So all the same reasons we are told not to trust hardware and services from China.

Not at all. As is becoming clear from Starmer’s visit to China, Trump isn’t happy because we are dealing directly with China and not via the US.

Trump would prefer if all trade with China goes via the US, so he can take his grifter’s cut.

I think you are right not to trust the US government (or any government) with your data, but the previous lot were up to some pretty shady tactics too, weren't they? Especially during Covid.

Don't make this a Trump thing, not everything is about that clown. Perhaps we should rename "The News", as "What has Trump done now"? Can't we talk about something else?

"I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help." Reagan.

Trump was president during COVID

Only at the beginning. The whole "vaccine passports" furore was later on when it all got a bit dystopian. Hopefully now the dust has settled a bit folks can see what an authoritarian nightmare that was? Or are y'all still bought into that narrative?

Trouble is, many of the mitigations for dealing with a pandemic need to be authoritarian to be effective. The challenge is preventing “mission creep”, which those in power seem to relish in.

The “vaccine passport” is a case in point.The system of issuing a simple vaccine record card, whilst wide-open to abuse, assumed the vast majority of people were trustworthy and honest.

The vaccine passport, basically, said people weren’t trustworthy, hence the need for an overly bureaucratic instrument.

"many of the mitigations for dealing with a pandemic need to be authoritarian to be effective"

They weren't effective. Full stop. We didn't lock down in the UK Christmas 2021, and the disaster that many predicted never materialised. China had a truly "authoritarian" lock down, which was effective to a point, but was totally unsustainable. You can't live like that. Is that what you would recommend for everyone? Because anything short of that just doesn't seem to work.

"assumed the vast majority of people were trustworthy and honest."

A lot of people didn't want that particular vaccine. They had already had Covid. They were concerned about side-effects. They felt it was a new and untested technology. That's their right. It shouldn't stop them from flying or eating in restaurants or driving a truck.

ANYWAY. Let's not re-hash old arguments. If you disagree with me on this, that's your right and I respect that. We can have a difference of opinion. I'd still have a beer with you down the pub as a fellow geek. I've been a lockdown sceptic since about halfway through the very first one, when I worked out it just can't work.

The actual point here is that all governments eventually want to get all authoritarian and, for example, clamp down on those pesky protests by people who object to things they don't like the government to do. Trump would love that power, and so would Starmer and The Conservatives before him. It would also be nice to control the press, so they can just get on with the worthy task of running the government without all that pesky scrutiny. It's all for the greater good, don't you see?

I flew into New Zealand from the UK about two days after their lockdown eased to visit elderly family. I met a number of people with the same opinion as you - COVID, meh it's not all that bad! Lockdown was a waste of time.

I told them about first-hand conversations with my medic friends at multiple hospitals in the UK, where people were being removed from ventilators because there weren't enough to go around and they were considered statistically less likely to survive than someone else, so they were taken off and left to die. Or about one particular guy that came in in a very bad way and and who actually apologised to my friend (ward nurse) that he'd been a sceptic but now he really, really believed COVID was a real thing. He died too.

In NZ their death toll was low double figures, so it's perhaps not too surprising they didn't see what the fuss was all about. But you seem to have forgotten that in the first wave in Italy, mortality rates were 2.5% - [1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8883532/ . No-one had any idea where the disease trajectory was going to go, but on the limited information avaiable at point you can easily make an estimate of over a million dead in the UK. A lockdown is the only rational response at that point.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8883532/

Seriously? After all this time I'm not going to convince you, and you aren't going to convince me. They stopped using ventilators because they were killing more people than they were saving.

Anyway, the article was about data sovereignty and authoritarian governments. Covid was just an example of how that can go wrong.

NOTE TO SELF: Stop trying to correct all the people who are wrong on the internet.

upvote as that comment works in both directions

that was intentional.

"Or are y'all still bought into that narrative?"

Well, we're all still alive and I for one believe that vaccines had a good deal to do with that. But what do I know, I'm only a biologist?

Being a biologist you might well be subject to heuristic driven bias or the Baader–Meinhof Phenomenon? (Frequency Illusion)

Oh gosh yes, why trust biologist and doctors over facebook?

I remember Margaret on Facebook during Covid. She'd been an established expert in parenting, road pothole repairs, returning worn stuff to Sainsbury's and knew everything about shades of eyeshadow. Lucky for us, during Covid she had just turned 19 and was able to give us great advice as she was now fully qualified as a leading expert in global pandemics, viral contagions and containment methodologies (qualifications cited: she had a really bad cold once, an std twice, knew how good bleach was in the toilet and could two-thumb type) ... Looking back on it, I wonder if she was orange?

