Microsoft has been ordered to provide documents stored in an Ireland data centre to the US government. http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2014/08/microsoft-ordered-hand-over-dublin-data. Will this hinder US companies offering cloud services?
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Eire is Part of the USA According to US Court
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @12:24PM
Rescuing Eire
(Score: 1) by isostatic on Monday August 04 2014, @12:32PM
Liberating
Remember many Americans thing that parts of Ireland is an occupied country
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday August 04 2014, @08:12PM
*think
Wouldn't some Northern Irish agree with that?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday August 04 2014, @10:51PM
No more than some texans believe that the us occupies Texas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 08 2014, @06:31PM
"Ayn Rand ended her days on Social Security and Medicare"
As will Bill Gates and Barack Obama. It's a retirement thing at 65. Everyone who has paid taxes gets them.
(Score: 5, Funny) by LaminatorX on Monday August 04 2014, @12:54PM
I couldn't resist running those back to back. ;)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Subsentient on Monday August 04 2014, @12:27PM
I hope so. Death to the cloud!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @01:55PM
Of course it will not hinder US companies offering cloud services. It may, however, make non-US companies think twice about accepting that offer.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday August 04 2014, @06:44PM
SN is running in the "cloud" : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday August 04 2014, @07:41PM
I meant to write that linode is a VPS provider, but looking at their site they're now "Linode Cloud"... What a shame. I'll consider moving my instances elsewhere, not.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday August 04 2014, @07:57PM
Heh, yeah, that wouldn't have unintended consequences.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Monday August 04 2014, @12:27PM
"Oh dear, the data that *was* held there, has been moved to another data-centre as part of a automated script. What a shame"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @02:04PM
Ideally, this is how it should turn out (but then, I know quite well that this is a dream only):
"Well, here's the data. Sorry, it's encrypted, we never store data unencrypted. No, we don't have the decryption key. Only our customers have the decryption key to their data."
(Score: 1) by wantkitteh on Monday August 04 2014, @03:36PM
Kim Dotcom's latest venture [mega.co.nz] is based on the premise of that very conversation taking place.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 05 2014, @04:47AM
But SpiderOak beat Dotcom to the punch.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by wantkitteh on Tuesday August 05 2014, @08:24AM
Cool! See that, $UNJUST_GOVERNMENT_ENTITY? The moles got themselves helmets this time!
(Score: 2) by Foobar Bazbot on Monday August 04 2014, @06:39PM
Thank you Mario!
But our princess is in another data-centre!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Horse With Stripes on Monday August 04 2014, @12:27PM
No, this won't because we all predicted that US courts (acting in the best interests of the US government and their alphabet soup of TLA's) would rule anything owned by, or under the control of, a US company or one of its subsidiaries would be subject to US laws as well as unlawful acts of strong-arming, coercion and clandestine operations.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WillR on Monday August 04 2014, @01:48PM
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Monday August 04 2014, @03:53PM
You mean totally legal. I'm not so sure about its legitimateness.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @07:14PM
Legitimacy.
(Score: 3) by WillR on Monday August 04 2014, @08:39PM
(Score: 1) by present_arms on Monday August 04 2014, @01:08PM
I took all my stuff off "the cloud" and backed it up locally. Then made a backup of the backup and moved it to another location. There is no way I'd put anything important in the cloud, one day I'll need it and it won't be there.
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday August 04 2014, @09:03PM
Why does backing it up to the cloud mean you have to put your only copy there?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Monday August 04 2014, @09:45PM
Good point, and it's worth a self note to myself to post before partaking in a couple of brandy's. I could have worded that much better :)
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: -1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @01:35PM
This can't be the first time a situation like this came up. How were these situations handled previously?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @02:01PM
With explicit international cooperation, I suspect.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Monday August 04 2014, @01:50PM
No, that's nothing like what they've said, and it just sounds childish to put it like that.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khchung on Monday August 04 2014, @02:11PM
I was just going to write a post with the same subject.
Since Microsoft had some money in the US, and EU court had ordered Microsoft to pay some fine in the past, the headline would then be "US is part of the EU according to EU court".
I know we don't have much submissions, but sometimes, it is better to have fewer higher quality items, so people can focus more comments on those.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday August 04 2014, @03:51PM
The topic is interesting.
Microsoft and most cloud providers are arguing to the courts that the US justice department cannot seize assets in another country. They're not trying to play semantics or protect the drug dealer in question. They said "you don't have jurisdiction in another country" and the judge replied "if it's digital, it's not another country".
The US cloud providers just got handed a huge blow. Competitors must feel pretty good.
