1mo ago

Europe needs digital sovereignty - and Microsoft has just proven why.

tuta.com Europe needs digital sovereignty - and Microsoft has just proven why. | Tuta

Call to action: Businesses already offer great European alternatives for digital sovereignty, authorities must start adopting them now!

A quiet but deeply unsettling moment just shook the foundations of international justice, proving why Europe needs digital sovereignty - and most Europeans not too interested in tech likely missed it: The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a court based in The Hague and central to Europe’s upholding of human rights, suddenly found that his email account was shut down. The service provider? Microsoft. The reason? Mr. Trump.....

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Europe needs digital sovereignty - and Microsoft has just proven why. | Tuta

tuta.com /blog/digital-sovereignty-europe

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Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why

tuta.com /blog/digital-sovereignty-europe

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18 comments

It's nice to see – once again – how dangerous it is to put the entire infrastructure into the hands of one single company. A company, that not only immensely obstructs transparency, but also falls into the jurisdiction of foreign / non-EU institutions.
And now imagine the hidden extent of (industrial) espionage, which happens without notice, because we put our data and our communication into the hands of these very companies.
- Plus those corporations being under the jurisdiction of a criminally corrupt, narcissistic political class; fuelled by a population suffering what can only be described as a propaganda induced mental illness epidemic ... with the surveillance capitalism of those same corporations the likely cause — the attack vector — of the epidemic.
- A company, that not only immensely obstructs transparency, but also falls into the jurisdiction of foreign / non-EU institutions.
  In the US, companies contracted by the federal government must comply with data storage location requirements that DO keep the data strictly within their territory and under national jurisdiction. i believe this falls under FedRAMP regulations. I'm 95%+ certain that major EU countries have equivalent policies (probably even better ones, considering the GDPR and so forth).
  That correction aside, I completely agree with the larger concern here.

Seems the ICC could use a bit of technical competence, too. Why the fuck didn't they set up their own MX instead of relying on MS' shitty mail service? It's not the first time something like that is happening and besides all politics Microsoft's MX' have proven to be unreliable countless times before, Extendend downtimes, lost accounts, blocks by antispam lists, etc.
- Not only MS. The EU should finally treat the Internet as basic infrastructure. They wouldn't (or shouldn't) let a foreign company control electricity or water supply. Internet services should be viewed much in the same way, at least at the government level.
  
  Well, technically the internet backbone is already controlled locally, it's the web services - software - that are dominated by US big-tech. And for such services to be safe we need a diversity of providers, not only local ones maybe easily coerced by our own national governments, some of which might also try to turn authoritarian in future. So the problem is not that US big-tech participates, rather that we let them become almost a monopoly.
- Convincing marketing/lobbying maybe
  
  And the ease of hiring people who have experience with Microsoft clients compared with the ease of hiring people that can set up an open source version
- I think the ICC by and large was built on the idea that governments would protect it. Instead we see multiple EU governments also attacking the court, be it verbally, be it by disobeying the court and violating the respective treaties or by not defending it against such attacks.
  Countries like Germany and Hungary seem motivated to destroy any form of rules based order in favor of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu.

I welcome my country's (USA) cutting off at the knees to provide greater diversity in tech allocation. It made sense to rely on corporations in the USA when our leadership wasn't outright hostile to the rest of the world, at least from the perspective of the people making such decisions. We have proven to be a rogue state. We can be trusted with nothing.
Isolate us and reduce the amount of harm we are capable of delivering. My sincerest apologies to the rest of the world for the shitty decisions of my fellow citizens.
- It never made sense to rely on American corporations. Even for Americans.

YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP
- Feels like Sheen bringing in UltraLord for show and tell.

So Trump tries to hamper the ICC through infrastructure. Mess with the email, and everything stops, right? That's how he believes it works?
Hey, Trump, you may not believe this, but the ICC have these things called "legally defined purpose" and "established procedures". I know you've recently proven that as far as the USA is concerned, those are just theoreticals that you think you can revoke at whim, but unfortunately for you, here in the democratic world they still mean something, as far as I know. No email outage will stop this show.

Trump is the best thing to ever happen to Europe in recent history

This reads like a long advertisement for Tuta.

The fucking site auto-translated without my asking , and provided no obvious way to show the original.
I really, really fucking hate this.

18 comments