Certainly the Blacklight test show that Microsoft EU respect way more the privacy (forced by law) than Microsoft US.
We recognize that our business is critically dependent on sustaining the trust of customers, countries, and governments across Europe. We respect European values, comply with European laws, and actively defend Europe’s cybersecurity. Our support for Europe has always been – and always will be – steadfast.
None of that matters, since they still have to comply to American laws, which means they have to give access to European data if the US government requests it.
Wrong, MS EU have to comply EU GDPR laws, yes or yes. They have learned it after several high fines, like also Facebook and Google, even X planned in the past to stop the service in the EU because of this. They can’t send userdata to third countries without the express consent of the user. Privacy in the EU is an human right protected by law. MS is scared with a reason.
If you want to be pedantic about it - if the NSA, or any such agency demands to place a [backdoor of any sort] in an American company’s datacenter, they have to comply.
So, no, they (meta, Google, etc) won’t be handing over the data knowingly. But those devices placed there for sure aren’t running Minecraft servers.
Also in the EU, security agencies and the police can have access to individual accounts, but only in the case of an criminal investigation and only with an court order. Even very privacy oriented services and apps have to give access to the data they have, in this case. But this, if these data are encrypted, there is few what the authorities can do, then they have to contact the user directly to obtain the encryption key, or trying through weeks to crack it. But all this has nothing to do with privacy, it’s not the same as sharing freely user datas to third party advertising companies, like it is possible in the US, in the EU it’s only alowed in a very limited way to share statistical, anonymised and tech data.
to contact the user directly to obtain the encryption key,
Or getting a house search warrant.
Only if that data centre is located on US soil.
I would think the Chinese government switching all government PCs and servers to KylinOS by 2026, would be weighing on all US tech companies.
Data sovereignty is going to be key to maintaining any sovereignity going forward, it’s so vital to the function of society and the economy that outsourcing it to another country is just giving part of yourself away.
Well, you can safely store it with trusted allies….
Don’t give up sovereignity, even to allies! Alliances change, but even ignoring that, it’s akin to letting allies run your infrastructure or make your policies or own your water. It’s giving part of yourself away.
So, abandon the EU? Abandon the concept of the USA? My comment was tongue in cheek but deep cooperation can be a good thing. It’s part of the reason for the EU. Mutual dependency reduces the risk of war. Isolationism, like the USA is tending towards leads to more war.
The EU is not an alliance, since member states give up a good portion of their sovereignty to the bloc. It’s much closer to a “loosely bound US” than a “NATO on steroids”.
The EU as a whole is an interesting project, but the Eurozone currency bloc was a mistake. All it did was surrender everyone else’s currency sovereignty to Germany and France.
And death to the US.
The currency is only one aspect and a quite recent aspect. Many other aspects of sovereignty are ceded as a condition of joining. However, the pros outweigh the cons.
The point of the increased cooperation is that everyone is better off, with less risk of war and better protections. The EU sets many minimum standards for goods, services, interoperability and budgets, legislation, courts etc that countries cannot override.
Death to the US is reductive and inflammatory.
Fun fact, the USA is a union of states.
Ask Greece or the other Mediterranean nations if they are better off without their own currency (hint: they absolutely aren’t)
Death to US is a basic statement of understanding that the US empire is the primary contradiction.
Ask Croatia, Ireland, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia andSlovenia if they are? Hint, they absolutely are.
Any union with such a variety of policies will have winners and losers for every project and legislation. Sometimes that will be individuals, sometimes countries. The point is that most are better off in general and that every country is better off from the sum of policies.
Countries have less control of their individual exchange rate. That was problematic for Greece, who underwent austerity, successfully I might add as access to the EU wide economy and trade, including (over)tourism is what’s taken them back from the brink.
In terms of larger countries, it has been beneficial for France and Germany, less so for Italy, but also less of a problem and less of the fluctuations the lira used to suffer.
EU is compromised by usa, so yes, give it up
Fun fact, the USA is not part of the EU.
Fun fact: the USA is a union of states.
Ah yes the ever so reliable us !
Seems like a natural response of Europe to Trump’s policies. I’m not sure why anyone would be surprised.
It’s kinda like good guy Hitler, because he killed Hitler.
Trump’s major achievement might be that the rest of the world starts relying less on the US.
Blame the right wing you rich corporations empowered with your self destructive lobbying and weakening of regulation. You and your billionaire counterparts’ push to the right has broken down the very order that brought you the wealth and stability that centered world markets on the U.S. Your reckless pursuit of endless growth will kill the world order that created America’s prosperity. These corporation drank too much of their own Kool-aid.
