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A comment on The town is no longer friendly for business.

Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by a_a_r_o_n on Sunday February 19, 2012 @06:52AM (#3609160)
"My servers are in Germany."

The author's granttree is at .co.uk, but woobius is at .com. My understanding is that the US claims domain over anything serving .com and .org, and that first world countries (do we say that anymore?) will roll over for the US on domain issues.

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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by colbyh on Sunday February 19, 2012 @11:58AM (#3609690)
Domain issues aside, Germany's own privacy laws (at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the US) are just as likely to cause anti-business sentiment. I would hate to build a product that collects user data on German servers.

A decent comparison can be found here: http://math-www.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html#privacy

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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by rmc on Sunday February 19, 2012 @08:45AM (#3609320)
(do we say that anymore?)

No, we say "developed countries"

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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by swombat on Sunday February 19, 2012 @09:12AM (#3609370)
I'm not managing the woobius.com domain anymore at this point. swombat.com itself is a dot-com, for sure, and so it is vulnerable to ICE-like shutdown, but not to the level that a GoDaddy domain would be.
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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by skrebbel on Sunday February 19, 2012 @07:58AM (#3609241)
The .com doesn't make random US agencies able to look what's on the servers. Worst case scenario, they could block the domain. Quite a difference, I'd say.

This is my reason for never deploying an app on anything that runs on e.g. AWS (thus incl anything on Heroku). It's like personally, directly, with no notification and no warranty, selling out your users to the NSA.

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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by swombat on Sunday February 19, 2012 @09:13AM (#3609376)
You can get AWS on european servers, and iirc that falls under digital safe harbour laws, so the US govt can't get access to it.
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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by thematt on Sunday February 19, 2012 @12:52PM (#3609828)
I don't think that's true, given that Amazon is a US-based company -- so they can be compelled to turn over data as a result of the Patriot Act, etc. Microsoft admits this is the case with them and I suspect it's true for other cloud providers as well.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/microsoft-admits-patri...

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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by toyg on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:43PM (#3610520)
This. Having worked for a few multinationals, I know that any US-based business is subject to the Patriot Act, no matter where their servers are located. Obviously they could choose to refuse access, if they really want to experience Guantanamo's tropical weather, but chances are that Interpol agreements will find a way to get that data anyway. Also, as soon as data enters your US-based network they can tap it, which makes your hosting arrangements irrelevant as long as you have US-based clients. The only practical difference is whether relevant US authorities can just show up at the facilities and get cracking or not.

Besides, it's all pointless anyway; any mainstream business (a category including any mainstream cloud provider) wants to be on the good side of the US government, so they'll bend over backwards at the first occasion.

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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by joering2 on Sunday February 19, 2012 @11:34AM (#3609650)
the Dot Com MU shutdown was an international operation with join-forces used from many different countries. What makes you think that if "US govt" wants to access/shut down your domain/servers that are Europe-based, they won't ask their French, UK, German, or any other European country allies for help?
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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by skrebbel on Monday February 20, 2012 @03:16AM (#3611726)
Asking an ally for help and simply sending out a "please turn over that data, mr Zuckerberg" is quite a difference. One is top diplomacy, interpol, the whole shebang. The other is something plenty NSA people can do on a whim.
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Re:The town is no longer friendly for business by neilk on Sunday February 19, 2012 @04:32PM (#3610481)
SOPA claimed dominion over any domain served with an ARIN-allocated IP address. So that also includes .ca (Canada) and Caribbean domains.

If I had a time machine, after I killed Hitler, I'd go back and fix DNS so it didn't map to geography or institutional type. There is just no reason for it.

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