How can we forget the implication of injecting bleach as a cure from the orange doctor? Or that orangey got covid and unlike the recommendations the administration was giving to take some pet drugs for eliminating parasites, he got top tier medical care with the latest anti-virals. Or that he was on oxygen with 24x7 doc supervision. Again unlike the rest of us who were told to suck it up and get a backbone. How quickly magats forget the past.

You were doing quite well right up until "some pet drugs for eliminating parasites". That's drug that's been administered literally billions of times to humans, and is one of the safest anti-parasite drugs with a seriously low side-effect rate. Don't be CNN. Be better.

There's a big difference between a virus and intestinal worms.

Trump is a great help though - it's a bit hard to ignore the bloke as he is saying it out loud.

Are you saying you are fine having the government spy on you illegally, as long as they do it secretly?

Not exactly - just pointing out that with previous presidents it's been relatively easy for other countries' leaders and their voters to pretend that the US had their best interests at heart.

Trump makes it pretty obvious whose interests are important and whose are not.

" Don't make this a Trump thing, not everything is about that clown. "

Yeah, you're right to a point.

Let's make this about America not being a reliable ally anymore. It's bad enough he's the figurehead, but it's what is under him that has put him there and it's what is under him that are the problem.

> Don't make this a Trump thing, not everything is about that clown.

Nobody (who matters) is "making this a Trump thing". If this was being seen as "a Trump thing", the EU would just grit its collective teeth and wait until 2028. It's not like anyone can build an independent digital infrastructure in 2 years anyway. No, this is very much a USA thing. The reasoning that's going around is that we can't be certain there won't be another lunatic, if not right after Trump, then after two, three or ten Presidents after him.

Did you read the actual article?

Very much making it a Trump thing.

Europe and the USA are not 'partners'. The USA is a rival, despite what the gullible or idiotic European politicians say. The truth is Europe is occupied by the USA. At the end of the cold war, Russia as heir to the Soviet Union, went home without firing a shot. The USA remained. It's missiles and nuclear weapons remained. As Russia has been invaded by Britain, France, and Germany throughout its history, it's no wonder the Russians keep a wary eye at the 'peace loving' West.

Now Canada is upset that Alberta separatist groups are having meetings with USA regime officials. Carney, the man who talks by excessively waving his hands, says it's unacceptable and the USA should respect Canadian sovereignty. Perhaps he needs to open his eyes. Carney said nothing when the USA illegally invaded Venezuela and carried out a kidnapping.

For years and years European and Canadian politicians have followed American orders, thinking they were 'on the same side'. They did this at great expense to their own economies, and accepting American interference in their policies. The view in Washington was simple: Europe and Canada are weak.

Slowly but surely, the American regime will boil Europe and Canada like the proverbial frog. Tariffs here, threats there. It's already happening. The European and Canadian governments will eat the American curate's egg.

The USA is not our friend.

The soviet union didn't go home. They occupied and controlled half of Europe.

Point to it on the map. After the end of the cold war.

Also invaded together with Nazi Germany before that. Not to mention Soviet Union has committed multiple genocides.

"Perhaps he needs to open his eyes. Carney said nothing when the USA illegally invaded Venezuela and carried out a kidnapping."

That was because the Orange one went on his 'I want Greenland' rant. Did you not realise the timing of that? It was timed to make everyone indignant about that, it was ramped up and up, until what he had done in Venezuela had dropped far enough out of the public eye ..... then all of a sudden he backed off as if he never meant it.

Wait until the next thing he does that the World would get indignant about, and then there will be another 'Greenland' that will be used to distract everyone.

If you look back you will find a number of 'Greenland' like threats that have come and gone (mainly tariffs), and you will normally find something that he wanted to distract you from just before or right at the start of the threat.

Or maybe t'other way about. Venezuela was intended to make everyone else think "It could be me next" but everyone else stuck together and he had to go back and tell the faithful about his success which was, in fact, the status quo that he'd ignored up to then.

They were broke. They couldn't afford to stay. Now that they've had a couple of decades of oil and gas revenue...

It did occur to me that Amazon paying twenty million dollars to the Trump family to make Melania , a film that clearly nobody wants or has any interest in, was fairly unambiguous bribery, and that if one was based in a country with strong anti-corruption laws that took them seriously, using Amazon services might expose one to risk.

Of course, when it's a company as wealthy as Amazon nobody does take anti-corruption seriously, any more than anyone thinks about any kind of enforcement action against X when their AI does clearly unlawful things, but in a world where the rule of law mattered more than making American billionaires more wealthy this kind of thing would have consequences.

Similar to former PMs and Chancellors getting hundreds of thousands for giving speeches at banks that no one listens too. If you do nice things for us, we'll make sure nice things happen for you. So much less grubby and more easily denied than brown paper bags stuffed with cash.

Europe native cloud and services are no longer a nice‑to‑have but a business continuity plan requirement.

It is amusing to see Reform struggling to comprehend matters. They thought and campaigned to regain “sovereignty” from “The EU”, only to now discover it had already been sold to the US.

