This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ramp it up!
The worst crime you can commit under capitalism is not participating, not buying, not renting, etc. These tech companies are built on debt that is serviced by profits.
Moving the needle down and impacting their income by even 5% will have a huge impact on a business’s bottom line and in turn a CEO’s income, bonuses and stock options etc.
If you want to make Trump and his regime change then you have to hit the only people he will listen to… his fellow oligarchs.
70% of the US economy is consumer spending. Hit them where it hurts.
I agree, the problem is you have to consume at some level you need food water clothes etc. and for poorer people 100% of their income goes to just buying the basics. You also don’t want to put other citizens out of jobs because of a boycott, that would get unpopular quickly.
For this to work long term you need to get the top 10% or 20% of consumers to cut back on the extras. I.E. Amazon Prime, Netflix, Chat GPT subscriptions, hold off buying an iPhone or electronics, etc.
If you did that and caused consumption to dip even 5% you would hurt the companies that the oligarchs run and in turn hurt Trump.
Silicon Valley people who wanted Trump are so fucking stupid its absurd.
Anyone who voted for trump is so fucking stupid it's absurd.
As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it's stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.
We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about "information wants to be free" and "the internet circumvents censorship", but also "market disruption" and "move fast and break things." But there's this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there's a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we're talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I'm now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less "damn the man" and more "fuck you, got mine." Nevermind that it's not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.
To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one's self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.
And my personal experience - take with salt - there's also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They're highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.
Imagine that. Being indifferent to your customer base and forcing them into areas they don't want to travel are two main behaviours that will destroy a business and bring it to ruin. Monopolies will always eventually have alternatives when their customers find out that the rain is just piss from above.
I’m selfhosting most of my stuff now and did closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review. It take times but I always while closing enter a comment like “lost confidence in USA for the next 50 years thanks to Trump” BTW most services don’t let you delete your account, in this case I empty all my personal data, upload blank images for profile, anonymize field, move email to temp mailbox and delete my password.
I did some architecture and implementation to Azure for a big client, now moved to pure AKS with only OSS software, nest step for them is to quit US cloud, a lot easier if you use pure kubernetes.
I think it is good that we reduce our reliance on US stacks, but not at the cost of using Chinese softwares.
Deleting Reddit, instagram, facebook was really the easiest and most satisfying of all.
I plan to organize meetup on sovereignty, privacy and self hosting soon too 😇
closed 500 accounts, still 960 to review
(⊙_⊙)
How??
it is easy to have 1500+ passwords, I'm online since 1996 :-) and use a password manager like keepass, some sites died, others are still online, i have multiple mailbox, twitter, facebook. it goes up really fast!
not counting also all SSO with google, apple, and now my own pocketid selfhosted domain :-)
I will have to remove also those 50+ google authentificator TOTP and replace them with passkeys....
BTW, it is recommended to use single password per service sinces more than 20 years now, so without a password manager it is impossible to create new accounts. i started in firefox, then chrome password manager, then keepassX ....
Gotta have privacy for his bot farm
How does one reach even more than 20 accounts?
By using the internet for literally 5 seconds.
I have over 200 logins overall, but most of them are to forums that have been dead for a decade.
The internet used to be quite a different place back in the day, people had separated communities and everything wasn't just on a handful of massive platforms.
It's all so unnecessary. But at least we finally do something about digital sovereignty in the EU.
The US held a unique privilege of being the world’s tech leader, their IT buddy.
Now that we’ve violated everyone’s trust, we will likely never get that position back.
As they say: it takes decades to grow a forest, but only one match to burn it down.
That really doesn't fit here IMO. It took decades of bullshit, law breaking, blatant spying, hostile persuasion etc. of US IT being forced onto the world, and without Trump and the fucking nightmare circus that's going on this wouldn't have happened. The world would have kept bending the knee and even inviting all of it forever, it took THIS MUCH to get the world to take a step back and realise that this isn't a good thing.
