81–90 of 229 posts
It seems likely the ICC will issue an arrest warrant for Trump in the coming years. I see all their recent moves as a signal they want to distance themselves from the US so they can actually issue that warrant.
After Microsoft left politics mess up with their customer base something like that was to be expected.
Microsoft has to follow US sanctions, even if they are misplaced. This isn't a choice on Microsoft's part here. The ICC was applauded in the US in the when it went after Russia but when it goes after Israel it is sanctioned. It unfortunately hard to be impartial, like the ICC is, when it comes to international war crimes. The big players want you to play towards their favourites and only hold their enemies accountabl…
There's an EU law, 'blocking statue' which also means that contracts can't be broken with reference sanctions even if the contracts themselves say they can be, and the services must be provided anyway.
This isn't GDPR type stuff. This is a path to infinite fines. Ending up jail for years is also a distinct possibility if you help people access their data, since spying on these institutions is actually treated as espionage. We recently passed a law here in Sweden forbidding espionage against international organizations in which Sweden is part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place. There used to be this quaint idea of rule of law and things like that. We can always argue that governments were happy to get dirty and occasionally illegal, and they certainly were. But a) it was universally seen as a bad thing, and b) no country would have done it so blatantly and openly. Perversely, this narrative was impor…
> So yeah, the clock ticked and now we’re in a new and exciting era for geopolitics and who knows what system will prevail in the end. What is certain is that the US abdicated their leadership. In fact John Yoo, most famous for authoring the "Torture Memos" for Dubya over 20 years ago, has been perhaps the most prominent legal thinker arguing in favor of the actions Trump's taken against the ICC: What can the incomin…
True. Trump did not appear suddenly out of nowhere and he’s only able to do what he does thanks to people who prepared for this and have been pushing us down the slope for the last couple of decades. Thanks for the quote, it’s important we remember this sort of things.
> It's just that many have decided to bizarrely retcon the Bush administration into respected elder statesman instead of the lawless war criminals they were and are.
I think that’s the fact that Bush is at least able to finish a sentence. But yeah, you’re right. It was the golden age of enhanced interrogation techniques by masked men in black in illegal prisons in foreign countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
USA has been very hostile to the ICC since way before Trump. The ICC was created in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the USA. He never ratified the Rome treaty. And then GW, Obama, Trump and Biden didn't either. Very few americans batted an eye as far as I could tell. Your are after all by definition exceptional. (/s)
This is not a U.S. specific issue. Once you strip away all of the formalities, titles, and ceremonies, you'll realize there's no such thing as international law, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. The law, by definition is a rule backed up by the use of force, specifically state-sanctioned violence. If you write a law but do not have the ability to use a sufficient amount violence to enforce it when ne…
Global military is not necessary, just consensus to enforce it.
Practical example, there is no EU military, but there surely are EU laws EU members have to follow.
OpenDesk – a flexible all-in-one office suite for the public sector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45838239 - Nov 2025 (19 comments)
Looks like openDesk uses Collabora Online, which is itself based on libreoffice online - web based libreoffice. https://www.opendesk.eu/en/product#document-management ("Collabora Online powers openDesk with a robust office suite designed for efficient teamwork and secure document editing.") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collabora_Online ("Collabora Online (often abbreviated as COOL) is an open-source online office su…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like this comment ^ was made in bad faith. Providing an accurate description of reality is not an endorsement of that reality, but I'm pretty sure you already know this, and your comment here is more of a rhetorical tool than an addition to the discussion.
Okay, I will spell it out: You are confusing might with right.
I think the bigger question is why they were using microsoft products in the first place. USA has been very hostile to the ICC under trump, but its not exactly a huge shift, bush was also incredibly hostile. It seems borderline incompetent to use a microsoft cloud offering given the political situation. Not to mention given the type of work they do, seems like hosting stuff off site at all is a bad plan.
How much do you think they should spend on IT to be independent from Microsoft (serious question) ? Wikipedia mentions they employ 800 persons working in several buildings and a detention center for a budget of 141 million USD. Microsoft O365 Business Premium per person is 22 USD per month so total per year is ~200k USD (online price, I imagine they can negotiate a bit for that amount of people).
Related: "IMPOSING SANCTIONS ON THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT" (white house, feb 2025) https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo... Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities (jul 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822902
>Microsoft admits in French court it can't keep EU data safe from US authorities Snowden leaked that fact before Microsoft made the admission. But it's good that it's coming from them officially nonetheless.