- cross-posted to:
- buyeuropean@feddit.uk
- cross-posted to:
- buyeuropean@feddit.uk
Microsoft is responding to mounting “geopolitical and trade volatility” between the US administration and governments in Europe by pledging privacy safeguards for customers worried about using American hyperscalers, and vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers’ data if needed.
Under Trump 2.0, some Europeans fear that storing their data in the bit barns of Microsoft, Google and AWS is no longer safe, a concern voiced to The Register in late February by Bert Hubert, a part time technical advisor to the Dutch Electoral Council.
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Then brags about having 20-30% AI generated codebase.
Why didn’t they take this shit seriously before? Fuck Microsoft.
Because the US was more trustworthy a few months ago
No laziness. I never got how the whole western world just said yep I’m fine with America controlling everything. I mean everything America has said about Chinese companies is also true about American ones. They are beholden to American government they could do an update that puts in a backdoor.
Monies.
Fuck proprietary US tech products. Proprietary European tech products are only marginally better because they have to abide by European laws. Europe should not only push for European products, but also for open source and open data. Hopping from one sizzlingfrying pan into another one with a small flame underneath is but one step. Eventually we have to jump out of frying pans altogether and away from the fire or proprietary software.
What do you mean by open data?
For example geographical data (cadastral, soil quality, air quality, public transport routes, public transport schedules, official hiking routes, …), statistical data, publicly funded research, data coming out of publicly funded anything actually (internet speeds, crime stats, police brutality, parliamentary attendance, and so on), and a bunch more. That shouldn’t be published on proprietary platforms for a fee, squirrelled away in a physical archive only accessible by travelling there, shouldn’t require a freedom of information request, or whatever else is put in the way.
Similar to the “Public Money, Public Code” campaign.
thankfully they already are
And if they were, why does Public Money, Public Code exist?
I for one am ditching Windows and Office which I’ve been using professionally since Windows 3.0. It’s the year of the Linux for me. As per data in US clouds (even hosted in EU), it was never safe.
What’s your advice to replace Office?
I’m trying OnlyOffice with my new cloud provider and… Even the most basic settings (default language for text document) are… Well let’s say I still couldn’t change it.
It depends on your use case I’d say. I’m replacing outlook with possibly Thunderbird or just web interface when it comes to exchange. I don’t use word, instead markdown for simple documents or typst for more complex ones. Instead of PowerPoint I’ll use JavaScript/html based presentation engines and instead of excel, I don’t know yet, perhaps LibreOffice equivalent. But then again, I’m more a developer than content creator.
TL;DR when it comes to word like documents, check out typst. It requires a shift, but you might like it.
same. been using MS shit since DOS 3.0 command line interface. now in the process of moving to linux. got a tuta mail account with my own custom domains in order to de-google. moving from dropbox to pcloud. switching from US vpn to european vpn
it’ll never be enough, but i will loudly contribute to the message. even if a US company is good (LMAOOOOO), all the data anyone ever had or has pretty much belongs to trump’s NSA/FBI/CIA/etc now. fuck that shit
Recently joined the Tuta + Custom Domain gang myself… Can confirm a smooth User Experience!
I’d add that I also migrated my DNS from Squarespace (formerly Google Domains) to France’s Scaleway. Altogether smooth transition.
love tuta so far. i never realized how much email in general has been enshittified and bloated with useless extra unnecessary crap until i started using this product that stripped all that crap away. tuta = everything you need, nothing you don’t
2025 is going to be Lidl Cloud Services year 🎆
Lidl is owned by the Schwarz Group who are heavily invested with a Israeli “cybersecurity” company called “xm cyber” run by a former Mossad director. If you don’t want your data with foreign intelligence including American intelligence i would steer clear of any of the digital services of the Schwarz Group.
Wow, I didn’t know about any connection to the Mossad
I pay money to get rid of “free” us services.
If they made quality products there wouldn’t be a problem for them.
Obligatory reminder to all Linux users to help every Windows user interested in switching.
vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers’ data if needed.
Problem is they simply can’t do that, the anti terror laws are enforced in secret, supported by secret laws and processed in secret courts. If you work against them in any way, you can be treated as a terrorist just for that.
The agreement between USA and EU for USA to respect EU law was never worth the paper it’s written on. Because US law simply doesn’t agree, and is designed to trump the agreement.
