But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.
It also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc
The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(
Granted, we already have US/EU/Asia as distinct regions. AUS would just make fail over even worse.
German e-mail service
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.
You can pull, but having the back and forth documented along with the code is not a nice to have imho
Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...
To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.
[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...
[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues
I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.
If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.
Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.
I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it... Perhaps I'm... Tolerated for the time being?
But their limit seems around 100 MB storage-usage, so I guess it's within their abilities to tolerate some glitches.
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
example.com {
root * /var/git
file_server
}
Google reviews: https://www.google.com/search?q=lcube&ludocid=91685905651961...
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
No it also encourages the local market and healthy competition. This way in the future we don't fall into the same enshittification trap.
Just on the Gmail front: maybe Trump decides to trade embargo you country and pressures Google to cut off email access. Maybe he decides Google needs to be broken up and sold for parts, and Gmail's data goes to Truth Social. Maybe he thinks illegal immigrants or "radical left wing lunatics" shouldn't have access to American email providers and gets Google to start suspending accounts based on a some criteria. Maybe some of this seems far fetched, but we are talking about a president who threatened to to go to war with one of America's closest allies.
The non-American west's exposure to the instability is too high, and already affecting people. Switching software providers where possible is something that can be done quickly, and relatively easily by individuals in the short term.
- small or midsize companies, or
- "hacker-minded people" (I know quite some "hacker-minded people" who rent a server or vServer at netcup),
since they offer quite a bit of value for the money. In opposite to Hetzner, netcup is more of an inside tip.
Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.
Worth considering when hosting in the EU.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...
On a national level, sure.
Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional at best.
The whole deal with Chat Control is also not to be forgotten. I do think you guys see this place with rose tinted glasses sometimes.
I agree with you that both of those laws are stupid, but that's a completely separate discussion to what I'm claiming above.
Does it allow blocking half the internet during football games?
It almost certainly does not: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-115705%...
AFAIU this is common because lower courts often deliberately choose to not try to interpret ECHR, leaving that for appeals courts.
But now we're straying even further from my original argument which boils down to "laws mean something" into arguing the intricacies of how laws are supposed to be changed. I'm not interested in having that discussion, as it has nothing to do with my original claim.
ECHR decisions are certainly not mere recommendations.
>It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so
ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
The only thing ECHR cares about is one piece of "legislation", which is not a law, but a declaration (Declaration of Human Rights), so that you have some sort of internationally recognised body to go to whenever you feel that your local judicial system has done you injustice. That is all it does. That is all it is meant to do. That is the sole reason of its existence. It is not a legislative body at all.
> ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
It can't. You're either making things up or severely misunderstanding the court. It can say "this law doesn't align with the Declaration" and that's it. The law still exists. ECHR relies on signatories being willing to make the necessary changes themselves. Some are and get right on it, some aren't. The election law in my country has lost 5 cases in the ECHR and not a single one of the verdicts are fixed as of now, the oldest of which dates back to 2009. This is horrible, I want to see them fixed, but ECHR can't force us to fix it and we as in the country face 0 consequences for not addressing any of them (as of yet).
There is a separate court called European Court of Justice which is the equivalent of the US supreme court and is tasked with interpreting EU-wide laws and making sure national laws are aligned as much as possible. That is a legislative body with an enforcement mechanism. ECHR is not, you don't know what you're talking about.
According to the European Convention on Human Rights, it's sort of the whole point.
Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.
Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation. Is that a big victory for the rule of law? I think not, the national governments should not be knowingly violating the ECHR in the first place.
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
that does not imply one being the subset of the other to me, if anything they are clearly defined and therefore clearly separate.
Trump refuses to answer simple questions and attacks and mocks reporters, that's if they're lucky and he doesn't directly sue them for millions/billions. Hell, the white house banned Associated Press. Is that free speech or freedom of the press?
None of this says anything about Americans' right to speak freely, which is absolute, unlike in any European country.
Oh please. There's free speech without a free press (US ranks 57/190, behind Sierra Leone) people are just amplifying the same BS they heard from some ignorant influencer. I would argue even your idea of "active enforced blasphemy laws" shows that. That's worse than useless, that is detrimental to a society (case in point, the current president and his whole cabinet).
Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".
European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.
And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
"Crowded theater"? In any case, yes, that's a popular understanding of limits on free speech in the US, but it's actually been superseded twice - first by "clear and present danger," then by "inciting or producing imminent lawless action." These days, it's probably (I am not a lawyer) legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater under many circumstances.
> Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
There are no laws preventing you from saying anything in the US, unless you are specifically, directly inciting people, at that moment, to do things that break other laws. That's the point. You can't measure it in terms of degrees of restrictions; the US has none, and all European countries have at least some. The latter approach opens the floodgates to restrictions on any kind of speech that the government doesn't like. The US Constitution prevents that from ever happening.
Sounds like there are some of those laws. You covered them with "unless"
Perhaps a misquote from 1919 wartime supreme court decision involving an anti-draft activist isn't a great example? Even when correctly quoted, this quote is utterly meaningless in 2026.
