Stranger43

We saw how fast and decisively modern states can move doing covid, so what is being suggested here is that at the end of the day the current leadership of the EU(especially some of the more US loyal smaller states) is not really ready to believe the US wont restore that trust at the next election.

I am from Denmark and it's been interesting seeing our politicians dance around the very plausible direct invasion threats made by the current US president against Greenland, where our PM made strong declaration while her ministry of defense kept increasing it's dependency on American planes ect.

And it's the same story almost everywhere for the digital sovereignty stuff, yes they claim to want it but when the legislation arrives it's nothing and there is no urgency within the technical departments actually running government it to change anything.

Lets talk numbers, rather then just sling cheap unfounded allegations

The problem with the way they talk at the big conferences is that there is almost no link between the rhetoric of existential crisis and the bills being passed at the national level.

The last numbers from Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops(thats up there with America) and as a response to that army's failure to drive Russia back Germany is talking about raising their armed forces less then a 3rd of that by 2030 thats just not real mobilization and thats my point about not taking the logistics serious.

Were the EU to mobilize as if it mattered to the actual population of the EU it could raise several time the army Ukraine have but nobody is actually suggesting that because the people in charge of the actual policy making don't really believe that Russia is a threat to any of the NATO member states.

No nor does it have logistical capability to deliver even half of the equipment currently being promised/discussed within a time-frame of less then 5-10year.

It's all dependent on the national government voluntarily following the advice of Brussels, and in most cases they don't really have the resources the EU wants them to commit to "The Ukrainian nationalist Cause".

The reluctance of the EU leadership to so anything materially significant about anything they claim to care about is kind of telling.

It's either that the leadership is so caught up in their own ivory tower bubble of pure rhetoric to realize they havent really put in the logistics to actually affect reality or that they somehow don't really want the consequences of actually changing things.

For this is pretty clear what they need to do to create any real digital sovereignty and yet the seem to not really be willing to take the obvious step of just banning the use of any technology that have any dependency of foreign owned/managed cloud services or closed source products, and ordering their technical staff to start making changes even if it makes stakeholders annoyed, and yet the keep letting companies like IBM/RedHat and Microsoft pretend they can and should be a part of the digital sovereignty transformation project.

We saw the same when safe harbour collapsed and with the cookie directive where rather then doing something effective they found some way to fix it by changing a few words in an mostly unenforced set of click wrap contracts/licenses. .

Well either that or completely privatize the infrastructure needed to operate those cars like multi-lane roads and parking lots with no mandatory minimums for road width and parking lot size.

But why does it have to be the case that the leadership of an opensource project have to emulate the desperation and authoritarianism of a potentially stagnant tech sector.

I don't think it's malevolence from the mozilla leadership team but more that if you hang around people who have bet their lifesaving on the success of cloud based LLMs, being cautious and making their use "optional" might begin to sound like a really controversial position even if that's actually what the users/community want from Mozilla.

Firefox market share have been declining and it's not easy to point to any obvious technical problem, so the reason for the decline is likely that the Mozilla corporation keep messing up the narrative by acting like just another Silicon Valley tech firm.

Taking the moral argument aside the fact that the largest best funded navy run by the wealthiest country have to call in airstrikes against barely(if at all) armed fishing vessels, that may or may not be smugglers, rather then board arrest and at least make an attempt at tracing the cash flow back to the wealthy businessmen who is organizing/funding the smuggling reeks of weakness and desperation rather then being the signal of strength and competency it's intended to be.

Sure it's a widely understood and often repeated problem with especially western naval and military doctrine that the peace time buildup favors white elephants(battleships, F35s etc) that, as was the case of the British high see fleet of WWII, end up inactive while entire new(often much cheaper and less sophisticated) classes of ships like destroyer escorts or Patrol boats have to be build as replacements. But still the US haven't quite deteriorated so badly yet that it couldn't reacquire whatever boarding capacity got lost in the relentless pursuit of military industrial complex profits quite quickly.

I think a fundamental lack of understanding/humility is the core of this conflict along with Mozilla's long and storied history of creating controversies/problems out of thin air.

The Mozilla leadership seems to have a unfortunate tendency to emulate the behaviors of the tech companies that their core Firefox project is often seen as an alternative too.

Firefox is a good browser but is prevented from capitalizing on the skepticism the consumers feel toward the tech sector by Mozilla using the exact same language and dark UI pattern to promote things like pocket that the user-base never asked for, and jump on to the lets enforce the use of AI everywhere that's driving discontent within the proprietary ecosystems, and this is yet another example of this class of behavior from the Mozilla leadership.

Why do we want them to donate money rather then time/people.

Why would we even want that, the whole point is to break the monoculture and single vendor dependency not to create an new mostly irrelevant one to be stuffed with has-been and rejects from the national levels the way most of EU's big prestige projects end up being run.

One of the thing that sets EU apart from most federations is that it kind of enables a lot more regional independence in how things are actually implemented while still guaranteeing the rights of the individual citizens, this lead to a lot of dynamism at the local level despite the failings of the central level, and allow this kind of projects to succeed and create paths for others to follow at their own pace.

But doesn't the codeless "infrastructure as code" kind of smell like cargo cult practices, i mean there might be places where having your infrastructure defined as data is a really good thing, but at least in my work i keep hitting roadblocks where i really wish i was writing actual logic in a modern scripting language rather then trying to make data look like code and code look like data, which is what a lot of devops tutorials seem to be teaching.

Blaming crowdstikes QA might feel good but the problem is that no company in the history of the world have been good enough at QA for it not to be reckless to allow day one patching of critical systems, or for that matter to allow single vendor, single design, critical systems in the first place. and yet the cyber security guidelines required to allow the pretense that windows can be used securely all but demand that companies take that risk.

It's also fundamentally a problem of Danial, everyone knows there will not be an good solution to any issue around security and stability that does not require that the assets tied up inside fragile monopoly operated ecosystems to be eventually either extracted or written off but nobody want to blaze new trails.

Claiming powerlessness is just lazy yes it might take an decade to get out from under the yokel of an abusive vendor, we saw this with IBM, but as IBM is now an footnote in the history of computing it's pretty clear that it can be done once people start realizing there is an systematic problem and not just a serious of one-off mistakes.

And we know how to design reliable systems, it's just that doing so is completely incompatible with allowing any of America's Big IT Vendors to remain big and profitable, and thats scary to every institution involved in the current market.