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US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

reuters.com

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Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not spread any lies ^ I did not say Robert Habeck was arrested Re the other cases: in a good democracy, insulting politicians should not be a crime and there should be no investigations for someone insulting a politician.

That is your POV. I fear that democracy erodes when there's insults, belittling, ... instead of exchange of arguments and the contest of ideas. Because at some point insults turn into ugly actions. Whether it's Charlie Kirk or Melissa Hortman.

There is a reason the founding fathers put freedom of speech as the first amendment

Insults should absolutely be protected speech.

In countries that make insulting politicians illegal, all a politician has to do to become a dictator is say that speech criticizing them/their behavior is insulting and therefore illegal

Would you like if Trump arrested anybody who insulted him?

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance is a Weapon. Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evi…

I find it hard to look at the actions of the Japanese and the Americans in the late 1930s and come away with any other impression than that the Americans were the good guys.

I'm not saying Japan was good, and this isn't a callout to you. I'm arguing that the erasure of US brutality in China and the Philippines, as well as Gunboat Diplomacy on Japan itself, is why we can see ourselves as the Good Guys. This erasure is part of Manufacturing Consent. Its better to abandon the temptation to moralize the sides in war and see it as Great Power competition.

First we have US [Commodore Perry] who, in 1854, used gunboat diplomacy in Nagasaki harbor to end Japan's isolation and open it up for trade. This would snowball into the Meiji restoration, which ended the Shogunate, and an Emperor that rapidly modernized Japan's economy and military to prevent foreign domination that China was experiencing at that time.

Three decades prior to Japan's invasion of China, and a decade before Japan seized Korea, the United States and other Great Powers were suppressing the Boxer Rebellion as part of China's [Century of Humiliation] to exploit China for themselves. In addition the US, after it seized the Philippines from Spain, spent several years brutally putting down the native independence movent [p-h war]. Americans aren't taught this history, and fear of that brutality of American reprisals influenced the Japanese against surrendering during WW2.

Speaking of the Philippines, its seizure by the US and other Spanish territories after the Spanish-American war as well as the annexation of Hawaii alarmed Japan. They saw US and other imperial powers as rapidly encroaching on Japanese sphere of influence, in particular the decades of 1890s-1900s. Japan saw all of this and didn't want to be the next China. Japan also saw all of East Asia was it's sphere of influence as a Japanese mirror of the Monroe Doctrine and the western imperial powers as both a tacit threat and competition.

The US wasn't interested in helping China against Japan out of a moral duty, but protecting US interests against a rising Japanese Empire, in addition to British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Far East. The tipping point for Japan was when the US embargoed Oil and ship-grade Steel (as well as other strategic commodities and economic sanctions) from Japan throughout 1941, which led to Japan planning to seize more territory in SE Asia. To support these annexations, Japan had to push the US out of the Philippines, and to do that they attacked Pearl Harbor as a way to buy Japan time to take and hold territory before Americans could respond.

I mention all of this because Americans aren't taught this yet so much of our history hinges on these events.

[Century of Humiliation]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

[Commodore Perry]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Expedition

[p-h war]:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_Wa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes#Phili...

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#413
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I support free speech through any media, including all noncommercial speech not including: - defamation (with extra lenience for speech about public figures) - evidence of child sex abuse - incitement to imminent lawless action likely to cause disorder Even those few exceptions are dangerous to liberty. Certainly anything else is too easily twisted into political censorship. For example, under the guise of fighting "…

Even here on HN insulting other posters gets you banned. Same in many US media. There's quite a discrepancy between what people claim and the reality on the field, why you think? Yes I'm aware I'm shifting focus from Europe to the US, but you know, who should cast the first stone...

Private companies should have the freedom to ban/censor whatever content on their platforms they want. I’d prefer if they don’t, but we shouldn’t force governments to prevent companies from creating their own rules about how people can use their own software

Governments however should not interfere with citizen’s freedom of speech - there should be no fines/arrests for insulting politicians. Otherwise those governments are actually authoritarian and repressive.

