Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. technology firms.
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I’m selfhosting most of my stuff now and did closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review. It take times but I always while closing enter a comment like “lost confidence in USA for the next 50 years thanks to Trump” BTW most services don’t let you delete your account, in this case I empty all my personal data, upload blank images for profile, anonymize field, move email to temp mailbox and delete my password.
I did some architecture and implementation to Azure for a big client, now moved to pure AKS with only OSS software, nest step for them is to quit US cloud, a lot easier if you use pure kubernetes.
I think it is good that we reduce our reliance on US stacks, but not at the cost of using Chinese softwares.
Deleting Reddit, instagram, facebook was really the easiest and most satisfying of all.
I plan to organize meetup on sovereignty, privacy and self hosting soon too 😇
closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review
(⊙_⊙)
How??
How does one reach even more than 20 accounts?
As a QA, I raised the very real risk that should tensions with America escalate, they could effectively cut us off and our business would be kaputt.
What happens if AWS goes down? We use Google. What happens if both go down (or cut us off)? We’re fucked.
The answer to me raising the risk was a, “Haha, yeah, true, we’d be in big trouble…” but there’s no actual appetite to do anything about it. We’re so tied up in AWS that I can’t imagine there ever will be.
Chinese open-source foundation models are already enabling small countries and companies to build their own large language models.
Had to be mentioned of course, in the context of critical technologies. 🙄
SEO is a bitch.
I don’t think ICANN
I’m playing my part… Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I’ve been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scaleway/UpCloud. This is a significant practical setback for me, but I can no longer live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.
UpCloud is nice but ever since I started using UpDog I don’t think I can go back.
Waits patiently for someone to ask what it is
Yeah also did that for my recent site using StaticBuilder and Codeberg. Took longer but well worth supporting smaller businesses.
Btw, if people are passionate about this topic. There is a community and website on !purchasewithpurpose@lemmy.world .
It starts somewhere, and it’s people leaving one by one. Good onya putting your money where your mouth is.
Obviously because once that country collapses or becomes a pariah state and starts fooling with the data for nefarious purposes, all goes almost anything the rest of the world relies on, including website hosting services. So, yeah, decentralization is necessary.
If most US websites are garbage this can’t happen soon enough. You can’t even trust basic search anymore thanks to AI bs. People complain about nobody reading articles when they are ad-filled crap usually written by AI, I’d rather spend my time playing video games.
Good news, AI is coming to ruin video games as well!
Not my Mahjong in my Linux laptop.
Not the DRM free ones running on an air gapped Linux machine.
I was hoping for that for a long time, so… thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.
Honestly he plays the heel too fucking well. Just wish he wasn’t taking so many innocents with him
He has made China, Canada and Europe greater.
He only cares about himself and the money he got from them. The better question is why all those tech billionaires supported him.
because once you’ve reached end-state capitalism, the only realistic way to make sure line continues to go up is either ratfucking public funds or to trigger a crash/credit crunch (enabling you to buy up discounted distressed assets)
I was reading an opinion piece about this sort of thing earlier today, “Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam’s clouds and go EU-native”. It opens by saying:
I’m an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn’t trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money.
The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s tech leader, their IT buddy.
Now that we’ve violated everyone’s trust, we will likely never get that position back.
Ding ding ding
And that IS a good thing. It’s great that it happened, I just wish it had happened 2 decades ago and before IT companies yeeted the fworld off a cliff into hell
No, now is the perfect time, because the rest of the world would get corrupt as hell. This will cause a massive leftwards shift, right around the dawn of AI.
We don’t want an AM.
deleted by creator
But everything was rolling, pretty goddamn great until…
I beg to disagree there. Each year Big Tech has become more and more aggressive in taking control from us, the consumer. Microsoft with the requirements of TPM in order to install windows 11. Google with they’re delaying open source releases of android, preventing apps from being installed unless it’s non-cfw. All tech companies shoveling AI everywhere. John Deere with their vendor lock-in hardware.
This needed to stop and these companies need to be reminded that “the consumer owns the hardware and that includes functional software (that does not change without the users consent)”.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Government failed it’s people in defending consumer rights and tbh, the EU hasn’t really done a stellar job either. However, this is certainly the" kick in pants" the EU needs (hopefully) to start to create competition against U. S. Big Tech… and the EU certainly understands that it needs to protect these small EU start-ups as they try to find their footing.