>Freedom of speech is not absolute
Nobody ever claims it is? That's literally never in dispute, fraud (for example) is illegal everywhere.
In a very narrow interpretation, yes. Everyone with a modicum of common sense would realise that countries with laws on the books against offending religions / inciting hatred against them are still more free than a country where the fucking Bible is cited in court rulings and political speeches, and where there are active laws prohibiting non-religious people from holding office.
One is for keeping the peace, the other is actively meddling religion and politics.
> baseline level of freedom of speech
Being unable to spout Nazi ideology is technically a restriction on freedom of speech, yes. But again, anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a bit of historical understanding) would understand this to be a good thing.
This is an aspect of our country that I think most Americans are proud of. Some relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
How did that end last time? We know where it ends, we know there's nothing redeeming. Nobody needs Nazis, there is nothing to be gained by engaging with them or giving them a platform.
It's not hard to imagine what kind of damage they could do to the EU if they took power in Germany and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs, etc.
My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.
We've already seen with Brexit that 100% control is not needed in a parliamentary system to destroy a country's livelihood. But my point was that AfD doesn't need something like "presidential control" of the EU, it would just need to start working with other far-right parties in the EU such as Hungary and France's RN to sow chaos from within. Is that very far-fetched? You can't tell me that most of Europe doesn't hold its collective breath at every French election, crossing their fingers that Le Pen's party doesn't win this go around.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
In the US the cops actually need a search warrant signed by a judge. In the EU they only sometimes need one.
>Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there
Really? I've always been under the impression that it is courts who issue search warrants in Singapore, not the police or prosecutors.
Also, what you're describing is still infinitely better than the European system! The cops get to issue the warrants themselves.
What you are claiming about European cops is also not uniformly true. A German police officer cannot "just" self-issue a search warrant.
Yes. The more worrying situation is that Hungary can just decide that their police officers can self-issue search warrants, and then send those around the EU in the form of EIOs.
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
Only sort of, because some countries have very weird ideas of what a "judicial process" is.
>I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That's fair, but I think it's a mistake. In the worst case the European system grants a village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever, a far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
I obviously don't share the sentiment.
> village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
> far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
If you think some policeman in a rural Frech village is a bigger threat to your freedom than NSA or other 3-letter agencies from the USA, we can all see who is mistaken in evaluating threats.
> Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever
I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
Just like the random mugger on the streets of Paris is a far bigger threat to my life and limb than the US with their drones.
You're talking from an ideological perspective, I'm looking at this from a rather more practical angle. It's very possible that your line of thinking leads to a better outcome than mine, or perhaps it doesn't.
>I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
It's really not that funny, cryptocurrency thieves have been bribing cops to rob people at gunpoint https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/crooked-cops-stolen-lapt...
Now you can bribe a village cop in Hungary or Romania, and have the French cops do your bidding. This is totally gonna end well!
Given your participation in this whole discussion, that was pretty cute.
There nothing else here even worth addressing. This conversation is a waste of time, for both of us.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
It's harder for me to worry about the NSA than people who have already negatively impacted me in the past.
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
EAW = European Arrest Warrant
EIO = European Investigative Order (basically lets different jurisdictions demand information from each other)
CJEU = Court of Justice of the EU (think of it as a supreme court)
That being said, I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal professional, this is not a legal advice.
I'll repeat: EIO
You can look at the history of EAW related litigation also, it'll probably prove most informative. Executing states used to constantly deny requests due to judicial review, rules were clarified to remove the possibility of judicial review by executing states.
An LLM can probably find some better links though.
Like, yeah, your EIO will be rejected if you don't tick any of the crime-category boxes in the form.
Dual criminality requirement only applies to non-Annex D crimes. Which is... not many crimes. You seem awfully confident for someone so ill-informed.
>And of course, we all know this is not happening
How would you know that it isn't happening? EIOs are not public!
Not sure what to make of the claim that Hungary might theoretically be enforcing Hungarian law in France. It seems surprising that no-one has noticed any specific consequences of this that you can point to.
The EIO is mostly just a formalization and standardization of a bunch of ad-hoc processes that were already in place. Law enforcement agencies in different European countries do try to assist each other, on the whole.
Now foreign authorities are trusted by default and significant parts of their reasoning are not subject to review, that's bad.
Also, account first created in 2021, coincidentally starts posting right after the other account in this thread is replaced with a green account?
Let's hope elections there will change Orban into something saner.
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
> - actual incidence is low
> - it's not being reported
> - it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
Fourth possible cause:
- the EU has 24 official languages
i.e. when it is reported, the number of people who are actually capable of understanding the reporting is only a fraction and rather localized.
It's a problem. But it has technical rather than political solutions.
This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
Maybe keep your US nonsense to yourself?
If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.
I'm not trying to say anything about anyone else besides the EU. Therefore I'm certainly not trying to compare EU to anyone else.
I am an European pointing out issues with the local system, issues that many commenters here clearly aren't aware of given how many replies seem to think that they'll be just fine as long as they don't host in Hungary.
The way this particular part of our system works is downright horrifying, but it's exotic enough that very few people (even lawyers) will be familiar with it.
