sjogress

Remember that Trump also had a term before Biden where he undermined cross-atlantic relations.

Under Obama you had the reputational fallout from the Snowden leaks.

Before Obama you had Bush Jr's wars, with especially the Iraq war being very controversial.

Raising a kid takes a village.

It is not like parents are the only influential figures in a kid's upbringing, they are not the only role models, they should not be the only ones paying attention and guiding kids to adulthood.

Parental control options as they stand are severely lacking. If you add the actively predatory enshittification efforts conducted by seemingly all larges tech companies, you are left either forbidding your kid from accessing anything (this does not work if the kid's friends have access) or allowing far more than you are comfortable with.

Lets take YouTube as an example. As it stands you have the options of YouTube (with both the most wonderful content available on one hand, and toxicity and brain rot shorts on the other) or YouTube Kids - an app with controls that do not work. How about allowing parents to whitelist content and/or creators instead of letting the algorithms run the show?

Spotify is another example. How about letting parents control whether the kid's account is plastered with videos, podcasts and AI slop?

How about your run of the mill browser, letting parents review and allow websites on a case-by-case basis? Maybe my kid is ready for news sites but not Reddit? Maybe 4chan and 8kun are better reserved for the more adventorous adults as opposed to impressionable kids?

I agree that age verification is a bad solution, but what the hell are parents supposed to reach for? It's not like Silicon Valley are stepping up with any real solutions or even propositions to these problems, it is left for - at best clueless - politicians to navigate the problem space.

Raising a kid takes a village.

Personally replaced Windows 10 with Linux Mint on my very computer illiterate mother in law's laptop a few months back. Haven't heard any complaints so far.

Linux is ready for prime time for anyone not bound to Windows/MacOS software.

Personally, I'm still on MacOS for work, but all my personal devices run some form of Linux. It's been liberating to say the least.

I'm of the opinion that these passion projects are incredibly important.

Your passions projects were problably also far more important to your growth than you give them credit for.

Scratching an itch is how we, as programmers/engineers/whatever, grow. It is also how we stumble into solving real problems and make our mark on the world.

Who knows, this could become the next big player in the browsersphere, or maybe it'll pivot into something else, or perhaps it will spark someones imagination. At the very least it has (probably) already been a source of creative bliss and pride for the ones involved, which in my opinion makes it worthwhile.

Im not a legal scholar in any way, but perhaps a solution would be a fully independent Microsoft EU that licenses Microsoft US tech for deployment/use within Europe?

An optimistic take would be that this forces European companies to think through their analytics/ad needs again, perhaps resulting in less invasive solutions and thus fewer popups/banners and improved privacy.

At least that is what I'm hoping for, however unrealistic it might be.

As far as I can tell this ruling means that transfering PII to any company/service controlled by an American company is illegal per the GDPR.

I work for a European company that is already being impacted by this ruling. Our first step is to replace Google Analytics, but I believe we are also looking through all cloud usage for any traces of PII.

I think this is a huge opportunity for European companies to get a foothold in the Analytics/Ads/Cloud/Office spaces. Perhaps also an opportunity for good open source alternatives, like Matomo Analytics, to get adopted.

It seems like you've done the research here: how do you know how you are supposed(?) to do the test in the US?

Here in my municipality in Norway the media keeps repeating how/where/when to get tested, and if anything important changes the municipality will literally send a SMS to all its citizens to ensure as many as possible are up to date.

From my admittedly limited experience with the US (NYC/tri-state area) I get the impression that information is often hard to find and hard to understand. This could of course be caused by cultural or lingual differences since I'm neither American nor a native English speaker.

I think for most/many European companies, especially those that are potentially handling PII, there are regulatory concerns with using US based hosting/companies.

My employer for instance has put a ban on deploying anything new on AWS/Azure/Google Cloud until legal issues have been settled after Privacy Shield was invalidated.

Everything new right now needs to be on EU/EFTA data centers run by EU/EFTA companies. This essentially means self hosting since most clouds are owned by US companies.

I must say the Framework laptop is a very enticing offering!

Do you plan on offering it in Scandinavia with Scandinavian keyboard layouts?

I agree with you that Office 365, AWS and Github are great products. Hard, if not impossible, to catch up as a competitior, especially when you have trillion dollar companies backing them.

However, if you cannot trust those products then you cannot use them.

Remember, this thread is about Github blocking an entire company due to one employee due to American politics. If a non-US company risks to lose it project management/code management (Github), its infrastructure (AWS) or its documents (Office 365) on a whim due to American policies then they cannot use those products.

If a big enough chunk of the world can't use the American offerings, then there is a market for alternatives.

At this point it is kinda an open question whether using AWS/Azure/GCP for anything involving PII is even fully legal under EU/EFTA law. I know at least my employer is working towards having more options to jump ship at a moments notice these days.

I think EU/EFTA is large enough to enable the growth of at least one 80% offering given enough time. Or otherwise large enough as an economic bloc to force America to stricter legalisation so that they can use and depend on the American offerings.

I guess their goal isn't necessarily to make a world leader but rather to ensure they're not left behind if the geopolitical climate keeps worsening.