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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: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:47PM (3 children)
We need self-sufficiency in protocols too...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:51PM (2 children)
I mean, I get what you're saying. But it doesn't have to be turtles all the way down.
But standards bodies, good ones at least, don't do the equivalent of fucking shipping a patch that fundamentally changes how a program operates and autoupdates all your shit regardless of how you want things to be. Or predicate your security on accepting the patch.
There's an extent to which Microsoft, Google, and to a much lesser extent Mozzilla, get to dictate how the next versions of HTTP, HTML, and JS will work. But there's also a huge open public warfare about it that encourages at least some public participation and governments can throw their weight around if it really matters.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 28 2020, @02:31PM
Let the free market work it out, like they did with phone chargers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday February 28 2020, @04:59PM
Well. Not (good) standards bodies, but of course the end-user application and OS-vendors do it all the time.
Witness the raft of "deprecated" and "removed" and "obsoleted" features, system calls, and even CPU architectures, that are thrown under the bus by everyone from compiler- through OS-vendors. Some of this is very regular — and very little of it is reasonably justifiable outside of market manipulation for profit.
Comm protocols are constantly mutating as well, again under the aegis of entities like Google, who (for instance) have been running a campaign to pressure site owners into HTTPS, and then there's the Google-originated push for those AMP pages — mutation is the order of the day, and there's probably no way to stop the "new, shiny!" crowd from keeping at it.
There's an awful lot of "we know what's good for you" when in fact, they don't.
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Not everyone gets it.