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European Alternatives

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Re: European Alternatives

#461

Post by hyperman1 »

hermanzegerman wrote: post #335
202508042147 wrote: post #174

One obvious thing missing from any of those lists: Visa and Mastercard alternatives. This is the protection money that is never brought up by the US officials when they say that America was paying for our security.

The big European countries still have their National Systems that work very well. If the US would nuke Visa/MC in Germany, payments inside Germany would still work very well via Girocard (except for some people that bank with cheapskate neobanks) Wero is coming and it should work across Europe

In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.

Re: European Alternatives

#462

Post by testing22321 »

202508042147 wrote: post #166

Doing my bit: migrating my small company's db this weekend from AWS RDS to Hetzner VPS + volumes. Fingers crossed! Already done: replaced SendGrid with Sweego. Later: move domains from US registrar to EU based. The difficult bit is the Microsoft Office because we are also using Azure DevOps for code, tickets, wiki and ci/cd.

Me too.

Just moved all my hosting and dbs from a US company to Hertzner after 15 years of good service. Moving domains now.

Re: European Alternatives

#463

Post by Fischgericht »

Teever wrote: post #459
Fischgericht wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before we closed our office in Mountain View years ago, every time we went over there: - I could not get out of my San Francisco Hotel to get to a deli across the road without having to step over at least 5 homeless people. - I could not fail to notice that even those people who did have jobs and not lost their homes to tech bros had a surprisingly low number of healthy teeth for a modern western first-world society…

Can you talk more about the Estonian tech scene? I am a Canadian-Estonian and I have been considering moving to Europe in the next year or so.

This here has been the key ingredient for the startup culture Estonia now has:

https://www.e-resident.gov.ee

It's just crazy. I went to the Estonian embassy in Berlin, was offered coffee, and 20 minutes later I had my digital card allowing me to create a limited company.

Re: European Alternatives

#464

Post by esperent »

202508042147 wrote: post #166

Doing my bit: migrating my small company's db this weekend from AWS RDS to Hetzner VPS + volumes. Fingers crossed! Already done: replaced SendGrid with Sweego. Later: move domains from US registrar to EU based. The difficult bit is the Microsoft Office because we are also using Azure DevOps for code, tickets, wiki and ci/cd.

Gradually moving over from Teams to Hetzner + Nextcloud over the past year. The chat app is the blocker (Nextcloud Talk is not quite there yet). But we've moved over files, docs, calendar, photos, etc.

Re: European Alternatives

#465

Post by deaux »

gtirloni wrote: post #49

This is nice but if Europe doesn't fix their tech salaries situation (half US' in most cases, if not lower), I don't think it's sustainable.

It very much is sustainable. See China, Russia, Korea and Japan, all varying degrees of being much less dependent on US tech than the EU is.

Re: European Alternatives

#466

Post by deaux »

looshch wrote: post #458

so much reasonable scepticism here is being downvoted, i don’t get why to add my 2 cents: why does anyone think the EU countries don’t or won’t pose the same risks as the US? They might just be doing it silently and illegally. Where is the guarantee that the mere fact a service is EU-based provides benefits over using US-based ones?

Most of it is entirely unreasonable and being posted by Americans with vested interests who would never dream of posting the same comment if it was about the US reducing their dependency on Chinese tech - think Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Bytedance. Imagine a post on that topic - there have been many when it was higher on the agenda - and droves of Europeans commenting "Gee, how strange that the US wants to do this".

It's the exact same, and it doesn't take much wisdom to understand.

Re: European Alternatives

#467

Post by deaux »

jacquesm wrote: post #132
yabones wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't massive tech conglomerates locking people into their ecosystems how we got here in the first place? The quest to replace US with EU products is really just treating symptoms of the problems that tech has created in the past 2-3 decades.

Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.

The task of governments is to stop this. Just like how Musk is prohibited from buying EasyJet.

Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML if Europe would let them? They would've done so a decade ago. The exact same reasoning now needs to be applied to the likes of OVHCloud.

Re: European Alternatives

#468

Post by deaux »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #167
jacquesm wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the cost-to-switch is more important right now than the details, the bigger fear I have is that if such an EU alternative is successful that the US incumbents will swoop in and buy it and then you're back to square 1. That has happened quite a few times already.

Is there a mechanism the EU could use to inhibit acquisition by a non EU entity?

Of course there is. Google Mush Ryanair, for one.

And just 2 seconds of thinking is enough to answer that question. Do you think China wouldn't have bought ASML yet if money alone was enough?

Re: European Alternatives

#470

Post by tialaramex »

embedding-shape wrote: post #439
tialaramex wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless. The EU should avoid key US dependencies, but that means things like we shouldn't design a system that needs Microsoft's stupid "Co-pilot 365" or whatever they are now calling Word and Excel, rather than it's important never to visit a web site hosted in the US. "The new government policy shouldn't require iPhones" is a long way from "N…

> EU Hacker News isn't infeasible my argument is rather that it's largely pointless Ok, but what are your actual arguments against it? Again your comment contains things about the EU and US which I don't know why you keep bringing up. Do you have any arguments against a European Hacker News that isn't related to the EU and US geopolitics or government policies?

Just seems needless. Like "We should have Hacker News for musicians" or "We should have Hacker News for City Dwellers". I think there's more value from the broader audience than from specialising what is already a fairly niche site. This isn't Facebook or Youtube, it's both less technically sophisticated (no offence to Dan & co keeping it working) but also much smaller in scope.

I'm sure musicians and city dwellers could have some stories they're more interested in versus less interested in, but this gets into the newsgroup hierarchy problem where too much specialisation means there's nothing left to talk about. We presumably agree that a Hacker News for people named Brian who work at Meta is a bad idea?

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