The world order that created America’s prosperity was ultra violence and super imperialism resulting in the deaths, abject suffering, and domination of hundreds of millions around the globe for a century.
“We will store backup copies of our code in a secure repository in Switzerland, and we will provide our European partners with the legal rights needed to access and use this code if needed for this purpose.”
If Microsoft is going to actually risk giving access to their source code then they’re really scared!
That’s SOP for government contracts. The US government, and others, have had access in the past. NDA blah blah blah.
It sounds like this would be expanding that to a lot more commercial customers, though?
Pretty sure that they already shared it with copilot, so I’m guessing that it’s only a matter of time until everyone has a copy…
Microsoft should be getting worried about Linux.
Tbh no not really, as long a OEMs either dont ship Linux at all or only niche OEMs do (or major OEMs on a small subset of their products) Linux will be a niche. The European Market still relies on American OEMs which means they have been cornered by Microsoft.
Azure runs almost entirely on Linux. MS has no need to be afraid of it.
Yes, but currently Linux isn’t a valid option for a lot of users, because a lot of professional and corporation apps, apart of most games are Windows only. To rise Linux is needed to change this first. The only alternative for this issue is maybe using instead eg. WindowsX, something like an “de-microsofted” Windows. Linux is certainly the best alternative, but also has some drawbacks, like too much different distros not always compatible one with another, depending on the distro also often an deficient support and maintance, certain driver problems, among others. Not good if an still minority OS is above to diversified, which cause a lot of problems for the devs of software. To dethrone Windows as leader of the market does it still need a lot of work in many environments.
It’s not a plug and play solution yet but Winapps exists and can run almost any Windows software on Linux using RDP.
This is just right. Massive amounts of corporations have a complete dependency on Microsoft Office. In a way that cannot be substituted by Libreoffice or similar.
Change need to happen. But there need to be a viable alternative before it.
Well, several administrations in Spain already are using LibreOffice, which is a pretty good alternative to the MS Office, it is even compatible with way more document formats than the MS Office. That means, that don’t exist an real dependency because tecnical reasons, but maybe because burocratic ones. Using alternatives of Windows is more complicated, but there isn’t any problems with general apps for Windows, except for some specific corporation ones, Windows catalogue of software is the biggest one of any other OS.
I, a Linux user, agree that there is work to be done, but I disagree with the “this needs to change first” on proprietary software availability. Specifically the “first” bit.
Let me explain why: The problem of software availability is a chicken and egg problem. No users on an OS = no developers make stuff for it = no users because there is no software.
With Wine/Proton, Valve “fixed” this issue for gamers. This “opened the floodgates”, and at least in one group of computer users, made Linux viable as a daily driver. People who play video games are diverse, and have different needs for software outside gaming, so this change grew the userbase of every category of software in Linux, not just games.
With an actual userbase comes both a community of people, who are all potential contributors for FOSS, whether that’s programming, docs, or reporting issues. And a marketshare for businesses to target (and profit off of).
The ball has clearly started rolling, Linux is gaining marketshare at a pace it hasn’t seen before. The bigger the userbase gets, the more software will work overall. The more software, the more people who can switch.
There isn’t a single definable point where software availability suddenly makes a userbase appear, these two grow together.
So yes, there is work to be done, but no, it doesn’t “need to change first”.
A lot of people find out after using Linux that it’s perfect for their daily tasks. A lot of other people never bother, and thus never find out. With Windows 10 EOL coming up, and MS pushing more and more onto users (like recall and copilot), a portion of people forced to switch will look for alternatives, or will try out Linux because they’ve heard of it as an alternative.
As for your other arguments:
too much different distros not always compatible one with another
Which used to be true, but is significantly better than even a couple years ago. “Standardized” packaging like Flatpak makes a ton of software available on all distros, ensuring compatibility. Valve took a shot at this too with Steam Linux Runtime, but this hasn’t seen any use outside Steam.
depending on the distro also often an deficient support and maintance,
For the vast majority of distros, no. Though I agree that we (the community as a whole) should stop accepting terrible resources for finding Linux distros (like “top 10 distros” lists that make no sense to a new user) and push for better ones.
certain driver problems, among others.
Which is being solved too. “driver problems” is exclusively Nvidia, but the issues are (very slowly) being fixed (by nvidia), and distros are offering easy options for getting the Nvidia drivers. Nouveau/NVK is also on the slow cooker, but I trust it’ll come out great. “Among others” is not a valid reason.
Not good if an still minority OS is above to diversified, which cause a lot of problems for the devs of software.
