Migrating to the EU
rz01.org
rz01.org
I use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.
From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
SPF is here https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/custom-domains/spf-dkim-an...
DMARC is up to the domain owner to set.
Mailbox.org is completely ignoring DMARC since months... And their handling of the issue IMHO is incompetent at best.
See this thread (in German) https://userforum.mailbox.org/topic/10676-mailbox-org-akzept...
If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)
I looked into this, there are lots of people in forums discussing/ asking for EU based servers.
Again non affiliated with either.
- SES was a big one. There was no affordable alternative at my (not big, not small) scale.
- I'm still waning myself personally of GMail. That dependency took decades to build and it will take years for all ties to sever.
This is something I think it is a blind spot we have and not big answer, because even if we take into account FOSS, ISO and ECMA languages, the biggest sponsors for those toolchains are US companies.
It will take decades to go back to the cold war days, of hardware, programming languages and OSes with European origin.
Those really don't matter.
> OSes
If you're talking about "US sponsoring" of Linux distros, then that doesn't matter either. If you mean Android and iOS, then you're right.
There's a super simple heuristic here. Does China care? If not, it doesn't matter. China doesn't care about adopting a Chinese-made programming language instead of Python or Typescript or Rust, meaning control over that isn't important. They do care about OS, which is why they put effort into increasing market share of phones with no American OS.
When I Google this I find a lot of options, but not sure which are actually mature tech companies vs start-up hopefuls
Because it's trending. Likely the same reason they ended up outside the EU in the first place.
I find this to be a non article. They moved from Google to Google and Apple, installed Graphene but installed the play store for a "significant number of apps", and didn't even consider self hosting email or git.
I've probably seen a dozen of these articles now, not to mention posts on LinkedIn, and it's a shame that there is almost never any real substance to them because on the surface it's an interesting thought experiment
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.
Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.
Maybe try Immich?
I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.
I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
You're paying for any of these?
I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.
But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
Maybe corporations can start to market this: we are not an American company.
Don't waste your time trying different map services.
Everything else is super easy to switch to better alternatives, especially search, e-mail and browser.
Startpage is owned by an American advertising company https://system1.com
Gocryptfs works well for that.
"They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed."
So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?
Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.
Worth considering when hosting in the EU.
This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
The EU is just one AfD win away from doing the same thing. It's not immune to this issue either, you have the same problem happening right under your noses.
A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
Maybe keep your US nonsense to yourself?
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
EAW = European Arrest Warrant
EIO = European Investigative Order (basically lets different jurisdictions demand information from each other)
CJEU = Court of Justice of the EU (think of it as a supreme court)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.
This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.
So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?
> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.
> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.
> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...
Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?
Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.
Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.
[1]: https://ecosia.org
[2]: https://qwant.com
[3]: https://uruky.com
Qwant is the way to go
Sources for Ecosia indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia#Ecosia
Sources for Qwant indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Development
You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.
I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.
Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)
* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)
* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)
Love them though.
and ofc, non-CN too
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.
Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.
> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?
I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.
Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.
I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...
[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
example.com {
root * /var/git
file_server
}
Google reviews: https://www.google.com/search?q=lcube&ludocid=91685905651961...
Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.
I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it... Perhaps I'm... Tolerated for the time being?
- small or midsize companies, or
- "hacker-minded people" (I know quite some "hacker-minded people" who rent a server or vServer at netcup),
since they offer quite a bit of value for the money. In opposite to Hetzner, netcup is more of an inside tip.
a) migrating to a different jurisdiction isn't realistically a massive barrier for them (related: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)
b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.
Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.
In my opinion though, the real threat model is not the actual government, its the US corporations. The NSA wont sell your information to any bad actor with a credit card and, realistically, doesn't care about you. But there is much that can be stolen or exploited for financially-motivated bad-actors from non-extradition countries or others with differing interests than your own.
I self host most services: contacts, calendar, git, ..
Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.
Tried hetzner, but it wouldn't allow me to create an account. Ovh it is.
I haven't thought about registrars, I don't think it matters for most tld. (Moniker, porkbun)
Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros
I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")
Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?
Didn't the Snowden leaks just prove that the NSA is listening to most things anyway?
I suppose this has more to do with the specific case of a lower-level agency being able to access your data, rather than it being actually secure?
I get that people would be concerned about that scenario, but also it seems like a little bit of hair-splitting.
If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.
I have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address.