I realise you were being a little facetious, but that would be making their point wouldn't it? Besides, sovereignty in the brexit/reform.eu sense would surely be about the ability to make your own decisions and your own mistakes. Including handing critical stuff to a US-owned provider subject to the PATRIOT and CLOUD acts :/

> being a little facetious

Yes, a little.

however, in the Brexit/reform.eu sense it is clear all EU members (both prior to Brexit and now) have the freedom to make “mistakes” and hand critical government stuff to US-owned operators…

Trump has done everyone a service, looking back we can see both UKIP and the Conservatives Eurosceptics/Anglophiles thought a post-Brexit UK could cosy up to their special “buddy” the US; becoming some form of 51st state - now such ideas are laughable.

I'd agree and add that by bringing it home, EU is fostering its own cloud/infrastructure future. It may cost a little now, and capitalism depends on letting you be lulled into saving a buck today, so that the owners can squeeze a buck out of you tomorrow. A game of monopoly anyone?

Reform as a whole may be struggling to comprehend it, but Farage isn't. Selling out the UK to his paymasters in both the US and Russia is what he's intended all along.

(posted as Anonymous Coward for obvious reasons)

I've been harping on about the fact that the EU has been setting itself up to be blackmailed by the USA when it suits them for years. Nobody wanted to listen.

Now, the problem is on our doorstep and doing something about this problem quickly will be very difficult. The company I work for (a state owned company) is completely dependent on the good will of the US administration and Microsoft. We wouldn't be able to divorce ourselves from Microsoft's cloud in anything less than a year, even if there was an EU company which could replace Entra, for example.

The entire company works on Office365. All our documents (and I'm sure this includes documents which should have never left an air-gapped computer) are in M$ cloud. Our entire authentication and authorisation system is dependent on M$.

Just replacing the cloud functionality won't get us off our addiction to M$ operating systems, which run 90% of all the servers and PCs that we have.

Through complacency and magical thinking, the rest of the world has allowed themselves to become technologically dependent on a country which has adequately proved itself to be an unreliable and dangerous ally at best. There are no quick fixes for this dependency.

You think you are "Anonymous" but this whole forum is (or used to be) written using some custom Perl scripts. It's probably hackable / hacked and they don't even know.

I know, I’m not anonymous, when posting anonymously, to the operators of ElReg(*), I’m just anonymous to the majority of the readership - both registered and unregistered, and search engines that trawl the site for nefarious reasons…

(*) I include government agencies who have “privileged” access to servers and the third-parties ElReg shares data with.

"the EU has been setting itself up to be blackmailed by the USA when it suits them for years."

They did they same with Russia, by guzzling Russian gas and oil. And to a lesser extent with China, with electronics, electronic components and auto components.

That's the problem with the EU and the UK, they've both deindustrialised themselves to the point that they have zero self-capability and live by the motto of "We'll just buy it in".

Not "Let's build our own EU Cloud champion".

Like Trump or not, he's right that the West in general has become far too reliant on buying stuff in. How many components in the average US branded server are made in the US?

"There are no quick fixes for this dependency."

Quite so, but when's the best time to start? Obviously "then" but that boat was missed. So when's the next best time to start? Obviously "now". If all you're paralysed by panic your actual time is going to be "when it;s too late".

If your board asks what to do they're going to want staff to providesolutions, not problems. Are you going to be someone who's already looking around and trying to find solutions?

Not my problem. I'm only a cog in the machine.

The company's leadership (you know, the ones who get paid 20 times my salary) are those who are responsible for getting us in this mess. If they had any vision, any qualifications for their positions, any concept of technical dependencies and risk management, they would have seen this coming and would have already been executing the plans they made years ago to escape from this situation.

As it is, they're keeping their heads firmly stuck in the sand while they continue to take home their obscene pay cheques.

There are a lot of people who, if they'd had the vision, would have seen this coming long ago. Recent developments have made it more obvious. Carney's speech seems to have been analysed in the sort of press they're likely to have read. Many of then - maybe your lot, maybe not - are starting to wake up.

How far up the IT chain does the "can't do anything about it" run? Do you have any suggestions if someone a bit further up the chain starts asking questions in anticipation of questions from further up? When it all goes critical are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

AWS recently made its European Sovereign Cloud available. This AWS cloud, Amazon claims, is "entirely located within the EU, and physically and logically separate from other AWS Regions."

That doesn't make it "sovereign". Cloud Act still applies and Krasnov's pawns can rummage through servers as they please and EU customers will never know.

These idiots are blinded by wine and steaks.

>> These idiots are blinded by wine and steaks.

And peccadillos. After decades of spying on Europe, the American regime knows all about the 'naughty' things the politicians get up to. Wouldn't it be a pity if some of it leaked.

Many are now finding that actually "Their server is our problem."