It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech, reinforcing the US's position as a global powerhouse. (Meanwhile US tech is built on the shoulders of their allies.) Now we see these same allies are starting to look inward and invest in technology they own completely because the US is acting decisively not like an ally. Something unthinkable since WW2.
I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
I agree, this is a good thing. Long term stable large contracts are great simulation for a market. Airbus obviously has a large amount of military work, and its data needs to stay in Europe.
What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
> Almost all computer equipment companies are from US.
Made in a few Asian countries. I think it's kind of funny reading the contents of your post and how it ignores Asia, that's actually behind most of it. How much of a Dell PC is US-American?
Was it laziness and stupidity, or was it protection money. I thought the deal since WW2 was a US security guarantee, in return for letting the US have our money. A protection racket. Or perhaps it was more like Europe paying tribute to its colonial master.
Anyhow it is clear the protection is not to be relied upon, so it is time to stop paying. It is dangerous making deals with gangsters. It is perhaps more dangerous to change the deal. But when the protection is not there, it is time to build strength.
Well done to France for maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent through this era. Britain made a mistake letting that go
This trope with CERN/EU created the WWW is just chauvinism. That contribution to the internet is just infinitesimal small. Just stop repeating it as it was the cornerstone of today’s world.
Is just one little stone in a gigantic castle made in the united states. I’m European, and I think is just silly to look who “invented” each thing, trying to feel patriotic about that. Every invention is based on other inventions, research, ideas and necessities around the world. Trying to put flags on it, is just stupid.
Your words are displaying the mindset that is the main driving force behind the currently ongoing decline of the American empire. Incredible hubris paired with ignorance and a lack of self reflection. Great qualities if you want to go further down that line.
> Some people in the US deride it's close allies as "freeloaders" because they choose to use and buy US tech
This is a disingenuous straw man. The allies are derided for derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
My country spends less on defence as a percentage of GDP than the US. But it spends much of that with US companies. This is not Freeloading. It was a deal. Cancel TSR-2, and buy American and we will lend you some money. Cancel your nuclear program and buy US submarine launched missiles and we will help you look after yourself. Now let Visa and Mastercard skim off all your transactions and we will keep you secure to keep the money flowing. Sweetheart tax deals for US companies to operate, and we will keep you safe to keep the money flowing. It is not Freeloading, it is colonialism
Much of what people call cloud is a commodity at this point. If you need vms, object storage, load balancers, vpcs, etc., which is what most people would need, that works in a lot of solutions. And you can usually also find managed databases, redis, and a few other bits and bobs. If you like Kubernetes (I personally don't), the whole point of that is that it kind of works everywhere.
People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.
This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.
We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
Seems extremely dangerous to be doing those kinds of things with software from someone politically hostile. Perhaps the EU should be weaning itself off that too?
> And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
Lmao but in all honesty, there are a lot of european cloud providers that I know and they are even cheaper than american counterparts like aws, azure, gcp. Personally I like european cloud too but I dont have so much as an preference and it depends but the current environment of america does seem a little hostile but not the fault of datacenters in america but I hope that hostility slows down
There are a lot of European “cloud” providers, but there’s not one that offers anything even close to AWS/GCP/Cloudflare. If you need more than compute and S3, you’re pretty much SOL.
I wonder if this includes Skywise, the Palantir-built data lake and design stack that they use for many many internal operations (design, airline support, manufacturing). Not sure what difference it really makes where the data is hosted if the folks doing the hosting call home to Colorado…
1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place)
2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?"
If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century.
You can have the data safely on-prem, connected to computers that are connected to the internet, or safely in the cloud, connected to computers that are connected to the internet. The threats are not that different.
It would be reasonably "secure" if it is encrypted on a physically private network using in-house _modified_ _mainstream_ encryption algorithm, then after an over-the-air transfer then you can store it on a third party could under the control of foreign interests. Oh, don't forget the file names have to be encrypted too.
