If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data.
Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens.
It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act. Their lunch is sitting out in the open, completely unwatched, waiting to be eaten by somebody else and it's far too late to do anything about it.
The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms.
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
I have a sliding scale of devices I trust more or less (I trust nothing completely).
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
You could take your analogy further, and consider why the Swiss banking isn’t so opaque anymore. Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
> Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
That's a nice re-write of history.
What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...
The Swiss didn't vet their clients. If Vladimir Putin wants to contract a data centre on your soil for the privacy, you can always have regulations that say, "No.".
> It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act
The US big tech has been in bed with the US establishment since eternity.
It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.
that might change is privacy is an option. The real problem is the cost of building in the middle of nowhere, even if you use spare Starlink capacity, where do you get power & personnel from?
If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.
that's a psyop from the cloud evangelism era. a few hundred milliseconds of latency make fuck all any difference for 95% of things, even voice/video calls.
The fact that government agencies, particularly those that deal with international concerns like these are using non sovereign tech for communications is mind-blowing. They might as well use public gmail.. atleast it would be cheaper. If you want it not exposed directly, host it yourself and take measures to secure it for intended eyes only. This should be common sense.
It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top.
I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the countries pushing digital IDs?
Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff.
I remember 15 years ago when our Minister of Foreign affairs was gleefully telling a gadget-vlogger about his personal setup where he was not using 'official email', but his own private Blackberry / iPhone (I forgot) and email for communicating all things. Out of 'frustration with how long it took for official IT to get things sorted'. Video is still online even: https://vimeo.com/13224190
I don't think Americans understand what US used to mean for the rest of the world.
America was supposed to be the next step of humanity, a new land stripped from the ills of the old world where you invest or you go to build things, where your past or identity wasn't the primary concern but your dreams your abilities were. It wasn't nationalistic place, it was open to all and pretty much it was the group work of humanity. When aliens arrive, they arrived to US and even if not, they certainly wanted to speak to the US president as the leader of humanity.
Unlike Europe it wasn't stuck into petty identity conflicts, unlike Russia or China it was governed by the law and the law would protect you from the sneaky politicians. Unlike Europe, US companies were fair businesses that could protect you the customer from bad things even if America developed European or Asian habits.
Why wouldn't you use anything from America? Americans don't understand how transactional they are becoming and that from now on they will need to perform. Like the Tesla boycott, suddenly Tesla had to price their vehicles to match the functionality they provide in order to be able to sell cars again.
Currently the US tech tools are better as they were refined for decades with huge resources and user bases, so it is hard to switch away and at this time it's the perception of risk and US no longer being cool are what pushes for the transition but if EU is lucky Trump will invade Greenland and will make people take the inconvenient path and US tech industry will compact into 350M US market. Europeans will have a few years of sub-par tech and then will have good sovereign tech.
This reminds me of a 1995 Norwegian song, freely translated by me and chatgtp:
We dreamed of America
where the soft wind lives.
We dreamed of America
where honey flowers grow,
where the sky is vast and blue
with stars and stripes upon it too.
We dreamed of America,
but not anymore,
no, not anymore.
I don't know when people first began dreaming of America.
Long before Columbus, people dreamed of America, I think.
A place of everlasting flowers where everyone was free and happy, and
no one had to take off their hat for anyone unless they wanted to themselves.
A smiling paradise where love lasts forever,
and old age is beautiful, a place without any smell.
In 1945—before that too, but certainly in 1945—I knew what I was going to be
when I grew up.
I was going to be an *American*.
That spring, the first films from the Pacific War arrived,
where the Americans stood with bent knees on jungle paths and shot Japanese soldiers with U.S. carbines.
The Japanese were ugly, with protruding teeth and protruding ribs,
while the Americans were brave, handsome, clean-cut, and immortal.
And even if they did die, they died with a courageous smile and said:
"Give this letter to my mother; she will understand."
While the Japanese died like grubs and worms,
and we felt no pity for them.
Besides being ugly, they were portrayed as horribly stupid—so stupid that they spoke broken English even when talking to each other.
I know that we dreamed of America well into the 1960s.
A scentless land beyond the sea,
where everyone had cars and white teeth.
I don't know exactly when it stopped.
But one day in the 1960s, we not only stopped loving America as a god;
we began hating America as a fallen god.
And nothing falls so heavily, so hard, and so deep
as a fallen god
who turns out not to be a god at all,
but merely America.
Then America was blamed not only for the Vietnam War and environmental disasters,
but also, for example, for car culture.
And the greatest share of the blame fell on the man who discovered America.
Now, 487 years after his death, Christopher Columbus is blamed not only for the slave trade from West Africa,
but also for the murder of Kennedy,
and for all the worlds traffic accidents.
Now they say Columbus was a bastard.
Because it was he who discovered America in 1492.
