Sure, that is fair enough. But why is EU not setting up their own servers for whisper or activity pub or whatever OSS protocols and just make that their only official and approved communication channel?
For example the French government has its own Matrix platform https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/ and its own Mastodon instance https://social.numerique.gouv.fr/.
I've seen this play out a few times in Europe. People are extremely resistant to giving up WhatsApp. These rules are so widely flouted that no one takes them seriously, including the people making the rules. It is a bit of theater, meanwhile everyone continues to use WhatsApp. There is no will to actually make this change.
If your boss keeps sending you messages over WhatsApp, why would you do any different?
Not to mention the app itself was pretty mediocre last time I used it, but that's neither here nor there...
The global usage is nuts. All of my Indian friends live on WhatsApp even if they are iPhone users. When I was in Portugal and Spain recently it’s literally the way businesses work.
Plus, you’re out of your mind for putting Teams on a personal device.
Most biz dont have the kind of money to hand over to Goog workspace or M$. therefore, you get what its free, and thats WA biz
For work related stuff we use teams and that it's kinda needed too because we can only link to internal resources there, like SharePoint.
Where my wife works they simply have a WhatsApp group because there _is_ no messenger, and while they don't use it for work stuff, they couldn't even have anything but group emails for discussing lunch plans or reaching someone who is not present at the office without calling (and in the case of reaching someone, they don't have access to anything on personal devices and they 90% have no work phones).
That they publicly use it at all is great though, as it likely helps shift the Overton window of what's normal, and what fits standard useage of Matrix-Synapse
Matrix shows me as active (green dot) when I have the client open but there's no way to override that. At least none that I found. I'm a bit surprised all these big governmental clients didn't ask for such a feature :)
This is the Mastodon server of the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (BfDI). Embrace decentralization.
Too bad the UX is dogshit and the end users lose their keys every 90 days. Even though they're explicitly warned, loudly and clearly, to not lose the keys.
Matrix software stack isn't idiot proof; Signal is.
But yeah it would be nice if the key could be escrowed somewhere for big organisations.
Yeah. But then the EU lost the plot a very long time ago. There is one EU company in the 50 of the world by companies market cap. One. Just freaking one. It's ASML.
From 2008 to today, in USD and inflation adjusted, the eurozone saw no growth. While both the US and China skyrocketed.
There's been this little thing lately that kinda took off: it's called AI. Where's the EU? How much of a leader was the EU in this AI revolution?
Explain how the EU is not long gone?
The EU is not even sinking at this point: it sank years ago. And it's busy making sure it's turning into the third-world.
I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening.
Billions of people exist in the EU. In real terms it has not gone anywhere.
Obsession with preserving political dogma, rhetorical forms, atheist appearing syntax and semantics (language that does invoke specific concepts of theology); political and economic abstraction that do not represent reality is not much different from religion.
By your measure every nation effectively died out centuries ago as some originating principles died with their originators of those principles. Yet here we are still discussing France and Russia and the US as real things. They only ever existed as ethno objects to begin with; things that only exist if we talk about them as existing.
So what if some rhetorical specifics that used to define the economic and political foundations of the EU mutate. That's immutable reality for you. It's bound to happen due to generational churn.
People who live there can still use the term EU to define whatever political structure and economic model they land on next.
Measuring economic growth in someone else's currency can be misleading. By the same metric you used, Eurozone economy grew by ~100% between 2002 and 2008.
I certainly had a delightful time visiting the winter markets across Europe, and it seemed like there were a fair number of people living well.
While the Eurozone might not be a great place to start a new business it is still a going concern, enough that those top 50 companies all have a European presence.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but living in the US ain't exactly like Escape from New York or Escape from LA. For every Mississippi there is an analogous place in Europe, and for every Liechtenstein there is an analogous place in the US. I'm not sure if your comment is a counterargument or neutral commentary.
And this is a good thing. All 50 of them should be broken up anyway.
>I'm in the EU and honestly it's more than frightening
I'm in the EU and I love it. It's not perfect, but I wouldn't want to live in any other place. And in the coming fight for digital freedom EU is almost always on the right side.
Think about every international dollar the Kingdom takes from Aramco: would Aramco or the Kingdom make more profit from it, including taxes on the percent more Aramco makes from it than the Kingdom?
People "don't trust" in the very abstract sense, Mark Zuckerberg. But in a very real sense they don't trust their manager at all, and they know their own manager can see their messages on the "sovereign" messenger. Zuckerberg wants to sell them stuff they don't want on occasion. Their manager ... well they're cheating their manager.
Oh and it doesn't even buy extra security: the platform owners can spy directly through hardware backdoors, they can "update" any app on the phone, and they have the root keys to the secure element, and so it isn't secure to them. And if you look under the covers ... the backend is on AWS? No? Must be on Azure then.
So annoying lots of people, reducing functionality, for no actual security.
Sure sounds like EU governments are behind this ...
For private discussions, you do that on your private device, with a private messenger.
I would say that the digital sovereignty is more about "Entity X doesn't want the US to have access to all of their internal communications". Typically a non-US company or a non-US government should care about that.
I suspect the reason would be far simpler - people use what they are used to, and WhatsApp is the de-facto standard Messenger app all over Europe.
Legally mandate its use for official communications.
They'll do it anyway.
Because, yes, in democracies we have public records laws.
Not sure what you mean here; I happily use whatever work email and messenger systems are provided for work. Most people do. I don't actually mind that IT services have access; they are in any case covered by GDPR.
In some cases there has been a legal crackdown on back channels: https://www.ft.com/content/68c26cf6-52d5-11e3-a73e-00144feab...
The Boris Johnson problem remains, but it can at least be made against the rules for normal work purposes.
(Remember not to type crimes into a computer, people)
“Videotaping this crime spree is the best idea we ever had!”
Please ignore that. It’s daft talk. Definitely record your abuses of power.
"Those 3 guys in a garage would never sell us out! They are paragons of virtue!"
If Julian Assange wasn't the wakeup call necessary to put this into action then I don't think the whims of a few government ministers amount to a hill of beans.
Good luck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...
Some are hosted internally (LLAMA models), other are sourced from commercial providers (Mistral, OpenAI).
I don't know of any software or services that would be banned at my university. People use all sorts of LLMs extensively.
At least in Finland also civil servants are free to use what AI services they want, given they don't put in sensitive information. Just like they can use any search engine they want.
The US is preparing to siphon most of the EUs wealth with this AI bubble. This title is just one in a long line of smoke and mirrors meant to distract Europeans from the fact that trillions are being spent to build datacenters in the US.
And really I'm super glad I don't live in the US with the nightmare regime there. Money isn't everything. Things cost a lot less here too. I don't need to have two jobs to pay for rent and healthcare, when I get fired I'm getting welfare. I don't get shot by random civilians carrying guns or even the ICE Gestapo.
Those things really matter too.
