"Customer support data is stored exclusively on EU-located networks and servers"
We should not just focus on the location. It's about who is managing the servers and networks.
diggan · 23m ago
> We should not just focus on the location
True, but location matters a great deal, because some countries have a tendency to MITM any physical link they can get their hands on, even if that means scuba divers or secret rooms. But also who it is who is managing it, agree.
pjc50 · 1h ago
SUSE S.A. ownership does seem to be entirely European, if you're worried about Safe Harbor type issues.
The focus should not be on the location, provided it is in the EU, but really the focus should be on carefully siloing the user data and make it only accessible to who needs them which is definitely no-one managing any servers and networks; it shouldn't matter (just dataloss, but not leaks which are not worthless). The info should be encrypted with different service dependent (healthcare, different levels, taxes etc) key pairs. As long as this data is accessible by anyone else but me, it's going to fall in the wrong hands anyway.
0xfedcafe · 49m ago
This is really good news. Europe has kept saying that digital sovereignty is a must, but for some reason, they have primarily considered US-based projects like Fedora and almost never SUSE. This has always made me wonder, because SUSE already has almost all the necessary tools; for example, Rancher and openSUSE and they're well known in Europe for quite a while.
pjmlp · 2h ago
Ironically, as ex zealot, desilusied with the endless fragmentation of Linux distributions and desktop dream, FOSS OSes currently are looking as the only way out of American dominated consumer OSes and related programming languages.
Plus in my deep Penguin days, SuSE was one of my favourite distros, I loved yast based management, and the KDE integration.
DaSHacka · 57m ago
> related programming languages.
Does it matter what country a programming language originates from?
pjmlp · 28m ago
Yes, unless they are 100% under international standards, or 100% open source, they are subject to export restrictions from the overloads contributors, as per the countries their headquarters are located on.
it's honestly a crime that they don't get more traction. Tooling they've put out like the Open Build Service (which is distro agnostic), is fantastic. I've been using Tumbleweed on dev machines for a long time, and the fact that they ship fully tested images is imo just a vastly better way to do a rolling release.
DrillShopper · 1m ago
Their corporate support is a joke.
When we bring a problem to them, which we pay them for, the turn around time is awful, and about 2/5 cases I end up having to break out the debugging tools and root cause/fix fix it because their support engineers can't be bothered.
Especially their nVidia support. Worse than useless.
defraudbah · 2h ago
good luck to suse, hopefully denmark will be first to migrate to linux and stay there unlike other countries (germany i am looking at you).
other than that i don't really believe owning EU data is the battle we can win with more regulations. I bet in 10 years nothing will change, maybe a few more grants, a few more laws..
saubeidl · 2h ago
I think regulations can be highly successful, if used aggressively enough. Look at China - they own their data, because they didn't allow it to be exfiltrated.
I think the issue at hand is that we've been half-assing our regulatory efforts.
Tajnymag · 2h ago
Have you just used China as a good example for user privacy?
saubeidl · 2h ago
No, as a good example for keeping your data sovereign. What you do with said sovereignty is another matter - I expect that part would play out differently in the EU than in China.
jorvi · 1h ago
I wouldn't be too sure of the EU being a particular strong stalwart of public institutions vis a vis privacy.
They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
Big picture, there isn't a government in the world that is better for their citizens than the EU, but it's more like least-worst.
For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
saubeidl · 1h ago
> They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
There is a fraction that keeps trying to do so. The fact that they consistently keep failing is a sign the system in the EU as a whole is doing well in this regard.
> For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
To quote Goebbels:
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
DaSHacka · 47m ago
> Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
Lol, just what I'd expect from a European. "Oh no, big government please protect me against the scary Nazi misinformation!" As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
> To quote Goebbels:
>
> > When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day? This doesn't stop Nazis from taking over the government or the rhetoric from spreading—see AfD's rise in Germany—it just means once they've grappled control of the government, now there's established precedent for them to censor anti-Nazi speech and expression without any sudden changes.
Well, good luck with that. It didn't seem to work out so well the last time you took that approach, but what do I know.
saubeidl · 14m ago
> As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
They beat them out on the battlefield, at great expense in both resources and human lives. The "free marketplace of ideas" was unable to stop Nazism.
> So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day?
What you're referring to has been formulated by Dr. Karl Popper, an Austrian who had to witness the rise of Nazism as the Paradox of Tolerance. To quote:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
[...]
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
FirmwareBurner · 14m ago
>Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans.
Yes, let's cede freedoms and live in a censored police state to "save us" from becoming Nazis again. You can't make this up.
>We've learned our lesson from history
Your nation lived under Nazism 80 years ago, which you always use as an argument for why you're right, but it seems you learned nothing from your history, or learned the wrong lessons if you think government censorship is the way to go.
For someone invoking the Nazi argument every other of your comments on HN, you sure are short sighted and lack critical thought and self reflection of what you're saying.
Please bring some arguments that can be backed by critical thinking, not by emotional appeals to "Nazis are bad m'kay".
saubeidl · 12m ago
You can make it up and you did.
It's easy to misrepresent an argument so you have a nice straw man to get mad about.
I would invite you to attempt some more intellectual honesty - it would make for better discussion.
palata · 2h ago
I think it's more an example of successfully enforcing regulations.
thyristan · 2h ago
China is especially good as an example because it shows that most tech companies can be made to bend to their regulatory whim. Europe is hesitant in that regard for fear of getting left behind. China shows that this fear is mostly unfounded.
