The video (embedded below) by [TechAltar] is titled “1 Month without US tech giants“, but it could have been titled “1 Month with Open Source Tools” — because, as it turns out, once you get out of the ecosystem set up by the US tech giants, you’re into the world of open source software (OSS) whether you want to be or not.
From a (German-made) Tuxedo laptop running their own Linux distro to a Fairphone with e/OS (which is French), an open version of Android, [TechAlter] is very keen to point out whenever Europeans are involved, which is how we learned that KDE has a physical headquarters, and that it’s in Berlin. Who knew?
He also gives his experiences with NextCloud (also German), can be used as an OSS alternative Google Workspaces that we’ve written about before, but then admits that he was the sole user on his instance. To which one must question: if you’re the sole user, why do you need a cloud-based collaborative environment? To try it out before getting collaborators involved, presumably.
Regardless what you think of the politics motivating this video, it’s great to see open source getting greater traction. While [TechAltar] was looking for European alternatives, part of the glory of open source is that it doesn’t matter where you’re from, you can still contribute. (Unless you’re Russian.) Have you found yourself using more open source software (or hardware) of late? Do you think the current political climate could lead to a broadening of its reach? Is this the year of the linux desktop? Let us know what you think in the comments.
I have a single Windows laptop, only for CAD and my remote work (It could be done on linux but it isn’t worth it with my company IT’s).
My development desktop is linux, my daily laptop is linux, all of my other computers are linux. My FLX1 phone is halium based and linux.
I would love for it to be the year of linux, but it won’t be. People don’t like change, even if it will save them money and do the same things with the same ease of use.
Next year is the year of Linux. Always has been.
Open Source Fusion.
By Halium you mean Ubuntu Touch, Plasma Mobile, or something else I am not aware of? I have been using Ubuntu Touch for more than 5 years and really like the interface and ecosystem.
UT doesn’t use halium. Sailfish and FuriOS (only for the FLX1) use halium. I gave you everything you needed to search in my comment.
“My development desktop is linux, my daily laptop is linux, all of my other computers are linux. My FLX1 phone is halium based and linux.”
But is that really good, if eventually everything is running Linux?
In the end, it’s just another form of monopoly, isn’t it?
Let’s also give BSD, Minix and Haiku etc. a chance I’d say! :)
Nah. The existence of a monopoly requires force to enact it. If every device in the world voluntarily ends up running off a Linux kernel because no alternative is superior, that by definition is NOT a monopoly.
If Big Linux buys up every competing OS and shuts the project down, or pays off the government to pass laws banning alternatives, that’s a monopoly, the exclusive control of a product or service. If there are alternatives, it’s not exclusive, not a monopoly.
Being successful doesn’t make you an evil monopoly that must be destroyed at all cost, that’s a foolish, childish way of looking at things.
i think it could be a kind of monopoly. it might come to parallel what has happened in browsers, where you have to follow an unpleasant bleeding edge defined by an institution that doesn’t care about you, just to be able to interact with the internet at large.
otoh, open source goes a long way to making a monopoly palatable.
honestly, i think most diversity in OSes is undesirable. apart from questions of very small scale (where RTOSes shine, for example), you usually want an OS that works and is roughly the same everywhere. if MSDOS or Windows worked well and had broad compatibility, I would perhaps even resent Linux adding diversity to that Eden! the key feature of open source is that anyone can improve upon it if it doesn’t work well for them. iow, the key failure of Windows is that it simply doesn’t work well and no one can fix it.
an illustration of this process is the slow growth of Wayland. among people who believe X11/xorg works well enough, there’s no question that the growth of Wayland is all downside to us. the monopoly of X11 over all of the different GUI programs on my computer has been very handy for me. diversification means there’s a larger surface to test (programs / library stacks built to handle X11 or Wayland), so more bugs reach the end user. users then consider switching between X11 or a number of Wayland options, and with each choice they make they lose access to a wide range of opportunities all at once. it’s relatively difficult to take the best parts of one environment and bring them to the other one.
OTOH, there’s a lot of reasons that people think X11 does not work well enough. and for them, Wayland is possibly a godsend. so they weigh the costs and wind up breaking the monopoly. it’s feasible for them to accept this cost because really they can reuse almost every component. for example, the vast library of programs that use gtk are easy to convert (literally effortless?). so then you might say they’re benefitting from the near monopoly of gtk.
my point is, i think we genuinely wish the perfect product existed for each niche, and that it had a monopoly. both sides of that generate friction in our lives. the imperfections in the monopoly, and the diversity outside of it.
