The lemm.ee server that was so generously hosting us is shutting down. We need to find a new home. I'd like it to be:

1. running in EU
2. backed by a bigger team (so it's not so likely to shut down too)
3. not federated with instances known to tolerate disinformation or trolling

I've been recommended to use PieFed instead of Lemme, on the account of better moderation tools and community migration feature (mittigating point 2) but I didn't really have much time to look into it. Any suggestions? I want to make a decision by Friday.

Tracking code that Meta [USA based owners of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp etc. - Tad] and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it's investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.nz/post/24112791

Trump is driving European governments to Microsoft alternatives: What Germany, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria are planning.

With Ukraine's cold position, rapprochement with Russia, and its tariff policy, US President Donald Trump has startled the Europeans – and fueled the discussion about digital sovereignty. The risks of dependence on American tech companies have suddenly moved up on the political agenda, not only in Berlin, but also in other European capitals.

The discussion has many facets, because US companies such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Broadcom and OpenAI dominate in numerous areas of IT, from hardware to cloud services to operating systems and (AI) applications. In some segments, however, Chinese suppliers such as Lenovo and Huawei also have a strong position, just like the Europeans themselves, for example with ASML or SAP.

An IT world without dependencies on third parties would not be conducive to productivity and prosperity and anyway unrealistic, after all, there is hardly any know-how for the increasingly complex products in hardly any company. But the dependence on Microsoft's software and cloud services is particularly concerned about many European politicians. If the company is forced to shut down cloud services like 365 due to orders from the US government, the impact would be drastic: ministries and agencies with 365 subscriptions could not even chat or email from now on.

If Microsoft no longer provide security updates, sooner or later all users of Windows and the "On-Premise" (i.e. on customer hardware instead of the cloud) ongoing variants of Office and Exchange got into trouble. Microsoft's plan to offer Offices only in the cloud in the future puts additional pressure on Europeans. And the switch to other providers is complicated, among other things, by the fact that management applications such as e-file programs are interwoven with Microsoft Office.

Archive : https://archive.ph/2025.04.30-111200/https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Wie-europaeische-Staaten-ihre-Abhaengigkeit-von-Microsoft-reduzieren-wollen-10365345.html

How long did it take Big Tech to pay off all their fines? A visual report from Proton AG.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64750194

• President Donald Trump on Friday said he is “recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union” after complaining that trade negotiations have stalled.

• The EU “has been very difficult to deal with,” Trump wrote. “Our discussions with them are going nowhere!”

The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with. Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable. Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025. There is no Tariff if the product is built or manufactured in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Arjen Lubach, a popular Dutch comedian, author, music producer and television presenter asks if Trump can flatten the Netherlands by leveraging our dependence on American cloud, and answers: yes. Funny but scary.

Alternative non-YouTube links:

• https://yewtu.be/watch?v=uoTMwX_clDs

• https://www.rtl.nl/tv/fragmenten/video/b79fd594-ce42-4364-bd8b-83d01bea90a2/kan-trump-nederland-digitaal-platleggen (⚠️ DRM)

Second, companies in this increasingly autocratic and hostile US control every major digital platform that Europeans use to debate and share news, with the exception of TikTok, which is Chinese. Even Europe’s news organisations rely on Google and other US advertising technology companies for online revenue. Trump can humiliate or cripple the oligarchs who control these companies.

The CLOUD Act allows federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/43179922

!linux@programming.dev

cross-posted from: https://jlai.lu/post/18244782

The full list:

https://code.gouv.fr/sill/list

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/buyeuropean@feddit.uk/t/2074870

Let’s back our own EU Tech industry. At & The Big Fish, we’re exploring a move to European IT solutions, like; • TUXEDO OS (instead of Windows) • ONLYOFFICE (instead of Microsoft Office) • Nextcloud Hub, EU-hosted (instead of Google Drive) Admittedly a bit opportunistic and I know large organizations can’t pivot like this easily. But SMEs and startups can! Using this stack or joining this movement? Drop your thoughts or tips below! #europeantech #cloud #digitalsovereignty #executivesearch #gdpr #buylocal Marloes Pomp Techleap TUXEDO Computers GmbH ONLYOFFICE Nextcloud www.andthebigfish.com

They even want to buy computers from @tuxedocomputers and use @nextcloud

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/61526418

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28006908

Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s 16 states, on Wednesday confirmed plans to move tens of thousands of systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement follows previously established plans to migrate the state government off Microsoft Office in favor of open source LibreOffice.

Dutch informatics and intelligence expert Bert Hubert explains why European governments are urgently trying to get away from the American clouds and how they do it fastest. The article is in German. Here are few excerpts translated by me using Firefox Translation.

What is happening in the EU, is that the politicians are finally waking up. They should have done this five years ago.

The Dutch Cybersecurity Center NCSC has conducted an in-depth investigation of Microsoft. In an official evaluation, it has recorded mutatis mutandis: "The USA can at any time access the European data storage. But we don't think they will do that." Of course, that has always been pure wishful thinking. [...] It remains subject to American surveillance laws.

The data transfer agreement will be cancelled soon. Either the EU Commission is pulling back the adequacy decision, which presupposes that the US is a country with an adequate level of data protection [...] or the European Court of Justice will declare it invalid.

The whole of Europe should be alarmed. We have become a digital colony of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. [...] Our officials are putting European security and independence at risk just so that they can continue to use Microsoft Outlook! That sounds idiotic, but that's how I experience administrations.

We must finally redeem the many European open source programmers. [...] At some point we stopped believing that we can write good software. Now Europe only offers SAP software as an export hit, that's it. But if we invest billions somewhere, it's in European software development.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/60461323

https://archive.ph/X5rh6

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/41819102

Viktor Shvets of Macquarie points out that in 2023, the US exported more than $300 billion in information and communications technology and business services, yielding a net surplus of $120 billion. US royalty and license fees (mostly tech) reached a net surplus of $90 billion, while financial services generated a surplus of $63 billion. “Expanding the scope of the trade war will be inflammatory,” he says, “but it seems the EU (and Canada) might have decided that one can only negotiate with the US from a position of strength, and services are the US’ Achilles heel.”

The Dutch Broadcasting Foundation reports (in Dutch) that European tech companies are seeing a spike in new customers. They attribute the increase to a growing desire to transition away from US-based tech companies.

It looks like new customers are mostly consumers and small businesses, but hopefully this will build momentum for larger european enterprises to consider switching. Often, a change in consumer sentiment and preferences foretells a shift at the enterprise level.

Matt Burgess writing at WIRED:

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

For years, there's been a bubbling concern about the behavior of the big US tech corporations around data privacy and tech lock-in. Now that's boiling over, into a near crisis about digital sovereignty and the imperative to find or build viable alternatives.

This article is a good overview of recent events fueling the movement to reduce or eliminate the utter dependence on big US-based tech companies.