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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.

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.

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 😅

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 non-critical things from 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.

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!

european-alternatives.eu/alter…

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 XP - 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.

🤔 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

Say it with me now:

The cloud is someone else's computer.

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.

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!

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.

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

#uspol

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.

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. 😅

Individuals may be savvy enough to have disconnected, but our major institutions and corporations have not.

I’m not sure the tech bros would allow it, thought. They vacuum a lot of money from us.

I cant roll out software quickly, but in terms of files I'd be alright.

The big problem would be SSO things, those are based on Intune and I don't know how quick I could spin up a different solution and get all programs changed that are SaaS and as such not administrated by ourselves.

Our primary care process could continue, but support would be flying blind.

Annoyingly, this is one of the DR scenarios we've been considering but so far the only real outcome to negate is "everything needs to be selfhosted and split between two datacenters"

As for endpoints, it would be a disaster for around 25% of employees. Most of our primary process uses ipads and webbased software. But the rest live in outlook of course.

The EU's next-generation digital ID system requires a genuine unmodified phone from a US manufacturer.

That entire continent would get a surprised look on its face and fall off the bottom of the screen. Doo-doot doot doot doo-doo-doo-doo doo-doot. Game over.

Russia here. To summarize, probably more than most. Heck, a lot of it was cut from within already.
ISPs are already legally forced to install govt traffic filters and most recently globally trusted CAs stopped issuing certificates for local banks, forcing them to transition to certs issued by the govt's CA – the roots of which are installed manually or available preinstalled in Yandex Browser; there are no mandates to do either, but people prefer their online banking to be accessible.

Visa and MasterCard left in 2022, local MIR and SBP handle electronic payments, major socials have been banned before with citizenry being herded towards govt-affiliated platforms VK and MAX, hounded by incessant ads and competitors not working (inaccessible servers).

Businesses can subsist on pirated software and some local alternatives.

Overall, this disentanglement from the rest of the world is one of many things that made the incursion in 2022 possible. So… mixed feelings about this.

It would take a few weeks for most critical government services to be back on line in Canada.

I and my family outside of the USA would not miss much; we already have working systems for most of those services, including a Euro Office collaborative setup. We have self-hosted email servers on three continents.

But private industry would collapse and self-immolate.

And that includes almost all the food infrastructure - now largely owned by US corporations.

My work? I would be mildly inconvenienced as currently the github action workers are better than the other runners at my disposal, but this would be balanced by the opportunities to make fun of all colleague who went Microsoft 365 "but they promised data was hosted on a datacentre in the country".

Our institute @ethz.ch hosts local instances of gitlab, nextcloud, matrix, etc. that I actively use as redundancy (git) or primary storage (docs).

I genuinely believe people don’t care anymore, my entire life in tech has been a farce and a sham.

good luck to everyone who even gives a fuck

Goes beyond the national plan.

Each organization needs to have a business continuity plan that includes all significant US- based services, devices, and platforms becoming suddenly unavailable or unreliable.

Every bank, hospital, and utility, for example needs to have a documented, tested, and practiced plan

on the whole, I’d say no, they’re not ready. But I think that’s more to do with the belief in the current mind rot passing, or the very real possibility of those companies actually leaving the US if it doesn’t.

The US is a very small market when compared to the rest of the world, those orgs would sink by quarter end. Way over-invested in infrastructure overseas, and I’d imagine it would be seized by government very quickly due to importance as critical national infrastructure.

That doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a digital cataclysm in the interim. There definitely would.

From my standpoint, I’ve been designing resilient systems for a long while, and that means controlling the software and infrastructure, which is deeply unpopular but the only way to avoid these outcomes.

Thanks @Em0nM4stodon I'm reading this at 23:20 and now mixing all of this into the usual how to sleep soundly type thoughts.

Stuff it, I know a nice dry cave that I could happily live in. On fact, I may go and have a look tomorrow anyway.

⬆️ @Em0nM4stodon