Don’t throw the word monopoly around lightly. A monopoly has a corrosive affect on the markets it dominates. Linux and open source offer one a choice. One might say choice is a double edge sword in it’s offering; choice gives variability. Variability can be fixed by standards. Don’t conflagelate the need for standards with the need to monopolize. Standards are a balancing affect for open source. They are a defacto when one monopolizes.
conflagelate – quite a word there. Not quite sure what it means. To whip together? To punish the group?
but that’s the thing, linux and open source do not intrinsically offer choice. there are myriad projects so large and so pervasive that they’ve essentially got a monopoly. chrome(ium) is open source and that’s actually a big part of how they developed their monopoly. every browser these days (i’m not counting abandonfox as a browser any longer, sorry) is forked from chrome because google used open source to help build their monopoly. and we all benefit, in a way, because the html standards are mere paper flying away in the breeze compared to the solidity of a common implementation that we all use.
so you can fork something, that’s a choice you get. but it’s a heavily-constrained choice unless you have a million man hours
Linux will never be mainstream, its too finicky with the hardware it runs on. If you try to run anything else than mainstream applications, you will end up either throwing your laptop into a wall, or learning how to compile an app for your hardware. Given the snarky elitist attitude of many linux users, the learning curve is extremely steep for someone who doesnt give a sheit about linux and just wants to use that one application unavailable in the windows verse.
Yep, precisely why I stopped running Linux on my desktop. The pain is tolerable on my server, once setup it only needs fixing every other year due to broken updates
It’s not the change, but the balkanization of the whole Linux/OSS ecosystem and platform, that makes things difficult and incredibly slow to improve. At every scale you have people engaged in petty disagreements and unable to standardize on anything or finish anything before someone gets a “better idea” and everybody runs that way instead.
How does that affect you. I load KUbuntu LTS and it just runs. My RPI PI OS just runs. Nothing that happens in the ‘back end’ is affecting my work. gcc is the same, Libre Office is the same, Firefox is the same … Just works and is reliable 24x7x365.
So, I comes down to ‘people’ don’t like change’ . Like things being done for them (OS pre-installed for example). There was a article/blog recently where the person changed over to Linux for a week as his main driver. Came down to most of the reasons for not liking Linux is it did things differently… Didn’t like that.
Yes exactly. I literally demoed for my sister how Libreoffice on Windows could do everything she wanted…She said “I don’t like it, I’ll pay every month for Office365” and she isn’t the only one.
Simplest possible change.
Of course it “just runs”, if you’re just happy with what you’re given.
But every time I’ve done it, eventually there comes a point where I have to do something else with it, and then the story goes “Oh, but it’s not in the repository.”, and then you have to sideload it and it’s not directly compatible, and then it all starts to become this ball of junk.
Amen, brother.
i like the balkanization. it helps me resist change :)
I don’t have a single computer running Windows. No need. Laptops, servers, desktops, SBCs — all run Linux. Been Windows free for years (at home). So the ‘year of Linux’ was long ago now. Unfortuately the company I work for is Windows centric. I really feel this Windows thing is like the Cobol of old. It just won’t go away soon :) as sheepeople just go with the flow and open their pocketbooks to stay in their comfort-zone. So at work, forced boots every week, sometime twice a week, 365 office apps, Edge … No freedom there. Just vendor lock-in.
And what exactly is it that you do with a computer?
What CAD run on Linux? The only thing hold me using windows is no CAD app run on Linux, this also the reason companies stuck with windows or Mac.
Blender for the artisty more freeform stuff, and FreeCAD once you get over the learning curve (as it is quite different, but now pretty darn good – IMO no more flawed and annoying than the other CAD options once you learn how it is different and thus how to work around its rougher edges the way you already will have done for your current CAD package (assuming any of that packages rough edges intersect with what you do)) for the engineering CAD both worth great on Linux.
I agree 100%. The only thing previously stopping me from switching to Linux was SolidWorks only ran on Windows and Fusion want really good enough to take over and was in any case not available on Linux. There are good browser based products but privacy is an issue. I started playing with FreeCad for some time and the Mango Jelly Solutions came across my path and opened up FreeCad to me. Once I started reworking all my designs, and realised that there no restrictions, I had no more reasons to delay the switch. When Windows, Apple and Android started forcing me into AI bots that harvest everything I do by scanning my computer at source, I got really freaked out. I noticed my powerful laptop battled under the list of these activities killing is progressing power. The final straw was when Microsoft raised my subscription of Office 365 by giving me a product I didn’t want and it later became evident that the miss represented the facts.
I took down everything from so my cloud drives and installed Linux in a dual boot config, just so I could convert old files of I need them.
I’m using Blender, Freecad, Inkscape and Libre Office and I’m running my business without missing a beat. I’m also much more at ease with NDAs that I sign with clients, knowing that I won’t expose my or clients information inadvertently. I’ve been running solely on Linux and Open source for the last three months, and in not looking back.
