Technology

The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s tech leader, their IT buddy.

Now that we’ve violated everyone’s trust, we will likely never get that position back.

I'm playing my part... Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I've been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scaleway/UpCloud. This is a significant practical setback for me, but I can no longer live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.

I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I'm working steadily down my list.

I was hoping for that for a long time, so... thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.

Obviously because once that country collapses or becomes a pariah state and starts fooling with the data for nefarious purposes, all goes almost anything the rest of the world relies on, including website hosting services. So, yeah, decentralization is necessary.

I’m selfhosting most of my stuff now and did closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review. It take times but I always while closing enter a comment like “lost confidence in USA for the next 50 years thanks to Trump” BTW most services don’t let you delete your account, in this case I empty all my personal data, upload blank images for profile, anonymize field, move email to temp mailbox and delete my password.

I did some architecture and implementation to Azure for a big client, now moved to pure AKS with only OSS software, nest step for them is to quit US cloud, a lot easier if you use pure kubernetes.

I think it is good that we reduce our reliance on US stacks, but not at the cost of using Chinese softwares.

Deleting Reddit, instagram, facebook was really the easiest and most satisfying of all.

I plan to organize meetup on sovereignty, privacy and self hosting soon too 😇

Rightly so, US tech is a dumpster fire with 24/7 surveillance.

Silicon Valley people who wanted Trump are so fucking stupid its absurd.

I was reading an opinion piece about this sort of thing earlier today, "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native". It opens by saying:

I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money.

Even Americans are trying to bail from a lot of this crap, not just for political reasons but because its shit.

Ramp it up!

The worst crime you can commit under capitalism is not participating, not buying, not renting, etc. These tech companies are built on debt that is serviced by profits.

Moving the needle down and impacting their income by even 5% will have a huge impact on a business’s bottom line and in turn a CEO’s income, bonuses and stock options etc.

If you want to make Trump and his regime change then you have to hit the only people he will listen to… his fellow oligarchs.

As a QA, I raised the very real risk that should tensions with America escalate, they could effectively cut us off and our business would be kaputt.

What happens if AWS goes down? We use Google. What happens if both go down (or cut us off)? We're fucked.

The answer to me raising the risk was a, "Haha, yeah, true, we'd be in big trouble..." but there's no actual appetite to do anything about it. We're so tied up in AWS that I can't imagine there ever will be.

But Tech companies gave Trump BILLIONS of Dollars! HOW could he Lose them SO Many Customers?

It's all so unnecessary. But at least we finally do something about digital sovereignty in the EU.

I don't think ICANN

I finally moved my personal dev/blog server to Hetzner and today was the first time in a while that the AWS bill was smaller than what it normally was (I did get rid of everything - EC2, S3 - except for domain registrations since I didn't want to renew ones that just got renewed yet). Obviously I was still just paying for half the month so next month should be even smaller.

I'd say that individual companies need to make contingency plans for when the US puts up their own great firewall (assuming they haven't already, since I'm in the US).

I think it would be prudent for nations that have Google/Amazon/Microsoft datacenters in them to create legislation that allows them to nationalize or detach those services from the US. I have no doubt that we will eventually have our own policy that gives us the privilege to snoop on foreign data in foreign datacenters that are running US owned hardware.

Chinese open-source foundation models are already enabling small countries and companies to build their own large language models.

Had to be mentioned of course, in the context of critical technologies. 🙄

SEO is a bitch.

Not everywhere can wean itself off, but the "big three" cloud compute companies arent the only shows in town. And of course there is a multitude of free and open source replacements for commercial software with companies willing to provide support.