Ding ding ding
And that IS a good thing. It's great that it happened, I just wish it had happened 2 decades ago and before IT companies yeeted the fworld off a cliff into hell
Not everywhere can wean itself off, but the "big three" cloud compute companies arent the only shows in town. And of course there is a multitude of free and open source replacements for commercial software with companies willing to provide support.
I'm playing my part... Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I've been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scaleway/UpCloud. This is a significant practical setback for me, but I can no longer live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.
UpCloud is nice but ever since I started using UpDog I don't think I can go back.
Waits patiently for someone to ask what it is
What's UpCloud? 😆
Yeah also did that for my recent site using StaticBuilder and Codeberg. Took longer but well worth supporting smaller businesses.
Btw, if people are passionate about this topic. There is a community and website on !purchasewithpurpose@lemmy.world .
They had already gone off the deep end. They've been enshittifying everything they can get their hands on and monetizing the slightest edge they can to everything as well. Tech bros are just the pharma bro multiplied. People that bring no value to the world make things that they have no knowledge about or input on behind pay walls because they can. It's for the shareholders brah! Rid the world of nepo CEOs and we'll all be in a better place. Also "economics" belongs with the other junk science like chiropractors. Some of them are great and some of the science is needed. Most of it is just junk that only makes sense to them and their schemes.
Oh Blockbuster, who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy memory
Thy storefront come
Thy movies return
On Earth as it is in Heaven
Give us this day our daily movie rentals
And forgive us our shortsightedness
As we forgive those who exploit us for money
And lead us not into micro-transactions
But deliver us from enshittification
For thine is the Weekend
The Power and the Vibes
Forever and ever
Amen
As a QA, I raised the very real risk that should tensions with America escalate, they could effectively cut us off and our business would be kaputt.
What happens if AWS goes down? We use Google. What happens if both go down (or cut us off)? We're fucked.
The answer to me raising the risk was a, "Haha, yeah, true, we'd be in big trouble..." but there's no actual appetite to do anything about it. We're so tied up in AWS that I can't imagine there ever will be.
The entire point of the Internet's infrastructure design was for it to be highly distributed. At some point, companies and governments decided to cramntheir entire critical IT infrastructure into monolithic services. In this case it was the US, but it could have been anyone anywhere. No matter who, it was a bad practice and everyone is now realizing why.
This isn't a "US bad" problem. This is a "don't be stupid, stupid" issue.
I'd say that individual companies need to make contingency plans for when the US puts up their own great firewall (assuming they haven't already, since I'm in the US).
I think it would be prudent for nations that have Google/Amazon/Microsoft datacenters in them to create legislation that allows them to nationalize or detach those services from the US. I have no doubt that we will eventually have our own policy that gives us the privilege to snoop on foreign data in foreign datacenters that are running US owned hardware.
For this to be practical you need to audit and control the code the runs in the data center. I think that was a hangup with some Chinese based services that offered to host in the EU.
Obviously because once that country collapses or becomes a pariah state and starts fooling with the data for nefarious purposes, all goes almost anything the rest of the world relies on, including website hosting services. So, yeah, decentralization is necessary.
I was hoping for that for a long time, so... thanks Donald I guess? What a rube.
He has made China, Canada and Europe greater.
I don't think ICANN
I ended five subscriptions to US tech services over the weekend, and I'm working steadily down my list.
imagine if this collapses their Economy
to be honest, it might have a significant impact. the US tech today serves a global market, but if that market gets reduced to just the US, that is probably a significant cut.
There's no reason to think that they won't also lose US markets. I live in the US and trying to cut my reliance on US tech.
I was reading an opinion piece about this sort of thing earlier today, "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native". It opens by saying:
I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money.
Chinese open-source foundation models are already enabling small countries and companies to build their own large language models.
Had to be mentioned of course, in the context of critical technologies. 🙄
SEO is a bitch.
