Microsoft is responding to mounting “geopolitical and trade volatility” between the US administration and governments in Europe by pledging privacy safeguards for customers worried about using American hyperscalers, and vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers’ data if needed.
Under Trump 2.0, some Europeans fear that storing their data in the bit barns of Microsoft, Google and AWS is no longer safe, a concern voiced to The Register in late February by Bert Hubert, a part time technical advisor to the Dutch Electoral Council.
Everyday I try to rely more on european products and I am not willing to stop. It is time to make Europe great again
As a Canadian I’m trying to switch as much as possible to European or Canadian services. The tricky thing is knowing which still use US hosting services in the backend.
Sure, totally believable.
I for one am ditching Windows and Office which I’ve been using professionally since Windows 3.0. It’s the year of the Linux for me. As per data in US clouds (even hosted in EU), it was never safe.
same. been using MS shit since DOS 3.0 command line interface. now in the process of moving to linux. got a tuta mail account with my own custom domains in order to de-google. moving from dropbox to pcloud. switching from US vpn to european vpn
it’ll never be enough, but i will loudly contribute to the message. even if a US company is good (LMAOOOOO), all the data anyone ever had or has pretty much belongs to trump’s NSA/FBI/CIA/etc now. fuck that shit
Recently joined the Tuta + Custom Domain gang myself… Can confirm a smooth User Experience!
I’d add that I also migrated my DNS from Squarespace (formerly Google Domains) to France’s Scaleway. Altogether smooth transition.
Lidl is owned by the Schwarz Group who are heavily invested with a Israeli “cybersecurity” company called “xm cyber” run by a former Mossad director. If you don’t want your data with foreign intelligence including American intelligence i would steer clear of any of the digital services of the Schwarz Group.
What’s your advice to replace Office?
I’m trying OnlyOffice with my new cloud provider and… Even the most basic settings (default language for text document) are… Well let’s say I still couldn’t change it.
It depends on your use case I’d say. I’m replacing outlook with possibly Thunderbird or just web interface when it comes to exchange. I don’t use word, instead markdown for simple documents or typst for more complex ones. Instead of PowerPoint I’ll use JavaScript/html based presentation engines and instead of excel, I don’t know yet, perhaps LibreOffice equivalent. But then again, I’m more a developer than content creator.
TL;DR when it comes to word like documents, check out typst. It requires a shift, but you might like it.
I suspect we’re going to see that US courts can just be ignored pretty shortly here. Build your own clouds, Europe.
That’s been the case for a long time, all you have to do is claim national security, and things can be handled under anti terror laws, where everybody is treated with the rights of a terrorist, meaning they basically don’t have any rights. And can be held, prosecuted and judged in secret, without normal rights to outside legal counsel!!
This has been the case since George Bush! Pushed through with the help of the 9/11 terror attack, and is what Obama called a “good balance”!
My bet is that it’s even worse now under Trump.
Yep, the rot started earlier. Still, that was limited to things covered by the anti-terror legislation. We could be talking about the wheels coming off entirely now.
Problems absolutely started already with George Bush, who said: “If you aren’t with us, you are against us.” While at the same time he fed us false information about weapons of mass destruction, that made many countries join USA against Iraq.
The fact that that idiot was elected twice was not good, the fact that Trump got elected was not good.
The fact that Trump got elected again, when it is evident he wants to dismantle Democracy in USA and dismantle NATO is insane!!!
That he now threaten Canada, Panama and Denmark militarily. While obstructing Ukraine and helping Russia, makes it insane he is allowed to continue.
Canada is probably the biggest traditional USA ally of all. And Denmark has been an extremely reliable ally that also participated (helped USA) in Iraq.
Obama was very well liked, and things almost got back to normal because of him, but even with Obama there were problems. Like non Americans apparently had no rights regarding surveillance. And also there were numerous grave incidents of illegal surveillance of European politicians and EU parliamentarians.
Like the saying goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
PS: I am not an anti American by habit, this is a new thing for me, in my childhood I admired USA. But I’ve really come to despise many aspects of American politics, and the flawed democracy. And it’s sickening to hear them call America land of the free, when they don’t even have basic civil rights that are universal throughout EU.
It’s no more safe to store data on US servers than it is to store gold there - as Germany has recently found out.