Expect congress to get mightily funded to resolve that problem as soon as they're back from doing less nothing than usual.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday August 04 2014, @05:55PM
Better headline:
US company still subject to US laws even if they store some data on an overseas server.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @06:59PM
Are you suggesting that companies should not have to follow local laws and regulations for whichever country in which they're located, regardless of their origin? We should make offshoring even more lucrative and beneficial and simply make them above all laws!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @03:43PM
Editors: please clamp down on trollish, misleading, and exaggerating headlines.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 04 2014, @04:25PM
Fully agreed. The court ruled that MS is a US company and so is subject to U.S. law.
If MS and co have a problem with that, perhaps they'd care to throw in with the citizens (for once) and protest the NSA and other government snoops.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday August 04 2014, @07:48PM
Trouble is, the judge may have ordered the subsidiary in Eire to violate Irish law. I'm not really sure that happened, but if not it was extremely close to such a situation, and IIUC no legal distinction was made as to whether the demanded action would be illegal for the subsidiary to perform.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday August 04 2014, @09:26PM
That is a huge legal gray area that may well come to the forefront. The U.S. courts have jurisdiction to order MS to turn over information that it is in possession of (wherever it may be physically stored) but the EU court has jurisdiction over data physically stored in the EU.
Lawyers could battle for a very long time deciding how that resolves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @10:04PM
Beyond just childish, it is almost as if instead of creating a new community site for nerds, they've decided to compete with slashdot for the lowest common denominator. Except, one of these sites has enough traffic to make money, and the other doesn't.
Presumably we're being sold out not for cash, but for the fantasy of getting cash for having sold us out. Goes along with the libertarian/right wing philosophy we're also subjected to.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dublet on Monday August 04 2014, @02:05PM
Can we get Unicode support already?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 1) by Buck Feta on Monday August 04 2014, @02:25PM
I don't know why they call it Ireland in the first place. I was there years ago and found very little ire.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 2) by dublet on Monday August 04 2014, @04:26PM
You must not've gone anywhere near Northern Ireland. It also helps if you're not English. :)
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome. [dublet.org]"
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 04 2014, @02:27PM
Söylent supports Unicode.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 04 2014, @02:35PM
(Score: 2) by drussell on Monday August 04 2014, @03:25PM
IIRC, you can use standard the html 'entity' or whatever they call it, like:
π should give you a pi: π
π (in hex) should work also: π
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday August 04 2014, @04:17PM
Thanks. Silly me, I was missing the semi-colon.
(Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Monday August 04 2014, @03:27PM
Nerdfest wrote:
Try using &#nnnn; e.g.: Öire. The current version of the slash code has many known problems with Unicode / UTF-8.
Unicode support, well technically UTF-8, is under development and a [partial(*)] implementation is scheduled for release during the next site update (which should be any day now). Kudos to: The Mighty Buzzard [soylentnews.org] who did the implementation; I only helped with testing.
You can play around with the current development implementation on our development server at: http://dev.soylentnews.org [soylentnews.org]
(*) Partial implementation because the database in which all of the comments and stories reside needs to be updated to support the entire UTF-8 scheme. At the moment, support exists for Unicode characters 0x00-0xFF. When the database has been updated, we will have full support.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @03:47PM
Éire
Courtesy of GNOME Character Map
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @07:22PM
> Éire (accent over the E) is not the same as Eire.
Irie man, [urbandictionary.com] no worries!
(Score: 1) by wantkitteh on Monday August 04 2014, @03:43PM
The UK government's recent "emergency" data retention laws, while claimed to be exactly the same as the EU data retention directive they're replacing, have quietly expanded their jurisdiction in the same way. It's like the EU said "this law is intolerable, get rid of it!" and the UK said "this law isn't intolerable enough, put it back and unleash the kraken as well for good measure!"
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday August 04 2014, @04:00PM
And yet, they still can't extract taxes from companies using Ireland as a tax haven.
(Alternative pun about it being where the dyslexic people in Pennsylvania live.)
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04 2014, @04:49PM
i dont know. but if it's "company data" then this is a good thing. it means that a company cannot go on environmental damage exploits (cheap cheap) in another country but will be held accountable to the laws of the country they are originally based in/from.
on the other hand if the data is from a service like ..uhm ..ah... "free email" which is privacy sensitive at the moment then it maybe should be implemented as parent poster has noted: provide the actual physical data storage location but encrypted so only the person creating the data can decrypt it.
obviously a company employee could then use said "free service: for .. umh ..ah ... company affairs : P