All throughout my adult life the US (for all its apparent faults) was to me a shining example of progress and humanity. It was the best large scale implementation of human rights, laws, and democracy. Sure it was far from perfect but “as good as it gets, for now”
Became very disillusioned with that image of the US in the last couple of years.
Maybe it’s always been like that - but the recent cronyism, the blatant openly displayed corruption and complete disregard for all the values it used to champion really destroyed the good image I had of the US.
In years to come they will realise what this loss of image (or “aura” as the kids would say) really means in a very practical and blunt sense.
Ah, come on, now that those government agencies and their employees are using "non-sovereign tech" (ie. chatgpt/claude/gemini) for thinking, the emails are basically not a concern at all.
This is ignoring that AI also, of course, lets spying agencies move from having every email ever sent in most countries to actually reacting to every email ever sent in most countries. They can move from helping Boeing make foreign airline companies ignore door closing issues to influencing every last restaurant's drinks buying decision individually.
I mean, I doubt they're there yet, but that's what they'll want to do.
With DigiID, as with this, I never understood why countries give critical infrastructure contracts away from the country it directly impacts, provided they have a mature tech ecosystem. I thought the whole point was that it was critical?
we never have evidence that providers bribe politicians into signing juicy contracts so I wouldn't claim they do, but it's either that or they're extremely gullible and don't care about their jobs.
consider Hanlon's razor before being mad and sending everyone to court for treason
Perhaps it originated from there. But EU Chat Control is brought up again and again and again for a vote. They'll continue until some version of it is passed. And then they'll go further with the next privacy infringing regulation to be building on top of it. It is really disheartening for privacy activists, but that is probably the strategy. Wear people out, and push the regulation through when resistance wanes. Note that the Netherlands is on the side of protecting privacy at this point in time. I think it does a great deal to erode trust of EU citizens in the European Union, in a time when that trust is perhaps more important than ever before. For information see: https://fightchatcontrol.eu
A more mature alternative would is Nextcloud as it offers a lot more, but setup is reportedly more involved. It does appear to be available for enterprise customers as hosted version as well though: https://nextcloud.com/office/
Not exactly free as in free beer but Collabora, and their 'Collabora Online' suite fits your description. It's effectively online hosted libre office with a few extras.
Facebook made a Twitter (now X) clone (Threads) and has reportedly more users than X now [1]. They have also started a Reddit clone as well now (Forum)[2]. Not sure if that one will be a success as well though, as Reddit isn't loosing users like X is.
Europe and many other nations will look back on the early 21st century and wonder how they ever thought it was a good idea to willingly give up so much soverignity to foreign powers
Then it was split in a camp dependent on the US and a camp dependent on the USSR.
Both the US and USSR spent decades keeping us together but definitely not united.
This runs deep in European political culture.
Until 2 years ago many Dutch people had more in common and more trust in Americans than <insert European country>. If only because half of them go broke once every generation.
Well the history is more complex than that - let's not rewrite it. The US bossed around and bullied large parts of Europe for decades (and still does). Often we did not have a choice (or, siding with the US was the least-bad option)
Please give me all the data I promise I won't look into them. Unless this is about kids. Or terrorism. In fact, I might look into the data without telling you, because fsck /dev/hdu
"the consumer is responsible for the data and information stored in the cloud. (You wouldn’t want the cloud provider to be able to read your information.) "
I think it’s not the first time the US has used that sort of interpretation of the law. There’s this one[^0] but also, I believe, an older case, also involving Microsoft, about data in Ireland. But I can’t find it.
Encryption is what's important, jurisdiction gives a false sense of security. Nobody should prefer their messenger be server-side encrypted in Iceland rather than e2ee in China.
I self-host e2ee services instead of server side encryption, even though I control the server. It's one less point of failure.
If the data centers can't see the data they're just hosting encrypted data like a Tor node that sends along gibberish–that's the endgame. Remove extra trusted parties to minimize data.
This also applies to metadata, that can be encrypted. SimpleX has 0 user identifiers, Signal's sealed sender encrypts the senders identity. Every Monero transaction is in the publicly distributed blockchain, hidden.
US companies cannot comply with the GDPR because of the CLOUD Act. The two frameworks are fundamentally in conflict with each other and it seems to me that everybody in the EU knows about it, yet this is somehow swept under the carpet and ignored even by government authorities. I've always wondered why this is so and how these kind of dependencies could be allowed in the first place. It's even worse for AI use than it is for productivity suits and email.
Anyone can read your email if it passes through their servers - it's the biggest drawback of email as it is unencrypted. So switching email services (or rolling out your own mail servers) isn't enough. You also need to control how it is delivered (i.e. control the networks / servers it goes through). With the US also treating encryption as a munition with export restrictions, it is also safe to assume that they can already crack any existing encryptions available in the market right now.