If you reveal anything from above secret law enforcement, you are yourself guilty of acts against the safety of United states. And if you in any way obstruct it, you can be held, prosecuted and judged as a terrorist with basically no civil rights.It’s insane that EU fell for it, and played along in the American circus to dismantle human rights and democracy.
If EU finally wakes up about such issues, I might actually celebrate the Trump presidency!!USA has decided to burn civil rights and human rights, and undermine democracy both globally and at home, let’s make sure that shit doesn’t spread to EU!!!
If the US doesnt play by the rules the EU will just turn up the heat and start cutting off US tech companies from the EU internet by force. As soon as some EU countries start implementing harsher punishments for US companies, other EU countries will start joining. It can avalanche pretty quickly and its already starting to happen.
I’ve been wondering if the US might isolate themselves from the world wide internet.
The idea of part of the world blocking the US might be more likely.
How would EU detect that US companies hand over information to American law enforcement contrary to the agreement?
The problem is that because of the agreement EU countries could pretend like it isn’t a real problem, despite by American law it obviously is. Now EU is waking up to reality, but we still can’t prove it’s happening.(the answer is secret agents but don’t tell anyone)
I still cannot come to terms with the fact that people find it completely normal that modern civilization rests on a handful of companies. If Google, Microsoft and Meta were to disappear tomorrow, half the planet would collapse given how many completely depend on their infrastructure. This by itself should be enough to induce a mania of local development and decentralized structures, but alas.
You forgot Amazon and it would probably cause the most disturbance if it disappeared. They are hosting so much of the internet.
Why are the balls touching tho?
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
( ͡• ͜ʖ ͡•) 👉
I suspect we’re going to see that US courts can just be ignored pretty shortly here. Build your own clouds, Europe.
That’s been the case for a long time, all you have to do is claim national security, and things can be handled under anti terror laws, where everybody is treated with the rights of a terrorist, meaning they basically don’t have any rights. And can be held, prosecuted and judged in secret, without normal rights to outside legal counsel!!
This has been the case since George Bush! Pushed through with the help of the 9/11 terror attack, and is what Obama called a “good balance”!
My bet is that it’s even worse now under Trump.Yep, the rot started earlier. Still, that was limited to things covered by the anti-terror legislation. We could be talking about the wheels coming off entirely now.
Problems absolutely started already with George Bush, who said: “If you aren’t with us, you are against us.” While at the same time he fed us false information about weapons of mass destruction, that made many countries join USA against Iraq.
The fact that that idiot was elected twice was not good, the fact that Trump got elected was not good.
The fact that Trump got elected again, when it is evident he wants to dismantle Democracy in USA and dismantle NATO is insane!!!
That he now threaten Canada, Panama and Denmark militarily. While obstructing Ukraine and helping Russia, makes it insane he is allowed to continue.
Canada is probably the biggest traditional USA ally of all. And Denmark has been an extremely reliable ally that also participated (helped USA) in Iraq.Obama was very well liked, and things almost got back to normal because of him, but even with Obama there were problems. Like non Americans apparently had no rights regarding surveillance. And also there were numerous grave incidents of illegal surveillance of European politicians and EU parliamentarians.
Like the saying goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
PS: I am not an anti American by habit, this is a new thing for me, in my childhood I admired USA. But I’ve really come to despise many aspects of American politics, and the flawed democracy. And it’s sickening to hear them call America land of the free, when they don’t even have basic civil rights that are universal throughout EU.
vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers’ data if needed
Courts don’t work in a dictatorship.
No shit they are. Even after all this blows over, as it inevitably will, they’re still gonna be huge… but what might be a small loss percentage-wise is still quite big when you’re as big as Microsoft.
Here in the nordics they seem to have almost every company and almost every municipality as their customer, if there’s a rule coming in saying public data must be in Europe or something like that — that’s a lot of dollars lost. Same if just a percentage or two of companies decide they’re not fans of American tech anymore.
Everyday I try to rely more on european products and I am not willing to stop. It is time to make Europe great again
As a Canadian I’m trying to switch as much as possible to European or Canadian services. The tricky thing is knowing which still use US hosting services in the backend.
Ovh should be a fairly safe bet
It’s no more safe to store data on US servers than it is to store gold there - as Germany has recently found out.