Why would a company without cryptographic expertise modifying an existing algorithm without any particular goal in mind just to be different, produce something more secure than the winning solution in an open cryptographic competition?
> directory names
And file structure too, preferably. Incremental sync could be done with XTS mode.
You need only cryptographic common sense: it seems you have no idea how much it is easy to modify a mainstream cryptographic software to add basic and robust cryptographic modifications...
You'd be fooling yourself if you think any moderately complex company still hasn't moved to the cloud or isn't thinking about it (with rare exceptions)
Yeah, not really sure how a globally distributed manufacturing operation with a complex supply chain and customers all over the world that need access to data for their operations is supposed to function effectively without it.
(and I say that as someone that used to sell commercial aviation data that came on CDs...)
I do, works perfectly if you know what you're doing. If you have no clue, jump to AWS and enjoy the lockin, if you do, jump to a EU provider, and enjoy not being locked in, and a vastly lower cost.
One of the reason is a lot of those "EU Sovereign Clouds" were malicious cash grabs.
It happened several times in the last decade:
- First politicians raise the alarm about "digital sovereignty"
- Then some create new EU sovereign clouds that are pitched/forced on corporations
- They usually do not work, get consolidated and then the scam is revealed
The biggest reveal was when we discovered and warned one of our client the Orange "Sovereign Cloud" (French telco partially owned by the government !) and built to host European most sensitive worloads was just handed over and run by Huawei [0] [1].
They were not the only one who did something like that.
I don't want to put actors like Hertzner in the same bag as they seem to be honest and really compete to offer a cheaper alternative to hyperscalers.
The US means to undermine the EU: https://www.dw.com/en/will-trump-pull-italy-austria-poland-h...
The US means to annex European territory: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0j9l08902eo
It's the same reason you don't want Chinese equipment in your telecommunications infrastructure. You can't trust what the Chinese government will do to it or with it.
I don't see this news as anything but a good thing. For every technology out there, the EU needs a native alternative. It's clear the current US administration wants to make the EU worse based on a politics of grievance.
What we also need is a faster acceleration of military spending so this can happen with more companies.
Long term, I agree with you.
Made in a few Asian countries. I think it's kind of funny reading the contents of your post and how it ignores Asia, that's actually behind most of it. How much of a Dell PC is US-American?
Anyhow it is clear the protection is not to be relied upon, so it is time to stop paying. It is dangerous making deals with gangsters. It is perhaps more dangerous to change the deal. But when the protection is not there, it is time to build strength.
Well done to France for maintaining its independent nuclear deterrent through this era. Britain made a mistake letting that go
https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-11/united-kingdom-nucle...
The US has a long history of funding the Silicon Valley expansion using Darpa and other federal agencies for example.
Europe never had such a thing, and they had a fragmented market for a long time.
The big money is in the US, thats why the talent goes there.
Is just one little stone in a gigantic castle made in the united states. I’m European, and I think is just silly to look who “invented” each thing, trying to feel patriotic about that. Every invention is based on other inventions, research, ideas and necessities around the world. Trying to put flags on it, is just stupid.
Yes, the www was created at Cern, but this is only a small part of the whole tech industry and history as a whole.
Also before that, Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet, was created and funded in the US by the military and the top unis.
s/laziness and stupidity/corruption/g
See, for instance, what happened to Gemalto.
This is a disingenuous straw man. The allies are derided for derided for literally freeloading on US military protection while underinvesting in their own defense.
My country spends less on defence as a percentage of GDP than the US. But it spends much of that with US companies. This is not Freeloading. It was a deal. Cancel TSR-2, and buy American and we will lend you some money. Cancel your nuclear program and buy US submarine launched missiles and we will help you look after yourself. Now let Visa and Mastercard skim off all your transactions and we will keep you secure to keep the money flowing. Sweetheart tax deals for US companies to operate, and we will keep you safe to keep the money flowing. It is not Freeloading, it is colonialism
The US isn't anywhere close to paying its way.
