Countries are growing uneasy about their dependence on U.S. technology firms.
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.
70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Hit them where it hurts.
I agree, the problem is you have to consume at some level you need food water clothes etc. and for poorer people 100% of their income goes to just buying the basics. You also don’t want to put other citizens out of jobs because of a boycott, that would get unpopular quickly.
For this to work long term you need to get the top 10% or 20% of consumers to cut back on the extras. I.E. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Chat GPT subscriptions, hold off buying an iPhone or electronics, etc.
If you did that and caused consumption to dip even 5% you would hurt the companies that the oligarchs run and in turn hurt Trump.
Silicon Valley people who wanted Trump are so fucking stupid its absurd.
Anyone who voted for trump is so fucking stupid it’s absurd.
As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.
We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.
To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.
And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.
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 😇
closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review
(⊙_⊙)
How??
1400 fucking accounts! My mind cannot comprehend that number.
This is… completely normal amount of accounts? I am at 1083 saved in my password manager. Admittedly it’s a bit inflated with things like crypto wallets and few dozen passwords for 192.168.1.1 for every router I ever saw. But then, I also been on account deletion spree for a year now and been avoiding making new accounts if at all possible, otherwise I’d easily be over 1500
My question is how does someone even know the number of accounts they have lmao
Like, over the past 2+ decades I’ve been using the Internet, I can’t even give an estimate of how many accounts I have.
it is easy to have 1500+ passwords, I’m online since 1996 :-) and use a password manager like keepass, some sites died, others are still online, i have multiple mailbox, twitter, facebook. it goes up really fast!
not counting also all SSO with google, apple, and now my own pocketid selfhosted domain :-)
I will have to remove also those 50+ google authentificator TOTP and replace them with passkeys…
BTW, it is recommended to use single password per service sinces more than 20 years now, so without a password manager it is impossible to create new accounts. i started in firefox, then chrome password manager, then keepassX …
Gotta have privacy for his bot farm
How does one reach even more than 20 accounts?
By using the internet for literally 5 seconds.
I have over 200 logins overall, but most of them are to forums that have been dead for a decade.
The internet used to be quite a different place back in the day, people had separated communities and everything wasn’t just on a handful of massive platforms.
deleted by creator
I’d always get paranoid that they’d revert the changing your details like reddit did when they undeleted mass-deleted comments before.
Imagine that. Being indifferent to your customer base and forcing them into areas they don’t want to travel are two main behaviours that will destroy a business and bring it to ruin. Monopolies will always eventually have alternatives when their customers find out that the rain is just piss from above.
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.
It starts somewhere, and it’s people leaving one by one. Good onya putting your money where your mouth is.
Yeah also did that for my recent site using StaticBuilder and Codeberg. Took longer but well worth supporting smaller businesses.
Btw, if people are passionate about this topic. There is a community and website on !purchasewithpurpose@lemmy.world .
UpCloud is nice but ever since I started using UpDog I don’t think I can go back.
Waits patiently for someone to ask what it is
What’s UpCloud? 😆
Unfortunately the DevOps world has largely left Ligma based services behind. Good luck finding someone with under 15 years in the industry familiar with it.
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.
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed. At some point, companies and governments decided to cramntheir entire critical IT infrastructure into monolithic services. In this case it was the US, but it could have been anyone anywhere. No matter who, it was a bad practice and everyone is now realizing why.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
This is definitely a specific problem with the US too.
My point is that had companies and governments no opted to put all their eggs in one basket, it wouldn’t have mattered as much whether the US morphed into a fascist hellscape or not.
The entire point of the Internet’s infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed.
The textbook explainer for the existence of the internet was (at least) two fold:
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Provide a high speed communication between research universities for conveying large amounts of digital data
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Devise a system of redundant communication such that any major node going offline would not cripple the international data infrastructure (specifically with an eye towards major natural disasters or nuclear wars).
But the evolution of the system, from a boutique international data exchange for government enterprises to a business-heavy commercial data system to a retail facing SaaS model degraded both original goals.
Data is no longer supposed to be public and freely traded. It is jealously guarded as a commodity controlled by a handful of privatized tech giants. And due to the continuous, voracious digital harvesting performed by these tech giants, more and more of the information needs to be siloed, encrypted, and otherwise shielded. This clogs the vast redundant network with overlarge choke-points designed to filter out unwanted traffic and shield the identity/data of its users.
This isn’t a “US bad” problem. This is a “don’t be stupid, stupid” issue.
The stupidity is a directly result of how the US private sector repurposed tools layout out by the international public sector. Unregulated solicitations and chronic system intrusions by malicious actors aimed at a naive retail user base, combined with the gluttonous privatization of research data, has inverted the core function of the network.
And because of the Tragedy of the Commons, there is no single actor who can fix the problem through their own virtue. You can’t unfuck this chicken with a Meshnet or through voluntary individualistic commitments to ideological principles unbound from the central rules of network communication.
You need the heavy hand of national scale regulators and industry scale redevelopment to re-engineer how the root layers of the internet function if you want to get back to its original design.
Or… if we’re moving in the direction it seems that we’re moving… we’re going to end up with a wholly proprietary loose confederation of Walled Gardens that look more and more like the Anarcho-Capitalist model of civil government (ie, The Network State).
You can’t unfuck this chicken.
100% I am definitely not offering an easy fix, and I hope my comment didn’t read that way. This chicken is…
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The Internet is still distributed, it’s the ownership (and thus also the command and control) that is super inbred. Cloudflare, Google, Aws, they all have hardware distributed in every city.