I don’t understand the problem? If you’re not doing anything wrong, there shouldn’t be anything to hide, right? What’s the big deal? Besides, it’s not like you have any privacy anyway.
We've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen.
After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital sovereignty as we ban construction of new datacenter is just too cute. This is all just political theater as we peacefully sunset into a museum continent.
Downvotes for stating a reasonable, and probably correct argument.
Europe's biggest problem (I do not mean just the EU, I mean everyone from the UK to Russia) is that it is in denial about its decline, weakness and irrelevance to the rest of the world.
The UK is a bit of an exception in being aware of it and actually talking about it. That is about it.
"Europe's biggest problem (I do not mean just the EU, I mean everyone from the UK to Russia) is that it is in denial about its decline, weakness and irrelevance to the rest of the world."
The EU in just the past year has signed deals with Latin America and India in addition to the already existing ones with South Korea, Canada, Japan etc.
It has positioned itself at the center of the world's largest free trade zone.
It's managed to replace US contributions to Ukraine and looks like its in the process of bloodying Russia's nose.
We Europeans are very well aware that we need to strengthen our position in the world, both economically and militarily. I would say we are making progress on both. China is not happy with recent EU decision for example.
Let's see how far China and US will go when access to the European consumer market will be resticted.
Let's see how well China and US can adapt to modern drone warfare when Ukrainians have the expertise and can share it with the rest of Europe.
We have to step up our game for sure, and everyone in Europe knows it. But the race is definitely not lost yet.
Well, Russia is trying to do something about it and I think we can all agree that there are wrong ways to go about it. Simply being incompetent, like the EU, is not the worst possible scenario.
Btw, say what you will about Russia, but it's light years ahead of the EU in digital sovereignty. One of the reasons it did not crumble under sanctions.
One understated outcome of Trump 2.0 is waking up some sections of the European intelligentsia to the risk of dependency on the United States.
Trump 1.0 should've been enough, but instead European leaders were just too thankful for a Biden back-to-normal scenario that they basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance.
Better late than never. Incidentally, trying to build EU tech independence should produce job making industries, so can become a populist move also
> basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance.
I love this. Do you think everything is in Europe's control? Do you know anything about the US has operated since WW2? Have you noticed the mismatch in economic and military might between the two regions?
And what about all the US military bases in Europe? Do you think it's simply a case of asking them to please leave within 1 year, thanks, goodbye.
They've had us in a headlock for a very very long time
It’s a mismatch we’ve been asking Europe to do something about for 30+ years. Instead, they decided to turn their countries into third world refugee camps.
yeah true. Still, the primary problem was lack of consciousness about this state of affairs, especially at leadership level. One thing Trump 2.0 does take off the mask on this. It's a start
Trump was elected. Twice. It was not a fluke, not a once in a lifetime event, he's a symptom of wider processes happening in the US. The world has changed and the old order is not coming back
Does it matter who is president? The US was spying on European leaders before Trump's first term:
"According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück."
The EU should fine such intentional violations with a billion euros per violation. That would stop this immediately and force cloud providers to split off their European side into separate companies that don't fall under US law.
Chat Control is not law. Of course there are some people inside the EU pushing for privacy violation, just like there are everywhere else, but it's not law. For now, the law protects privacy, and Microsoft violated it. That is the issue at hand.
And it's not "The EU", but really one EU commissioner. Many organs of the EU including the EU Legal Service have criticised CSAR (Chat Control) and the European Parliament has voted against it, effectively killing it.
Hardly a decade ago, a well documented part of prism was on how Berlin was being scanned all the way up to the chancellor
Could the Dutch government think they were any different to the Germans ? Did they not use outlook ?
You put a lot of hope in managers from large companies and governments who get their rent and yearly bonuses no matter their performance, and will never ever be made redundant
This is entirely the wrong lesson to take from this. Why are we still using a plaintext protocol in this day and age? Why can we not get an E2EE addition to the email protocol with full backwards compatibility?
Yes, I understand that it would be imperfect since inevitably not all servers would support it thus forcing additional understanding and decisions on the end user. No, I don't care that a user other than myself might leak my messages in plaintext. Perfectionism in this regard only serves to further shoot us in the foot. Yes, I understand that key distribution is a difficult problem but then that's the case no matter the protocol. Other protocols have solutions that work reasonably well at this point.
There's no justification for the current status quo.
Alternatively I'd be fine using matrix for all my PII related needs (healthcare, government, subscription services, etc, etc) but somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
For large organization data the keys would need to be stored within the organization, not with one particular user as in the case of your personal PII needs.
And then you'd still need to worry about digital sovereignity for the keys.
Getting from here to there is going to be tough, but I agree 100%. Not only should email be E2EE, but it should include a certificate scheme such that you know the person purporting to be the sender is actually the sender.