I wish Proton would just allow me to respond to an email from the address it was addressed to
Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either
https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...
A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.
I have been using this for years now after having hosted my own Nextcloud instance. The space and performance they give you for that price is unbeatable with nearly no downsides. The one downside is that you can't just ssh into the server, but you can even run occ managment commands via their web interface. It is an absolute no-brainer.
There are some downsides, though:
- No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files
- Data is not encrypted
It's not a full-on Nextcloud instance, mind. For example there is no ffmpeg for generating video thumbnails.
But liking it so far
I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.
In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.
I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.
Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.
But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.
Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).
– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE
If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.
You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.
But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?
[1]: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/ [2]: https://about.gitea.com/
Currently, my private setup is:
- VPN: Windscribe [CA]
- AI: Mistral [FR]
- Phone: De-Googled Fairphone [NL] (F-Droid/Aurora/OpenStreetMap)
- Search: Self-hosted SearXNG + YACY (since ~10 years / good setup & documentation)
- Domain Provider: INWX [DE] (since +10 years / good setup & documentation)
- DNS: Self-hosted AdGuard Home / dnscrypt-proxy 2 + dnsdist / resolver (since ~5y / good setup & documentation)
- Git: Self-hosted GitLab (since ~1 year / ok setup & documentation)
- Mail/Cal/Card: Self-hosted with Mailcow (since +5 years / good setup & nice documentation)
- Password Manager: Self-hosted KeePass2 + SSHFS (since +10 years / easy setup)
- Notes: Joplin + self-hosted Joplin-Server (since ~5 years / good setup & documentation)
- Feeds: Self-hosted Miniflux (since +5years / easy setup & good documentation)
- VPS/Server/Storage/Hosting: netcup [DE], Webtropia [DE], IONOS [DE], OVH [FR], Hetzner [DE], Contabo [DE]
- Browser and Mail-Client: Firefox and Thunderbird (since ~2013 - last Opera release)
Costs: ~60 EUR/month and between 2 and 4 hours of work a month to maintain.
Moving away from PayPal and Amazon is quite hard and currently I search for a Slack alternative that don't need a k8-cluster to run stable or cost >50EUR/month (playing around with Matrix, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost).
Recently, I’ve been using https://european-alternatives.eu/ a lot to help friends and family.
Have you tried zone.eu? Think they are related to the Nodemailer people or they acquired them. Would fit the whole Migrating to the EU theme of the article. And it is in English ;-) Couldn't really navigate the hosting.de site without using Google Translator.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
I've gone back to FastMail for the time being
I think what I really want is:
- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails
- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old
I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)
Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?
I have not done any research into this facet of EU laws, but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
It's a case of "better is not perfect".
Yes, the EU & it's member states allow the police quite a bit of access to data and servers. However, there are still decently functional checks and balances. Unlike China, unlike Russia, unlike the US, where there is a carte-blanche already employed by authoritarian governments.
What the line really seems to refer to is General data protection. While "the state spies on you" is one attack vector, and one certainly becoming dangerous for oppressed minority groups in the US, it's not the only one.
For most people, really, all people because the authoritarian systems rely heavily on data from breaches, the chief risk to one's wellbeing are said data breaches. Of companies recklessly collecting all data they can get their hands on and retaining it forever.
There, the EU does have notably better laws. Where data collection and retention are restricted, and user-requested deletion is a legal right. (Enforcement of this is still a mess.)
Depends on the country, as much as it would xState in the US.
I like what they're doing, however Codeberg's 14 day uptime is _97.05%_. I've heard from many that downtime is normal there, and is worse than GitHub (which is already... bad). This makes them a non-starter imo, until that improves.
With the current trend of things going down all the time, the best way to compete is just to be available.
Forgejo is even trivial to set up as it is a single self-contained binary you can throw somewhere and it'd work.
Github: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
It doesn’t have any backend and all data is stored in the browser.
Also, I do think that there's benefit to opting for EU products, as they are generally more 'consumer-rights' friendly than the US alternatives.
I had read about other problems about this mailbox.org service, but not this one. Anyone knows what's the catch when trying to send emails from your own domain?
So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.
Then again one of my wife’s friends is high up in the Canadian policy establishment and some of her positions on surveillance and political control over social media were chilling, and I assume widespread among the Five Eyes. Certainly the UK and Australia have deeply authoritarian policies far beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams.