So, I hope this results in the EU creating laws to “level the playing field”. Which, I hope, actually spurs innovate and Open Standards (something Big Tech has been working hard on suppressing), which will be good for all of us (regardless, if you’re in the EU, U.S., and beyond).
You’ll notice there is a lot of “hope” in these sentences. I am skeptical, but I can see how this could be “a good thing”.
For decades there has been tension between European data protection principles and US principles that corporations should be able to monetize your data and the US government should be able to access everything. Our dependence on US tech companies had made our position weak. We should have subsidised European cloud infrastructure a long time ago.
Especially the last few years it’s been terrible how many companies and organisations have surrendered to US Big Tech. Even Dutch banks have abandoned their own excellent contactless payment system to surrender to Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
I mean, privacy had been getting worse for decades before Trump got in office. Mainstream tech has been on a steady decline for years, if not longer, and the privacy invasions being baked into most software have always been horrifying.
Was it all functional? Yeah. Were there a lot of horrifying things under the hood? Also yeah.
As they say: it takes decades to grow a forest, but only one match to burn it down.
That really doesn’t fit here IMO. It took decades of bullshit, law breaking, blatant spying, hostile persuasion etc. of US IT being forced onto the world, and without Trump and the fucking nightmare circus that’s going on this wouldn’t have happened. The world would have kept bending the knee and even inviting all of it forever, it took THIS MUCH to get the world to take a step back and realise that this isn’t a good thing.
There are those who learn from the past mistakes of themselves and others…
and there are those who don’t…
Judging by the popularity of Germany’s AfD party, the US isn’t the only one.
I quote from the good book of YG:
Tbf USA weren’t having their own Hitler until now. Give em a chance
That’s alarmism.
The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s cloud host, but that’s thankfully only a decade or so of bullshit.
And it’s good when trust gets broken in things where trust is wrong.
And sorry, I still see most big things in tech centered around USA. That won’t go away until some jurisdiction becomes safer. Perhaps Brazil stands a chance eventually, LOL.
This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about
You say “we violated”, but its literally one person called Trump.
I think once he is out of office, the western world can work together again. Its just so much to gain from that. The mentality of Trump is from Russia or North Korea.
All his decisions can be reversed by the next president.
Oh sweet, summer child. It’s an entire cult of pedophiles who also EAT children.
The US has worked to keep the upper hand w.r.t. tech, espionage, backdoors, copyright acts and trade agreements for decades. We never saw eye to eye (he), this didn’t start with him.
one person, along with all the people who voted for him, all the people who got those voters to vote for him, all the people who helped him
Romania knew how to deal with a fascist candidate, the USA didnt
who cares about trump here. he’s just the catalyst that started the process we long needed. american big tech has for much longer been parasitic and anticonsumer, and that’s not on trump. every administration before that was fine with it too.
yes you violated, and that’s out of question.
The loss of soft power can’t be reversed easily and especially not in the next presidency. Why would any sane country think this is a one off for us? Next election we might elect someone crazier for all they know.
All his decisions can be reversed by the next president.
And then reversed by the next next president. Do you think this kind of trust violation blows over just like that?
The orange Cheeto threatened to annex a fucking European country. And nobody in the US told him otherwise. The Democrats seem to be too busy eating popcorn and waiting for elections.
American companies have shown that they will happily bend the knee and lick the boots of fascist dictators for money. No one should trust them ever again.
Speaking as a canadian, I do believe our leaders will attempt to work with any new administration the US votes in. We are too inter-linked to not try. BUT, I think recent events have shown not just our government, but our general populace that we cannot rely on the USA. I don’t think everything will just “go back to normal” like you hope.
I still think it will, if a good president is selected. But can the US select a good president? That is more doubtful to me actually. I havent seen anyone good since Obama. And even him was disliked by some.
2/3 of the voting population didn’t vote against him, btw
doesn’t really seem like “literally one person”
There’s a bit of a problem with that: every single thing Trump has promised has turned out to be a lie. A very obvious lie that has costed this entire country more than we could possibly imagine.
So… How do you square that with what Trump promised before now?
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed. At some point, companies and governments decided to cramntheir entire critical IT infrastructure into monolithic services. In this case it was the US, but it could have been anyone anywhere. No matter who, it was a bad practice and everyone is now realizing why.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
The internet should have been nationalized under the purview of national postal services globally with private options through telecoms.