Given that the cryptography would necessarily be asymmetric verifying the sender on a TOFU basis seems like a trivial addition (just sign something). I doubt you can do better than TOFU though unless you tie it to an external ID system (corporate or government or etc issued hardware tokens or similar).
For a public institution you want some sort of accountability / auditing mechanism, so you can't just do E2EE encryption between users.
Otherwise, a public servant could do sketchy stuff behind the public's back with no paper trace.
What you don't want is hostile foreign capitalists leaking your data to their local authoritarians. They are not your public and shouldn't have the data in the first place.
It seems similar conversations are happening in Europe as well. Originally, Korea is a country where the 'pro US faction' (the faction that believes Korea should be subordinate to the US) is very strong by default. The US had a very strong influence on the establishment of the Korean government, and if you look back at Korea's history, it has always been about finding a country to serve. It feels like siding with the strongest power. In fact, the pro US faction is very strong, but there has also been a strong flow of security, bureaucratic, and economic elites who have justified dependence on the US as a national survival strategy.
But recently, after Trump, I have never seen anti American sentiment this bad. It is the first time.
Actually, it is natural. In my view, Trump's policies look very similar to the Indian caste system, and I think they are a serious regression for democracy. More than that, he is destroying all the international trust that the US has built up. In Korea, people used to think of the US as a 'just' country, but these days, people are cautiously mentioning US wrongdoing more often. Especially after the tariffs and the Iran war. I myself am now unemployed because my factory expansion was canceled due to the Iran war.
My country has a natural talent for impeaching presidents, but unfortunately, Americans do not seem to have that talent. What a pity.
South Korea does seem to be somewhere where the people are more acutely aware that they are a new democracy, and also that there are a number of horrific fascist incidents in recent memory ("tank day") which remind people that it matters.
It seems Korea lacks the "cheat code" for fascism: an ethnic minority population on which all evil can be blamed.
In Korea, there is also a minority group that receives that kind of hatred. They are called Choseonjok(To be clear, I think this kind of discrimination is wrong), which refers to ethnic Koreans who came from autonomous regions in China. There are also problems with far right groups, particularly religious ones. They tend to hate China. (I do not hate any specific country. I hate and also love all humans around the world. Every country has its own problems.) There is also collusion between religion and politics, such as religious groups helping politicians with their election campaigns. Korea itself has many problems, but in our case, it is probably because our historical background has taught us how hateful the era of dictatorship was
Can you run an empire democratically? Imagine if the US president instead of being a dictator had to actually spend EVERY SINGLE DAY convincing Congress members.
> That is exactly where digital sovereignty begins. It is not a patriotic slogan, nor a storage-location promise. It is the practical question of who can compel access, who can audit the chain of custody, and who can deny or limit disclosure when another jurisdiction asks for the keys.
Please at least try to make your LLM write better. It can! You can start by giving it https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md.
Not the US but the Dutch state is the problem here.
The powers that be know that US espionage is not only limited to some emails and also entails sophisticated industrial espionage and never cared.
Now "suddenly" they want to do something about it.
This is Not about Dutch interests / sovereignty - we need to find out what it really is about.
If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data.
Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens.
It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act. Their lunch is sitting out in the open, completely unwatched, waiting to be eaten by somebody else and it's far too late to do anything about it.
The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms.
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
I have a sliding scale of devices I trust more or less (I trust nothing completely).
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
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> Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
HarmonyOS
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You could take your analogy further, and consider why the Swiss banking isn’t so opaque anymore. Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies
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> Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
That's a nice re-write of history.
What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...
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> Swiss society decided
Nice attempt at whitewashing and gaslighting, but the only entity here that decided that is the fucking US of A.
The Swiss didn't vet their clients. If Vladimir Putin wants to contract a data centre on your soil for the privacy, you can always have regulations that say, "No.".
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> It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act
The US big tech has been in bed with the US establishment since eternity.
> Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations
neither are Microsoft 365 subscriptions at governmental scales
No offence, but I do believe a few Dutch ppl could run email servers for cheaper
It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.
> people tend to want low-latency and high-speed
that might change is privacy is an option. The real problem is the cost of building in the middle of nowhere, even if you use spare Starlink capacity, where do you get power & personnel from?
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If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.
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that's a psyop from the cloud evangelism era. a few hundred milliseconds of latency make fuck all any difference for 95% of things, even voice/video calls.
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The fact that government agencies, particularly those that deal with international concerns like these are using non sovereign tech for communications is mind-blowing. They might as well use public gmail.. atleast it would be cheaper. If you want it not exposed directly, host it yourself and take measures to secure it for intended eyes only. This should be common sense.
It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top.
I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the countries pushing digital IDs?
