Hacker News Reader

Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

What would be a good jurisdiction for them?

Germany has very strong privacy laws which is one of the reasons Amazon dropped an AWS region there. Customers are paying a premium for the jurisdiction.

If customers are paying a premium why would Amazon drop the region? Were the privacy laws too complex for them?

I think he means "dropped" as in "the rapper dropped his mixtape today", not as in "the service provider dropped their service due to lack of profitability".

Well that's confusing :) Given your example is out of context and counter-example is perfectly in context.

Yes, because I agreed with you that it was perhaps a poor time for a colloquial usage of "dropped" considering that, in the context, it was fairly likely to be interpreted as my counter-example, or your initial interpretation.

I'd like to think my wording was completely unambiguous to make up for any context-switching your brain might have tried to pull on you, and if not I apologize.

"dropped" in this case = "added" or "dropped into place"

Think "drop a pin" like in Google maps parlance. To "drop something" is to release something. In that context it's really American hip-hop slang. Although its used widely by the music press when discussing a new release from any type of artist.

A band or artist might be "getting ready to drop something new" - a new single, a new album, video etc.

Sidenote, this is an example of a contronym, a word that means one thing and the opposite.

Those laws protect against commercial exploitation, but not against endeavours of law enforcement or intelligence services. "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" (data retention) law just took effect. In fact the BND doesn't care about the law at all. Fear driven neo-con politics are en vogue as everywhere else. I think the main difference is the civil opposition which is probably a tad more vocal and active than in non-EU or soon to be non-EU countries.

Some kind of crypto-haven like The Isle of Man or Liberland

What is the tech scene there in those two countries? Could they hire the correct talent?

I'm not sure about Liberland, but I know in the Isle of Man that Bitcoin is thriving: https://www.middletonkatz.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Isl...

I guess that it's even easier to sniff upstream traffic (to/from VPN endpoints) to such small internet outposts than, let's say AWS, Akamai or any other large infrastructure provider out there.

This. You're at the mercy of their upstreams, which are fixed, targets for TLAs, and likely to be sharing the pipes with other people who are (at least in their own eyes) high value targets.

it might be time for space satellite hosting companies... or maybe once SpaceX reduces the cost of used rockets.

>it might be time for space satellite hosting companies.

Uhm that would probably backfire and make you an open target for every security service on the planet.

German BND did bulk-collection on satellite communications, even tho German law does not allow for something like that. So BND reasoned "Satellites are in space, German Grundgesetz does not apply in space!", dubbing it the "Weltraumtheorie" (Spacetheory)

German source: https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Geheimakte-BND-NSA-B...

What if you can't control it once it's gone? and anyone can access the read-only data that is stored on-board.

Afaik this whole "satellite/international water" scenario was suggested to prevent government agencies from forcing access to sensitive data trough legal means. If your data is so insensitive, that you can have it just sitting there accessible by anybody, then you might as well just put the data on regular public servers and not bother with the effort of building a "space server".

Iceland maybe?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com