I’m not particularly patriotic or bothered about nations in general, but the yanks can go take a hike.
By the way, sex him off? Trying to decipher the number of characters
What the EU fails to realize is that rights have always been dennied due to the "great good". Nazi Germany did it. The USSR did it. China does it today.
So by claiming "there are good reasons" creates no distinction between them an authoritarians. They need to have a better reason.
A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.
Again this is a false equivalence, 'a little less marked' isn't close to imparting the true state of things and to be honest a little disingenuous.
The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states. The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.
So 'ah yes but Hungary' doesn't persuade me even though I'll concede it's a problem for the EU. If Tisza is elected in April, Hungary will be on course to turn things around. So you're comparing 1 out of 27 to 50 out of 50 states.
But it is? They forced Romania to do a re-election because they didn't like the candidate. And they still try to force Chat Control, try to bypass the unanimity rule and the EU commission gives itself more powers every day with authoritian laws like the DSA. As a European, I don't get the USA's EU-fetish. It's not better here than in the US.
Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.
Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.
Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.
From e.g. Wikipedia:
>At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
D'oh!
>That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen
How convenient he got fired, everything is good now, surely the Commission does not hold the same views as him! Are you really this naive?
And don't get me wrong, I support neither Georgescu (a typical conspiracy theorist nut) nor AfD (who only argue that the evil immigrants are at fault). But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place. If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
> And don't get me wrong, I support neither
It is not about who you support and what your favorite color is.
I didn't call anyone stupid. I have been deceived many times in my life. It happens to all of us and it is happening to you now.
> At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
Yes, that is the issue with misinformation, isn't it? It works. Otherwise nobody would care, would they? Misinformation is incredibly destructive, for example it caused Brexit, which was based on mostly lies, some of them famously written on a bus, along with algorithmic manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, that were never properly challenged leading to the referendum. This is all well-known by now and easily verifiable.
> How convenient he got fired
He didn't get fired, you are making things up. This is precisely the sort of misinformation that destroys democracy. He had resigned months before this appearance on French TV because of frictions with von der Leyen, who tried to block him from being reappointed. By the time he gave the interview, he was already a private citizen and his resignation had nothing to do with this incident.
Also, and importantily, he never claimed that the problem was that any party of candidate was "bad" or "not acceptable". Breton framed his remarks around enforcing EU law against foreign interference, specifically in the context of Elon Musk's (a foreign actor, by the way) support for the AfD ahead of Germany's snap elections. He said: "Let's stay calm and enforce the laws in Europe. They did it in Romania and, obviously, it will have to be done, if necessary, in Germany as well".
The misrepresentation that you are repeating was initially posted on X by the account Visegrád 24, a well-known propaganda account that constantly posts lies and disinformation with an anti-EU bias.
> But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place.
Unfortunately there is indeed one European member state that is suffering democratic backsliding and that is Hungary, but this is not the EU's fault. Otherwise, everything you wrote is demonstrably false.
> If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
AfD has not been banned, and the issue is not them being on my side or not. There are plenty of political parties that I dislike in Europe and I don't want them to be banned. I only wish to ban parties and candidates that break the law, namely by receiving illegal funding from out geopolitical enemies because, unlike the "nationalist" post-truth movements, I am actually a patriot and I love Europe, open societies and liberal democracy.
I wish there was an easy way for me to bet against the imminent fall of the United States as predicted by so many internet commenters. I don’t like what the current administration is doing, either, but I would readily bet against all of these “the end is just around the corner” or “the empire is dying” takes in a heartbeat.
It's already slid in to 'electoral democracy' instead of 'liberal democracy' the difference between the two is how 'rule of law' is prioritised and the balance between checks and balances between institutions is enforced.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf
We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.
Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about
But there is always risk no matter what you do.
To be honest I haven't done the setup for sending a handful of emails but IPs sending hundreds/thousands per day it's fine as long as you don't start spamming people and get flagged.
You were lucky, congratulations.
Addressed in another comment "I wouldn't try it from a residential IP but as long as you run a blacklist check on the IP before you start".
> Don't act like we're idiots, we know what SPF, DKIM and DMARC are.
If you read one comment higher in the thread instead of reacting emotionally, I was specifically asked to elaborate on what the correct DNS meant. Please don't act like those who don't know are idiots.
> We've seen perfect e-mails (rated 100/100 by deliverability services) get rejected by Microsoft because reasons.
No, you haven't.
> You were lucky, congratulations.
What do you call consistent luck? In my case 14 years across 6 different sending domains, 4 different servers with four different hosts using two different MTAs?
Even then, there's no interesting conversation to be had unless we pretend it does.
I personally found some interesting comments here, including but not limited to services based off EU that I can use.
If you find it uninteresting, you should stop wasting your time in it and go do something more productive with your time.
Unless, of course, you just want to do some "concern trolling". You know, the "just asking questions" and "just noticing" behavior.
I'll be charitable and presume you are talking in this thread accidentally, and will find your way to more productive activities instead.
What?
Currently it's just smaller pieces and no bigger agenda is visible (or even exiting). But there are constantly new regulations that would make an authoritarian coup (like currently in the US) easier.
