It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds - Bert Hubert's writings
*It was never safe
"But now it's kinda obvious so we better spin it as a newly discovered development in order not to look too bad."
Never was, honestly. If it's not on your computer it's on someone else's, and it's only a matter of time until that's somebody you don't trust.
I think the EU should have a bloc-funded cloud program, where all nations in the EU fund a collective cloud. Each nation has their own servers, but collectively purchase the same hardware, have the same security standards, internet quality, and so forth. The majority of these servers can be housed in bloc facilities that are collectively owned by the EU, while particularly sensitive data can be kept within secure facilities within each nation's borders. Military blueprints, diplomatic comms, ect. The generic facilities can be used for holding taxes, driver licenses, and so forth, maybe excess space of the general servers can be sold to the public for use.
This would allow the EU to be mostly economical, while maintaining their safety. Plus, it gives an "public option" of sorts on cloud services, so commercial companies have to exceed the baseline standard set by the government cloud service.
Brazil saw the paint in the wall years ago and created a government company to manage the government cloud services with brazillian located data centers.
As a dev I have had this workflow at a previous employer:
I start my Windows 11 work laptop. I write emails to my coworkers on Outlook, I take notes in OneNote, I make presentations in PowerPoint. We have remote meetings on Teams.
I use GitHub and GitHub Actions. I host packages on npm. I write my TypeScript code with VSCode with help from GitHub Copilot, the C# .NET Core code with Visual Studio.
I login in to everything usingusing Single Sign On with Active Directory.
And everything we make is of course run on Microsoft Azure.
Yes, everything mentioned here is owned or maintained by Microsoft.
many businesses has it like this, finally its up to the money. i asked our ITs why they moved everything to MS clouds and why they finishing with local data storage archives and the answer is very simple - it costs less than maintaining data locally. second thing is that i work for corporate with 60-70k employees world wide. so its up to top level mng decision.
I am not advocating for anything specific here. Well.. Maybe a bit using european clouds instead.
Cloud is probably the way to go in most cases. It's more secure, more reliable, often cheaper, and less work.
Everything I do is cloud native and has been for a while
I use all of those Microsoft products at a sensitive department of the Federal government of Canada, and they are NOT ready to transition away.
(btw VSCodium is an open source VSCode without the telemetry)
a sensitive department of the Federal government of Canada,
Ha! I know who sold you that.
It was never safe
The mask is off now.
Never was.
The cloud was always a slow walk off a long pier approach to data takeover. It sickens me.
The cloud is amazing. As long as you control the cloud. I've been considering a Homelab for this very reason for some time.
I run proxmox in a cluster and next cloud for my mobiles contacts, calendar, files, and pictures. All stored by me
Took you long enough. We’ve put our lives in the hands of the US for too long, it’s made Europe complacent and now we’re so far behind. We could be equal to or greater than both the US and China, but if we’re honest we have a long way to go.
Citing from Bert Hubert's article:
Acknowledging painful changes is not easy. In the 1930s, the Netherlands realized the world was becoming pretty dangerous, and therefore planned to buy weapons and ammunition from Germany (!). However, the ordered weaponry was not delivered on time, or at least not in the way you’d want.
I love his clarity (and humor) combined with an incredible will to make things better - and fierce optimism that we can, really.
And as for data safety and privacy, another 1930s Dutch story. Dutch people are great at data and statistics, and very meticulous.
As a result, we have tons of data on people, including data on where someone's ancestors are from and what religion they have. The results of that, combined with a fascist regime were not pretty.
People just don't realize how much power of abuse all this data provides in evil hands. Take smart phone location data. Some time ago, there was an uproar when the move-fast-break-laws company Uber published an analysis of how many of their clients in New York City had probably a one-night stand - based on their location data. A breach of privacy, sure.
But think about this: Google is collecting all this location data all the time, and storing it permanently. Finding out who is probably having an affair while their spouse is away on a business trip is essentially a database query for them.
Or another thing: It is well known that the animal most dangerous to single humans is other humans hunting them. The unspeakable hunt on Europes Jews is an example from hell but depressingly, there are many more cases in human history, like the witch hunts or the catholic inquisition.
Now, if things got too hot, people had the last resort to flee and simply disappear, going to a safe place where nobody knows them. That was the thing that saved Salman Rushdi when he had to flee Iran.
But in an ultra-connected world without privacy, this is not possible any more. That's because companies like Facebook, Twitter/X and Google have your social graph including your family. And even if you would never would give these companies your address in Rushdie's situation, a family member who has your address on the phone would happily upload his or her whole address book to Facebook or Google.
That's not a theoretical consideration - being ratted out by social media was the way many people in Syrias civil war (fuelled by Russia) died.
And this time you can't just go to the archives and burn it down like they did in 1940.
Sweden I think has the earliest records from the 1600s ...
I have warned about this for decades ... To no avail - Sweden is TOO Microsoftified.
The entire world is too Microsoftified, but with the rise of flatpaks, Linux may change that.
Ugh. Flatpaks are really not the answer.
Go ask a security guy. Go ask an experienced build guy.
Distros need to make working with flatpacked applications easier. It's way too hard to figure out where files are being saved or how to give apps access to the right resources. FlatSeal helps, but it's not really geared towards casual users.
Maybe this year will be the year of the Linux desktop
Microshittified* FTFY
The cloud shit was the stupidest idea. Sorry, you want to be an industry leader your going to need industry leading tech professionals.
I've moved all my services into Europe. Earlier on I didn't care much about where they where, but given recent actions and attitudes of the sitting government of the US of Assholes I've decided to leave all US services. Ain't that hard really. https://www.goeuropean.org/ gives you many options for a lot of them.
I am still on the way to ditch all US services, but it cannot be done overnight without huge additional cost - new devices, new services etc. So I am doing what I can withing my budget.
Was it ever?
And yet we still do it. See Germany.
No longer?
Was never!
I work in data engineering, European cloud providers do not seem to be able to provide alternatives to managed data warehouses like Google Big Query or Snowflake.
Can't or don't ?
It's hard to compete against the mega buck providers, however if there is suddenly political willingness to buy locally then there are vendors that can build the capability. They'll only do so if it is likely to be profitable though. Chicken / egg conundrum that the EU and national govts can help solve
Might be over due setting something up. Unless you don’t care about security.