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The Helsinki Times reports that Finland's Minister of Finance suggested during a recent foreign policy speech that Finland and the EU could pursue self-sufficiency in computing, in particular to avoid over dependence on just a handful of companies. She pointed out that this overreliance on said companies has become so severe that company policy has already started to override existing relevant legislation. The topic had earlier been brought up by President Sauli Niinistö. So far, though, not even Russia has made progress in that direction despite over a decade passing since announcing plans.
"Cyber self-sufficiency, in practical terms, could mean having a European operating system and web browser. The EU could also function as a provider of certificates," she envisioned in a foreign and security policy speech in Helsinki on Wednesday, 26 February.
Previously:
Moscow Bans Sale of Gadgets Without Russian-Made Software
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:42PM (26 children)
Good luck making a new browser from scratch. Unless you mean reskinning Krome which changes about nothing.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:47PM (4 children)
It was good enough for Microsoft.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday February 27 2020, @08:07PM (3 children)
Actually Microsoft did not make the browser from scratch. They licensed Spyglass Mosaic and built from there.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday February 27 2020, @08:17PM
Sorry, I meant with regards to the rebranded Chrome.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Informative) by DannyB on Thursday February 27 2020, @10:02PM
Microsoft acquired Spyglass for $100,000.00 up front plus a generous royalty percentage of sales.
Microsoft then renamed Spyglass to Internet Explorer.
Guess how many copies of IE were ever sold?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:04PM
> They licensed Spyglass Mosaic
no they scammed them into licensing their product for nothing.
Hey, BTW, "Spyglass" is the most appropriate name for the modern browser.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:52PM (2 children)
Good luck making a new browser from scratch.
What, you only need ~13 billion years, more or less...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:14PM
Are you kidding me? you also need the plus infinity years for the random quantum fluctuation that made the universe bang happen in a proper combination, and you also [ineffable] the ineffable that meta-encodes and meta-enforces the quantum behavior, because even if you formally proved that that behavior is the only conceivable one, you still have to disprove the inconceivable ones, as conceiving stems from being in the conceived universe, so it is tautological.
13 billion years is an estimate from when the bang happened, as proven by the calculations that trace back stuff assuming the bang happened and by interpreting the CMB as the echo.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @02:35PM
13 billion to develop a secure Javascript and animated autoplay spank the monkey, 2 minutes to disable it all back to the Stone Ages.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:31PM
I would suggest calling up the Norwegians and convince them to resurrect the Presto engine.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 27 2020, @09:52PM (8 children)
Chrome is open source. It can, and has, been rebuilt so that it doesn't phone home with every juicy detail of your sordid porn browsing. Why would you have a problem with the EU forking an open source project? They can fork all of Linux, if they care to, and it will be "their own" operating system. BTW, we all realize that Torvalds wasn't an American when he created his operating system? What's that called, again? Torvuldix, or something like that? Yet another 'nix-like OS.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:17PM (3 children)
Linux
Is
Not
Uni
X
Especially after udev, pulseaudio and the init system that shan't be name-d
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 28 2020, @06:15AM (2 children)
FTFY
I mean, how would something that is merely an init system interfere with encryption of your home directory? [launchpad.net]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday February 28 2020, @06:26AM (1 child)
I just noticed that the page I linked to didn't mention systemd; my source was in German and linked to that page; I neglected to scan that page for mention of systemd, sorry about that.
Here's the German page: https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/ecryptfs/ [ubuntuusers.de]
Quote of the relevant part:
Translation:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 28 2020, @07:12AM
first they came for encfs and i didn't speak up because there was ecryptfs
then they came for ecryptfs and i didn't speak up because all my speeches were in the encfs dir and i lost the key.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @07:08AM (2 children)
Because its direction is controlled and will be controlled by Google. Unless you want to completely diverge from them, which would be quite a bit painful task and require quite some euros.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday February 28 2020, @08:07AM (1 child)
In this case, divergence would be good. Google spies too much, and it only benefits Google and a few partners. Google wouldn't have any control over a new browser, let's call it EuroFrugal so we can get a dig in at Google.