Small countries like Iceland have enlightened policies but are vulnerable to coercion and in fact were militarily occupied during WW2.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/police-arrest-...
The EU seems to be mandating surveillance by the government, which is a higher-order concern for me.
How did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?
For someone like the author, it's not a reason to stay with a US company
And helping European companies be more successful might prevent them from selling out...
The US government is sanctioning European individuals for doing their jobs, preventing them and their families from accessing any US digital service.
I could go on. But the message is already clear: Relying on US services is gambling with a ticking time bomb.
Other than them suddenly and arbitrarily deleting your account on a week's notice if you chose to have been born in the wrong country, they're great.
Arbitrarily because you can always email them and explain why you chose to be born in the wrong country and how you're actually one of the good ones.
But you don't understand: most of their employees are from a country that the wrong country is currently in conflict with, so they can't stand idly by while you sit there with your birth certificate hanging over you.
And in terms of degoogled phones, I like the idea, but the conspiracy theorist in me tells me, "hhhhmmmm, people are leaving the google / apple ecosystem, and the best phones out there for degooling is Pixel phones by google..."
That's like the best move Google made, their "free" services are the main driver for selling their phones.
This is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.
Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.
I don't understand why people keep saying this when Europe is more hostile towards privacy.
The constantly insist on schemes like chat control, and GrapheneOS users are often confronted by legal authorities.
They may have "the laws", but its way less trust worthy.
But more importantly, at least there are privacy laws in the EU that do something. In the US, there are virtually none, so of course you won't hear about their erosion.
I trust the EU ten times more than the US in this regard.
Nothing will change with respect to trust after the midterms.
But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.
It also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc
German e-mail service
The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(
"Migrating to the EU" is serving a self-fulfilling delusion just as joining the so -called revolutionary forces after WW2 and moving to eastern Europe.
The EU does everything to de-industrialize itself and protect its ground by using surveillance tools branded as "child protection" rules.
Europeans don't have any tradition in thinking in freedom, in civil rights, in having a state that isn't there to spoil you, but grant basic service to allow you to shape your life the way you want it. Instead, Europeans hunger for "the state", thrive under more and more "protection rules" and supervision over the economy.
Anything and everything that requires financial and economic freedom is deemed suspicious and under the disguise of equality needs to be taxed into the ground.
Almost no one takes offense by the fact that the predominant topics in the EU center around perceived life-style threads all caused by one person thousands of miles away while wondering that the quality of life and public service going down the hill and every still existing local newspaper looks like an international outlet like New York Times: local topics don't exist. Anything and everything has to be linked to something that can be linked to "the fight against XYZ" not simply pragmatism or anything rational.
In Germany there is a former major party imploding in record time, having absolutely no representation anymore. And what these radicals do, is building a self-serving kraken, that checks off any and every checkmark of an totalitarian playbook.
And this shall be the basis for making my future depend an services having to exist within these given circumstances?
The genius thing about US constitution is the inherit limitation of terms. You see exactly the opposite in anything and everything in the EU and Germany. 14 or 16+ years of being in control means there was never any need to readjust.
I am more than happy and willing to move everything out of the EU.
Given the fact that europeans think, that a "Hosted in the EU" service is 100% European (whatever the term means) is some sort of discriminatory - something that is dealing with the double standard rampant in the EU.
BTW, I am still waiting for full autonomy: nothing from Github or any open source project that traces back to Github was used in this service.
European arrogance is so disgusting. Instead of simply changing the tune and accepting the fact, that different circumstances lead to different results, there is some sort of ego distorting the decision making process.
How much more evidence is needed, that the EU is lost compared to services done in the US? And you should look at the whole picture, instead of using your gut to draw conclusions.
I admire and acknowledge anything and everything that has been achieved in the US in regards to Computer Science.
I will never ever migrate to the EU. Never.
Guido Van Rossum is Dutch.
Anders Hejlsberg is Danish.
Bjarne Stroustroup is Danish (I think?).
Rasmus Lersdorf is Danish.
Bram Molenaar was Dutch.
Edgar Dijkstra was Dutch.
Niklaus Wirth was Swiss.
Andrei Alexandrescu is Romanian.
I can probably think of many others.
The US is good at inventing things but it's amazing at marketing them and making money and drawing others to do the inventing for them.
We're not all Germany over here.
Is one supposed to go over such a laundry list/dump of talking points one by one? It hardly seems serious.
Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.
The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.