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Comment by quadium4004 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that a 1930s trade law can be leveraged to demand data on a foreign citizen is a stark reminder of why local-first software and hardware transparency matter more than ever.

When we build tools that rely entirely on centralized cloud providers, we aren't just outsourcing the hosting—we're outsourcing our legal jurisdiction.

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> we aren't just outsourcing the hosting

Like you've outsourced this comment to an LLM.

Incredible that this isn't flagged/dead yet despite so many replies.

Shouldn’t we fix the laws instead of penalizing users for using cloud services? There should be freedom to use cloud services for our convenience without having to accept legal defeat. That should be the focus for fix.

Even if you fix the law today, the law can change tomorrow. As Bruce Schneier put it: "it's not enough to protect ourselves with laws. We must also protect ourselves with mathematics".

Also, the president of United States and his ICE Czar do not seem to care what law says. And no one seems to care to enforce the opposite.

American laws aren't something I can meaningfully influence.

In theory yes. In practice, the working class is competing with corporations that are flooding the political arena with billions. This was already a daunting challenge to deal with even before the oligarchy went mask off across all branches of government.

sure, except if you're Canadian like the man in question you can't do that for US law. Easier to use local-first software than influence the laws of every country where a service provider you could potentially one day use be based.

We could, but then these companies would just go on ignoring the law like they do now. The current state of American governance has made it very, very clear that following the law is strictly optional if you have enough money or power

No, it's a reminder of why not letting your country descend into fascism matters more than ever.

Two things can be true. We rejected our fascist clown in a landslide, but local-first is still necessary to avoid your fascist clown.

I'm not going to say to not do the thing that'll get you a 1% benefit, but you should definitely do the thing that will get you an 80% benefit.

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