Comment by comandillos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by comandillos | Hacker News Reader

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Cannot agree more with Josef on how dangerous this is for our intellectual property; Of course there laws and mechanisms in China for the government to obtain any information retained by their companies under any possible justification, but the US does so, and thanks to the Cloud Act they can simply decide to do the same with any of the big players sitting in their territory (even to servers located out of their territory).

So, taking into account >80% of European companies rely either on Amazon, Microsoft or Google to store all their most private and business sensitive data, is this any different from all the data we are possibly leaking already? Same with AI, same with the phones and payment systems we use on a daily basis...

Sometimes I just have the impression that this has nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property but rather with finding an enemy and focus on that while pretending everything else is fine... and a blogpost from the owner of Prusa Research talking about their main competitor is a good demonstration of that.

What's frustrating is that Prusa isn't too far removed from how Bambu works today. Prusa-Link (the onboard firmware) allows you to do very basic job control but has essentially zero machine control and very little telemetry. All the major functionality is behind their PrusaConnect cloud service, which they've now added a paid tier to, and which they've been promising for years to open source in order to allow print farms to run offline.

I love Prusa printers and all my machines are Prusa, but they really do need to get their software situation sorted because in it's current form, it's somewhat hard to distinguish from the operational reality of Bambu - if I want to use all the features on my XL, I need to send my files to Czechia first.

I don't want to sound like a Prusa shill or anything, but if they see Chinese state-sponsored competition as an existential threat (and I see no reason to doubt either claim), then I imagine that, from Prusa's perspective, it's a losing proposition either way ("damned if you do, damned if you don't"): anything they develop in the open directly strengthens their competitor and doesn't elevate the playing field for the benefit of all (unpunished licenses violations) ; anything they keep to themselves turns Prusa further and further away from their ideological stance, more akin to their enemy and less relevant.

> pretending everything else is fine

No one pretends that everything else is fine.

It is in my opinion reasonable to call out any violations of any law or any violations of the users' or companies' privacy as they are spotted. And everyone is best suited to spot issues in areas or fields in which they operate.

Your cloud act is making American cloud vendors lose customers in droves

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