This is why the cloud was a bad idea for so many use cases in the first place. Security and privacy are often things that aren't considered nearly as carefully as they should be... This kind of threat could have been foreseen.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
107 points (99.1% liked)
World News
35662 readers
5 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
It was foreseen. And the "fearmongerers" promptly ignored.
Yes, I remember having this discussion with someone a sea away and they were adamant it "made more business sense."
Once again convenience trumped everything else. People are lazy as shit.
~~People are lazy as shit.~~
Companies are cheapskates.
This is my country's government and it isn't about money, but about culture.
Derp. Reading comprehension failure on my part there.
Lol, that you think that this is just laziness. Some people got some very sweet deals. Just have a look at the LiMux project. Microsoft is really good at this; goole and co. won't be that much worse at it. They know how to influence the right people.
There actually are systems in place for this. However, if the dutch chose to not host their own cloud service, made by a tech giant, thats on bloody them haha. This is perfectly possible to do if youre a government.
And dont get me wrong btw, i believe every government should host their own cloud service because being reliant on an international company to do your hosting ( besides the software ) is baaaaaad
The Netherlands’ digital sovereignty is a joke wrapped in a Microsoft license agreement. Complete dependence on American tech giants isn’t just negligence—it’s institutional Stockholm syndrome. Pretending GDPR-compliant data centers protect us while the CLOUD Act looms is like building a moat around a house that’s already on fire.
Trump and Musk’s DOGE circus turns data security into a geopolitical punchline. Young “efficiency” bros with admin privileges and zero oversight? That’s not innovation—it’s a script for a cyberpunk dystopia.
Open source isn’t a silver bullet, but clinging to Azure while preaching sovereignty is peak delusion. European “alternatives” remain vaporware because Brussels would rather debate ethics than fund infrastructure. Until we treat data like a national asset—not a SaaS subscription—we’re just paying rent on our own digital grave.
"We've got nothing to hide and this will send a clear signal of unity with our allies towards authoritarian states like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia"
- the Dutch (me excluded)
The article's specifically about Dutch data, but I suppose it's probably very similar with the most of European countries, or?
Very likely.
But the Netherlands has been exceptionally trusting of the US over all other nations.
Europe is now discovering why China has the digital firewall and spent time ensuring that domestic companies became dominant players building out digital infrastructure.
Is it because of literally 1984? I bet it's because of literally 1984
😆
I am sooo xxxx pissed. The EU had all the time in the world and all incentive imaginable to develop an "EU-OS" and an "EU-Office". Linux and other FOSS software was always there to build upon. And with EU founding it could have been an easy solution, making the world a better place in the process.
But instead so many xxx politicians rather made some nice deals...
Now we reap what the EU parliament did.
What’s xxxx and xxx?
fuck shit or piss
Eu parliament has nothing to do with this.
This is generally the result of cloud computing taking over and us companies having the capital to invest to basically take it over.
Also, trump does not have control over that data, at least if its in azure.
Azure for governmental bodies is a private cloud service separate from the general public. For eu countries these are either hosted in the country its government data centre or in germany, which is in the eu.
This means that if trump would demand data, he cant access it without the approval of the server owner or he'd be breaking international laws.
Source: im a developer with azure certification
The tools are and were there to build the development on. The EU parliament should have started this 20 years ago. They rather took the sweet deals and we got to deal with corrupt software developed by corrupt developers (I don't mean you, but your employer).
20 years ago there was no talks of anything digital, let alone cloud. Hell, most of the population didnt have a computer that was connected to the internet yet. At BEST some countries had e-id's ( like myself ) and some company cards had a chip ( like debit cards ). You might want to recheck history.
20 years ago was 2005, not 1975... Cloud services started before that year. AWS started in 2002 and they weren't the first.
But digital autonomy is not only about cloud services. EU countries were depending on US products with backdoor way before 2005.
Linux was mature at 2005. It is coincidentally even the exact year I started using Linux and also the year I personally first said, that we in the EU have to get independent from US owned operating systems. And I am not a genius.
2005 is funnily enough also the exact year Turkey started its project to get independent from US owned OSs, a project called Pardus. Sadly it pretty much failed, but the EU would have had different resources than Turkey on its own.
Yeah they couldn't figure out how to use foss
Probably takes a whopping 5-10 developers to set up the systems in question from scratch with FOSS. "From scratch" as in, not accounting for whatever insane backwards compatibility requirements exist, though that's not some impassable obstacle either.
They could, but they didn't want to.
Well deserved.
And surely this news will send a strong signal towards Russia that we are more united with our allies than anyone else and that we've got nothing to hide from them. /s
I'm from the Netherlands
(and the second sentence has been the actual thought process for years from anyone but me here 😢).
That building looks like a 4080 founders edition
i didn't check but I'm guessing they gave him top secret clearance a long time ago
edit: looks like he's had top secret for a while but that's not supposed to give him access to payment data and all this other shit