Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of how you view the current political climate in USA, it's simply become a major risk-management factor for almost any European organisation. We're heavily invested into Azure, but we've had to work out plans on how we could potentially exit within 30 days because we're part of the European energy sector. (We're really part of the global energy sector, but we're based in the EU.) We still view US tech companies as more reliable and secure than a lot of other non-EU places, but it's not like it was 5 years ago. I'm not sure any of us are really happy with this. Mistral is fine, but it's not as good as Claude and similar. It is what it is though.

Ironically there are no current exit strategies for our public sector mobile apps which rely solely on Google play or the Apple store. I've written a plan for how we can move our resources from Azure to Hetzner, luckily I'm not involved with how we would move any 365 products so it was not too bad. Only the plan involves me using our digital national ID app on my phone, which would not work if I wasn't running android with Google Play (or apple). I mean, in the extreme it wouldn't be impossible to use my passport in person, but still.

That is also true. Relying on the USA past this point is a losing strategy.

> Ironically there are no current exit strategies for our public sector mobile apps which rely solely on Google play or the Apple store.

Its not just consumers. A lot of the private sector also relies on mobile apps. Even more of it relies on American desktop OSes. There are lots of other online services - email, storage. Lots of non-IT services such as payments (SWIFT, Visa, Mastercard).

How much good will you moving from Azure to Hertzner do if lots of other businesses are down, lots of payments are not working, and a lot of government stiff is not working. Maybe you can keep a few things going because they have energy (and it is important to keep supplies going if everything else fails), but that is about it.

Out of curiosity - do you also plan for the possibility that your will want to move to another provider at the same time as the rest of your industry if not large parts of the EU as a whole?

Whenever I think about these things I just don’t see us Europeans being able to tackle suddenly having to decouple from the US if Trump or a successor suddenly turns the screws to 11.

Sort of. We're heavily containerized and have almost no reliance on Azure only services. So we could deploy it to any EU cloud, or even put it on our own hardware if needed. In the worst case, we could use work laptops as a linux cluster and run on that, though storage would be "interesting". That is my part of the business though. IT operations don't exactly have an easy exit if they're told we can't use Windows or Office in a month. Finance doesn't have an easy exit if they're told they can't use BC, and so on.

Basically energy production would have few isses with a disconnect from the US, regardless of where we'd have to go. But the business would struggle.

How do people who don't have a smartphone (they still exist!) manage without digital ID? Is there no analog fallback?

In Sweden you can technically get by with only a psychical ID. But even now when the number of people that only have a physical ID is low getting things done can be hard. Suddenly switching to physical ID only on asocialt wide basis would be comparable to going from almost exclusively shopping online to in-store cash only.

You don't have kodebrikke in Sweden? Just app?

Unfortunately not. I would welcome it.

Most banks supply some sort of hardware auth device. But those are only valid with the bank’s services.

Given that the EU is encouraging disaster preparedness and handling things like extended power outages I really hope they don't make it impossible to function without a charged phone.

Even though it's the same app and ID, there is a bit of a difference between the company ID tied to my digital ID and my private digital ID. You can get a physical code thingie instead of the phone app for private use. To be honest though, the primary reason I have a smartphone is that it's annoying if you don't. Banking, contacting the doctor, buying medicine, dealing with your childrens school, going to the library and so on are all super annoying without apps, and you can't get them without Google Play or Apple.

I agree it's annoying, and even though I have a smartphone, I'm annoyed. My kids' school uses a tool that has a web UI but I wonder how long that will last.

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