I'd like to place a wager here. I'll bet that there are more than enough qualified people in Europe to develop and maintain an indepentent fork of Chrome. If the EU were backing the browser as an indepence from US influence, I'm sure they could hire some of those qualified people to do the job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @08:11AM
That'd be an interesting development, although I don't believe at the moment that it will actually happen.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @01:39PM
As long as the Chromium project is the foundation for a near monopoly of browsers and Google controls the Chromium project, it gives Google an effective control over web standards. So, for example, standards work that would make it harder to do browser fingerprinting will never get any priority either in the standards body or in implementation. Standards work that would make migration away from GMail will never get attention in the standards body or in implementation. And so forth.
Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled Chromium is open source. But even with open source a monoculture is dangerous - especially one controlled by a for-profit entity.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday February 27 2020, @10:00PM
To avoid a monoculture, every country should have their own web browser.
They each should base their browser on Chromium.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday February 27 2020, @11:08PM (6 children)
It's not like nobody knows how to make a web browser. The dev process goes something like this:
1. You get a window with a forward, back, reload, and home button, an address bar, and a menu.
2. You get it to go out to a URL, download content, and display the source contents with no formatting.
3. You get it to display the contents reading HTML formatting more-or-less correctly, but without worrying about fonts, CSS, or Javascript.
4. You get it to handle links.
5. You get it to display the contents as properly formatted HTML with CSS and fonts.
6. You add in a Javascript engine. This will be the really hard part. Or you borrow one from another web browser.
Is it a pain to do? Yes. Is it impossible? Heck no, and we know this because many organizations have done this.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday February 28 2020, @05:37AM (3 children)
Make it a generalized document viewer. For steps 3 and 5, why limit the program to just HTML? Instead, make it out of a generic XML engine and then it can potentially handle other formats than (x)HTML, an important one being OpenDocument Format. There are already many web browsers out there, even if only a few engines any more. So if they are going to reinvent the wheel, they could at least invent a better one.
Javascript though? A for point 6 there, I'm disappointed, to say the least possible about it, that it is perceived by some as being part of the web. What on earth is beneficial about running unsigned, unverified programs from random external sites on my computer thus giving them access to my system and network?
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 28 2020, @07:20AM
yes, javascript should be limited to UI elements. It is already dangerous that way. The trend is towards javascript frameworks, while I considered that most of my sites do not really need to be rendered by pulling data from a db, i am going json to templates to static html and the site is lightning fast, has no cookies and tracking, and all I need to care for is bugs in the www server which is completely interchangeable anyway.
If I needed a db, I would test the http://gun.eco [gun.eco] database though, it is fascinating. if it works.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @01:58PM
With respect to Javascript, I don't think it's going away on a large scale without an economic revolution. The advertising uses JS to the tune of tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars a year, you won't get that shut down without attacking the industry directly. Google owns Chromium, they sure as hell aren't going to adopt anything that reduces Javascript's power.
Even if JS is bad, I think WebAssembly is interesting. It seems to take the original concept of Java but do it right. Write one, run anywhere, much better sandboxing than the JVM, and from what I understand lower performance overhead than the JVM too (though I could be wrong). And while your C-to-WebAssembly or C++-to-WebAssembly code can still have race conditions and memory leaks, and maybe (it's not clear to me) use-after-free errors, as far as I understand it the WebAssembly runtime protects against buffer overruns and stack smashing.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 28 2020, @05:01PM
I don't like the fact that some sites are completely non-functional without it, but that's where we are right now, and Aunt Tillie isn't going to go for a browser that doesn't work on their favorite website. This hypothetical new browser might be able to do a better job of sandboxing it than what's currently out there, but even so there's going to be a tradeoff of things that don't work as a result.
Now I get the argument that those websites are broken by design, but the tools to make those websites work should exist and a setting should exist to break them on purpose.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @07:12AM
It's an always moving target. While you are doing all of that HTML will be doing genetic engineering.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Friday February 28 2020, @09:47PM
7. You add in a KeepTheJavascriptUnderControl engine.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.