Submitted 2 weeks ago by kalkulat@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/30/euro_firms_must_ditch_us/
“You don’t need a DEA warrant or a Justice Department subpoena to see the trend: Europe’s 90‑plus‑percent dependency on US cloud infrastructure, as former European Commission advisor Cristina Caffarra put it, is a single‑shock‑event security nightmare waiting to rupture the EU’s digital stability.”
This is everyone’s risk. The digital equivalent of thinking that ICE won’t be interested in me so I’ll wait and watch instead of doing something now.
We have move most of our processing jobs from AWS to Hetzner. We use Cloudfleet as control plane so we will even be spreading our workloads across multiple European providers. About to move some of our long term S3 storage to Scaleway. Not only is it safer, we are saving a ridiculous amount of money.
Data sovereignty and social media sovereignty is something I’d love to see worked on more. I mean, the shift is already happening to a larger degree as you know if you’re reading this comment.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the average Joe needs to consider these things - or maybe it’s a wake up call to our relative complacency over the past decades?
I prefer to keep my data outside of the US. Canada for some, specific EU countries for others. But bills like Chat Control are even threatening other nations’ long-standing privacy norms. The burn-out will be real for some, those who didn’t care may not until it directly affects them. Others will hopefully find a balance they believe suits them.
The floor is lava! Have to keep jumping around!
I don’t know how these laws work when everything you and your environment use is self-hosted, but where I am it’s the one thing you can do to control your data, by law. Not even a warrant allows checking personally owned or company owned devices. However, most, if not all, institutions and companies rely entirely on US based tech hosted in the US. That shit needs to end.
Self-hosted is a great way to go for those who can afford the initial cost and can get the setup done. I’d love to see more of it but I also know that most people won’t do that, and I get it because if I asked my mom to self-host right now I think her brain would explode.
Second best we can do is start using a promoting alternatives. Us nerds tend to be some of the earlier adopters. If enough users flock to the right platform, and if the platform is easy for non-nerds to sign up, then the shift may happen. Now is a climate where the desire for change is higher than normal.
No company is too big to dominate the landscape, the momentum and desire just needs to grow. And we should be careful of jumping from one pirate ship to another pirate ship. TikTok to Reels, Twitter/X to Threads, these are not the kind of changes we need to encourage.
But I’m not one for social media overall, so I can’t do much except inform my family and friends in a way that doesn’t drive them crazy. To anyone reading: don’t be that guy either, because if you pester too hard you’re likely to breed resentment and cause people to become further entrenched in their current habits.
@stinkytofuisgood @kalkulat Have ever someone thought that the bad results are a problem of the business model ?
Why should Open AI ( besides competition with others ) make the AI answering correct and with the minimal amount of tokens , if they get payed on token ?
I only just had this thought reading this post.
When it comes to LLM AI usage, there’s definitely a few things you can consider.
I’ll reference OpenAI as you mentioned but it can apply to others as well to varying degrees
First is that the OpenAI has the goal of making a profit, but the market is getting more saturated, the costs to run data centres increases with model complexity and user base increases.
Funding is being pumped into them by investors, government in the US and other non-AI companies are banking on AI to bolster the economy and profits respectively. For things like ChatGPT they offer paid plans for consumers but this is a small fraction of their revenue.
The stats show they are losing money quickly. Investors want profits, the company wants dominance, the government seems to be approaching it from a “too big to fail approach”.
So we’re slowly seeing shifts; in the US, ads are being experimented with in ChatGPT, models are being chosen that use less tokens and less computing power, etc.
There have also been studies showing the diminishing returns of the thinking that “a bigger model is better”.
There’s also the question of how much they care about correct answers. They are surely aware that most don’t understand how an LLM AI works, that most will not do much research to fact-check answers, that most will consider convenience to be king.
Their token system is a huge balancing act and I’m not fully convinced they know what works and what doesn’t.
AI is being propped up, it shows signs of a bubble. Not to say AI is going anywhere, but when the pop inevitably happens, the LLM AI landscape will leave behind a lot of failure and monetary loss, and a few winners. Think dot com bubble for reference but in a whole new era of computing.
The circular economy going on and the investment from private and US government entities can only keep this train on the tracks for so long.
If I were to subjectively answer your question in a phrase: I don’t think they really do care too much at the moment.
I need a European android now!
What we actually need is for european companxes to drop the safety checks dependant on google play services and start using the phone checks only so alternative roms can function properly without depending on google.
It can be done and would allow people to more freely develop and adopt alternatives like grapheneos without hassle.
Or make an EU app store that can verify certain apps (such as banking) so we can ditch google
I would much rather European companies ported their application and services to a non-Google/non-ASOP platform. Having native e-government and applications would be a solid addition to make something like Sailfish OS more usable.
This is one area where European and Asian countries are a way ahead of the US, thing like e-govermernt (parts of Europe), simple and no/very low fee mobile payment systems (parts of Europe, India’s UPI system).
Sailfish OS
Its open source
Just make one
Yep! Let me find my hat
Our company still relies 100% on Azure and probably won’t switch anytime soon. Azure has now opened a partnership with an EU company to share code with them in case of a hostile government takeover (idea being that they could rebuild the cloud in the EU). This obviously purely symbolic and completely impractical measure was still enough for our company to cancel all plans to migrate away from Azure. It’s frustrating.
That’s really too bad, even without any technical knowledge of the code sharing system, it’s clear that this approach is done in bad faith.
Yet they are making deals with Ellison and Thiel
They have learned to say the right things for the voters, but they have not understood what it means and are continuing like before because of that.
Well, that’s the stage where the others remove their dependencies:
7 stage collapse pattern www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs2nBl43hhs
-94°…… habitable.
mrnobody@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
I hope everyone ditches everything the US has produced, so that in the end, we can all point fingers to Trump.
Hey, remember when everyone said in 2015 & 2016 he’d be a good president cuz he knows goes to run a business?? Well, he sure has… Makes everything about profits over people, outsources work to some 3rd party vendor, goes horribly and loses s a bunch of money. Now, running it into the ground! Just like before!
Only difference now is, is everyone else’s money too!
kalkulat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is the guy who bankrupted 4 casinos. Clearly what he’s best at.