> Official second-level domains do not exist.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nl
That's the most common approach globally. Like most countries, the Dutch Government use .gov.nl.
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Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff.
Yes, this results in enshittification.
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I remember 15 years ago when our Minister of Foreign affairs was gleefully telling a gadget-vlogger about his personal setup where he was not using 'official email', but his own private Blackberry / iPhone (I forgot) and email for communicating all things. Out of 'frustration with how long it took for official IT to get things sorted'. Video is still online even: https://vimeo.com/13224190
I don't think Americans understand what US used to mean for the rest of the world.
America was supposed to be the next step of humanity, a new land stripped from the ills of the old world where you invest or you go to build things, where your past or identity wasn't the primary concern but your dreams your abilities were. It wasn't nationalistic place, it was open to all and pretty much it was the group work of humanity. When aliens arrive, they arrived to US and even if not, they certainly wanted to speak to the US president as the leader of humanity.
Unlike Europe it wasn't stuck into petty identity conflicts, unlike Russia or China it was governed by the law and the law would protect you from the sneaky politicians. Unlike Europe, US companies were fair businesses that could protect you the customer from bad things even if America developed European or Asian habits.
Why wouldn't you use anything from America? Americans don't understand how transactional they are becoming and that from now on they will need to perform. Like the Tesla boycott, suddenly Tesla had to price their vehicles to match the functionality they provide in order to be able to sell cars again.
Currently the US tech tools are better as they were refined for decades with huge resources and user bases, so it is hard to switch away and at this time it's the perception of risk and US no longer being cool are what pushes for the transition but if EU is lucky Trump will invade Greenland and will make people take the inconvenient path and US tech industry will compact into 350M US market. Europeans will have a few years of sub-par tech and then will have good sovereign tech.
This reminds me of a 1995 Norwegian song, freely translated by me and chatgtp:
> America was supposed to be the next step of humanity, a new land stripped from the ills of the old wor
wat
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Sometimes I envy the illiterate.
At least they cannot read this ridiculous load of propaganda.
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This kind of sums up my sentiment.
All throughout my adult life the US (for all its apparent faults) was to me a shining example of progress and humanity. It was the best large scale implementation of human rights, laws, and democracy. Sure it was far from perfect but “as good as it gets, for now”
Became very disillusioned with that image of the US in the last couple of years. Maybe it’s always been like that - but the recent cronyism, the blatant openly displayed corruption and complete disregard for all the values it used to champion really destroyed the good image I had of the US.
In years to come they will realise what this loss of image (or “aura” as the kids would say) really means in a very practical and blunt sense.
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Ah, come on, now that those government agencies and their employees are using "non-sovereign tech" (ie. chatgpt/claude/gemini) for thinking, the emails are basically not a concern at all.
This is ignoring that AI also, of course, lets spying agencies move from having every email ever sent in most countries to actually reacting to every email ever sent in most countries. They can move from helping Boeing make foreign airline companies ignore door closing issues to influencing every last restaurant's drinks buying decision individually.
I mean, I doubt they're there yet, but that's what they'll want to do.
Disaster, meet Catastrophe.
In the meantime Belgian public sector will use Google Cloud, it seems: https://ittech-pulse.com/news/smals-partners-with-google-clo...
That's not the case. Smals will use it, that doesn't mean that the rest of the public sector has to follow.
The tender was about R&D, the press release is about replacing the federal cloud, if you read between the words.
bonkers
With DigiID, as with this, I never understood why countries give critical infrastructure contracts away from the country it directly impacts, provided they have a mature tech ecosystem. I thought the whole point was that it was critical?
we never have evidence that providers bribe politicians into signing juicy contracts so I wouldn't claim they do, but it's either that or they're extremely gullible and don't care about their jobs.
consider Hanlon's razor before being mad and sending everyone to court for treason
Either ways, something needs to change
Because politicians hate depending on their engineers so much that they are willing to risk high treason charges instead?
Nobody is getting charged for this in any way.
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The irony that it is data from civil servants that wan to implement the biggest central digital censorship endeavor in the western hemisphere.
Netherlands has always been pretty firmly against Chat Control (except for one political party, EPP)
Is this about EU Chat Control? Because that was mostly pushed from Denmark no?
Perhaps it originated from there. But EU Chat Control is brought up again and again and again for a vote. They'll continue until some version of it is passed. And then they'll go further with the next privacy infringing regulation to be building on top of it. It is really disheartening for privacy activists, but that is probably the strategy. Wear people out, and push the regulation through when resistance wanes. Note that the Netherlands is on the side of protecting privacy at this point in time. I think it does a great deal to erode trust of EU citizens in the European Union, in a time when that trust is perhaps more important than ever before. For information see: https://fightchatcontrol.eu
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Ah, yes. Sure. Proof?
the danish were one of the strongest Chat Control promovers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control
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Is anyone building (open source?) G-Suite - I’m honestly tired of paying Google money and I think everyone needs independence.
