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I moved my digital stack to Europe

monokai.com

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Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#301
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Notice how no one really lists contingencies for "what if the EU goes off the rails"? Where did you try to find this? And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? There are a bunch of contingencies already in place for economic instability both for individual members states and EU-wide, there is "Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union" in case there is one rogue member, and then each member state ha…

I think you misunderstood what I was talking about, or perhaps you're an example of it. > And what does "EU goes off the rails" actually mean here? It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table? And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because ", then…

> It means, "what if the EU starts acting belligerently to other countries like the US has?" Where, hypothetically, would someone move their data since now the US and EU are off the table?

You mean if a EU member state does this? Then those contingencies I mentioned earlier will be used.

If you're a EU member and another EU member does that, you'd still have your data in EU, just not in that member state, if you had that.

> And if your answer is "well, you see that would simply be impossible because ", then I guess you're an example of someone believing that EU politics will forever remain sane.

I've literally pointed you to concrete and very real contingencies that exists today, zero hand-waving.

> Same situation as the US...

I don't know how it works there, I just know that no one in the EU assumes everyone else will always agree with you, and if you look at how democracy works in EU and in the member states, I don't think anyone has those assumptions there either.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#303
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd never heard of that imprint stuff but that's pretty Draconian yeah. If it will start being required for foreign sites I'll block all German IPs. I avoid doing any business in Germany these days. I tried to get a VPS from Hetzner but they demanded a copy of my ID and didn't accept that I blanked out my citizen number. Which is actually recommended by our national police for identify theft risk. I moved to Scaleway…

I am from Canada and when renting from Hetzner was never asked about personal ID. Maybe because I started few years ago. Never knew about Scaleway. Looked at their website - prices for bare metal seem to be higher than in Hetzner

The ID checks are random. When I registered a while back I had to provide mine, so I aborted the registration. I tried again recently and was not asked for one.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#304
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there would have been mumblings in certain sectors of the EU since the first Trump administration? It’s just that they started to execute now?

I feel like the concern started getting popularised during the first Trump administration, because the US were overtly bullying the EU (and others of course). But the main change was that it was done overtly: before that the US has always been a big power trying to... say "defend the interests of the US" abroad. E.g. the US have been spying their allies forever. So I think it was more of a "they should stop bullying…

I think this is pretty much what Mark Carney said at his speech in Davos.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#305

Using OVH for backups is a crazy choice. They had a datacenter burn down (in large part because it was fully built using wood) and lost all customer data and did not take any action for 6 months after the incident. They're just not a serious company.

This is borderline adversarial propaganda. While the incident did happen, a lot of actions were taken and most of the data was recovered. OVH now also keeps backups even for clients that don't pay for it. I was hit by that datacenter catastrophe and got my data back almost immediately, in a new VM. I've been using them for years with little issue (no more than happened on my AWS or Azure accounts, I would say less be…

> most of the data was recovered

I had a VPS there and all the data was lost. I'd like to see any proof that data was recovered, because that's simply not true.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago. I work as a consultant and freelancer across a bunch of companies, some American but mostly European ones. Last ~8 months or so, the sentiment about "Hosting our data in EU or even our own country" has drastically changed, I don't think I've seen such a clear shift in public opinion so fast before. The amount o…

Out of curiosity how much of this is a manifestation of the utility of LLMs? I get the current political impetus right now but also the barrier for swapping out an infra stack was also much higher 2 years ago. From my own projects major swaps are now relatively trivial which means that vendor lock in is weak.

Besides some companies that were deep into the weeds of AWS and been pushed to enable and use every single AWS service by their reps, I don't think it's much harder/easier today than it was two years ago.

Sure, LLMs help a bit with the actual typing, but the hard part is still planning, alignment and actual execution, all which are best done by humans talking and working with other humans.

I don't think we're in the days of "Hey Codex migrate our AWS stack 100% to Hetzner VPS stat" yet, without issues along the way. Wouldn't claim it's impossible either, but again the easy parts were already easy, and the hard parts are still hard.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most digital things in Europe are in fact much better. Lots of laws allow people to protect themselves from digital exploitation. I agree that there is a ton of bullshit as well though. Gotta dox myself with imprints for example, so I cant share my work with people without also doxing myself. Also as a hobbyist you pretty much need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small pub…

> need all the business documents as well, like a privacy policy even if its just a small public app on the playstore And this is a bad thing why exactly ?!?!?! If you respect your users data and right to privacy then you've got nothing to hide by publishing an EU compliant privacy policy. It might be "just a small app", but I and many other people still very much still "do give a damn" about what the hell you do wit…

Because if I want to provide an app to like 5 people I know personally, I am soon forced to do so via the Playstore due to Google disabling sideloading on Android. So now I am forced to inform myself about all the bullshit documents I never cared for beforehand. Yes I know what I am allowed to do with my users data, no I don't send it to some data brokers, yes I already comply to privacy laws and whatnot. Just requiring some official document that you have to let a lawyer take a look at is beyond me.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there would have been mumblings in certain sectors of the EU since the first Trump administration? It’s just that they started to execute now?

There been mumblings for as long as I've been a developer, I remember hearing about "EU data independence" first when the ePrivacy Directive came around, which must have been multiple decades ago at this point. But yeah, in recent times the sentiment became more urgent. If I were to guess, with zero data in front of me and just judging by what I remember, I think the sentiment really changed first with the ICC blocka…

Trump may genuinely end up being the best salesman European hosting companies ever had. I run one of the tools mentioned in this post (Bugsink) and I literally had an uptick of Danish people/companies (specifically) reaching out to me after Davos.

Re: I moved my digital stack to Europe

#309
I’ve also moved all mine to Europe. There are ample alternatives to us-based commercial cloud.

The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before

It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers

Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters

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