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Comment by diminoten | Hacker News Reader

Comments in here currently are on par with YouTube. It's disgusting - we get it, you don't like NSA's spying programs. Breathless pontification on that point is utterly worthless. Stop.

Source report for the article: http://www2.itif.org/2013-cloud-computing-costs.pdf

I always laugh at graphs who move steadily upwards from the beginning of recording to the present, but then do insane things like dip dramatically and then rise prolifically in the future, like figure 1 in the report.

After looking at the endnotes for this report, it's clear that the writer has actually bought the meaningless blustering these companies and governments are doing. Threats, promises, and warnings aside, there's a distinct lack of actual action on the part of governments and companies towards this idea of harming US companies for what their government did.

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This is all nice and well, but here on the ground, the NSA scandal has really bad consequences for tech companies.

Do you know what it is like to live in a jurisdiction where you are actually liable for what happens to the data of your users? Especially if it is data on teachers and pupils, which are (due to the fact that they are children) especially protected, as is the case with education software startups?

I can't use the Amazon cloud, can't use App engine, Cloudflare or anything that is connected to the US or companies with a US mother firm.

The whole situation is one infuriating clusterfuck and I find it really insulting when people claim that there are no real consequences to the recent scandal.

> I can't use the Amazon cloud, can't use App engine, Cloudflare or anything that is connected to the US or companies with a US mother firm.

But is that because of NSA spying, or because of the lack of privacy laws in the US? Because I know people who've not sent any user data to the US for years, certainly before they found out about NSA spying.

> Do you know what it is like to live in a jurisdiction where you are actually liable for what happens to the data of your users?

No offense but it's this same reason that U.S. companies would be pilloried if they hosted all their users' private data on a cloud service hosted in Russia or China.

Even without an entity like the NSA an organization in the EU could not simply assume that any other nation obeys their data privacy rules without a strong bilateral agreement dictating just that.

That's not a consequence of the "recent scandal" as even now the scandal hasn't revealed anything with regard to non-U.S. networks that wasn't already known: the NSA intercepts communications abroad when they can, just as they've done since 1949.

The NSA stories have certainly brought it to prominence but anyone hosting their user's private data on Amazon's US-EAST before this, without a guarantee that the U.S. would obey European data privacy laws at the Virginia data center, was guilty of negligence at best, since no such agreement has ever been made to my knowledge.

What the NSA stories have helped to illustrate is that there is an essential disconnect between applying nation-level laws to global-level networks that needs to be rectified one way or another.

> Do you know what it is like to live in a jurisdiction where you are actually liable for what happens to the data of your users? Especially if it is data on teachers and pupils, which are (due to the fact that they are children) especially protected, as is the case with education software startups?

This is why they wanted to pass CISPA.

Actually, what you can't do is expose that data to the Internet, period, if you're attempting to be consistent with your, "NSA spying is causing me problems" viewpoint, because the NSA is monitoring network traffic around the globe, and decrypting what it can and storing what it can't.

So, if you're going to be internally consistent, you're going to have to delete all digital copies of all "sensitive" data, lest you yourself get hacked.

Or you could accept that with all operations there exists risk, and attempt to mitigate that risk using methods which are consistent between one another.

Not using US products gets you nowhere, in other words.

Exactly. There is zero reason to suspect non-US clouds are any more secure.

>distinct lack of actual action on the part of governments and companies towards this idea of harming US companies

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/14/us-cisco-results-i...

Cisco's revenue warning comes after former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden exposed widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency through internet data, much of which is transmitted via Cisco's equipment.

Cisco's chief financial officer, Frank Calderoni, told analysts the company had been affected by a political backlash in China, but said it was difficult to quantify how much of its revenue shortfall was a result of this.

YouTube comments are great. Everyone always bags on them, but the complainers have no sense of humor.

It's going to be much worse than that graph shows: http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten/13-08-14-the_cost_of...

I'm curious what you think comments are for, if not for people to express their opinions. Or is it only the comments of people who disagree with you that you'd like to stop?

I apologize if what I said was unclear (ironically), but expressing one's opinion and expressing one's opinion well are two entirely different topics, and my complaint was of the latter, not the former.

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