Which fits into the point of Flatpaks for proprietary software, and highlights where FOSS truly shines. Flatpaks standardize the runtime, proprietary software only needs to support this one standard to support all distros. FOSS devs can target whatever they want for their project. If “works on my machine” is good enough for them, so be it. (People will always complain about stuff like this though). If a distro wants to officially provide some open source software to its users, it has to be packaged. With the packaging process for a distro, modifications might need to be made, which can often be contributed back to upstream.
To dethrone Windows as leader of the market does it still need a lot of work in many environments.
It’s a lot closer than you think. It’s already a viable daily driver for many. The biggest blocker is the fact that MS is a global megacorp, with advertising, OEM “support”, and a lot of money to “persuade” people and companies to use Windows.
OEM support also ties into the whole “choosing a distro”. I trust that even the worst OEMs choose at least a supported distro, which takes all pressure away from the user. When Linux marketshare grows enough for OEMs to provide the option, the least technical users going to a brick and mortar store will be presented with “100$ cheaper, but looks different than your current computer”. If Windows UI keeps being as inconsistent as it currently is, it would have similar impact for non-technical users going between Windows N and N+1 as it does going to Linux.
Agree, in part, certainly the panorama is changing, but fact is that Linux has still only an 4-5% marketshare reparted in several different distros. Well, the Flatpack is an solution, but the general amount of soft m FOSS and also proprietary is still lightyears away from the software catalogue from Windows, simply because Windows is by far the most used OS (I hope this may change in the future, we’ll see) and in consequence most soft, incluse FOSS, is developed for this OS. law of the market. Yes, for a normal user with his daily tasks, Linux is the best option, but as said, not for everyone. Linux has it’s drawbacks as any other OS. The perfect OS is always the one which best fits the need and tasks of each user, period.
they are literally doing that with wine and proton.
most peoples use cases are covered in the workplace.
For business usage, it’s really just Debian and Red Hat as options, along with their derivatives. For personal use, add Arch to the list.
Other distros exist but people don’t generally need to worry about them, their stability or compatibility, etc. This includes developers as well as users.
Good, fuck microsoft.
Certainly the Blacklight test show that Microsoft EU respect way more the privacy (forced by law) than Microsoft US.
What test?
But really, I read the whole article and there’s nothing mentioned about a blacklight test.
https://themarkup.org/blacklight
In Options in the search bar you can filter the country US or EU
Oh I see. That’s just measuring tracking scripts on websites. It’s not particularly relevant to what is discussed in the article (data sovereignty of cloud providers).
Yes, but you can also proof it, checking and even blocking the traffic in the OS, eg. with Portmaster. Not a big Problem. Different to MacOS, Windows permits to make it reasinable private in the settings, the only problem is that a lot of settings (in total over 200 setting points and registry entries) are indocumented and hidden. The OS as such is only another modified UNIX fork, the worse part are the apps. telemetries and services added by M$. The gutted, mencioned WindowsX, shows it, also mine DIY version of Windows11 24H2 which I use, with only <700 MB in RAM, after eliminating all this MS crap.
Again, nothing to do with Microsoft’s cloud platform.
But a lot with it’s TOS and PP in any MS products and services in the EU. MS can’t act in the EU the same way as in the US.
You’re going to link me to youtube shorts?
Please, no.
You can just get a userscript that redirects it to become a normal video.
I’ve spent so little time with YouTube Shorts I didn’t know you could change the URL to a normal video
I try to avoid them as well. They show up a lot in search results for no reason, but adding something like “before:2100”, that is, refining one search to show videos before the year 2100 in this case, that removes a bunch of unrelated shorts as well. In general whenever I see a feature I don’t like, I check if others hated it as much as me and did something about it via a userscript.
I forgot about using those scripts. I’ll have to put Grease Monkey on my newer computer. I added an extension a couple months ago to stop websites from preventing me from pasting into text fields, but I’d guess using a script would be a more efficient way to deal with it than adding an extension for every annoyance!
There’s also TamperMonkey (closed source) and ViolentMonkey (also MIT license like GreaseMonkey). I prefer ViolentMonkey. I believe there was a reason many years ago where either Tamper or Grease monkey didn’t work for like a week which is why I switched, but I believe they’re all equally good.
Manifest v3 might make it harder to get going on chromium browsers in a months time, but looks like you’re on Firefox - shouldn’t be problem there.
I could also edit the URL manually, it’s just an obnoxious way to respond to a question.
They were just trying to be funny, but I also wonder what it means.
I hadn’t seen that sketch in a little while, I was pleasantly surprised to see they added 14 additional audio tracks with translations. I wish that was more common, making humour more international like that.