💯❤️👍🏻
FreeCAD is retarded and dysfunctional because it is based on ideas and logical hierarchies that were not designed or suitable for CAD and were developed by people who didn’t understand CAD in the first place. It’s a bad look-alike copy of what professional CAD was in the 1990’s before people had better ideas.
The learning curve you have is because of the need to adopt a learning framework that relies on memorizing specific procedures with specific results rather than understanding general and universal principles of operation. Its both difficult to learn and lacking in features compared to modern CAD, because it’s literally 30 years out of date in fundamental principles.
Different yes, but far from dysfunctional, by that argument OpenSCAD is also awful, being very much developed to be nothing at all like normal CAD… In reality both are great tools, and in many ways not being a commercial offering that needs to keep finding new bling to add that breaks the basics so you “must” upgrade and pay them again…
You could run a Windows version of your CAD software in a virtual machine in seamless or integrated mode. virtualbox calls it seamless mode.
Or Wine or Proton or…
One application is a tiny reason to pick an operating system, now that most things are interoperable.
There’s a list of European alternatives to US based providers: https://european-alternatives.eu/about
How about peertube instead of youtube
The laptop was Intel, so that was a total red herring. You’re not out of the woods yet.
Despite the positive attitude, the video shows why it still doesn’t realistically work: software and trust. While many OSS apps work well, chances still are the one thing you want or rely on doesn’t. The killing blow is not being able to use your bank’s authenticator app, because the bank trusts Google and not you.
It means, we’re back to those paper cards with numbers on them for online authentication, and those aren’t issued anymore.
But if the bank uses OAuth, you could roll your own 2FA.
https://hackaday.com/2017/10/16/inside-two-factor-authentication-apps/
but also
https://hackaday.com/2024/03/07/an-esp32-multifactor-totp-generator/
https://hackaday.com/2018/01/04/two-factor-authentication-with-the-esp8266/
https://hackaday.com/2022/06/18/build-your-own-two-factor-authenticator-with-good-usb/
I could… but realistically?
If I do it on my own, I’ll get the national security and intelligences services on me for suspected banking fraud or intrusion into digital systems. If I contact the bank, they’ll say “No.”
Suppose I was a company developing the app to avoid the first problem. The second problem remains: I’d have to go to the bank and say “We’re developing an app that allows your customers to authenticate using hacked phones and other devices using untrusted operating systems that we won’t limit or control.”. Guess what they’ll answer?
I mean, that’s the reason why the app isn’t available outside of the Play store in the first place.
Based on this “If I do it on my own, I’ll get the national security and intelligences services on me for suspected banking fraud or intrusion into digital systems. If I contact the bank, they’ll say “No.””
I can confidently so no you can’t. Its OAuth. It has nothing to do with “hacking” a bank. Its validation and its certainly not illegal.
The point was that if I start developing my own authenticator and don’t tell the bank I’m doing it, they’ll see the activity as someone attempting to do something naughty because it’s not coming from their app.
It doesn’t matter if it’s technically legal – they still don’t want you to do it.
The authentication is the trivial part – the difficult part is being reasonably sure the user is the user and not some malware that has hijacked the user’s phone. This is why the authenticator app exists for your phone or tablet, but not for your laptop – because the laptop may run any software and is frequently compromised by scammers.
Phones really are not safer than PC’s if anything they are probably worse as folks believe they are safer so do stupid things – too much crap gets onto the app store and/or the phone maker refuses to allow certain popular apps so folks are side loading them and likely other things of dubious origin…
It’s vastly better than on a PC. You have to go out of your way to do stupid things, despite multiple warnings.
A common attack on the phone is to use a sideloaded app that pretends to be the banking app or the authenticator. This is another reason for banks to not allow sideloading of their app, so they can tell their users that their app cannot be sideloaded and anyone attempting to convince you otherwise is probably a scammer.
Agree especially give the often ancient kernels in most android phones. 4.19 is a popular one
You really don’t have to go out of your way Dude, all it takes is downloading a malicious app from the officially sanctioned appstore, with documented cases of bad apps being available for eons after being detected by the whitehat folks at times.
That app doesn’t even have to be overtly malicious, can even do the ‘real’ work it is supposed to, while simultaneously making use of its access to do what you don’t want it to, which as Sword points out is often quite easy as many of these devices are hopelessly outdated from an OS perspective, and can’t be updated without the manufacturer’s support, leaving wide open security holes an app can exploit…
Also The permissions you grant the app can even in many cases include things it has no legitimate reason to want, and folks will still accept – as every app is asking for things it should not need as those permission are not granular enough for it only ask for what it needs. – It really isn’t secure, it just pretends well enough people trust it so much more completely, when they really shouldn’t.
It being Intel is hard to get around if you want to be part of the world. ARM is coming a long way though so a purely ARM based system could very well be realistic to be not relying on US tech companies.
My bank doesn’t trust Google. They have their own authentication thing(no paper cards involved). So most definitely not a killing blow.
