I think the doomerism was all to get that moat. There’s no vendor lockin either, even if you’re using the API. You can switch between providers really easily.

100%. I’ve had the same email going on 20 years. It’s been hosted in a dozen different places. It was on proton for a while, it’s on mailbox.org now. I can move again in an hour.

Agree with all your points but none of those reasons are we supposedly live in a democracy and the vast majority of us don’t want these data centres.

Not even just boomers anymore. I get AI slop shared with me by all ages. I just tell people now assume nothing online is real.

Me too, was a paying customer for several years. Perks of using your own domain. I can switch providers in under an hour.

In UK in 2010, 10 new nuclear plants were announced. Since then 5 older plants have been shut leaving us with 5 active. 1 of the 10 new ones started construction and it’s massively over budget and delayed.

In the same time we’ve added about 20GW of solar.

My first thought. Everything is going to look the same soon isn’t it

I was looking for graphics the other day and the stock images sites I’ve used before were virtually all AI slop. Why would I pay for that?

How do you know the software running on the voting machine you’re about to vote on is the software that was audited?

You go get all the machines together, make sure all the software runs on the newest version and it’s correct and it’s configured properly with the candidates. When you’ve got to distribute them to the polling stations, they’ve got to be kept securely between audit and polling day. Your adversaries are foreign state actors who want to manipulate your elections.

And then at the end of the day you have to get the results off the machines. You have to trust that the machine gave you the correct numbers and then you have to get those numbers all together without anyone having the opportunity to manipulate them.

Usually at this point someone comes up with the idea of a paper backup so the machine prints like a receipt of who you voted for that you can put in a ballot box.

If you’re doing that and then count all of the paper ballots to verify the machine count, why even bother with the machines? Just have people vote on a paper ballot with a pencil and count them by hand. The ways to attack paper ballot just don’t scale. You might be able to manipulate a few votes in one polling station, but you’d need a massive operation to do it across the whole country.

It can’t spread across networks because it doesn’t run locally. The “agent” is running in their data centre the entire time. It should be very easy to stop it

We’re on AWS at work. I use Hetzner personally.

The main issue with switching is the services. On AWS we use KMS, SQS, DynamoDB. On hertzner we’d have to run an instance with software for that ourselves and then rewrite systems and do migrations etc. That’s the expense.

Also KMS has no alternate because it’s not just software. It’s a HSM. So where do we store the master keys on Hetzner?

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to do it, not up to me unfortunately.

I’ve been explicitly told not to use any open source for a project. I don’t even know what language I’d write it in. We ended up not even quoting for it in the end.

Yeah this only makes sense if the builds start diverging from the open source code, extra features that are closed source.

Hertzner storage box. I think it’s €13/month for 5tb. Just storage with ssh interface. I use restic but most backup systems should work with it.

That would make sense, i hadn’t put that together but they had a lot of embedded control systems. This was water treatment but entirely separate from the control systems but i can see them having that a standard requirement

Did a project several years where the customrr required that the server we delivered specifically for the project never use more than 50% CPU or RAM. No requirements about how fast it actually performs its intended function, just that it can only utilise half the available resources while doing it.