Maybe it’s not too late?
Tbh I think I’m greatful that it is not under the direct purview of this administration…
The Internet is still distributed, it’s the ownership (and thus also the command and control) that is super inbred. Cloudflare, Google, Aws, they all have hardware distributed in every city.
This is definitely a specific problem with the US too.
My point is that had companies and governments no opted to put all their eggs in one basket, it wouldn’t have mattered as much whether the US morphed into a fascist hellscape or not.
Correct. And everyone needs to remember the actual problem, not the symptom. Its like leaving one social media platform for another then when it too goes to crap complaining. Oh how can this happen again!?
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed.
The textbook explainer for the existence of the internet was (at least) two fold:
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Provide a high speed communication between research universities for conveying large amounts of digital data
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Devise a system of redundant communication such that any major node going offline would not cripple the international data infrastructure (specifically with an eye towards major natural disasters or nuclear wars).
But the evolution of the system, from a boutique international data exchange for government enterprises to a business-heavy commercial data system to a retail facing SaaS model degraded both original goals.
Data is no longer supposed to be public and freely traded. It is jealously guarded as a commodity controlled by a handful of privatized tech giants. And due to the continuous, voracious digital harvesting performed by these tech giants, more and more of the information needs to be siloed, encrypted, and otherwise shielded. This clogs the vast redundant network with overlarge choke-points designed to filter out unwanted traffic and shield the identity/data of its users.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
The stupidity is a directly result of how the US private sector repurposed tools layout out by the international public sector. Unregulated solicitations and chronic system intrusions by malicious actors aimed at a naive retail user base, combined with the gluttonous privatization of research data, has inverted the core function of the network.
And because of the Tragedy of the Commons, there is no single actor who can fix the problem through their own virtue. You can’t unfuck this chicken with a Meshnet or through voluntary individualistic commitments to ideological principles unbound from the central rules of network communication.
You need the heavy hand of national scale regulators and industry scale redevelopment to re-engineer how the root layers of the internet function if you want to get back to its original design.
Or… if we’re moving in the direction it seems that we’re moving… we’re going to end up with a wholly proprietary loose confederation of Walled Gardens that look more and more like the Anarcho-Capitalist model of civil government (ie, The Network State).
You can’t unfuck this chicken.
100% I am definitely not offering an easy fix, and I hope my comment didn’t read that way. This chicken is…
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Can I still use stuff from the '60s to about the late '90s?
I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I’m working steadily down my list.
So are you moving to other subscriptions, based in another country, that are also at the whim of other corporations?
I think it’s time more people learn how to self-host what’s important to them. At least make sure to keep multiple backups of all of your media.
The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.
Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.
Could be a great time for small services and modular subscriptions (e.g. block stores or MTAs). I wouldn’t trust many small VPS’ to host an organisation, but it is fine for me personally.
Hopefully enough stable income exists to grow a cottage industry of small infra and protocols lower the barrier to entry/migration.
I would pay for access to an artisanal data center of the finest organic hosts, tenderly shepherded by third generation sysadmins.
I agree in principle. I know how to self-host, and I do self-host some things, but I can’t always afford the upfront investment (especially with today’s hardware costs) and I don’t always have time to keep up with the administration (because I’m a wage slave) so I end up renting some of it. I’m not the only one in this position.
I think there’s a place for rented tech services just as there’s a place for rented housing, but the problem in both cases is regulatory capture by landlords that mean we get stuck renting forever from exploiters. (And with tech there’s the surveillance too, so they’re the landlord that puts a secret camera in your bedroom.) So anyway, I’m trying to at least pick my tech landlords more carefully until I can afford a better solution, and as far as possible I try to make sure my stuff is encrypted before they see it.
that’s why I believe that in a normal world, renting should only be needed for temporary hardware. a temporary home, a temporary vehicle, a temporary server, temporary storage…
but with homeservers you could have your own once you can afford it, and you could request help from contractors for the urgent type of maintenance. replacing failing disks in the array, minimal monitoring so that they can keep an eye on when that happens, maybe critical updates…
Rightly so, US tech is a dumpster fire with 24/7 surveillance.
More worried the US is spying on me than China at this point.
That’s rational. [not sarcasm]
Even Americans are trying to bail from a lot of this crap, not just for political reasons but because its shit.