Yes, "Euro-Office" was launched this week. It is a European fork of "OPENOFFICE".
It is open source and supported by Nextcloud, IONOS, Proton, Tuta and more.[1]
I haven't tried it out, bu you can find the documentation on how to host it yourself here: https://euro-office.github.io/documentation/
A more mature alternative would is Nextcloud as it offers a lot more, but setup is reportedly more involved. It does appear to be available for enterprise customers as hosted version as well though: https://nextcloud.com/office/
[1] https://github.com/Euro-Office
https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr
Something like nextcloud.com? It's appeared on HN a few times. Some European governments and municipalities have switched to it.
Not exactly free as in free beer but Collabora, and their 'Collabora Online' suite fits your description. It's effectively online hosted libre office with a few extras.
Where and how will you host your email service, for example?
to be clear is the "paying" part or "google" part a problem to you?
Nextcloud+self hosted email
No one made the easy pickings of Facebook clone, Reddit clone or Twitter clone for insane profits. You really think someone will make a gsuite?
The person making project X days are over. The energy and drive is extinguished from humanity. Ambition is all that’s left.
Facebook made a Twitter (now X) clone (Threads) and has reportedly more users than X now [1]. They have also started a Reddit clone as well now (Forum)[2]. Not sure if that one will be a success as well though, as Reddit isn't loosing users like X is.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-dai... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/meta-quietly-launches-a-ne...
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These things go in cycles, we’ll be back - or potentially something better will come along.
They have been doing it for years? ECHELON isn't exactly new. Also, recent EU and UK actions are not exactly privacy friendly.
So they aren't one of the Five Eyes, they joined later...
https://tuta.com/blog/fourteen-eyes-countries
And are proposing their own EU version as well....
>Incoming Dutch coalition floats European version of ‘Five Eyes’
https://www.politico.eu/article/new-dutch-government-floats-...
Europe and many other nations will look back on the early 21st century and wonder how they ever thought it was a good idea to willingly give up so much soverignity to foreign powers
Europe was beaten down, broke and simply kaput.
Then it was split in a camp dependent on the US and a camp dependent on the USSR.
Both the US and USSR spent decades keeping us together but definitely not united.
This runs deep in European political culture.
Until 2 years ago many Dutch people had more in common and more trust in Americans than <insert European country>. If only because half of them go broke once every generation.
To be fair: the # of wars fought between European nations... many. This goes back way further than WWII or Cold War.
But yes both US and Russia (perhaps China too) might stand to gain from Europe staying divided as it is.
Well the history is more complex than that - let's not rewrite it. The US bossed around and bullied large parts of Europe for decades (and still does). Often we did not have a choice (or, siding with the US was the least-bad option)
Please give me all the data I promise I won't look into them. Unless this is about kids. Or terrorism. In fact, I might look into the data without telling you, because fsck /dev/hdu
they never promised they won't look into them, they just suggest it
The way they break the informative tone and circle around the bush in AZ900 absolutely looks like a admission that they do and is peak hilarious:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/describe-...
>Describe the shared responsibility model
> How responsibilities shift in cloud
"the consumer is responsible for the data and information stored in the cloud. (You wouldn’t want the cloud provider to be able to read your information.) "
Digital sovereignity is not enough. You need to get electronic communications completely off the internet.
You mean off the web... Properly encrypted email can't be read in a browser (unless you give your keys to Gmail etc);
Never thought about it, but makes quite a lot of sense.
Why? e2e encryption and self-hosting exist.
I think it’s not the first time the US has used that sort of interpretation of the law. There’s this one[^0] but also, I believe, an older case, also involving Microsoft, about data in Ireland. But I can’t find it.
[0]: https://hackernoon.com/the-factors-prompting-a-judge-to-issu...
Encryption is what's important, jurisdiction gives a false sense of security. Nobody should prefer their messenger be server-side encrypted in Iceland rather than e2ee in China.
I self-host e2ee services instead of server side encryption, even though I control the server. It's one less point of failure.
If the data centers can't see the data they're just hosting encrypted data like a Tor node that sends along gibberish–that's the endgame. Remove extra trusted parties to minimize data.
This also applies to metadata, that can be encrypted. SimpleX has 0 user identifiers, Signal's sealed sender encrypts the senders identity. Every Monero transaction is in the publicly distributed blockchain, hidden.
Politicians LOVE theatre
Removed that to be less extreme.
US companies cannot comply with the GDPR because of the CLOUD Act. The two frameworks are fundamentally in conflict with each other and it seems to me that everybody in the EU knows about it, yet this is somehow swept under the carpet and ignored even by government authorities. I've always wondered why this is so and how these kind of dependencies could be allowed in the first place. It's even worse for AI use than it is for productivity suits and email.