No app either, I presume?
They have an app, which once authenticated, can be used to pay and approve transfers.
And is that available from somewhere else than the official appstore, and can you install it on any other device than official Google Android devices?
A purely arm based system? That’s… any phone. Or an Apple laptop.
The catch is that Google and Apple are US tech companies, so even on an ARM system you have to go out of your way to avoid them, and then you’ll run into problems with other services that rely on the platforms and ecosystems built by Google and Apple.
For instance, if I want contactless payment on my phone, it’s either Google Pay or Apple Pay. Rooting the phone and removing Google’s services, or installing a non-Google operating system on it would remove contactless payments for me.
And then you just use a card like a normal person.
Maybe its just me, but I don’t want my phone to store my credit cards (and yes I understand that it basically generates a one time card for the nfc transaction and is very secure)
So, “sour grapes” basically. If a feature is not available, you can just argue you didn’t want it in the first place.
Or, you could argue that this is a problem that needs to be addressed. Otherwise you’d just be building yourself a mental Berlin Wall to stop yourself escaping to the west.
I use Samsung Wallet, no need for Apple/Google.
In the UK banks used to issue card readers as an MFA device. When logging in you’d enter your username and password to the site then for MFA put your bank card in the reader and key in your pin. The reader would generate a 6 or 8 digit code you’d enter into the website.
Some banks have those one-time-pad generators that look like little calculators – but that’s not much better than the paper slip. Drop it in a puddle and whoops, can’t even log in to the bank’s online portal to order a new one. You have to physically visit the front desk, which is somewhere far away because they’ve closed most services due to digitalization.
It’s a really fragile system they’ve built. Just lose your phone and you’re instantly locked out of essential services, including the way to get yourself back in.
Dude these things really are not that fragile, its a really really low voltage all the way down to the battery which makes them pretty much immune to being dunked in water, as long as you can find them again. Also phone helplines and contact forms exist outside of the ‘secure’ logged in part on every bank I’ve ever seen that will be able to help you get a new authenticator.
That’s…. entirely missing the point on multiple accounts.
Even if I call the bank’s regular service number, I’d still have to go to the bank’s service desk in person to show ID. They aren’t allowed to do it over the phone anymore, because someone could order the ID device instead of me, using stolen identity data.
In order to complete the order over the phone, I would have to call the bank’s helpline by authenticating myself using the bank’s mobile app, to make the call from within the app. The way you activate new authentication devices is also by using existing authentication methods – or they have to be done at the bank, again, in person.
Also, yes they are that fragile. The latest iteration of the ID device is like a mini phone that has a camera for scanning QR codes. It has user-replaceable AAA batteries behind a simple plastic snap-on cover. The IP rating is probably IP54 or worse – certainly not watertight.
If you drop it in a puddle, it’ll probably work right away, until it corrodes and stops working some time later. The camera may or may not survive the ordeal.
Banks still provide the card-reader things and the key fob things. And they post out the key fob things, though you have to work hard to convince them you don’t want to switch to the app.
Dude if you call the bank for a new authenticator they’d send it to your registered address – they don’t need you to be authenticated to get the new authenticator. As to use that authenticator the scammer would need access to the pin code type stuff that shouldn’t be public knowledge, and to get hold of the new authenticator, even if they knew all your other secrets they would need to be able to intercept the delivery to you or have access to your house – at which point nothing the bank could do would actually prevent fraud, as these people have enough access to your life to just flat out be you as far as any system is concerned.
And I’ve yet to see anything in these authenticators that would be troubled by a dunk in water – obviously you have to dry and clean it out if you want to prevent the possibility of eventual failure after getting it wet, but it isn’t the sort of device that will actually care very much about the electronics getting wet, low voltage, big fat traces as there is so much board space and they are cheaper so you might as well, the brains is probably a gloptop so encapsulated and well protected…
Yubikey
I have a Yubikey and can’t figure out how to use it.
While authenticator apps are available, all banks in Canada will send a one-time code via SMS or voice to a phone number on file for 2FA. It doesn’t even need to be a smartphone, never mind one with google services. Does this option not exist in Europe?
The banks that I know that still use SMS rely on the paper one-time-pad for the actual authentication. No bank that I know of uses text messages or voice alone.
The banks that have stopped printing and mailing the code lists have also stopped offering SMS and voice authentication.
The phone (text messages) is not reliable option due to ss7 attacks or sim swapping.
I wish more companies provide multiple options as a 2fa including hardware key (like yubikey) and software otp.
But most of financial companies (in the US) are far behind
Depends a bit on which region of EU you are in, but the rule of thumb is no callbacks, no sms. Some banks in some regions provide you with a code calculator should you convince the bank you need it.
bruh what do you think ‘red herring’ means?
