Moving away from US cloud services • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#351

Post by bad_user » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

mtsr wrote: post #288

microtonal wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Australian businesses have to provide GDPR protections to EU citizens, regardless, just as EU companies operating in Australia have to obey Australian law.

I also have a feeling the Five Eyes agreement is about to end.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#352

Post by mindcrash » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

As a Github alternative you could consider self-hosting Forgejo (https://forgejo.org/) which is the underlying system powering codeberg (mentioned earlier) and some other public instances (https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#publ...).

As a plus they provide Forgejo Actions (https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/admin/actions/) which is pretty much similar to that other Actions, and which should make migrating that much easier. (you could replace the Alpha state Forgejo runner with the Gitea forked act runner -- as they are both essentially act runner forks); or you could run any of the CI/CD tools mentioned here: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#ci-c...

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#353

Post by lrem » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

INTPenis wrote: post #20

One relatively simple thing we're missing on the Swedish cloud market is someone offering OIDC SSO, Chat, Video meetings, e-mail, calendar and file sharing. I can't even say which European company offers this, Proton maybe? Being a long time open source advocate I think it can be done, but system integration would never be as good as MS or Google. But this simple platform would get a lot of SMB's to migrate.

Um, after “simple” you’ve listed six different kinds of services. Just operating that any kind of nontrivial scale will require quite a bit of headcount.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#354

Post by microtonal » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 8:03 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #351

mtsr wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Australian businesses have to provide GDPR protections to EU citizens, regardless, just as EU companies operating in Australia have to obey Australian law. I also have a feeling the Five Eyes agreement is about to end.

I also have a feeling the Five Eyes agreement is about to end.

That's certainly possible, but as long as the servers are in the US, that's not really meaningful I think?

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#355

Post by blacklight » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 8:37 PM UTC

I'd assume that self-hosting is not an option for this user?

Otherwise the alternatives would be pretty much a nobrainer for me:

Microsoft Office 365 -> Nextcloud Bitwarden -> self-hosted Bitwarden/Vaultwarden GitHub -> Sourcehut/Codeberg/Gitea/Forgejo Google search -> Searxng Reddit -> Lemmy Hackernews -> Lobsters Twitter/LinkedIn -> Mastodon / any Fediverse software

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#356

Post by RobMurray » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 8:53 PM UTC

jb1991 wrote: post #252

teamonkey wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the info, I am a Private Internet Access customer and didn't realise til now. I now feel disgusted and will definitely be switching to another provider when my subscription ends. Luckily I only use it for Linux ISOs and changing region for streaming services so not much to spy on.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#357

Post by lousken » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 9:41 PM UTC

egorfine wrote: post #217

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…

> European companies to step up ... and drown in regulations and taxes. There's a reason why the vast, vast majority of IT startups are not in the EU. Source: am a startup in the EU.

As far as i know, most of the actual tough regulation is focused towards larger businesses with enough revenue, not startups

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#358

Post by couscouspie » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

config_yml wrote: post #43

fbn79 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally Proton is not based in European Union nor European Economic Area. Switzerland is extra EU just like USA, China or Russia

The European Commission has recognized the Swiss Data Protection Act as equivalent to the GDPR. This allows data to continue to flow freely between Switzerland and the EU.

Yaeh, but they also gave that seal to the US authorities even though everyone clearly knew that this was based purely on wishful thinking.

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#359

Post by edwinjm » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 10:16 PM UTC

Another interesting European hosting company is Hostinger https://www.hostinger.com/

Re: Moving away from US cloud services

#360

Post by bamboozled » Tue, Mar 18, 2025, 11:11 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #321

bamboozled wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this just start to go from productive efforts to stupid ones? Why aren't we all flying on Russian made planes and using Russian cloud products?

I don't get what you're saying? There was a brief fad for using the other Chinese short video service, Rednote (Xiaohongshu) for about five minutes while TikTok was banned in the US, but mostly this discussion is about data sovereignty for Europeans who want to use European products for better legal protection. (people have long since moved away from the Russian-bought social network, Livejournal; it's very occasiona…

If you look into the history of some of our most recent, major disasters, they've happened under the watch of authoritarian governments. Two that spring to mind would be Chernobyl and Covid.

Companies running under those governments should surely be susceptible to similar issues because the fish rots from the head down. The culture and fear of speaking out and there for steering things in the right direction would be really dangerous for a company like Amazon and the AWS ecosystem.