want to continue to operate.

Virtually all foreign companies that set-up shop in Europe (or anywhere else) do so by setting up local subsidiaries. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc. When you deal with all of these guys in Europe you deal with their local subsidiary(ies), not the US mothership.

This doesn't matter as far as the concerns about US warrantless surveillance laws go because those laws also apply to subsidiaries of US companies. IIRC Microsoft tried to argue that its EU subsidiary could not comply with US requests and lost.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#282

Post by magicmicah85 »

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…

Qwant is an EU search engine, NPM allows you to specify a git repo and that git repo can be hosted on a gitlab instance or an EU provider. It’s not impossible to switch these providers, you just give up on major conveniences.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#284

Post by aetherspawn »

mwinatschek wrote: post #73
aetherspawn wrote: post #62

Hey so I’m pretty sure you can host your own business mail for free these days without a static IP. This is basically how it would go: Cloudflare Tunnel installed on your box (free) Cloudflare Email Worker connected to your domain which writes emails to a KV store (generous free tiers) Cloudflare Worker that downloads the emails from the KV store and uses Worker TCP sockets to send it to your mail server over the tun…

I thought the whole point of this post is to get away from US clouds. So why should I choose Cloudflare and Azure in the end?

I think it’s better to have all your mail data on prem. You’d only be using US companies as a transit.

Yeah there’s some lock-in with all the free Cloudflare stuff but you could probably get it running again without CF pretty fast if you needed to. If you have a static IP, skip the CF stuff!

OP suggested Proton but I’m not sure I’d want to go from one mail host to another. That’s just shifting trust and what I’m taking away from happenings of US at the moment is that being insulated from the events of the world is a good thing.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#285

Post by yread »

rambambram wrote: post #84

> Startpage is owned by a Dutch company which is operated from its headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands, and is a part of System1, a publicly traded company based in the United States. I was hoping Startpage was the successor of startpagina.nl, which I used as a kid in 1995 to 'browse' the web. One of the oldest Dutch websites that I can remember. Fond memories!

Still pretty cool. It has an "View anonymously" button that basically proxies your requests through them

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#287

Post by Tubbe »

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…

Also the CEO is praising the current Republican administration https://x.com/andyyen/status/1864436449942110660

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#288

Post by mtsr »

microtonal wrote: post #239
oakesm9 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail[0] is what I use for my personal email. They support all the standards, but are also pushing things forward with standardising the JMAP protocol[1] which is much better suited to mobile clients than IMAP. They only have email and calendaring though, no equivalent of Drive/Docs/Sheets. [0] https://www.fastmail.com [1] https://jmap.io

I have used Fastmail for well over a decade, but they have their servers in the US, so I have been looking at alternatives.

And Australian law doesn't quite offer the same protections as GDPR. In fact, being a Five Eyes country, it's effectively the opposite.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#289

Post by squarefoot »

SSLy wrote: post #211
Foobar8568 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get banned within 5 minutes when I browse Hermes or LV websites, fun stuff...

I got banned from dash.cloudflare.com because apparently opening a few new tabs quickly is enough…

That would be extremely stupid from their part as it checks with a browser merely restarting with or recalling the latest session.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#290

Post by hnbad »

nickslaughter02 wrote: post #187
cbg0 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much every country has interests groups trying to push backdoors into end-to-end encrypted services, what's your point?

Not everybody's chief has a nickname "Zensursula" (German word for censorship ("Zensur") and her given name ("Ursula")).

She got that nickname for her push to mandate provider-level blocking of requests to foreign servers distributing CSAM while working as the German minister for family affairs, which critics argued would create a slippery slope by establishing a practice of forcing ISPs to implement network request blocking (IP bans). This push materialised in the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz, which while being passed in 2010 was never actually applied and eventually repealed. Around the same time the German minister for the interior argued for police powers to use trojans (computer viruses) for investigations, which likewise passed and seemingly has been used with very mixed success - it's worth noting that the use of this practice by US federal law enforcement was already well-documented at the time.

The USA PATRIOT Act on the other existed and had been used extensively (as far as we know) before expiring in 2020. But even without the USA PATRIOT Act, the US is well-documented in using warrantless surveillance: https://proton.me/blog/us-warrantless-surveillance

The existence of nicknames is a weird metric to judge a jurisdiction's attitude to privacy by when you have actual evidence of behavior you can compare directly.

EU governments trying to push for special powers for law enforcement to sabotage encryption and failing (remember: the UK is not in the EU anymore) is very different from what US federal agencies and law enforcement are not only permitted to do but also are doing and have been doing for decades. It's probably not necessary to point out the limits corporations face under EU privacy laws compared to the US.

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