Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. technology firms.
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.
As they say: it takes decades to grow a forest, but only one match to burn it down.
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 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.
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.
AM?
And why would other nations get corrupt as hell without US tech? That is a weird flex
Tech goes through phases of enshitification. Meaning, that once EU breaks free of US tech, they will try and make actual good shit for a while, but then the shit will become shittier, just like in the US. Then it will become bad shit.
Well, shit.
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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.
Yeah nah.
Trump didn’t fuck google. Trump doesn’t run facebook. He didn’t create dark patterns, predatory subscriptionware, he’s not responsible for win 11… this is a process that’s been going for a while, and so is the detachment.
I can’t even say 100% that trump goosed the accelerator
He doesn’t need to run any of those companies because those CEO dickweeds will do whatever he wants anyway.
How do you not see that as gigantic problem?
Other way around.
Prior to el cheeto they were facing anti trust lawsuits and regulation. Now they’re not.
All they have to do is fake the occasional reacharound and they can ride him forever.
A lot of lock in effects and stuff but yes how can anyone in their right mind trust again in the next 5-10 years?
It’s like believing Putin will give us a special price on gas next year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
2/3 of the voting population didn’t vote against him, btw
doesn’t really seem like “literally one person”
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.
It’s not just Trump, it’s an entire dream team of fascists. The GOP has never distanced themselves from maga, meaning that is the new line.
They did not vote for Harris, not going to vote for 90 year old Sanders or AOC. So strategically (as in long term) the world is not going to trust the US anymore.
Oh sweet, summer child. It’s an entire cult of pedophiles who also EAT children.
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.
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 .
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
What’s UpCloud? 😆
Unfortunately the DevOps world has largely left Ligma based services behind. Good luck finding someone with under 15 years in the industry familiar with it.
It starts somewhere, and it’s people leaving one by one. Good onya putting your money where your mouth is.
I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I’m working steadily down my list.
I was hoping for that for a long time, so… thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.
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)
short-term profit i guess. tech companies get unlimited ability to fuck over society’s minds, trump gets some propaganda or sth, idk.
Because he won’t say no to them.
The group of toolbags parked behind trump at his inauguration all have one thing in common: they live so far up their own arses the concept of “no”, “no one wants this” and “you cannot do this” is so foreign to their fantasies it feels like offense.
Complete sociopathy
Don’t forget to thank the majority of US voters too. Couldn’t have done it without them.
Honestly he plays the heel too fucking well. Just wish he wasn’t taking so many innocents with him
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 the DRM free ones running on an air gapped Linux machine.
Not my Mahjong in my Linux laptop.
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??
1400 fucking accounts! My mind cannot comprehend that number.
This is… completely normal amount of accounts? I am at 1083 saved in my password manager. Admittedly it’s a bit inflated with things like crypto wallets and few dozen passwords for 192.168.1.1 for every router I ever saw. But then, I also been on account deletion spree for a year now and been avoiding making new accounts if at all possible, otherwise I’d easily be over 1500
Gotta have privacy for his bot farm
it is easy to have 1500+ passwords, I’m online since 1996 :-) and use a password manager like keepass, some sites died, others are still online, i have multiple mailbox, twitter, facebook. it goes up really fast!
not counting also all SSO with google, apple, and now my own pocketid selfhosted domain :-)
I will have to remove also those 50+ google authentificator TOTP and replace them with passkeys…
BTW, it is recommended to use single password per service sinces more than 20 years now, so without a password manager it is impossible to create new accounts. i started in firefox, then chrome password manager, then keepassX …
How does one reach even more than 20 accounts?
I have over 200 logins overall, but most of them are to forums that have been dead for a decade.
The internet used to be quite a different place back in the day, people had separated communities and everything wasn’t just on a handful of massive platforms.
By using the internet for literally 5 seconds.
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Silicon Valley people who wanted Trump are so fucking stupid its absurd.
Anyone who voted for trump is so fucking stupid it’s absurd.
As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.
We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.
To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.
And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.
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]
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.
Even Americans are trying to bail from a lot of this crap, not just for political reasons but because its shit.
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.
You’d think the few global AWS and Cloudflare outages would have worked as a warning, but most people just went from “nah it couldn’t ever happen” to “well, it did happen, but surely it wouldn’t ever last all too long”.
That’s the thing, we’re all so tightly involved in those few platforms it’s near impossible to correct the situation in the short term.
In our company we’re also documenting the risks related to US services and it’s pretty bleak. And even if we magically untangled ourselves from all that, we’d still be screwed when all the suppliers, the local infrastructure and literally everything is still on top of those. Honestly I’m not even sure if we’d get through the doors or have electricity in the whole cities we operate in if all went out at once.
The best we can do in short term is to not make it worse and choose wiser with new projects, migrate everything that can be done cheaply and hope for the best until we can get everything lifted off US governed services. Even with the risk recognised, it still doesn’t warrant that magnitude of investment. So we at least plan and document everything as well as we can.
I feel you dude
Ramp it up!
The worst crime you can commit under capitalism is not participating, not buying, not renting, etc. These tech companies are built on debt that is serviced by profits.
Moving the needle down and impacting their income by even 5% will have a huge impact on a business’s bottom line and in turn a CEO’s income, bonuses and stock options etc.
If you want to make Trump and his regime change then you have to hit the only people he will listen to… his fellow oligarchs.
70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Hit them where it hurts.
I agree, the problem is you have to consume at some level you need food water clothes etc. and for poorer people 100% of their income goes to just buying the basics. You also don’t want to put other citizens out of jobs because of a boycott, that would get unpopular quickly.
For this to work long term you need to get the top 10% or 20% of consumers to cut back on the extras. I.E. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Chat GPT subscriptions, hold off buying an iPhone or electronics, etc.
If you did that and caused consumption to dip even 5% you would hurt the companies that the oligarchs run and in turn hurt Trump.
But Tech companies gave Trump BILLIONS of Dollars! HOW could he Lose them SO Many Customers?
It’s all so unnecessary. But at least we finally do something about digital sovereignty in the EU.