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#414
post #298

And in related news, major European democracies are spending real money architecting sovereign cloud tech - planning on replacing not just the infra, but also the key parts of commonly used SaaS stacks. (How do I know? I got a job offer from one of those governments to help them architect that; exciting times).

As an American working for a cloud provider in a tech role (security), I'm angling for an invite to the party. Increased investment in tech in the EU means more opportunity for me to GTFO.

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#415
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great deal of what may be included in "homegrown talent" in the US according to this comment, indeed has come from other countries...

And the US is much richer for them (monetarily, and culturally). But what if home countries had said, "We can give you the resources you need for your work and home life, and it will be for purposes you can believe in and feel good about; not for crypto rug pulls, nor for surveillance capitalism, nor for stunting and manipulative social media"?

Sign me up.

I'm optimistic at the response from the EU on tech investment, but I haven't seen them put their money where their mouth is yet. If they want to poach talent from the US they'll also have to figure out an work visa path that makes it easier to move there (bureaucratically, like the classic "you need a phone number to sign up for a bank account, you need a bank account to rent an apartment, you need an address to sign up for a phone number") and direct investments away from the US and into local tech providers in support of infrastructure and development (that isn't AI related datacenters).

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European countries aren’t known for strong privacy against the state. There are exceptions, but the EU’s “privacy rights” are almost exclusively against corporations. American privacy, by contrast, is almost exclusively focused on state surveillance. There are holes, the biggest being that foreigners on foreign soil have no privacy rights. Nor do the dead. But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have agains…

I think the US basically sees DMA, GDPR, etc as a tariff

It’s definitely made browsing the open web a worse experience. There should be global opt in/out.

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance is a Weapon. Much of the US media is captured, so virtually nothing is fed back to us Americans. This also builds on top of US gunboat diplomacy going all the way back to the Monroe Doctrine. Keeping Americans ignorant allows our government and corporations a free hand in foreign affairs. The limited information allowed through is heavily sanitized and depicts US actions as the Good Guys attacked by the Evi…

I find it hard to look at the actions of the Japanese and the Americans in the late 1930s and come away with any other impression than that the Americans were the good guys.

You should look up what the Japanese did to the Chinese.

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a failure of government because the law mandates the notice in so many places that it becomes pointless noise. Cookie banners are not analogous. It's easy to make a web site that doesn't need cookie banners. It's actually easier to make a site that doesn't need them than to make one that does. Adding in the tracking that requires banner takes effort. But companies prefer to put in that effort and annoy their u…

How easy is it really, seeing how nearly every website ends up having them? Even if they don't think it's needed, seems the legal risk isn't worth.

It’s not the legal risk, it’s the desire to track users. How often have you seen a cookie banner that says “we only set cookies when it’s essential to the site’s functionality so there’s nothing for you to opt out of”?

Re: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives

#420
post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European countries aren’t known for strong privacy against the state. There are exceptions, but the EU’s “privacy rights” are almost exclusively against corporations. American privacy, by contrast, is almost exclusively focused on state surveillance. There are holes, the biggest being that foreigners on foreign soil have no privacy rights. Nor do the dead. But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have agains…

I read an article that dug into public GDPR cases, which is a surprisingly small set, and it explained they have had a near zero impact on the massive advertising and data broker industry. They mostly just have a large back log of legal cases against large US companies like Google which occasionally result in fines - but even that moves very very slowly and has little impact on their global business models. They do a…

I’ve read the GDPR has zero impacts on national security/law enforcement. It applies weakly to other state functions.

I’ve also seen cases where GDPR is used against religious groups that have a strong religious justification for keeping lists of believers. Think Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church, which regard family trees and baptismal certificates as semi-sacred. And kept on paper or scrolls.

Not sure what to think about that. Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.

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