Roll on Schrems III.
Anyone can read your email if it passes through their servers - it's the biggest drawback of email as it is unencrypted. So switching email services (or rolling out your own mail servers) isn't enough. You also need to control how it is delivered (i.e. control the networks / servers it goes through). With the US also treating encryption as a munition with export restrictions, it is also safe to assume that they can already crack any existing encryptions available in the market right now.
I don’t understand the problem? If you’re not doing anything wrong, there shouldn’t be anything to hide, right? What’s the big deal? Besides, it’s not like you have any privacy anyway.
(Am I doing this right?)
We've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen.
After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital sovereignty as we ban construction of new datacenter is just too cute. This is all just political theater as we peacefully sunset into a museum continent.
I don’t think that trust is coming back with a simple president swap.
People still refusing to notice policies don't really change with presidents
A museum country like Germany manages to have a larger automitive manufacturer than Ford.
Downvotes for stating a reasonable, and probably correct argument.
Europe's biggest problem (I do not mean just the EU, I mean everyone from the UK to Russia) is that it is in denial about its decline, weakness and irrelevance to the rest of the world.
The UK is a bit of an exception in being aware of it and actually talking about it. That is about it.
"Europe's biggest problem (I do not mean just the EU, I mean everyone from the UK to Russia) is that it is in denial about its decline, weakness and irrelevance to the rest of the world."
I disagree on this broad statement.
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The EU in just the past year has signed deals with Latin America and India in addition to the already existing ones with South Korea, Canada, Japan etc.
It has positioned itself at the center of the world's largest free trade zone.
It's managed to replace US contributions to Ukraine and looks like its in the process of bloodying Russia's nose.
Reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
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We Europeans are very well aware that we need to strengthen our position in the world, both economically and militarily. I would say we are making progress on both. China is not happy with recent EU decision for example.
Let's see how far China and US will go when access to the European consumer market will be resticted.
Let's see how well China and US can adapt to modern drone warfare when Ukrainians have the expertise and can share it with the rest of Europe.
We have to step up our game for sure, and everyone in Europe knows it. But the race is definitely not lost yet.
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Well, Russia is trying to do something about it and I think we can all agree that there are wrong ways to go about it. Simply being incompetent, like the EU, is not the worst possible scenario.
Btw, say what you will about Russia, but it's light years ahead of the EU in digital sovereignty. One of the reasons it did not crumble under sanctions.
One understated outcome of Trump 2.0 is waking up some sections of the European intelligentsia to the risk of dependency on the United States.
Trump 1.0 should've been enough, but instead European leaders were just too thankful for a Biden back-to-normal scenario that they basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance.
Better late than never. Incidentally, trying to build EU tech independence should produce job making industries, so can become a populist move also
> basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance.
I love this. Do you think everything is in Europe's control? Do you know anything about the US has operated since WW2? Have you noticed the mismatch in economic and military might between the two regions?
And what about all the US military bases in Europe? Do you think it's simply a case of asking them to please leave within 1 year, thanks, goodbye.
They've had us in a headlock for a very very long time
It’s a mismatch we’ve been asking Europe to do something about for 30+ years. Instead, they decided to turn their countries into third world refugee camps.
yeah true. Still, the primary problem was lack of consciousness about this state of affairs, especially at leadership level. One thing Trump 2.0 does take off the mask on this. It's a start
Because Trump has 2.5 years left and they may be hoping a Democrat wins
Trump was elected. Twice. It was not a fluke, not a once in a lifetime event, he's a symptom of wider processes happening in the US. The world has changed and the old order is not coming back
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Does it matter who is president? The US was spying on European leaders before Trump's first term:
"According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück."
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
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The EU should fine such intentional violations with a billion euros per violation. That would stop this immediately and force cloud providers to split off their European side into separate companies that don't fall under US law.
The EU is trying relentlessly to read our IMs though.
Chat Control is not law. Of course there are some people inside the EU pushing for privacy violation, just like there are everywhere else, but it's not law. For now, the law protects privacy, and Microsoft violated it. That is the issue at hand.
That's a separate problem.
And it's not "The EU", but really one EU commissioner. Many organs of the EU including the EU Legal Service have criticised CSAR (Chat Control) and the European Parliament has voted against it, effectively killing it.
I was trying to read the article, but those animations kept distracting me.
Use NoScript. Worked like a charm.
This should kill Office 365 instantly globally.
these scandals happen every other day
Hardly a decade ago, a well documented part of prism was on how Berlin was being scanned all the way up to the chancellor
Could the Dutch government think they were any different to the Germans ? Did they not use outlook ?
