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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

The first two are reasonable positions. The third, on the merits of the argument in the article, is absolutely bonkers. It's the UK government that is unleashing this stupidity on the world. There is no European alternative that is any safer, and it's the UK's own hands that are at fault in the first place.

Not that there aren't other reasons to be skeptical of American companies' right, but it's just so easy to fall into nationalistic prattle instead of fixing the real problem.

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> but it's just so easy to fall into nationalistic prattle instead of fixing the real problem.

Right. This, right now, is 100% a UK problem. De-Americanising your tech stack isn't going to fix the political issues domestically. Hence Apple pulling ADP out, they made the choice of not complying with the UK and not offering the service instead of compromising the service for everyone else in the world.

UK citizens need to direct their attention inwards against their own government.

> Right. This, right now, is 100% a UK problem.

Do you not think every other govenrment in the world is currently eyeing this up and figuring out how to do the same thing?

Scary stuff: they've just handed the EU a reason to go after ADP. Turns out no back door is needed, you just force their position into making ADP unavailable in the EU.

I still believe that 5 eyes organised this, but the UK drew the short straw and had to be the guinea pig.

That is just borrowing trouble that hasn’t arisen.

Oh yes, the UK is very keen on Reform. Reform in this case however is the death rattle of a long dead empire.

“Death rattle”? More like “zombie groan”.

Last time I was in the UK, the news (BBC) was bizarrely 90% American politics. Trump this, Trump did that, etc. People there knew American politicians better than the people who actually represent them.

Why “bizarrely”? The US has enormous influence on many countries, Trump’s actions are newsworthy in many places.

If the UK news is made up of 90% US politics, and 10% UK politics, then I would say that is definitely bizarre.

Here is the BBC news website:

https://bbc.co.uk/news

It is not 90% American politics.

Trump is a chum with Farage, far right con man and Putin's buddy.

For the reasons unknown BBC is *massively* promoting and platforming far right in the last few times (airtime, framing of the events, promoting party lines as facts, etc).

So Trump in the BBC might be considered beneficial to the far right. This would explain it.

>The first two are reasonable positions. The third, on the merits of the argument in the article, is absolutely bonkers. It's the UK government that is unleashing this stupidity on the world. There is no European alternative that is any safer, and it's the UK's own hands that are at fault in the first place.

Disagree. Australia and also likely Canada have identical these laws. And once the capability is in place, its likely that the US can all writs access to the same tool. Apple is unique in that it has a semi legal canary, in choosing to withdraw the services instead of complying.

You cant trust any tech company that remains located in the 5 eyes nations.

I am not aware of good alternatives, but worst case you can run up a VPS with Owncloud or something.

> There is no European alternative that is any safer

How do you figure that? If you're worried about your privacy in the UK, keeping your data in a Five Eyes country cloud provider is a very bad idea, arguably even worse than keeping it in a UK cloud provider where it becomes a domestic legal matter where you at least get a day in court, not a foreign intelligence matter where you don't. And the US is a pretty bad place for anyone's data given a) its lack of robust privacy laws (and large commercial data-trafficking ecosystem) and b) the National Security Letter system.

While there is no perfect country, somewhere like Germany or the Netherlands seems a much better bet.

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