Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Feature Request: Host on infrastructure outside of the US.

EDIT: DISREGARD. It's already hosted outside the US. (Germany: https://www.ip-projects.de/)

I know a lot of this post-PRISM fear of the US government is to be expected and is certainly popular on HN, but comments that single out the US like this really make little sense to me. The governments of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all share tech-related intel with the United States and, potentially if not presumably, have similarly intrusive methods of surveillance. China goes so far as to ban social media sites that they don't have control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) and replaces them with sites that they do (renren, weibo, and youku/tudou). That, combined with general censorship of the web, is far scarier than what the NSA does, even assuming the NSA's scope is as wide as television shows make it out to be. And even in most other countries, the scope of domestic Internet surveillance is unknown, which is very different from "known to be minimal".

Edit: Ah if this was about intellectual property takedowns, then currently the US situation is a bit worse than most of the rest of the world. But still, China friggin censors their Internet, and comments like the above still seem to always single out the US.

I suggested it due to DMCA takedown notices, not NSA-related concerns.

Kind of related (in fact OT): Any news about the torrent? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226373

Uploaded ~100GB of it to S3, wasn't thinking enough to check torrent size limits. S3 limits torrents to 5GB objects. Want me to provide personal info for you to get in touch with me? I can mail you a SATA drive with the archive on it.

Glad to get in touch at d.pitrolo [the usual sign in the middle] gmx [dot] com

Otherwise, yes, if you provide me contact info, I'll get in touch.

In this case though, it does make sense. For this example we're not talking about surveillance, but about intellectual property takedowns, something which american companies find (slightly) harder to do in countries other than the USA.

The USA has taken possession of .com domains and raided physical premises based on copyright.

This need have nothing to do with the NSA and still be a perfectly valid and reasonable suggestion.

I think it's reasonable that any site that has user generated content should consider not being hosted on US soil or using a .tld that is under US control.

In general I'd say Germany has quite some problems with UGC hosted here as well.

> Ah if this was about intellectual property takedowns, then currently the US situation is a bit worse than most of the rest of the world. But still, China friggin censors their Internet, and comments like the above still seem to always single out the US.

Okay, let me give you the reasons:

a) No one would normally host their content in China. That's just ridiculous.

b) No other country is bragging as much about being the land of the free. So of course the one (perceived to be) at the top is going to take the most flak

c) Generally most bigger things are US hosted so the general advice to for example move your host away from Uruguay makes little sense

d) It's usually assumed that while other western industrial nations would like to spy as much as the US does, they usually do not have the money and manpower of the NSA.

We (ehrm, I) are based in Germany, along with all servers.

Sorry about that. I should've checked before posting. Any chance you include SHA1 hashes of the files/objects?

Genuinely interested to know how Germany is a safe-haven for file-sharing since almost every other European country would probably give you trouble.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com