@Em0nM4stodon I’ve asked that question for about a year, always met with blank stares. Same stare we used to get running pandemic scenarios for BCP work

@Em0nM4stodon My country's government included until recently a guy that came straight out of Microsoft and who only left to become mayor of the second largest city in the country.

That ought to tell you all you need to know about that.

@Em0nM4stodon we would be fucked.

@Em0nM4stodon Work in a Hospital in Canada supporting the IT infrastructure - and yeah, we do!

We have an offline physical PC preloaded with PDFs connected to USB printers available at all units in case the main EMR were to somehow spectacularly explode or all internet is lost - they'd revert to paper charting and bust out their pre made downtime kits with workflow instructions.

All units also have 'red phones' using dedicated copper circuits incase cellular or the main digital PBXes fail. 😅

@Em0nM4stodon nope, we are so guzzling the Microsoft/AWS koolaid here that we'd definitely grind to a halt. Might be why our current government is kowtowing to the US government and trying to turn us into a mini-US.

@Em0nM4stodon

NZ here. lol no.

@Em0nM4stodon You could have included Visa and Mastercard.

@Em0nM4stodon as though the techlogarchs would stop the cash flowing in for a day.

@Em0nM4stodon @OdyX Throw your arms in the air with the famous “qui aurait pu prédire ?” catchphrase (loosely translated as “who could have predicted this?”). That's Macron's response to basically everything (with some exceptions like “come and get me”, for an increased fuck-you score).

@Em0nM4stodon and schools.

@Em0nM4stodon oh God this would be awesome. Terrible at first for some but a blessing in disguise

@Em0nM4stodon
Fortunately the drive by the tech companies to make money is stronger than even DJT's vindictiveness.

#uspol

@Em0nM4stodon I live in New Zealand. The simple answer is no, we are not at all prepared.
Our government has been touting new data centres that have been established here to give us data sovereignty. But guess who runs them? AWS and Microsoft, for two.
Having the hardware on our soil is just an illusion of data sovereignty in my opinion (but I am not a tech expert).

@Em0nM4stodon

I would assume cutting off Canada would result in our cutting off their oil, electric power, and uranium, each having its own immediate to long-term effect, basically making their data centres and clouds useless instantly.

But we really do need (and I assume are planning) to disconnect our computing services from the unreliable rogue state.

If not, we should be.

@Em0nM4stodon You'll be hard pressed to find a business that doesn't use Google or MS desktop apps. A good chunk of businesses have their enterprise applications in US controlled cloud. And those that don't are often using third party apps and SaaS that rely on US cloud under the hood.

Basically, losing connections to Google, MS and AWS would shut down a country.

Which is why we need IT sovereignty... but it's not an easy problem to solve. US tech is ingrained deep!

@Em0nM4stodon not sure about the bigger picture, but many govt offices use Linux. As far as what the incumbents think they need to function, we have great home made surveillance and identification/oppression systems already in place.

@Em0nM4stodon in Czech republic is seznam.cz. many people use email, maps and other services from seznam. So no big deal for lot of people.

@Em0nM4stodon that's why, we should have start cutting our relieve to the USA at least since the USA killed millions in vietnam

@Em0nM4stodon We (the UK) would be fucked.

@Em0nM4stodon @blotosmetek We're as prepared as the US is for China cutting off access to the products they manufacture. Or, in fact, as prepared as we are for that eventuality ourselves. There's a similar situation with Taiwan and chips, or the Netherlands and chipmaking machines. This is probably number 30 on our priority list right now.

@Em0nM4stodon I brought this issue up at our yearly company council conference. My concerns were more or less brushed aside. "We can't move that many people to a different operating system", they said. "Our servers are safe", they said.

@Em0nM4stodon Say it with me now:

The cloud is someone else's computer.