You put a lot of hope in managers from large companies and governments who get their rent and yearly bonuses no matter their performance, and will never ever be made redundant
What's the point of this when The Netherland, among some other EU countries is already all in into eternal Atlanticism.
yes, digital sovereignity of the individual.
This is entirely the wrong lesson to take from this. Why are we still using a plaintext protocol in this day and age? Why can we not get an E2EE addition to the email protocol with full backwards compatibility?
Yes, I understand that it would be imperfect since inevitably not all servers would support it thus forcing additional understanding and decisions on the end user. No, I don't care that a user other than myself might leak my messages in plaintext. Perfectionism in this regard only serves to further shoot us in the foot. Yes, I understand that key distribution is a difficult problem but then that's the case no matter the protocol. Other protocols have solutions that work reasonably well at this point.
There's no justification for the current status quo.
Alternatively I'd be fine using matrix for all my PII related needs (healthcare, government, subscription services, etc, etc) but somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
For large organization data the keys would need to be stored within the organization, not with one particular user as in the case of your personal PII needs.
And then you'd still need to worry about digital sovereignity for the keys.
I don't follow. Are you saying that BigCorp would demand key escrow? They already deploy custom email solutions today so I don't see the issue.
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Getting from here to there is going to be tough, but I agree 100%. Not only should email be E2EE, but it should include a certificate scheme such that you know the person purporting to be the sender is actually the sender.
PGP had the right idea, but the system is too hard for the average person.
With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.
Given that the cryptography would necessarily be asymmetric verifying the sender on a TOFU basis seems like a trivial addition (just sign something). I doubt you can do better than TOFU though unless you tie it to an external ID system (corporate or government or etc issued hardware tokens or similar).
How about the metadata? Perhaps if you mean something like self-hosted Matrix, then I agree.
For a public institution you want some sort of accountability / auditing mechanism, so you can't just do E2EE encryption between users.
Otherwise, a public servant could do sketchy stuff behind the public's back with no paper trace.
What you don't want is hostile foreign capitalists leaking your data to their local authoritarians. They are not your public and shouldn't have the data in the first place.
It seems similar conversations are happening in Europe as well. Originally, Korea is a country where the 'pro US faction' (the faction that believes Korea should be subordinate to the US) is very strong by default. The US had a very strong influence on the establishment of the Korean government, and if you look back at Korea's history, it has always been about finding a country to serve. It feels like siding with the strongest power. In fact, the pro US faction is very strong, but there has also been a strong flow of security, bureaucratic, and economic elites who have justified dependence on the US as a national survival strategy.
But recently, after Trump, I have never seen anti American sentiment this bad. It is the first time.
Actually, it is natural. In my view, Trump's policies look very similar to the Indian caste system, and I think they are a serious regression for democracy. More than that, he is destroying all the international trust that the US has built up. In Korea, people used to think of the US as a 'just' country, but these days, people are cautiously mentioning US wrongdoing more often. Especially after the tariffs and the Iran war. I myself am now unemployed because my factory expansion was canceled due to the Iran war.
My country has a natural talent for impeaching presidents, but unfortunately, Americans do not seem to have that talent. What a pity.
I have never seen anti American sentiment this bad
Bad is subjective?
I am speaking based on the response criteria of Korea's largest research institution.[1]
https://kbthink.com/news-list/view.html?newsId=2026011611543...
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South Korea does seem to be somewhere where the people are more acutely aware that they are a new democracy, and also that there are a number of horrific fascist incidents in recent memory ("tank day") which remind people that it matters.
It seems Korea lacks the "cheat code" for fascism: an ethnic minority population on which all evil can be blamed.
In Korea, there is also a minority group that receives that kind of hatred. They are called Choseonjok(To be clear, I think this kind of discrimination is wrong), which refers to ethnic Koreans who came from autonomous regions in China. There are also problems with far right groups, particularly religious ones. They tend to hate China. (I do not hate any specific country. I hate and also love all humans around the world. Every country has its own problems.) There is also collusion between religion and politics, such as religious groups helping politicians with their election campaigns. Korea itself has many problems, but in our case, it is probably because our historical background has taught us how hateful the era of dictatorship was
Can you run an empire democratically? Imagine if the US president instead of being a dictator had to actually spend EVERY SINGLE DAY convincing Congress members.
[flagged]
> That is exactly where digital sovereignty begins. It is not a patriotic slogan, nor a storage-location promise. It is the practical question of who can compel access, who can audit the chain of custody, and who can deny or limit disclosure when another jurisdiction asks for the keys.
Please at least try to make your LLM write better. It can! You can start by giving it https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md.
Not the US but the Dutch state is the problem here. The powers that be know that US espionage is not only limited to some emails and also entails sophisticated industrial espionage and never cared. Now "suddenly" they want to do something about it. This is Not about Dutch interests / sovereignty - we need to find out what it really is about.