#China

Via Kottke.

• All of computing is moving to the cloud at a rapid clip, including (government) parts you might want to keep under your own control
• Europe has no relevant ‘hyperscaler’ cloud providers at all, and there is a desire to change this by policy means
• Competing with the IKEA-concept is nearly impossible. Offering IKEA-like products but then with a smaller range is not an attractive proposition. You can’t replicate IKEA without a LOT of upfront work
• Replicating a company like Airbus (or ASML) is similarly very hard: both companies (and their ecosystems) are one of the very few places where you can buy modern wide body jets and extreme UV wafer steppers. Their products are technically incredibly advanced.
• The ‘hyperscaler’ cloud providers (like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba) are both IKEA and Airbus/ASML hard to replicate. They offer a huge and complete range services that are also incredibly advanced and years ahead of commodity products
• Europe has precisely nothing that competes, and is 100% dependent on the ‘IKEA clouds’. We only have partial companies.
• Fixing that situation will not be possible through legislation, standardisation or concerted government action. You can’t procure a competitive mega cloud into existence. Europe did assemble Airbus from its component parts but it was very hard
• Although IKEA exists, you can still get (better) furniture from more specialised places. A European owned email, communication and collaboration cloud might be a feasible idea
• European procurement law makes it entirely doable for governments to order their services from such European communication clouds
• From that, a more viable European cloud ecosystem could perhaps evolve

Source: Taking the Airbus to the IKEA Cloud by Bert Hubert

We do have some (smaller) cloud (Scaleway) and datacenter players (Leaseweb, could use some innovation) and some inbetween (OVH, Hetzner)... But none are really a true cloud provider with serverless, all the storage stuff, etc.

Keep seeing more and more topics, threads and sites about it. And it's probably not getting half as much attention as it deserves.

Here's a summary from Danny Mekić post:

• The European Commission wants to turn digital communication apps into mass surveillance tools by automatically scanning EU citizens' live conversations, photos and videos for criminal offenses, even if they are not suspected of a crime.
• Hundreds of academics, privacy regulators and EU legal experts have condemned the proposal, arguing it grossly violates privacy rights and the technology cannot accurately detect criminal activity.
• When the EU Council meeting showed insufficient support for the proposal, the Commissioner launched a paid advertising campaign on social media targeting specific countries to sway public opinion.
• The campaign used emotionally manipulative images and music to suggest opponents did not want to protect children, while also misleadingly claiming majority European support.
• The ads were microtargeted to exclude people interested in privacy, Euroscepticism, Christianity and other critical political/religious groups, creating an uncritical echo chamber.
• This microtargeting violates the social media platform's policies, the Digital Services Act, and GDPR.
• When a proposal lacks sufficient support, the proper response is to withdraw or amend it, not pressure doubting members through manipulative disinformation campaigns.
• By setting aside European values, the Commission is endangering the foundations of the European Union.
• The Commission should take down the ad campaigns and refrain from future attempts to bend public opinion through illegal targeted ads.
• The document was written by a jurist and technologist who is critical of the Commission's overreach and disregard for democratic processes and individual rights.

Via Kagi: Undermining Democracy: The European Commission's Controversial Push for Digital Surveillance

I think this has been greatly underreported.

Apple purposely disables a feature on your phone during unrest.

Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

Really, really good analysis by The Pudding.

When these shows resurfaced, they were full of these weird jumps, signaling that scenes were removed during censorship because someone somewhere thought it would be inappropriate or illegal to stream such content.

[...]

77 of the first 100 episodes had at least one edit, amounting to 206 removed scenes.

[...]

I categorized these scenes, among which sex, LGBTQ+ (and atypical heterosexual relationships), as well as disrespect toward China or the country’s allies are the most common ones. The four other topics account for a rather small portion but are still worth mentioning: illegal actions, religion, unhealthy addictions, and miscellaneous.

[...]

Those pages are now gone, along with thousands of anonymous posts sharing gossip, seeking advice, and protesting against government policies. In August, police in Hong Kong arrested two administrators of the Facebook page Civil Servant Secrets on suspicion of sedition, without specifying what content they found problematic. Shortly after the arrests, many other popular pages each with tens of thousands of followers shut down, as people feared becoming the next targets of Hong Kong’s crackdown on dissent.