@Em0nM4stodon

🤔 i can't imagine this US govt would do that for the simple fact all those companies are currently bribing Dotard Tumor. if it happened, i'd assume it was a grift by Dotard to extract more bribes from them to turn it back on

it would greatly affect clients

personally:
i use a degoogled Fairphone
using LibreOffice for decades
shopping for a Linux 2in1 laptop to fully ditch microsoft
use Signal for video & most comms now
switched to Proton mail
I NEVER shop on Amazon

@Em0nM4stodon

I wrote to my MP (UK) about this. I didn't get a sensible reply

- My former employer ran MS servers. They would grind to a halt
- Some UK hospitals were still using Windows 😜 - dead in the water
- Emergency services and banks - don't know

The whole country would be screwed

You can also add the threat to close payment services like Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.

@Em0nM4stodon here’s a complete and comprehensive list for those who are migrating to open source software to become digitally sovereign. Please do check out the whole website, it will be worth your time!

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to

@Em0nM4stodon I personally would feel no effects other than my Android phone not having access to Google services.

I host my own email, my own chat server, my own videoconferencing software, and so on. I rely on nothing from Amazon or Microsoft and only a bit for Google.

But you are right. Almost everyone else in my country would be in big trouble, and in the end, I would be too because I do rely on stores, hospitals, etc.

@Em0nM4stodon my ircd is ready and waiting for when teams goes offline (again)

@Em0nM4stodon at @squads we are prepared, but it would still hurt badly. Some of our customers would be dead in weeks.

Most people I spoke with about this risk don't see the merit of investing in a (from some perspectives) inferior backup solution that is never used and their people aren't trained on.

It's like watching a slow motion disaster, but my sales skills are not enough to convince them to invest in mitigation. Hard to explain, because running a nextcloud instance that backs up a us cloud is really not that expensive. It's another story if you're fully locked into the likes of aws, Azure, Salesforce of course.

That said, I also believe that it wouldn't be so easy for the regime to block whole countries. I expect them to target individual accounts like they did with ICC.

Oh well, we can do the disaster recovery for those that survive such an attack I guess 😅

@Em0nM4stodon Same if you're a company/organization in the USA that might get accused of something like 'harboring terrorists'.

@Em0nM4stodon i am pretty ok tbh, almost everything is stored in EU

@Em0nM4stodon nope. my country is not prepared. I have almost finalized moving all my stuff away from US or US-hosted services, but I still rely on banks, government, etc that all are completely reliant on the US. There's still government agencies that are migrating _towards_ Azure at the moment...

@Em0nM4stodon

Degoogled my life years ago.

The only Microsoft product I use is Flight SIM 2020, which can also work in offline mode.

Windows 10, hasn't had updates in almost a year, it's stable. No OneDrive, no Spotlight, no updates that screw things up on a weekly basis.

My other computer will be moved to BSD because Linux updates crap the bed, and no distro properly supports dual GPUs any more (they did - with some command-line magic, 15 years ago, but not any more). Makes sense since Red Hat is owned by IBM.

Other things - keep a year's supply of some essential nonperishable food on hand, keep a decent amount of cash on hand, keep a physical chequing account at a local bank and a supply of physical cheques. Because right of now the US is not above attacking Canada's banking and internet systems.

@Em0nM4stodon I am pretty sure it is not prepared, and things will go medieval in a moment. 😟

@Em0nM4stodon Yes we are talking about it, #sovereignty is a major part of ongoing preparedness work, for when the [r]us leader shows their true colors.

One issue, which is the same issue #security folks has always had, is that so many people in [commercial] leadership simply Do Not Care since they think they will just swap jobs if TSHTF. They don't really think in terms of global outages or impacts.

The most annoying part is that those same clueless folks will turn to us when it happens, either helpless or accusing.

No fair.

@Em0nM4stodon As a french, the entirety of our private data has been exfiltrated through months of 'hacks' targeting public services. If our country shuts down, we can always buy everything back since all has been rehosted some place else.
I'm surprised hackers have never asked for hosting fees, since their security and redundancy is certainly better than ours.

@Em0nM4stodon Nobody in the US is that stupid, right? Right?

@Em0nM4stodon You’ve posed a great question, which prompts another one: what if they did it here in the US as well? Makes me think again about buying that manual typewriter 😉