“something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question”
Talking about OSS or buying a German laptop to “escape” US tech giants is misleading and irrelevant when the hardware comes from Intel. You haven’t escaped anything.
The difference being that the hardware will, most likely, keep working. While with any SaaS-service (yes, that’s service²), like Google, MS365, the plug could be pulled any time, instantly.
Devil, details: an Intel laptop with Linux still runs Intel firmware, so yeah, how independent is independent? But hey, once you have escaped the windows-lock-in, the way to actually choosing a microprocessor becomes viable.
Sure, it keeps working. Until Intel discovers yet another security issue that can only be fixed with new bytecode… which you can’t get.
Also there is CachyOS an optimized for gaming Arch Linux distro which is also German and I have it with KDE Desktop.
“I don’t need Google, I can stop anytime I want!” – said in a video on google youtube.
However, as true now as it always has been, it is always lovely to see someone learn and implement what goes into such services, and good to see implementing their own.
As one who also was in the single-user nextcloud camp, it was at one point the second best “phone sync/backup” backend in existence, second only in ease-of-use by google/apples own tools.
TechAltar also publishes his videos on Nebula, so he’s making an effort there.
https://nebula.tv/techaltar
It’s so ironic to put this on YouTube of all the video streaming services…
Well, everything else is behind a paywall
Off the top of my head, there’s viemo, rumble, odeseey, bitchute and peertube. Except nobody watches most of them unless they’re looking content that was (or would be) banned from Youtube.
From a technical perspective they’re fine, it’s just network effects that keep them from being viable alternatives.
Vimeo is more of a hosting service – it doesn’t seem to offer a user platform where you could just browse videos.
The rest are just full of quacks and cranks. The “network” that is already there actively discourages others from joining.
dailymotion
quacks and cranks! we’d fit right in :)
TechAltar also publishes his videos on Nebula, so he’s making an effort there.
https://nebula.tv/techaltar
Nebula is American just like Vimeo, Rumble and most of the app mentioned above. You don’t have where to go. Stop with the stupidity, most of the things we use nowadays in the modern world since the 18th Century were invented in the USA. In fact according to Encyclopedia Brittanica report around 60% of the 350 most important inventions since the 1400’s have been AMERICAN INVENTIONS. At least be more grateful of everything that great nation have given us. In my country just like in most of the world American brands, companies, apps, social networks, laptops, operating systems, etc dominate the market, Europeans on the other hand are irrelevant with the exception of luxury handbags and cars (categories where Europe market share have been also crashing down like a meteorite being overtaken by American brands in handbags and Chinese and Japanese brands in Cars). Accept the faith as it is. USA is also richer, more powerful, innovative and influential than entire continent of Europe is statistically speaking in every single category from Gdp. GNI, total wealth, private wealth, net and gross financial assets (total and per capita), Stock market size, Bond market size, equity market size, Consumer market size (nominal and ppp), Gdp per capita, GNI per capita, Gold Reserves, Corporate wealth, Country Total Brand Value, Billionaires, Millionaires, UHNWI, HNWI, National wealth, Currency Reserves, pension funds, government budget, government revenue, military budget, education expenditure, videogame market size, music market size, cinema total box office, tech market size, construction market size, NATURAL RESOURCES, MINERAL RESOURCES, CLIMATE DIVERSITY, Koppen Climate zones, BIOMES, ECOREGIONS (Terrestrial and maritime), Soil types and orders, weather record difference, ARABLE LAND, FARMLAND and more. Not mention have larger Oil, Gas and Coal reserves. More nuclear, biomass, geothermal, wind and solar energy than all of europe combined. More AI, Quantum Computing, robots, etc companies than Europe and any country on earth. More startups and unicorn companies than Europe and any other country on earth. More Data Centers, Malls, retail space, roadway, railway, Airports, heliports, stadiums, museums, zoos, amusement parks, ports, marinas, etc than Europe and any other country on earth. More inventions and patents in history than Europe and any other country out there (statistically proven). More Nobel prize and Nobel prize equivalent of other fields winners than any country in history (more than Europe too). There’s no match, just accept reality and cope with it. Greetings from Dominican Republic a country that loves our brother to the North (USA)
Man oh man, learn to structure your manifestoes. Just looking at your ranting gives me a headache.
I would say there are probably lots of folks that use cloud based (self hosted or otherwise) primarily to let them get access to their stuff from anywhere, making the collaborative features and user controls just a nice bonus for when you do work with somebody else, and these days likely how the software is set up to default to.
Fair point.
I would strongly advise against trusting EU online services.
Because the EU is very political and censorious, just in different ways and areas than the US, causing people to be fooled. (and no I’m not a vance follower and BS subscriber).
For example people talk about German alternatives for US online services apparently not realizing how bad it has become with German law and what their ‘security’ apparatus is allowed to do (including hacking the devices of foreigners and selected entities). And how restrictive for instance he big EU players are about music rights and such. Much more so than even the US.
