So sure, there are probably some signals the USA won't receive, but they still get the bulk of it.
And this is already being criticized over and over again. With various German government organizations now actively moving away from Microsoft and demonstrating that you don't need Outlook & Office 365 to run a government, I would be quite surprised if the possibility of doing the same here won't at least be discussed any time something needs an overhaul.
People in high places only know Microsoft and they don't want to risk having to learn something new. National security isn't as big of a deal as having to spend a few afternoons of training, after all.
I always found the framing on this funny. Europeans will talk about data sovereignty and decreasing reliance on the Americans and simultaneously cry foul when the Americans threaten to take their ball and go home.
I am sure that you are aware that there are more than one person in Europe, and most of the countries there being democracies, those people are allowed to have different opinions. They even have the right to express them, go figure!
You won’t because your administration is not stupid and knows what kind of soft power it gives them. But I really, sincerely, wish they would fuck off.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Talk about irony.
You can still take your ball.
This is a nearly decade-old baseless conspiracy theory.
They are fighting against a country with something like 1/5th of their population so this reasoning is completely fallacious. You will use any advantage gained by Russia as evidence of collusion without demonstrating that the advantage was based on collusion. The intelligence agencies have tried and failed to prove this theory of Russian infiltrationism for more than 10 years now; you haven’t seen something that they’ve missed.
I remember the Mueller report explicitly stating they would say he was innocent if the evidence showed but that they could not indict a sitting president.
The theory might be incorrect be incorrect, but to claim it’s baseless is factually wrong
Source: I was inside one of their offices for a few Azure trainings.
"De Belastingdienst, met daarnaast ook de Douane en de Dienst Toeslagen, gebruikt momenteel eigen software voor kantoorautomatisering."
This is M365 so it's not to do with Azure. It says they used their own office software before that was not cloud. That's what I referred to.
I was not aware what they do with the more traditional cloud stuff but I'm not surprised they handed everything on a silver platter to the US though. The neolib party that has been in power for the last 20 years is super US centric and their previous prime minister is now acting as Trump's lapdog as general secretary of NATO.
Then as we grew the finance team, they found that Google Docs couldn't handle the spreadsheets they needed, and even Excel on Mac wasn't compatible.
So, the Finance team started running VM's where they could run Windows and native Excel. Then as they grew (in size and power) they found themselves using the VM so much that they started moving from Mac to Windows laptops. Then as our windows footprint grew, more and more departments started requesting Windows.
When I left around 25% of the ~1000 person company was on Windows (almost all on the corporate admin side, engineering remained overwhelmingly on Mac), and the Windows support team was twice as large as the team that managed the Mac infrastructure.
For other office apps, the alternatives work, although I don’t know how, for example, LibreOffice fares with collaborative editing.
Microsoft could have worked to make access more accessible to non technical users. But they didn't bother.
We will probably have fusion power first.
But even knowledge that your department must support non-Microsoft way is good, as it helps getting at least some parts vendor-neutral.
Same as security -- there's no perfect security, but the grade matters.
But even knowledge that your department must support non-Microsoft way is good, as it helps getting at least some parts vendor-neutral.
Same as security -- there's no perfect security, but the grade matters a lot.
The solution isn't going for a few cloud products, or Libre Office, the solution has to be the whole stack like during cold war days when almost every nation had their own computing stack.
That said, the current American administration probably doesn't see Russia as a threat.
America has always been spying on Europe, making it a bit harder by not willingly providing intel is a step in the right direction at least.
That's just pabulum for the masses which you're better off not repeating so as not to appear so easily fooled. Keep your friends close and your enemy closer [1] rings a bell I assume?
[1] https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/keep-your-friends-close-...
That this is the strategy being deployed is so far without meaningful evidence as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
It appears far more scattergun, corrupted, ignorant, incompetent and focused on the aggrandisement of US leadership than really at any time in US history.
Gee, you think? https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/pete-hegseth-tie-causes-...
The entire Trump administration is indistinguishable from a deliberate -- and very successful -- attack.
No, if they did, they'd know about certain attacks or planned attacks earlier [1]. So they should but they don't.
[1] https://www.amazon.nl/Het-oorlog-maar-niemand-ziet/dp/946381... - not an affiliated link, just the first one I could find.