And in cases where Western companies don't want to invest in China due to their regulations, local alternatives seem to quickly pick up the slack and over time even become better than their Western counterparts (at least in certain aspects). Just look at all those Chat+Payment things over there.
em500 · 10m ago
> Europe is hesitant in that regard for fear of getting left behind. China shows that this fear is mostly unfounded.
It's hard to transplant the Chinese experience elsewhere. Not only due to Europe's current far greater dependence on American software and cloud providers, but also due to China's far larger pool of technical expertise, likely resulting from many decades of heavy emphasis on math and science education, together with far greater social and monetary rewards. I doubt that European politicians or their electorates have the patience for a big turnaround that may not start to pay off for several decades or even generations.
saubeidl · 8m ago
Thankfully, we have parts of the ex soviet bloc that had the same heavy emphasis on math and science. You wouldn't believe the number of Romanian software engs I've worked with.
pjmlp · 2h ago
So far we thought the though guy on the school playground would always be on the same team, now it doesn't feel like it will ever be the case again.
saubeidl · 2h ago
Yup, it's a win-win.
You either bend a foreign company to your will or you get to build a local champion.
We should not just focus on the location. It's about who is managing the servers and networks.
True, but location matters a great deal, because some countries have a tendency to MITM any physical link they can get their hands on, even if that means scuba divers or secret rooms. But also who it is who is managing it, agree.
https://siliconangle.com/2023/08/18/suse-taken-private-major...
Plus in my deep Penguin days, SuSE was one of my favourite distros, I loved yast based management, and the KDE integration.
Does it matter what country a programming language originates from?
Some examples,
https://www.java.com/en/download/help/error_embargoed.html
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/nuget-org/policies/e...
it's honestly a crime that they don't get more traction. Tooling they've put out like the Open Build Service (which is distro agnostic), is fantastic. I've been using Tumbleweed on dev machines for a long time, and the fact that they ship fully tested images is imo just a vastly better way to do a rolling release.
When we bring a problem to them, which we pay them for, the turn around time is awful, and about 2/5 cases I end up having to break out the debugging tools and root cause/fix fix it because their support engineers can't be bothered.
Especially their nVidia support. Worse than useless.
other than that i don't really believe owning EU data is the battle we can win with more regulations. I bet in 10 years nothing will change, maybe a few more grants, a few more laws..
I think the issue at hand is that we've been half-assing our regulatory efforts.
They keep trying to hammer through anti-encryption or logging or scanning laws.
Big picture, there isn't a government in the world that is better for their citizens than the EU, but it's more like least-worst.
For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
There is a fraction that keeps trying to do so. The fact that they consistently keep failing is a sign the system in the EU as a whole is doing well in this regard.
> For example, free speech is a thing that the EU or its national governments love to encroach on and I am quite envious of the fiery defense it gets in the US.
Personally, I am quite glad we don't allow Nazi propaganda to spread as easily as the Americans. We've learned our lesson from history - the Americans are right now in the phase where they discover the consequences of allowing rampant misinformation to manipulate their electorate.
To quote Goebbels:
> When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
Lol, just what I'd expect from a European. "Oh no, big government please protect me against the scary Nazi misinformation!" As if the U.S. didn't hold true to freedom of speech when the actual Nazis rose to power, and still beat them out in the free marketplace of ideas all the same.
> To quote Goebbels: > > > When our enemies say: well, we gave you the freedom of opinion back then- yeah, you gave it to us, that's in no way evidence that we should return the favor! Your stupidity shall not be contagious! That you granted it to us is evidence of how dumb you are!
So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day? This doesn't stop Nazis from taking over the government or the rhetoric from spreading—see AfD's rise in Germany—it just means once they've grappled control of the government, now there's established precedent for them to censor anti-Nazi speech and expression without any sudden changes.
Well, good luck with that. It didn't seem to work out so well the last time you took that approach, but what do I know.
They beat them out on the battlefield, at great expense in both resources and human lives. The "free marketplace of ideas" was unable to stop Nazism.
> So, better to never have freedom of speech at all, than to have it and risk it being diminished some day?
What you're referring to has been formulated by Dr. Karl Popper, an Austrian who had to witness the rise of Nazism as the Paradox of Tolerance. To quote:
> Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
[...]
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
Yes, let's cede freedoms and live in a censored police state to "save us" from becoming Nazis again. You can't make this up.
>We've learned our lesson from history
Your nation lived under Nazism 80 years ago, which you always use as an argument for why you're right, but it seems you learned nothing from your history, or learned the wrong lessons if you think government censorship is the way to go.
For someone invoking the Nazi argument every other of your comments on HN, you sure are short sighted and lack critical thought and self reflection of what you're saying.
Please bring some arguments that can be backed by critical thinking, not by emotional appeals to "Nazis are bad m'kay".
It's easy to misrepresent an argument so you have a nice straw man to get mad about.
I would invite you to attempt some more intellectual honesty - it would make for better discussion.
And in cases where Western companies don't want to invest in China due to their regulations, local alternatives seem to quickly pick up the slack and over time even become better than their Western counterparts (at least in certain aspects). Just look at all those Chat+Payment things over there.
It's hard to transplant the Chinese experience elsewhere. Not only due to Europe's current far greater dependence on American software and cloud providers, but also due to China's far larger pool of technical expertise, likely resulting from many decades of heavy emphasis on math and science education, together with far greater social and monetary rewards. I doubt that European politicians or their electorates have the patience for a big turnaround that may not start to pay off for several decades or even generations.
You either bend a foreign company to your will or you get to build a local champion.