And I’m only scratching the surface.
Of course there is less change that a ‘wrong’ view leads to the cops standing in front of your door to ‘have a chat’ if you aren’t in the EU, so you got that leg up. Although that stuff is now coming to the US too, but from and by US authorities.
Now there are some services that are still not affected, but as soon as they are noticed by the activists/politicians they likely will be. So be careful trusting EU stuff.
Care to elaborate what’s bad with eu and german law? This reads like FUD
less chance*
Excuse my mistake.
“realizing how bad it has become with German law and what their ‘security’ apparatus is allowed to do”
You mean the good ol’ “Bundestrojaner”? Good point.
But on other hand, US American tech companies must include a backdoor for the three letter agencies, I think.
China products send back home telemetry, too.
Other countries have similar things going on, I suppose.
In Germany, such things are at least being openly talked about.
There’s even a Wiki about the matter.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staatstrojaner
Yes, its best to go with Open Source solutions that undergo regular and rigorous security audits.
One must not forget the very strong drive in EU for crippling VPN services and forcing the providers to arrange EU membership state governments backdoors for monitoring VPN users. The selling point is “preventing child porn” and “preventing exploitation of children”. Which more or less is utter BS, as many of the lobbyers are corporate entities associated with copyrighted materials, movies and music businesses.
“Many are thinking about switching from, or even boycotting Google, Microsoft, Apple & Co” WHY? You use a “German” laptop and a “Dutch” phone (both likely made in China). Security? Lack of personal user data collection?
If online activity would in any way make you a target for security or law enforcement services, your local EU and UK spooks will be far more of a threat to you. For example, in the UK a Facebook post which the government considers offensive will land you in prison. In Germany, liking the populist AfD party makes you a potential terrorist in the eyes of your government. For any app you use that you don’t pay for no matter what its national origin, your data is in some way the income source. And I hope you’re not a TikTok user just because it isn’t American.
Finally, if you are for any reason targeted by your national spooks or, worse, Five Eyes, forget it.
IT instructor, and as usual never enough budget. So I am at the point of using FOSS more and more:
Debian & Cockpit for file shares
Proxmox for VMs & containers
FOG Project for image distribution
Rustdesk for client support
And considering Ansible for automation
All running on two dell R630 servers. The Clients are a mix of Windows 11 & Linux systems, 50 total. FOSS tools are available without the the tech giants.
For the moment, the AfD thing is a bit exaggerated, I think.
So far, you’re merely being considered a silly right-wing voter, one of those ca. 20% from last voting.
The problem with the party is that it claims to be a people’s party, but its actions and mindset speak a different language.
(That brings back some memories of dark history and the NSDAP.)
Meanwhile, enough evidences are being collected for it being “definitely right-wing extremist” and there’s some talk about forbidding the party, too.
But it’s not as if ordinary people are being punished for just liking the party.
If so, the whole former East Germany had to be imprissioned now.
AFAIK, they have the least immigrants or refugees, but mostly had voted for AfD. For whatever reason.
You could even see the former FRG/GDR borders through the AfD votings in the past years. Terrifying.
Here are some links. Articles from 2018 and 2025.
In all of them, the former borders can be seen.
Deutsche Welle:
https://amp.dw.com/de/die-afd-und-die-instrumentalisierung-des-ostens/a-43421106
Federal Agency for Civic Education:
https://www.bpb.de/themen/deutschlandarchiv/560011/zeitenwende-2-0/
BBC:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy6zk9wkrdo
PS: AFAIK, there’s a clause in German law that states Germany can be re-occupied by the allies if national socialism comes back.
It’s in the own interest to take care of parties like AfD, maybe.
I mean Germany literally arrested and charged someone for calling a politician a dick. It was “hate speech”
Well, it depends al lot on how something is said.
Germany doesn’t have “free speech” as such but “free opinion”, for example.
You can (almost) say anything if you add “I think” or “in my opinion”.
If it’s clear that it’s your personal opinion and not presented as a fact, it makes a big difference.
It even covers insults to some degree (as in “Sir, I think you’re a big fool.”)
AFAIK, hate speech doesn’t formaly exist, but there’s a paragraph against “Volksverhetzung” (“incitement to hatred”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksverhetzung
Also, the article one of the basic law is about human dignity..
It also must bee seen as a result in context of WW2 and the horrible things that happened to human beings at the time.
(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.
(2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world.
(3) The following basic rights bind legislation, executive power and jurisdiction as directly applicable law.
Its an easy google, and it did get dropped, but just the fact that a police unit scrutinizes the internet for innocuous things like that, decides it warrants action, get a judge to sign off, gets a team together, raids the house, arrests the person, seizes devices, takes person to jail and it takes a literal judge….the last possible stop to go “hey this isn’t right”
Yeah there isn’t free speech or opinion in Germany.
