Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

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If push comes to shove, these services can and will be weaponized against EU interests. They are bugged and backdoored to the brim. If we see a risk in chinese-made electrical buses which can potentially be remotely shut down by an integrated sim card, then using AWS should be a no go in the current political climate - no matter how much lipstick they put on that pig.

Last week, after receiving a fine in Italy, the Cloudflare CEO demonstrated that US tech leadership are extremely emotionally volatile and can lash out in all directions, threatening unrelated parties with shutdown of service. This is in line with Peter "anti christ" Thiel and Elon "nazi salute" Musk going off the rails. Maybe it is a drug-induced psychosis from their annual gathering in the desert where US tech workers consume illegal substances, I don't know.

What if someone scratches Bezos' yacht by accident and then he threatens to shut down the DC? Or he might get upset about a CO2 surcharge when refueling his private jet? Can we really take these risks?

Italy’s demand was completely unreasonable and CloudFlare threatened to end business in Italy, including informing impacted partners.

People talking about EU sovereignty and US hegemony then crying Italy isn’t allowed to dictate terms globally are showing they’re not people with principles — they’re just losers who would be every bit as hegemonic as the US, they just lack the power to be and are publicly crying about it.

I heard they are hiring in Cloudflare PR department

The best PR that Cloudflare could possibly have here is just the demand letter from AGCOM (aka the Italian comms agency).

Just reading what they are demanding from Cloudflare and their reasoning for it is enough to turn pretty much anyone to Cloudflare’s side. And that’s before even digging into the details of the context preceding that whole conflict

We cannot, no. A break break, as clean and hard as can be under the circumstances is required.

There will be gnashing of the teeth, doomsaying galore, a few actual minor catastrophes... but we will be okay.

Not just okay, but we will be better off for it. The Internet will be better off for it, because the inescapable side effect will be at least a bit of re-decentralization.

Any European equivalent replacing what is lost will be better. Not because we have better coders or are even better people, mind you - far from it. It will be better because we will have the gift of hindsight; any replacement for web-based productivity services, search engines or social media springing up will be the product of a society and legislative system which has caught up at least in some sense to technological progress and which has been there, done that. The actual web two point oh.

So let's pull out as many plugs as we can. It'll hurt for a bit, but not only is it without alternative - it'll be fresh, it'll be fun and it'll be good in the end.

Let's get to work.

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