I haven't mentioned America or any other continent. It is the Europeans who are shouting about sovereignty right now.

Well, no one has mentioned computer hardware until you did.

Surely you understand how "all the motherboards are made in Taiwan" is less of an immediate risk to sovereignty than "all of our business and personal data is stored on American servers and subject to US law"

It would be nice if Europe could produce its own computers, but right now no one can except China, so what is your point? That limited sovereignty efforts undertaken in the realm of reality are futile and that enables you to get some cheap shots in for whatever reason?

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carlosjobim 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Computing is the software and the hardware. So you're right, I feel that it is futile.

Well, you can use the old hardware which you've already got if you get cut off from foreign suppliers. But the same is true for software. It's even more true for software.

If the French government and other Europeans were serious about reducing or eliminating dependency on American cloud services, they should switch to older versions of MS Office and MS Windows be done with it. No need to retrain your workers, and a realistic and speedy way to implement it.

	▲	microtonal an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		they should switch to older versions of MS Office and MS Windows be done with it That does not make any sense at all. These are full of known security vulnerabilities.
	▲	samus an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There is one very serious issue with software: it needs updates for security issues that are uncovered. And it might be built requiring access to MS cloud services to work. To get rid of these problems is basically equivalent to adopting open source products.
	▲	einr an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Unfortunately that’s an unacceptable security risk, especially for a government.