Then there’s a special case, the “Beamtenbeleidigung”.
People working for goverment or state have slightly more rights.
If the insulted person is a politican, for example and if the insult results in big political harm to the person.
Also, if say the insulted person is a police officer in duty then the superior can file a criminal complaint instead. Such things.
The Wikipedia article can explain it better.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamtenbeleidigung
What your saying is: ‘Don’t live in Germany’.
Agreed.
Most of my family (not on Rente) are at least considering jumping pond.
It’s better than the UK.
They throw people in jail for wrong-think routinely.
Between that and hitting the 51% of population on government tit democracy failure mode, they’re done.
Only thing left for brits to do is ‘vote with feet’.
Yeah. Just don’t adress the fear and concerns of those people and just make fun of ’em.
There will still be time to ban their party if they go higher in polls.
if a party has 20% support from the population, you cant really do much about it without marginalizing and radicalizing said %. Illegalizing AfD would be an idiotic move, that would brew an unimaginable future shitstorm in unrests and terrorist groups, just like in the good old 70´s and 80´s, Baader-Meinhof comes to mind.
Why? Because for some ‘mysterious’ reason people no longer want to be used by the US authorities and economy and its companies.
And no, you are wrong, there ARE people that make software and supply services without abusing you or wanting to use you, regardless how hard that is to believe for you.
Although there also ones that fake it of course.
But as I already said, you can’t trust the EU either and the EU will go after EU citizens and it’s of course easy to do for them.
So I agree in part, don’t avoid the US but try to avoid ALL governments and big corporations and advertisers and moneymakers. Oh and as always: think-tanks.
Irony: This message was posted on a site owned by a US company owned by the EU German multinational company Siemens .
‘All your base are belong to us’ eh
About Siemens.. It’s nolonger being German by heart, I’m afraid.
It’s a “multinational company” and doesn’t really care about Germany and Germans anymore, I think.
Siemens being German is more of a formal thing, I suppose.
They have at least one genius on staff:
The guy who put their UK office in ‘Stains’…
I’m not sure how euro it is but I know they rely on some very talented German engineers and they produce in Germany though.
And there are (still-) EU companies that rely on their output.
i think this is an interesting claim: “there ARE people that make software and supply services without abusing you or wanting to use you”
i don’t know if it’s true though?
for example, i’m one of the good ones. i make programs for the joy of it, or in other words, for my own personal use. and about half of the android apps i’ve made, i go ahead and upload them to the play store because i figure someone else might use them. my apps are adware-free, and generally not bloated. they are good at what they’re supposed to do, and they don’t do anything else.
but if you want something different, you’re at my mercy. i mean, they’re open source but the closest anyone has come to forking any of my apps so far is to put one of them on an alternative app store that i guess builds from source automatically. and so people send me requests and more than half the time i reply…i might as well say “i’m the dictator, and i have decided that i am the only user that matters and i don’t want that feature.”
and one of my apps, SimpleSSHD, was moderately popular for a decade. and then google made me jump through hoops to keep it on the app store. and i simply didn’t do it. i wrote it for me to use, and i am happy to sideload it. so now all those users are out in the cold.
is this kind of self-interested neglect not a kind of abuse?
I know what I said is true because a) I see it often enough and b) I understand the thinking and have done some modest stuff for others in the area of software without wanting or expecting reward.
Think about it, things like G’MIC and Krita and Gimp and various AI thing and the majority of the github projects, all of them not seeking to exploit and profit (including not with the intent to do it later when they ‘hooked’ people in).
Yes I know some projects get support from donors or universities or government grants, but I think you can see from observing the people involved that that is not the motivation.
Because there’s a risk that the US government starts to use online services and virtual assets as a means to extort and pressure EU governments, institutions and corporations as well. This would likely cause a mad scramble to find alternative providers anyways, so it’s better to be prepared early to cushion the drop.
If suitable alternatives can be found, it’s sensible to make the switch anyways wherever possible, because an EU “domestic” provider will be cheaper overall even if it’s directly more expensive or somewhat worse in quality – because they would be banking their profits, paying their taxes and hiring their people here instead of the US. Some of that will land back into your pockets as well. That’s exactly the trade policy that the US is pushing against the EU as well.
As a means to extort and pressure EU governments you say, how does that differ from what the present day clown in the white house is doing ?
It goes directly against the ways the nations and their governments function on a day-to-day basis.
Imagine if Teams and Outlook stops working now. Right now. This second now. About 95% of the public institutions in the EU would stop working entirely. Your social security stops working, your public health, education, everything grinds to a halt because people can’t send a simple email using the official channels they’ve established or hold a simple online meeting to discuss the matter. It would take months to sort it out, and the end result would be a hodge-podge of bad solutions that don’t meet the original specs.
