Oof, clutch win against the US Company, as a US Citizen…You don’t want our irresponsible and stupid corporations buying your stuff and running it. It would be a privacy nightmare! It would be expected that The Netherlands would protect their citizens from the forces of nasty US companies.
As a us citizen I saying that is a very smart call.
Finally some good news
G O O D
Helaas kunt u niet inloggen
I don’t know Dutch but I choose to believe this says “hey cunt youre not logged in”
‘U kunt’ is a valid Dutch sentence
So is ‘Dank u’ , which is mildly amusing in English, but quite sordid in french (it’s pronounced similar to ‘dans cul’ which means ‘in the ass’)
I speak Dutch and this is entirely correct.
Something like “We couldn’t log you in” I think
That’s correct
It’s incredible how easy Dutch is to understand for a German lol
basically
Meanwile, in Finland, we outsourced our fucking vote counting system, to god-damn AWS.
Sounds like you guys are going to love having Putin be your best friend.
Poor Finland, stuck between a rock and a hard place this time.
…isn’t UpCloud Finnish?
E: looks like they didnt go through with it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-24/finland-shelves-plan-to-move-election-platform-to-amazon-servers
Oh good.
That the plan got frozen wasn’t nearly as publicized as it initially passing.
I wonder why that might be.
News agencies brought everyone and their dogs to give their opinions on why using foregin (and USA specifically) provider for voting systems was a bad idea. Then there was plenty of articles what the decision is being reconsidered and eventually a handful of items noting that we are actually staying in domestic datacenters. Rational decisions apparently don’t get as many clicks.
But there’s still plenty of our data (banks, insurance companies, etc) using AWS/Azure which should be considered as a national security issue, but those are private companies, so government can’t (or won’t) interfere as strongly.
Good
Fuck the US and their bullshit capitalism. Do not trust them. They are the enemy, which feels wild to say but we’ve long memories, and education, and we’ve seen this before.
I find it so stupid that countries would outsource important stuff to any other country. You never know what the future holds.
As an American, I approve of this statement.
This is so great to hear. It would be great if I could stop seeing the EU capitulate to Orange on the news. From the perspective of American citizens it is very annoying, and you will ingratiate yourselves to us by pushing back against him.
It’s probably a tricky balancing act for EU leaders. On the one hand they want to quietly step away from the US, on the other they are well aware that one of his tantrums could start WWIII.
They’re in that situation when you wind up talking to the violent lunatic at a party and you are quietly trying to remove yourself without flipping their switch.
We are probably already there but they just won’t say… all quiet on the western front…
I thought you were talking about Orange the Telco, and I thought, “shit, what did orange do this time” lol!
I’m American and the US is my enemy too
Has anyone coined a term like “digital imperialism”? I think it’s quite fitting.
Iannis Varoufakis (there’s probably 2+ typos there) has coined something like digital feudalism.
I think it makes more sense when imperialism is between countries like in this case, but if you get rid of imperialism you still have feudalism between the tech companies and the users of their monopolistic products, on their terms.
Technofascism
Since the article is in Dutch, let me try to provide a little extra context:
- It’s not actually the company that runs DigiD, that’s Logius, who is part of the ministry of the interior.
- It’s about the cloud-hosting company that DigiD runs on. The DigiD code was open sourced, though it looks like the GitHub repository is now archived (https://github.com/MinBZK/woo-besluit-broncode-digid-app)
- It really is used for everything related to authentication with government services. Doing your taxes, scheduling an appointment with the city government for <insert anything>, scheduling a doctors appointment, getting a prescription refilled, on and on.
Correct. It’s the cloud provider, not the app that was going to be sold.
The Dutch government claims it does not have the expertise to host it themself.
One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.
I mean, it’s not as if a Digital Cloud is any more than a bunch of servers running somewhere with a direct connection to the Internet.
Then again, this is The Netherlands, which is has been ruled by a very Neoliberal right-wing party (in various coalitions) for over a decade so it makes sense that the government there would have even essential software for interacting with Public Services be operated by the Private Sector.
One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.
I read (no citation here, I forget where I saw this now) a while back somebody involved saying that their procurement policies require they accept the lowest bid tended, as long as its legally submitted and not obviously a scam.
So yes, typical neo-liberal right-wing mentality is very much at fault I suspect.
Scheduling a doctor’s appointment and getting a prescription refilled? I’ve never used my DigiD for that, nor do I think it’s even an option here; it’s pretty much all telephone. And as for the source code, only part of the source code was published (as a result of ‘Wet Open Overheid verzoek’: a request for transparency); and I believe they’re migrating from Github to code.overheid.nl.
Actually it is used. My doctor does it but still has the option with a regular account.
If its that core to the country maybe the govt should buy it
The company actually inquired, our government said no. That’s what you get when capitalists are at the wheel and expect “the market” will magically solve everything.
The title is a bit misleading by the way, it’s about the company that hosts the infrastructure, Solvinity. The application itself is built and maintained by a government agency called Logius.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t DigiD created by Logius, which is part of the “Interior Ministry” to roughly translate into English?
I didn’t had the time to go into that much detail, but that is correct. 🙂
And they call themselves Capitalist.
As an American: Good!
Good.
Good.
It’s always funny (and sad) when someone from the USA points out that almost all internet services are US owned, not European, it sounds like they did all the work developing the modern internet, and while Americans really did a lot, they also bought a lot of services created in other countries.
The Web was born in that well known American institution, CERN, invented by that well known American citizen, Tim Berners-Lee.
Internet itself (the network) is based on arpanet which was developed by ARRPA now known as DARPA which part of the US Department of Defense.
Doing some of the work developing the modern Internet isn’t the same as doing all the work developing the modern internet.
Don’t know what you are referring to as Internet but I was referring to the low level infrastructure and the technologies at that level. Also Internet != www.
modern Internet
isn’t just the OSI stack all the way to IP.
CERN is Swiss though and Tim Berners-Lee is English.
Yeah, that was kinda the point I was making.
PS: And CERN is actually an international project, rather than just Swiss, though located in Switzerland.
Thought I was sensing sarcasm in your message.
PS: And CERN is actually an international project, rather than just Swiss, though located in Switzerland.
Quite true.
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Turns out the company in questioned already was bought by a UK company, so already isn’t even Dutch (or even EU anymore). But at least it’s not American (the concern is that American laws potentially give the American government a lot of access to the Dutch citizen data). Companies owned by companies. It gets complicated.
Formal online authentication is apparently everything :p
