We need Europeans need to rid ourselves from American big tech used in government functions. This is simply unacceptable.
Just off the top of my head, accessing the IRS website (taxes) gets tracked by google. Windows keeps trying to pull everything online. Americans don't get separate apple app stores.
It goes on and on.
But you can only use this in a big way once. And all parties have pretty much assumed the US would never use its leverage as Trump has been doing.
The same way we dare invest in the US stock marked, because we're confident the US won't do a Cuba-style nationalization of private assets.
Obviously, the orange man is gambling EU won't decouple from the US. He might be right, this probably isn't big enough.
Decoupling all systems is expensive, it cheaper to wait 4 years.
That said, the orange man did get EU defense investment -- the investments are just not being made in the US.
Sadly, I don't think anyone will decouple, people still laugh at the idea of using LibreOffice.
People who say this haven't internalized how much shit the US is in. In the absolute best case scenario where there is a fair election and the Democrats retake the federal government, the decisions made over the next 4 years will have harrowing effects throughout the world that will take decades to recover from.
In the most likely case scenario, Republicans will continue trying to expand their fascist power and suppress the judiciary and their stranglehold on Congress so they can effectively remain in power indefinitely.
At this point, Europeans would be stupid to rely on US in any sense whatsoever. Sure, milk the cow for whatever's left while you're at it, but "this too shall pass" is not a viable long-term strategy.
Imagine what you would do if you thought weakness could leave you no recourse if you were sent to the gulags? How ruthless and self serving would you get?
> once you start defying lawful orders, people are going to be scared that this same power can be used against them.
I feel like people only born yesterday could say this. There has been a bipartisan push for an Executive unfettered by the legislature since 9/11, and extreme partisans just point at each other. You're both right.
On average, not much apparently. Can't find the story now, but there was someone recounting Jewish families still hiding and hoping people aren't coming for them specifically, in towns where soldiers ended up coming for all the families. It seems like when it comes to similar decisions made individually, people aren't that keen to risk their lives.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/microsoft-network-b...
Look at how silicon valley was bootstrapped through government expenditure.
I rather suspect that this would come with mandatory encryption backdoors.
Having worked on Firefox CI infrastructure years ago, it's a huge and complex setup. As I recall back then it was >100 compute hours per push.
Fork it and keep synching in from upstream, sure that's easy. But are you an independent browser?
I've been quite happy with smaller local services for a loong time. Started using them in 2004 when I got my first website and aside from short try of gmail when it was still free, always used them.
Mandating browsers (preinstalled on devices sold in EU) auto-delete cookies on window close, and add a button to whitelist 1st party cookies on specific domains, would solve many more problems without wasting time with annoying popups.