For example: https://www.heritage.org/europe/commentary/europe-wants-be-t...
The EU is just one AfD win away from doing the same thing. It's not immune to this issue either, you have the same problem happening right under your noses.
Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.
It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:
1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.
2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.
3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals
There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.
The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.
Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.
Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.
See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.
We can cross our fingers and hope that nobody would work with them (I know that Germany's parties all have a pinky promise not to work with AfD), but it was only 10 years ago that everyone in the US was laughing at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – and now here we are, much sobered. These things happen, and AfD, or RN, or whoever, could wreak havoc to the EU from within the EU if they took power and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs and more.
Except the Swiss.
So it would be incredibly hard for a political entity like AfD or RN to gain full and absolute power like the orange has achieved. Even in the worst cases, those parties usually only have ~30% popular support at most, which usually translates to at most ~30-40% of seats in parliament. Which means they cannot even get parliamentary majority, and probably can't get head of state either.
Americans just like to pretend things aren't that bad and they aren't the only ones falling into the abyss.
Who does this weird proposals like Chat Control?
AFAIK, it is not "alt-right" parties - so it really does not clicking for me, why AfD and others constantly brought in during online privacy discussions?
(I am not from US, please keep that strawman out)
And then you have all kinds of charlatans that are basically Orban doubles. You hear the same stupid talking points and bullshit, the same cozying up with Putin. And to top it off, the USA has openly vowed to fuel and fund that fire of self destruction, so the billionaires can eat the corpse. Because that is where the term conservatism came from, to conserve the power of the king and the ruling elites, as a god given construct (the only original moral aspect of conservatism).
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/since-20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/17/refugees-jew...
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
I think we can probably agree that this number is not very accurate.
Between 2021 and 2025 (inclusive), Wikipedia lists 68 dead in Germany versus 5882 dead in the US, despite the US only being ~4 times larger. More people have been killed by police in the US this year than in Germany in the past ten years, and it's not even April yet.
What a disingenuous comment. Do we really think that is the case?
You ignored my other link. Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry. Yet, Denmark gleefully does that.
Funnily, I had friends from Europe participate in the No Kings protest here, while coming from countries that have literal kings.
This is either disingenuous or misunderstands the nature of European constitutional monarchies.
The US literally deports people to concentration camps in countries with no civil liberties. Many have disappeared there. A whole other group have been raped and become pregnant and are being moved around to force births.
And you are concerned about fucking jewelry. Genuinely, are you taking a piss here?
And here's the US laws for it, explained https://leppardlaw.com/federal/forfeiture-seizure/federal-se...
Trump issued an executive order that explicitly allows seizure of assets https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/trump-administr...
There are four times as many people in the US.
Germany has four cities with around a million people.
The U.S. has at least 15.
Also, absolute numbers don't reflect justified shootings, which is an entirely different and much more nuanced conversation.
No part of this should be taken to mean that I don't think there's a problem in the US, I just object to complex issues being overly simplified.
So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.
> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.
> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...
Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.
Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.
Those procedures are written in blood
Just now, like today, a decision was made that cops who literally made up a gang to go after innocent people ... wont be investigated.
Pretending you found proofs legally when you did not is easy. Especially when you are untouchable. And the rule does absolutely nothing to protect innocent people. It is just trying to make up for one injustice by creating another smaller one.
Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.
This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.
Their judiciaries are very different from how you describe civil law systems.
>Judges in Scandinavia have investigative powers and can judge the truth of the matter.
This is, at best, technically correct. While Judges in Nordic countries tend to technically have some limited investigative powers, it is extraordinarily unusual for them to be used in any meaningful capacity.
In reality the investigate powers wielded by judges in Nordic countries tend to be the same as in common law countries, asking a question here and there during the hearing to make sure they're keeping up.
These countries are certainly not at all like France or Spain where you might have examining magistrates, criminal investigations are run by the police and prosecutors.
This isn’t your average „my neighbor built a fence and damaged my tree“ case.
In such cases, the technical differences between fully adversarial common law systems and mixed-but-still-some-inquisitive-powers systems like the Nordic law matters.
And of course it is not exactly like Napoleonic law countries.
Also, the police still runs investigations, even in France. It’s just that the judges can choose to not believe the police. Famously, even if you sign a confession they can say they don’t believe it.
EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?
So, with the police? YMMV.
Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.
Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either
https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...
> I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection.
"or switch to European service providers". EU or not, CH is still in Europe, so would qualify?
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.
I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.
Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.
- SES was a big one. There was no affordable alternative at my (not big, not small) scale.
- I'm still waning myself personally of GMail. That dependency took decades to build and it will take years for all ties to sever.
> Zoho Corporation is an Indian multinational technology company that makes cloud-based office software.
I did it a few years ago and I simply signed up for Fastmail and had gmail forward all email there. It forwards to a specific e-mail address so I can see if there are still people/companies that use the old email address. The painful part was going through all my accounts to update the e-mail, but you can do it in stages if you follow the above.
When I Google this I find a lot of options, but not sure which are actually mature tech companies vs start-up hopefuls
A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.