“WHY”
This one, for example.
Microsoft had deleted this one’s guy e-mail address on command of the leader.
“One reason the the court has been hamstrung is that it relies heavily on contractors and non-governmental organisations.
These businesses and groups have curtailed work on behalf of the court because they are concerned about being targeted by US authorities, according to current and former ICC staffers.
Microsoft, for example, cancelled Mr Khan’s email address, forcing the prosecutor to move to Proton Mail, a Swiss email provider, ICC staffers said. His bank accounts in the UK have been blocked.”
News site: https://tinyurl.com/5axe9p4j
I hear Khan is also suspended by the ICC while under investigation by the ICC for shady dealings.
I wonder if MS saved his emails and if they will be part of the investigation.
And I also wonder if his bank account suspension is actually the result of the US’s political action OR part of the investigation. Sometimes you need to wait a bit to find out what’s really going on.
But yeah US companies like MS being a tool of such politics is a concern, we agree on that. And especially if they were not told to but do it preemptively like some suggest MS did, which leaves even less room for challenge.
That was a really bad business decision from MS, one they will regret in the long run as it definitely alienates EU from their services.
It’s good to have alternative.
– Few times I saved a lot of money on my computers just because Windows wouldn’t run on them anymore.
– I had enough using smartphone that was obsolete just because no security updates were not provided. I went Apple which came with it’s own limitation but now there are more vendors with longer software support to choose so I don’t need to keep myself locked in those limitations.
– Ownership. In PC, “P” now stands for “proprietary” now. I like to have an option in case “everything is subscription based service from cloud” becomes rather sad reality than distant future.
– competition. If our giants had no competition they would stop developing features and focus on milking the users only.
– I can afford new machines but it looks like I pay for being beta tester of a product designed to be obsolete before mature even though technically fully capable.
Haiku is faster and nice.
I like SerenityOS but still gcc on linux is better.
answer is === YES! (but probably after decade or 3)
As far as I know, YouTube itself is NOT open source…
Funny how US went from being the challenger to the hunderds years old behemoth monopolies (UK and Europe in general) now leads the way to be the home of the worst monopolies on Earth.
BTW, it was the US companies that broke the mechanical watch monopolies in UK. This was more than 100 years ago when federal government basically didn’t exist, there were no federal taxes, AND there were many small- and mid-sized companies that served as the backbone for the larger ones. The US companies secret? Instead of fine-tuning every part that goes into each watch, mass-produce the parts on the cheap with liberal tolerances, then match those that more-or-less-have-similar-oddities during the assembly. Obviously, there as a lot of waste, but so were plenty of cheap spare parts available on the secondary market for all kinds of tinkerers, kinda open source for the willing. UK makers couldn’t compete (and at the time they were doing “corporate restructuring” – outsourcing watch making to their backwaters, Switzerland, that had cheaper labor, so weren’t exactly thrilled that US makers figure out how to mass-produce reasonably good watches that would be cheaper), and eventually just closed pretty much most of the shops (well, WWI helped a great deal – there was a spike in demand for some while, but eventually it came down, and US makers won just the same).
Rewind to present and find it all in reverse – US just semi-decimated its industries during 1990s and 2000s (NAFTA 1.0 and NAFTA 2.0, outsourcing to China, which was the equivalent of UK’s Switzerland, eh, same story there, Switzerland/China eventually became better at making what was being outsourced AND accumulated expertise that’s not outsource-able, at least not easily), so now US companies are just the UK watch makers, guarding their crumbling monopolies by any means necessary, even though the history is NOT on their side. Apple, what Apple, its last invention was iPad, and it hasn’t brought forth much ever since, kinda like discovered its Higgs Boson and went stale.
History doesn’t teach anything to anybody – it has to be the other way around, those who want to know their backstory HAVE to learn the history.
Let’s see, on the topic of watches, US invented the quartz clock, then it was deemed “not worthy R&D and too expensive to mass-produce” and basically given to Japan (well, kinda sorta, not exactly) to toy with. When they figured out how to make it small enough to squeeze one into a hand watch AND make it cheap enough … you get the idea. Mechanical watches were suddenly on the path to extinction. Oh, Swiss watch makers tried and failed – for example, by copying very VERY simple Accutron (by US Bulova) – imho, a marvel of simplicity, tuning fork and one huge cogwheel driving the hands, that’s it (still not as efficient as the LCD quartz – battery runs out much sooner). But all in all, all dinosaurs sooner or later face mass extinction, they are unwieldy, too prone to black swan unexpected events, focus on their own survival way too much, etc.
Point being, what benefits megalomonsters not necessarily what average Sam needs (or wants). Sooner or later there will be average Sams figuring out how to live without paying mandatory corporate taxes and providing for himself more or less well.