People over pay for AWS mostly because of brand recognition. And it's not even small amounts. You get a lot more CPU/memory/bandwidth with some of the competitors. AWS makes money by squeezing their customers hard on that. Competitors do the obvious thing of being a bit more generous. Companies could save a ton just switching to competing solutions. Try it. It's not that hard. Some solutions are obviously not as complete.
This not about US vs. EU but about sovereignty. If you are married to AWS, that's a weakness in itself. Ask yourself how hard it would be to move to Google cloud. Or Azure. Or whatever. If that's very hard, you might have a problem when Amazon jacks up the prices or discontinues a product.
We use a mix of Google Cloud and Telekom Cloud for some of our more picky customers in Germany. Telekom Cloud is not very glamorous. But it's essentially openstack. Which is an open source thing backed by IBM and others. I wouldn't necessary recommend Telekom Cloud (it has a few weaknesses in support and documentation). But it does the job. And unlike AWS, I can get people on the phone and they are happy to talk to me.
I have tried Lambdas and then got this "oh-shit moment" when I have realized that if AWS would be to kick me out, I would be absolutely screwed.
Now I am slowly dispersing and using VMs instead and avoiding all the AWS-specific stuff as much as I can.
Is this her decision or EU's decision?
And how do we fight terrorists, CSAM and political opponents without Palantir ?
Fighting "CSAM" is absurd and ridiculous, and used as a justification for eroding public liberties. So is the fight against "terrorism".
The US government has decided to kill innocent fishermen en masse and labelled its victims "narco-terrorists" as a justification for these crimes.
We absolutely do not need Palantir.
You can make exactly same argument for client (phone) scanning and depreciation of encryption.
By doing police legwork and by prevention work (i.e. offer help to pedophiles, don't go and wreck MENA countries for funsies, but invest in helping the civilian populations).
I'm talking about the Skywise data platform.
https://www.aircraft.airbus.com/en/services/enhance/skywise-...
It would be nice to know what the requirements are. There are plenty of providers in the EU happy to sell cloud services
Don’t they know you can get Hetzner servers starting from $5/month?
1/ First migrate out your "17 years Accenture veteran" executive vice president of digital [0] (who probably sold you MS and Google cloud in the first place)
2/ Then appoint any inside good engineer and ask him to investigate this: "As one of the most prominent and sensitive aerospace corporation, do you think we can setup servers and run our software on it?"
If the answer is no, Airbus might not be fit for the 21th century.
- [0] https://www.airbus.com/en/about-us/our-governance/catherine-...
If it matters so much, run your own computer systems don’t use any cloud.
Not only Airbus. You see, cloud is secure, information is encrypted and only you have access to your data.
Everything else is, I am sorry to say, BS.
Why would a company without cryptographic expertise modifying an existing algorithm without any particular goal in mind just to be different, produce something more secure than the winning solution in an open cryptographic competition?
> directory names
And file structure too, preferably. Incremental sync could be done with XTS mode.
Are you an AI?
(and I say that as someone that used to sell commercial aviation data that came on CDs...)
It happened several times in the last decade:
- First politicians raise the alarm about "digital sovereignty"
- Then some create new EU sovereign clouds that are pitched/forced on corporations
- They usually do not work, get consolidated and then the scam is revealed
The biggest reveal was when we discovered and warned one of our client the Orange "Sovereign Cloud" (French telco partially owned by the government !) and built to host European most sensitive worloads was just handed over and run by Huawei [0] [1]. They were not the only one who did something like that.
I don't want to put actors like Hertzner in the same bag as they seem to be honest and really compete to offer a cheaper alternative to hyperscalers.
- [0] https://www.huawei.com/en/huaweitech/publication/winwin/29/o...
- [1] https://www.techmonitor.ai/hardware/cloud/orange-introduces-...