The internet should have been nationalized under the purview of national postal services globally with private options through telecoms.
Maybe it’s not too late?
Tbh I think I’m greatful that it is not under the direct purview of this administration…
This administration may not exist without the rampant political manipulation that happened online by “private” companies.
Correct. And everyone needs to remember the actual problem, not the symptom. Its like leaving one social media platform for another then when it too goes to crap complaining. Oh how can this happen again!?
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.
That’s the thing, we’re all so tightly involved in those few platforms it’s near impossible to correct the situation in the short term.
In our company we’re also documenting the risks related to US services and it’s pretty bleak. And even if we magically untangled ourselves from all that, we’d still be screwed when all the suppliers, the local infrastructure and literally everything is still on top of those. Honestly I’m not even sure if we’d get through the doors or have electricity in the whole cities we operate in if all went out at once.
The best we can do in short term is to not make it worse and choose wiser with new projects, migrate everything that can be done cheaply and hope for the best until we can get everything lifted off US governed services. Even with the risk recognised, it still doesn’t warrant that magnitude of investment. So we at least plan and document everything as well as we can.
You’d think the few global AWS and Cloudflare outages would have worked as a warning, but most people just went from “nah it couldn’t ever happen” to “well, it did happen, but surely it wouldn’t ever last all too long”.
I feel you dude
They had already gone off the deep end. They’ve been enshittifying everything they can get their hands on and monetizing the slightest edge they can to everything as well. Tech bros are just the pharma bro multiplied. People that bring no value to the world make things that they have no knowledge about or input on behind pay walls because they can. It’s for the shareholders brah! Rid the world of nepo CEOs and we’ll all be in a better place. Also “economics” belongs with the other junk science like chiropractors. Some of them are great and some of the science is needed. Most of it is just junk that only makes sense to them and their schemes.
Oh Blockbuster, who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy memory
Thy storefront come
Thy movies return
On Earth as it is in Heaven
Give us this day our daily movie rentals
And forgive us our shortsightedness
As we forgive those who exploit us for money
And lead us not into micro-transactions
But deliver us from enshittification
For thine is the Weekend
The Power and the Vibes
Forever and ever
Amen
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.
For this to be practical you need to audit and control the code the runs in the data center. I think that was a hangup with some Chinese based services that offered to host in the EU.
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.
If most US websites are garbage this can’t happen soon enough. You can’t even trust basic search anymore thanks to AI bs. People complain about nobody reading articles when they are ad-filled crap usually written by AI, I’d rather spend my time playing video games.
Good news, AI is coming to ruin video games as well!
Not my Mahjong in my Linux laptop.
Not the DRM free ones running on an air gapped Linux machine.
I was hoping for that for a long time, so… thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.
He has made China, Canada and Europe greater.
He only cares about himself and the money he got from them. The better question is why all those tech billionaires supported him.
because once you’ve reached end-state capitalism, the only realistic way to make sure line continues to go up is either ratfucking public funds or to trigger a crash/credit crunch (enabling you to buy up discounted distressed assets)
short-term profit i guess. tech companies get unlimited ability to fuck over society’s minds, trump gets some propaganda or sth, idk.
Because he won’t say no to them.
The group of toolbags parked behind trump at his inauguration all have one thing in common: they live so far up their own arses the concept of “no”, “no one wants this” and “you cannot do this” is so foreign to their fantasies it feels like offense.
Complete sociopathy
Honestly he plays the heel too fucking well. Just wish he wasn’t taking so many innocents with him
Don’t forget to thank the majority of US voters too. Couldn’t have done it without them.
I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I’m working steadily down my list.
So are you moving to other subscriptions, based in another country, that are also at the whim of other corporations?
I think it’s time more people learn how to self-host what’s important to them. At least make sure to keep multiple backups of all of your media.
I agree in principle. I know how to self-host, and I do self-host some things, but I can’t always afford the upfront investment (especially with today’s hardware costs) and I don’t always have time to keep up with the administration (because I’m a wage slave) so I end up renting some of it. I’m not the only one in this position.
I think there’s a place for rented tech services just as there’s a place for rented housing, but the problem in both cases is regulatory capture by landlords that mean we get stuck renting forever from exploiters. (And with tech there’s the surveillance too, so they’re the landlord that puts a secret camera in your bedroom.) So anyway, I’m trying to at least pick my tech landlords more carefully until I can afford a better solution, and as far as possible I try to make sure my stuff is encrypted before they see it.
that’s why I believe that in a normal world, renting should only be needed for temporary hardware. a temporary home, a temporary vehicle, a temporary server, temporary storage…
but with homeservers you could have your own once you can afford it, and you could request help from contractors for the urgent type of maintenance. replacing failing disks in the array, minimal monitoring so that they can keep an eye on when that happens, maybe critical updates…
The problem isn’t necessarily corporate services - the problem is corporate services with no practical competition. If there’s an actual marketplace, then enshittification is limited, because you can just hop providers when service degrades. If there’s an actual marketplace, then you can hop providers when some government takes control your provider.
Putting fun services behind the wall of ‘you must be this technically competent to participate’ isn’t going to fix the broken system.
Could be a great time for small services and modular subscriptions (e.g. block stores or MTAs). I wouldn’t trust many small VPS’ to host an organisation, but it is fine for me personally.
Hopefully enough stable income exists to grow a cottage industry of small infra and protocols lower the barrier to entry/migration.
I would pay for access to an artisanal data center of the finest organic hosts, tenderly shepherded by third generation sysadmins.
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.