I have been using this for years now after having hosted my own Nextcloud instance. The space and performance they give you for that price is unbeatable with nearly no downsides. The one downside is that you can't just ssh into the server, but you can even run occ managment commands via their web interface. It is an absolute no-brainer.
There are some downsides, though:
- No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files
- Data is not encrypted
It's not a full-on Nextcloud instance, mind. For example there is no ffmpeg for generating video thumbnails.
But liking it so far
Yet another index detached from objective measures.
>your supreme court is owned
The same court that declined to take up Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election?
Yes, that same court. It's incredible how rapidly the legal system has eroded in the US.
Again non affiliated with either.
Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.
But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.
Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).
– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE
If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.
You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.
But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?
[1]: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/ [2]: https://about.gitea.com/
I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.
In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.
I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.
I had read about other problems about this mailbox.org service, but not this one. Anyone knows what's the catch when trying to send emails from your own domain?
Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.
and ofc, non-CN too
And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.
Or move to Russia. Not recommending, just saying
The Queen died of 8th September 2022.
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.
Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.
Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.
Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
Seriously though, nothing but recommended in every other regard. Alias management, anonymous domains you can use, configuring the sender in Thunderbird no problem, everything else was great. My colleagues didn't seem to mind this delay so much as me so it's something to be aware of but might work fine for you
Edit: I realised this is already like four years ago now, it could have gotten fixed in the meantime. It was an issue for several years before we switched away for some reason related to calendars (don't remember the details, I wasn't my choice)
I was disappointed more by their lack of communication than by the outages. And one outage wasn't even reported on their status page although they confirmed it via support. That's a very bad communication.
Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.
> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?
I use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.
From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?
If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)
I looked into this, there are lots of people in forums discussing/ asking for EU based servers.
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
SPF is here https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/custom-domains/spf-dkim-an...
DMARC is up to the domain owner to set.
I took the https://emailspooftest.com/ and while the "spoof" mail gets delivered to mailbox.org's Inbox, my Thunderbird client is all red and it warns me about DKIM and SPF fails.
But it definitely used to be possible, I tried once with success.
Anti spoofing for incoming mails was not perfect the last time I checked either, but is a different issue.
Mailbox.org is completely ignoring DMARC since months... And their handling of the issue IMHO is incompetent at best.
See this thread (in German) https://userforum.mailbox.org/topic/10676-mailbox-org-akzept...
I have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address.
I wish Proton would just allow me to respond to an email from the address it was addressed to
[1]: https://ecosia.org
[2]: https://qwant.com
[3]: https://uruky.com
Qwant is the way to go
Sources for Ecosia indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia#Ecosia
Sources for Qwant indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Development
I self host most services: contacts, calendar, git, ..
Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.
Tried hetzner, but it wouldn't allow me to create an account. Ovh it is.
I haven't thought about registrars, I don't think it matters for most tld. (Moniker, porkbun)
I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")
Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?
No need to share my cc with yet another company.
it won't even slow down actual criminal investigations by nation states and might not even stop a determined civil suit.
The authorities might know you ordered a gift card, but not which Mullvad account you funded it with.
Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros
Once I got them on a better path, I haven't had any issues. I don't remember what plan exactly, but I've been a customer for a long time, since they were founded pretty much.
0: I host a non-profit and we use my migadu account, since they are broke and I'm too lazy to count the actual number.
This is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.
Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.
For the moment, would be much more appropriate to design performant implementations (mobile/server/desktop) on RISC-V ISA.
The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.
[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/Fr...
Like many countries, it is not homogeneous.
My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.
They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.
I started with this:
Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)
GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)
I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.
I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.
Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.
Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.
TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.
Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.
Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
Maybe try Immich?
Registrar, and search? Not possible.
Maps? Paper would be more practical.
Browser, done.
Git, a lot of extra work for no gain.
On the contrary, maps are (IMO) one domain where FOSS is genuinely better. OpenStreetMap data is far more detailed than any corporate map, and the available clients (Osmand in particular) are far more powerful.
You-know-who can only compete because of its (admittedly useful) data on businesses. And, alas, because of ignorance among normies, many of whom are still clueless that, for example, for hiking or outdoor wayfinding, there are much better alternatives available.
Some anecdata I can offer: since last year I have used exclusively Osmand for navigating over 3000 km of cycle touring, on roads and paths of all types. The most common problem that arises is wrongly tagged surfaces (and occasionally access rights) for tracks and paths, i.e. for "roads" that do not even appear on the corporate maps. There is no comparison in terms of detail. Obviously this is less relevant for regular car drivers.
And certainly the situation for FOSS public-transit navigation is still quite poor.
https://transitous.org/ (https://github.com/public-transport/transitous) works quite well.
I guess it depends a bit on scale and additional feature requirements, but a remote git repo is pretty trivial to self-host, no?
I have my personal ones sitting on a standard vps, but they could be anywhere
But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
Mail is stored e2ee on server, so not even Proton can read it. Proton mail has also made PGP very easy to use. It’s Swiss based and a foundation, not a corporation. They’ve done this so they cannot easily be bought.
It ticks most boxes in terms of privacy and security.
Just fyi
Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.
Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.
Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.
They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.
Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.
