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: 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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Dark humor is like medical care.
Not everyone gets it.