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| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The non-technical narrative is very simple: Google, Apple, or the German government can revoke your ID at any time. You cannot purchase or sell anything[1], sign any contracts, have a job, rent an apartment, use public transportation, or receive any kind of government services without an ID. This should sound extremely alarming to everyone regardless of technical knowledge. [1] Maybe with cash, for now, but cash is clearly not long for this world, and your bank account will be inaccessible already. | | |
| ▲ | 4ad 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It also makes you sound like a conspiracy theory nutjob, and the current political climate in Europe is such that people are really sensitive to this sort of alarmist messaging (which they erroneously perceive as fascist rhetoric) and will not listen to you because they don't want to be associated with those people. I don't think we can win this fight. Personally I tried to advocate against eIDAS in Austria and I've had negative success. After my warnings, people like it more. "Oh, it's an EU thing? it must be good!". | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I feel like if you frame it against the Americans you might have more success? Given this implementation is fully Google/Apple-based. Then it's not "conspiracy theory" but "something that is literally happening and in the news already", where you can point to the Europeans who were sanctioned by the US. But after demonstrating the American threat is real, it is also important to turn around and ask whether your own government should have that much power either, and for what benefit do you stand to gain by giving them that much? For those people who think you sound like a fascist nutjob, I would ask: you might be okay with the current government having this power, but will it still be okay if the FPÖ comes to have this power? But then again, maybe there is nothing that can be done. It boggles my mind that even on HN most people are defending this. It seems like freedom is a completely lost cause. |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Write too many color emojis in a row on a YouTube livestream chat > Get banned from society for life | |
| ▲ | hhh 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, it affects a tiny percentage of people today, so why would they see it as impacting them? | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do people in Europe not intuitively understand that willingly making yourself [more] dependent on a foreign corporation is disadvantageous to you? | | |
| ▲ | herbst 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Do people outside of Europe do not understand how Germany is just a small fraction of Europe. | | |
| ▲ | not_that_d 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | While true, it influences a lot in the EU | | |
| ▲ | herbst 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think they influence more than France does. But I don't know, I live in Europe but don't care for the EU | | |
| ▲ | reddalo 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you live in Europe you should care for the EU: not only it's the reason why there hasn't been a war for 80+ years, but if we can have a voice on the international stage it's because we are united instead of 27 small independent countries. | |
| ▲ | baxtr 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Don’t feel bad! The EU cares about you as much as you care about the EU. | |
| ▲ | lukan 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you live within the EU, or in europe? |
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| ▲ | megous 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Thankfully, not in the technology area. Eg. we in the post-soviet EU block are well beyond using fax, and stuff like that, ... :) |
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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | People in Texas are in the US, right? |
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| ▲ | rufasterisco 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | US dependency did bring a lot of value to a lot (albeit not all) of Europeans in past, specifically 1938-1988.
If you were born, raised and lived in that timespan, you might have developed a deep seated and hard to break habit to rely on that dependency for security and lifestyle/wealth. Also, that same lifestyle is based on ignoring externalities applied to commons and/or events happening “somewhere else”, even when factually proven.
Little wonder and tiny bit ironic that the same principle has embedded itself so deeply, that it holds true even when the damage is inward, just a few indirections away. On your side, yes, I think that “people in Europe” intuitively understand that, it just needs time to blossom.
The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future.
As a point in case, it will lead to reconsidering assumptions on habits that many generations of US businesses and diplomats have built. Many in this thread point at difference instances of services that should be decoupled.
Connecting the dots, the larger picture looks painfully obvious to me: Silicon Valley never was a partner to be trusted, and certainly not after they built or bent every business to rely on an ad ecosystem that exploits users. That original sin, on which a huge portion of Wall Street rests, is now at the center of discussions.
Hence, the EU will build tools to address this because it has to, but consumers will flock to them especially from the US, since at this point no one can trust SV companies on data privacy (since Snowdens at least), no one can trust the US administration to protect citizens (since Trump at least), and about half of the US is scared about what’s going on deeply enough (the emotional push needed to break the habit).
They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?). This will be compounded by the fact that everyone tries to build better LLMs and to get AGI, while forgetting that LLMs work on data pipelines. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The reputation/trust damage self inflicted by the current US administration is triggering a pushback that will expand into the future. This barely even seems like the relevant part. If Google was founded in Japan and Apple in Brazil, it would still be foolish to entrench them as a dependency. It would barely even be better to do it with a local company. > They will move their data it the EU (where else? China?). This feels like hopium. Network effects are powerful and as long as the internet is actually global, there are really only two options: 1) Centralized megacorps, and then the US ones have both the US apparatus behind them and the incumbency advantage, or 2) open protocols where no corporation of any nation is a gatekeeper. So for Europeans to get the hooks of the US incumbents out of them, their best chance by far is the second one, and that one is also mostly to the advantage of the Americans who aren't the existing incumbents, which is why it works. Start making phones with open hardware and social networks with open protocols and you can get people outside of your own country to use them because they don't much like the incumbents either, and that's how you reclaim the network effect. Try to clone the US megacorps without the US apparatus to get them established in other countries and they don't because they're wary of foreign central control, which in turn means you don't get the network effect and you lose. But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction. | | |
| ▲ | TeMPOraL 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Relying on open protocols to make all the difference is much more potent hopium than what GP wrote. Open protocols are kind of thing techies do when in cooperative mode, when industry isn't looking. But this is not this kind of problem - this is an economic, geopolitical problem. It's not about your local school moving off Windows to Linux, it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?). I'll grant it, the turmoil of such transitions is a perfect moment for pushing for open protocols, federated solutions, etc. - the industry is distracted, there's more space to sneak in some good solution before everyone notices, and EU has cultural and political tradition of pushing towards FLOSS (even if largely just as an alternative to Microsoft) and associated values/memetic complex. But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will. It's a blind spot for some software folks, because they forget that FLOSS is an exception here; everything else in the real world - including computing hardware and supporting power and network infrastructure - plays by rules of market economy, with proprietary solutions and clear structures of ownership. It makes no sense to try and fight this here - but it does make sense to go along with the flow and improve things by pushing for more globally optimal solutions, especially that EU is known to be favorable to using openness in protocols and standards as a policy vehicle, both internally and externally. | | |
| ▲ | ElFitz 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > it's about the European corporations moving off Azure to some other cloud solution offered by European corporations (do we even have any?). Scaleway and OVH?