Please think and do some work before you reply.
You can store an encrypted master key (like Luks), download that key to the client and decrypt it there. Or you can have it in decrypted in server memory, but only during an interactive session with the user. But that quickly turns into a fad, as you pointed out, which was exactly my question.
> The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Please think and do some work before you reply.
I asked a simple question, so that at others could chime in about the exact details and limits. I don't understand why that was highly offensive to you, but I assume it is something like a Monday Mood.
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
And of course the recent allegations that they hand over your metadata on >90% of requests. See https://x.com/DoingFedTime/status/2030108076531995016
The encrypted mail storage adds no value for me because I pull all my mail from the server immediately anyway. It's just a big hassle to deal with that bridge. And when a mail comes in they have to handle it in plaintext (and also, the other party sees it which is 90% of the time microsoft or google or another bad actor). I just view email as a lost cause really.
The only thing I get from Proton is the VPN.
Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.
You're paying for any of these?
Look at their revenue breakdowns.
"They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed."
So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?
Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
Consider for a moment how you would feel if, after carefully composing and sharing your thoughts in good faith, you received this response.
FWIW in case you are unfamiliar with it -- Canada has a history of not supporting its own products and companies - so this sentiment expressed above is tough one to swallow given the exceptional talent and capability of Canadians and some countries efforts to undermine that.
I learned something new today, thanks! I did face this a LOT in Canadian workforce, never knew it had a term, but the way you get undermined and attacked for not being an average is crazy, taking/sharing the credit, and pushing you on the sides, excluding you from meetings and all shenanigans haha. Completely the opposite in the US, not just productivity wise, but US companies embrace individualism and “as long as you get shit done”, go wild! It’s why US companies do better, I doubt it’s the market size as always brought as a justification, I am sure if Canadian companies did better they will have US based customers too just like Switzerland had European ones.
One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.
pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.
Maybe corporations can start to market this: we are not an American company.
Gocryptfs works well for that.
They created that "paid cryptography addon" later, but it's hard to trust at this point.
I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.
I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.
New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.
That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.
It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).
I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.
Don't waste your time trying different map services.
Everything else is super easy to switch to better alternatives, especially search, e-mail and browser.
Apple Maps does driving directions way better in general - better visuals, speech etc. It does foreign pronunciations better too IIRC. It's even not bad as a PWA on Android ( https://maps.apple.com ).
Google Maps loves to say take eg "exit Via Emilio Enrico" on some random roundabout in some random Italian town, seemingly with no idea that there are big signs to eg "VERONA". The street name is often totally useless.
I also find Google Maps does a great job at directing me into traffic. Like, not unexpected traffic at all.
Google Maps is great at giving you terrible recommendations because of the heavily, heavily filtered/gamed reviews however. Nothing more untrustworthy than a 4.7 star review on Google.
And of course there is also Mapy, HERE, TomTom etc...
I wanted to like Apple Maps, but when you are traveling and actually need maps to find your way around, it's unusable. For example visiting some of the top cities in the world, and Apple Maps doesn't have public transport info. Or outdated business information.
HERE maps are unusable on mobile because of whacky two-finger zoom and pan algorithms which seem to be taken from a different decade.
I've actually found great success in migrating to nothing from YouTube. Specifically I've found nothing to have a much less insidious algorithm, no shorts, no comment section, no upvotes or downvotes, no creepy Mr beast thumbnails, it's quite refreshing. If you still want cideos that are exclusively on YT, you can simply skip the website and access them via other means.
As for the algorithm, it is actually great if you take care to nudge it with subscriptions, likes and dislikes.
I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.
At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it
I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere
I started to use my own domain within Gmail 2 years ago. Transitioned things I cared about to use that email at that time.
Then this years I moved to Proton using that domain. And I'm forwarding Gmail to proton indefinitely.
I told my family, friends to start using that address going forward.
Slowly but surely as I get email into my gmail folder on proton I take the time to go change the address.
The big change is using an address from you own domain.
Then I setup a new mail account (by now I abandoned Proton for Infomaniak there as well)
The next year I just kept responding with my new email address, asking people to update their contact data and each time I logged in somewhere I changed my email address. This went really well, just 1 or 2 services where I couldn't change it because they only accept the big providers, no custom domains.
In the end the first 3 weeks were really painful, afterwards it was smooth sailing.
Since then I've swiched provider quite a bit from Proton to Zoho and now to Infomaniak (where I will stay for a long time I think) and each of those changes took me about 2h each time.
So in sumnary, you will curse yourself for a few weeks and thank yourself later!
Startpage is owned by an American advertising company https://system1.com
For someone like the author, it's not a reason to stay with a US company
And helping European companies be more successful might prevent them from selling out...
There's many a way to ruffle feathers eh?
Because it's trending. Likely the same reason they ended up outside the EU in the first place.
I find this to be a non article. They moved from Google to Google and Apple, installed Graphene but installed the play store for a "significant number of apps", and didn't even consider self hosting email or git.
