Or are the German data centres of Azure safe as they're run by a German company?
If the us wants access to our data, they’ll need to go through the Danish courts.
We spend a lot of money though, but it afford us our own private servers in the Irish farm, that we have physical access to and our data never enters the public part of Azure.
If the US government wants to get access, it probably can, after a few months in various EU courts, but all they’ll find by the in our little vault will be a tape recorder playing twister sisters - we’re not gonna take it on repeat.
Of course American companies will be replaced by an European competitor if the US government doesn’t wise up and stops being dicks. If there was a real alternative to American clouds we’d have left by now.
Not a lawyer so pure speculation but would be interested if anyone has details.
Maybe this verdict changes things, but if it did, I’m fairly confident that I would’ve known by now considering it’s a sensitive issue.
We do have extensive exit plans at hand, for such an event. Plans that are really just us burning money because the US surveillance state can’t get it’s damn act together.
- Upcloud (based in Finland)
- Cloudsigma (based in Switzerland)
- Deutsche Telekom TelekomCLOUD (based in Germany)
- Online.net / Scaleway (based in France)
- Aruba Cloud (based in Italy)
- Swisscom (based in Switzerland)
- etc.
Unfortunately none of them offer the breadth of services like Google Cloud, Amazon or Azure, but they most likely will be more than enough for many purposes.
It’s quite nice for tiny projects you don’t want to spend on.
Under these conditions, the provider can (and has incentives to) challenge the order requiring the production of the data. If the order is quashed, the US government would need to get an order from the local government under MLAT for the data.
As for your German datacenter question... Under the text of the law, it depends on whether that data is within a US electronic communications or remote computing service provider's "possession, custody, or control." In theory, a service provider might contract out the management of these aspects of its operations, but it would be hard to imagine a service provider feeling comfortable moving the data outside of its control.
[1] See p 2205 of bill text for the CLOUD act part. http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20180319/BILLS-115SAHR16...
[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/germ...
Is there actually a market for this that people would pay for, or is it just something that people would like to exist?
Even without the national boundary feature, good crypto APIs not bound to your compute vendor is a nice thing to have.
As long as everyone thinks everything is fine if they keep using the same old US services they've always used, none of those steps will happen. Expect to get a push-back from users who prefer continuing to use US-based services so they can justify their own choice.
To their credit, Microsoft have resisted US Government pressure [0] on this subject in the past.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/micro...
If there is a way to sign up for Hetzner without giving them a copy of your passport, does anyone know?
I don't like the practice but believe their argument, hosting services attract a lot of bad actors and this will probably filter out most of them from the start.
So at least 3 months.
Unfortunately, you are not supposed to do it yourself because its complicated so you have to find a trusted third party to do it that has been vetted.
But now you have to come up with a system to vet the vetters.
What a complicated world we live in.
Not that I really agree with it, most of the time the secrecy is for secrecy sake imho, and to advantage government prosecution. It's pretty scary tbh. Does this mean it's ok for a US company operating in China to turn over US information?
What happened is roughly this: Pursuant a warrant, USG wanted something from Microsoft, Microsoft said it was on a server in Ireland and outside the reach of the warrant, USG and Microsoft went to court to sort it out. Meanwhile US Congress passed a law addressing situations like and mooting this case. That's it. In the grand scheme of things, this didn't really change anything.
When they want to scare people, they say "the police will start asking ordinary citizens for ID". Its a huge deal when the pharmacist asks for ID for a controlled substance.
And add to that the privacy culture here (on HN and in tech circles). I would rather pay a few extra bucks for now. But if they dropped the requirement I would use it.
I bet I am not alone and there are many others who feel the same.
I wonder if it would feel different if they didn't ask for a copy of the ID, but just had someone look at it.
I think it also feels different because no one else asks for it (VULTR, AWS, Dig Ocean, etc)
Also a drivers license feels less intrusive (for whatever reason) than a passport, and I believe for foreigners they want a passport.
USA uses ID cards for banking and employment though.
The problem isn't necessarily a national ID card (after all most people have driving licenses, passports, etc). The problem is the data that's all linked and available to governments.
In today's world, where facebook knows far more than any government can, heroes like René Carmille become more and more important.
They managed to erase my entire environment, not have any way to recover anything, and once my case got escalated within their company the responses I received were the most unprofessional communications I've received in my career.
Honestly, I am amazed that this is a German company at all. You usually expect Germans to be more organized.. but I guess no matter where you go, the old saying is true: you get what you pay for.
I wonder if serverpilot etc will work equally well with these guys.
I think many US citizens would be outraged if a Chinese court could issue warrants to access their data stored at any company. Not sure if EU citizens trust the US judicial system much more.