Although I’m not sure how they compare at scale to AWS / Azure / GCP. | |
| ▲ | rufasterisco 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | great counterpoint! (no i'm not an LLM, it is a actually a crucial perspective)
i especially agree with
> But open anything won't save the day - more corporations will. i am not advocating for a pure "open source will save the world"
there are just a few points i'd like you to consider, and hopefully give me insights i can learn from * other than code, open source has also given us governance "experiments" capable of running critical systems. As another poster was mentioning, the risk is to fallback on "big corps", usually run by "big man", and we are back to zero. The hope? expectations? is that the open source governance ecosystem has tackled this space in enough dimensions to be able to build something over this.
I am looking specifically at the area around licenses (mariadb, redis, ...) and just overall governance frameworks, as in "deteach business ownership from ethical frameworks" * in order to build anything this big/reliable, without megacorp budgets, you can just ... pay FLOSS? They are one of the 2 majorly screwed groups by the current SV setup (with PLENTY of cavaets,amongst them that SV is a huge open soure contributor)
The other one being content creators.
Slogan? "For this to succeed, you need the best coders and the best marketing departments in the world"
Looks to me like incentives are aligned towards them being available.
Talking broadly on a systemic level: details need refinement, and space beyond this single message. * EU (the political instituion) desperately needs this. An innovative tech ecosystem (not startup, not product) driven by "european values" that puts them on the spot. Start with redefining it: there are no users, but citizens.
Something effectively out-innovating SV, not just trying to get on par.
The risk of "being bought out/copied" doesn't really apply, since (as I said in my original comment) the discriminator is existential: US companies cannot be trusted because they built the existing system.
Any attempt to block this (stop users from getting their data back) is going to be challenged by the EU (GDPR violations cannot be brought to court by citizens, only by nation's data authorities, which means a citizen gets big guns and doesn't ned to pay).
Also, go on and explain that to all you other (US and not) users. * A EU cloud provider doesn't have to provide the same services an US provides. That would hardly be innovative.
You also don't need to focus on corporations. Provide data storage for citizens, that will be the basis to build a privacy focus cloud, and then business might want that.
There is a possible continuation into "advantages of storage&privacy based vs compute", that i skip. But essentially, to me it seems that an open source, true, "give me back my data" business driven initiative has never been as actionable as now.
I short, such a project can make 2 bold statements
"We are more innovative than SV"
"We have better freedoms than the US" |
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| ▲ | rufasterisco 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | thank you for the insightful answer > But then it's not so much that data ends up in "the EU" as that it's on your own device and then backed up or distributed as encrypted chunks in a distributed network which isn't tied to any specific jurisdiction. 100%
i launched into a long trajectory from the comment i was originally answering to, and stopped short i think-of? dream-of? try-to-build? what you just said my "in the EU" claim is mostly around legislation (EU art 8 vs US CLOUDS act vs vs China approach to citizen's data) the legislation is there, since GDPR
it's a matter of tools since corps built tools, they "forgot" to add the third button on cookie banners: "give me back my data" ... (and fourth: "delete it")
but the legal framework is there, as well as most of the tooling (google takeout, and so on from all other major players) it's not that pipelines for moving data from US corps to inidividual do not exists, it's more that, up to now, whenever i was talking about "data rights" to people, even in tech, i got yawns back now we have a "perfect storm": distrust towards US (administration, collpasing onto US businesses) + global uncertainty towards AI (where lots of people just perceive something happening but lack any tool that gives them control over it) this is what i perceive as a tectonic shift that can be used innovatively, by EU businesses, hopefully leveraging open for completeness, i have indeed wrapped "EU" as the spearhead for this, given the incentives to build it, but yes, central authority over this should live inside of each citizen nation framework (see, Japan and South Korea, both providing legal frameworks for data protection) |
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| ▲ | krater23 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, most people aren't interested at all. They say it will nothing happen. Changed a little bit since Trump, but not enough to have really impact. |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "My government can read my XXX" also affects only a tiny percentage of people today, but due to historical precedents and a lot of history and civics lessons, everyone thinks it affects them personally. |
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| ▲ | shevy-java 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But there is nothing abstract here. A private entity, situated in a country that is very hostile and pro-Russia, controls parts of the software stack and implementation here. That's a law written by lobbyists. | |
| ▲ | heavyset_go 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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