I've probably seen a dozen of these articles now, not to mention posts on LinkedIn, and it's a shame that there is almost never any real substance to them because on the surface it's an interesting thought experiment
Then again one of my wife’s friends is high up in the Canadian policy establishment and some of her positions on surveillance and political control over social media were chilling, and I assume widespread among the Five Eyes. Certainly the UK and Australia have deeply authoritarian policies far beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams.
Small countries like Iceland have enlightened policies but are vulnerable to coercion and in fact were militarily occupied during WW2.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/police-arrest-...
Not to mention that they are actively hostile towards its own allies, threaten to annex ally territory, don't want to help its allies, and then when it can't pull off a war it on its own started, then EU is supposed to come help? And when we don't, we get insulted for not being friendly? Honestly, F USA, and everything that place stands for. What a toxic cesspool of a place.
This is just complete nonsense. We are not run by pedophiles. Nobody is being arrested because the people you want arrested have committed no crimes. Being in the Epstein files doesn't make someone a pedophile.
Didn't the Snowden leaks just prove that the NSA is listening to most things anyway?
I suppose this has more to do with the specific case of a lower-level agency being able to access your data, rather than it being actually secure?
I get that people would be concerned about that scenario, but also it seems like a little bit of hair-splitting.
I think the fines and enforcement have been a generally good balance to the status quo in the USA.
But- in practice, is your data materially used differently than in the USA?
The problem is that no one is abandoning facebook, instagram or youtube and that data is being used in the exact same way as it is in the USA- to sell you things and track you across the web. Technically there are more barriers to getting and using that data, but I would argue that it's not a blocker, just an inconvenience to those using that data- it just makes the targeting etc. 10% less accurate. The whole system still runs the exact same way.
And, to make it look like it seem like it works now everyone has to deal with these dumb popups that don't mean anything.
How did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?
Even without personal details you can collect quite a lot of data - ip address that uses certain VPN account, which servers it talks to while using vpn, at what hours, at what intervals, also all the plaintext data exchanged between client and server. A lot of data that someone (who might already have your ip address mapped to your personal info, for example your ISP, or an online store where you shopped something before you turned on the VPN) would be willing to pay good money for. And companies like money.
I have not done any research into this facet of EU laws, but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
It's a case of "better is not perfect".
Yes, the EU & it's member states allow the police quite a bit of access to data and servers. However, there are still decently functional checks and balances. Unlike China, unlike Russia, unlike the US, where there is a carte-blanche already employed by authoritarian governments.
What the line really seems to refer to is General data protection. While "the state spies on you" is one attack vector, and one certainly becoming dangerous for oppressed minority groups in the US, it's not the only one.
For most people, really, all people because the authoritarian systems rely heavily on data from breaches, the chief risk to one's wellbeing are said data breaches. Of companies recklessly collecting all data they can get their hands on and retaining it forever.
There, the EU does have notably better laws. Where data collection and retention are restricted, and user-requested deletion is a legal right. (Enforcement of this is still a mess.)
Depends on the country, as much as it would xState in the US.
I don't understand why people keep saying this when Europe is more hostile towards privacy.
The constantly insist on schemes like chat control, and GrapheneOS users are often confronted by legal authorities.
They may have "the laws", but its way less trust worthy.
But more importantly, at least there are privacy laws in the EU that do something. In the US, there are virtually none, so of course you won't hear about their erosion.
I trust the EU ten times more than the US in this regard.
I've gone back to FastMail for the time being
I think what I really want is:
- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails
- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old
I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)
Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?
So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.
Nothing will change with respect to trust after the midterms.
Github: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
It doesn’t have any backend and all data is stored in the browser.
Other than them suddenly and arbitrarily deleting your account on a week's notice if you chose to have been born in the wrong country, they're great.
Arbitrarily because you can always email them and explain why you chose to be born in the wrong country and how you're actually one of the good ones.
But you don't understand: most of their employees are from a country that the wrong country is currently in conflict with, so they can't stand idly by while you sit there with your birth certificate hanging over you.
"Migrating to the EU" is serving a self-fulfilling delusion just as joining the so -called revolutionary forces after WW2 and moving to eastern Europe.
The EU does everything to de-industrialize itself and protect its ground by using surveillance tools branded as "child protection" rules.
Europeans don't have any tradition in thinking in freedom, in civil rights, in having a state that isn't there to spoil you, but grant basic service to allow you to shape your life the way you want it. Instead, Europeans hunger for "the state", thrive under more and more "protection rules" and supervision over the economy.
Anything and everything that requires financial and economic freedom is deemed suspicious and under the disguise of equality needs to be taxed into the ground.
Almost no one takes offense by the fact that the predominant topics in the EU center around perceived life-style threads all caused by one person thousands of miles away while wondering that the quality of life and public service going down the hill and every still existing local newspaper looks like an international outlet like New York Times: local topics don't exist. Anything and everything has to be linked to something that can be linked to "the fight against XYZ" not simply pragmatism or anything rational.
In Germany there is a former major party imploding in record time, having absolutely no representation anymore. And what these radicals do, is building a self-serving kraken, that checks off any and every checkmark of an totalitarian playbook.
And this shall be the basis for making my future depend an services having to exist within these given circumstances?
