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.
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.
Try Softmaker if you don’t like Libre/Onlyoffice. It’s worth it.
It is not perfect,but especially for people coming from MS it’s often much much easier to adopt.
Fuck proprietary US tech products. Proprietary European tech products are only marginally better because they have to abide by European laws. Europe should not only push for European products, but also for open source and open data. Hopping from one sizzlingfrying pan into another one with a small flame underneath is but one step. Eventually we have to jump out of frying pans altogether and away from the fire or proprietary software.
For example geographical data (cadastral, soil quality, air quality, public transport routes, public transport schedules, official hiking routes, …), statistical data, publicly funded research, data coming out of publicly funded anything actually (internet speeds, crime stats, police brutality, parliamentary attendance, and so on), and a bunch more. That shouldn’t be published on proprietary platforms for a fee, squirrelled away in a physical archive only accessible by travelling there, shouldn’t require a freedom of information request, or whatever else is put in the way.
Similar to the “Public Money, Public Code” campaign.
Why didn’t they take this shit seriously before? Fuck Microsoft.
No laziness. I never got how the whole western world just said yep I’m fine with America controlling everything. I mean everything America has said about Chinese companies is also true about American ones. They are beholden to American government they could do an update that puts in a backdoor.
Then brags about having 20-30% AI generated codebase.
vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers’ data if needed.
Problem is they simply can’t do that, the anti terror laws are enforced in secret, supported by secret laws and processed in secret courts. If you work against them in any way, you can be treated as a terrorist just for that.
The agreement between USA and EU for USA to respect EU law was never worth the paper it’s written on. Because US law simply doesn’t agree, and is designed to trump the agreement.
If you reveal anything from above secret law enforcement, you are yourself guilty of acts against the safety of United states. And if you in any way obstruct it, you can be held, prosecuted and judged as a terrorist with basically no civil rights.
It’s insane that EU fell for it, and played along in the American circus to dismantle human rights and democracy.
If EU finally wakes up about such issues, I might actually celebrate the Trump presidency!!
USA has decided to burn civil rights and human rights, and undermine democracy both globally and at home, let’s make sure that shit doesn’t spread to EU!!!
If the US doesnt play by the rules the EU will just turn up the heat and start cutting off US tech companies from the EU internet by force. As soon as some EU countries start implementing harsher punishments for US companies, other EU countries will start joining. It can avalanche pretty quickly and its already starting to happen.
How would EU detect that US companies hand over information to American law enforcement contrary to the agreement?
The problem is that because of the agreement EU countries could pretend like it isn’t a real problem, despite by American law it obviously is. Now EU is waking up to reality, but we still can’t prove it’s happening.