The genius thing about US constitution is the inherit limitation of terms. You see exactly the opposite in anything and everything in the EU and Germany. 14 or 16+ years of being in control means there was never any need to readjust.
I am more than happy and willing to move everything out of the EU.
Given the fact that europeans think, that a "Hosted in the EU" service is 100% European (whatever the term means) is some sort of discriminatory - something that is dealing with the double standard rampant in the EU.
BTW, I am still waiting for full autonomy: nothing from Github or any open source project that traces back to Github was used in this service.
European arrogance is so disgusting. Instead of simply changing the tune and accepting the fact, that different circumstances lead to different results, there is some sort of ego distorting the decision making process.
How much more evidence is needed, that the EU is lost compared to services done in the US? And you should look at the whole picture, instead of using your gut to draw conclusions.
I admire and acknowledge anything and everything that has been achieved in the US in regards to Computer Science.
I will never ever migrate to the EU. Never.
We're not all Germany over here.
Guido Van Rossum is Dutch.
Anders Hejlsberg is Danish.
Bjarne Stroustroup is Danish (I think?).
Rasmus Lersdorf is Danish.
Bram Molenaar was Dutch.
Edgar Dijkstra was Dutch.
Niklaus Wirth was Swiss.
Andrei Alexandrescu is Romanian.
I can probably think of many others.
The US is good at inventing things but it's amazing at marketing them and making money and drawing others to do the inventing for them.
Is one supposed to go over such a laundry list/dump of talking points one by one? It hardly seems serious.
If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.
And in terms of degoogled phones, I like the idea, but the conspiracy theorist in me tells me, "hhhhmmmm, people are leaving the google / apple ecosystem, and the best phones out there for degooling is Pixel phones by google..."
That's like the best move Google made, their "free" services are the main driver for selling their phones.
a) migrating to a different jurisdiction isn't realistically a massive barrier for them (related: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)
b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.
Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.
In my opinion though, the real threat model is not the actual government, its the US corporations. The NSA wont sell your information to any bad actor with a credit card and, realistically, doesn't care about you. But there is much that can be stolen or exploited for financially-motivated bad-actors from non-extradition countries or others with differing interests than your own.
* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)
* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)
* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)
Love them though.
Salesforce spending millions to conflate “CRM” with “sales pipeline” was just marketing.
Also, Zendesk calls itself a CRM. Freshdesk’s parent is literally named Freshworks CRM. Gartner and Forrester have always put support under the CRM umbrella.
PS: By the way, "Can Zendesk be used as a CRM?": https://www.zendesk.co.uk/blog/can-zendesk-be-used-as-a-crm/
>like you’ve never left Azure
hmmmmmm
Also, I do think that there's benefit to opting for EU products, as they are generally more 'consumer-rights' friendly than the US alternatives.
I like what they're doing, however Codeberg's 14 day uptime is _97.05%_. I've heard from many that downtime is normal there, and is worse than GitHub (which is already... bad). This makes them a non-starter imo, until that improves.
With the current trend of things going down all the time, the best way to compete is just to be available.
Forgejo is even trivial to set up as it is a single self-contained binary you can throw somewhere and it'd work.
The US government is sanctioning European individuals for doing their jobs, preventing them and their families from accessing any US digital service.
I could go on. But the message is already clear: Relying on US services is gambling with a ticking time bomb.
Currently, my private setup is:
- VPN: Windscribe [CA]
- AI: Mistral [FR]
- Phone: De-Googled Fairphone [NL] (F-Droid/Aurora/OpenStreetMap)
- Search: Self-hosted SearXNG + YACY (since ~10 years / good setup & documentation)
- Domain Provider: INWX [DE] (since +10 years / good setup & documentation)
- DNS: Self-hosted AdGuard Home / dnscrypt-proxy 2 + dnsdist / resolver (since ~5y / good setup & documentation)
- Git: Self-hosted GitLab (since ~1 year / ok setup & documentation)
- Mail/Cal/Card: Self-hosted with Mailcow (since +5 years / good setup & nice documentation)
- Password Manager: Self-hosted KeePass2 + SSHFS (since +10 years / easy setup)
- Notes: Joplin + self-hosted Joplin-Server (since ~5 years / good setup & documentation)
- Feeds: Self-hosted Miniflux (since +5years / easy setup & good documentation)
- VPS/Server/Storage/Hosting: netcup [DE], Webtropia [DE], IONOS [DE], OVH [FR], Hetzner [DE], Contabo [DE]
- Browser and Mail-Client: Firefox and Thunderbird (since ~2013 - last Opera release)
Costs: ~60 EUR/month and between 2 and 4 hours of work a month to maintain.
Moving away from PayPal and Amazon is quite hard and currently I search for a Slack alternative that don't need a k8-cluster to run stable or cost >50EUR/month (playing around with Matrix, Rocket.Chat and Mattermost).
Recently, I’ve been using https://european-alternatives.eu/ a lot to help friends and family.
Have you tried zone.eu? Think they are related to the Nodemailer people or they acquired them. Would fit the whole Migrating to the EU theme of the article. And it is in English ;-) Couldn't really navigate the hosting.de site without using Google Translator.