New blogpost:

[colman@mastodon.ie]

@neil there’s a fair bit of nationalist and libertarian nonsense about it.

[annehargreaves@ioc.exchange]

@neil I think of digital sovereignty in terms of autonomy as opposed to subservience/victimhood/exploitation. So sovereignty need not have a geograhical aspect but one of rights and consent - using those tech resources & providers that are relatively more respectful of one's autonomy regardless of whether they are paid for or not. Viewed from this standpoint it allows choice by the vast majority of users who are not in a position to develop/host their own tech. Sovereignty means using tech, not being used by it.

[coolcalmcollected@mastodon.social]

@neil

I just listened to this episode last night and is directly related to questions asked in your blog post

*UNLOCKED* Scaffold to Heaven | TRASHFUTURE

Riley has been driven insane by a… company hinging on a single Australian man that appears to be bamboozling the British State with complex financial chicanery, and now you all have to hear the story of how NScale started out as a landlord for bitcoin miners and became the government’s best hope for a “Sovereign AI” but that has only a scaffolding yard to its name. Except it also doesn’t own the scaffolding yard either. If you want to hear more bonus episodes like this one, consider signing up on our Patreon! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here:https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

(trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com)

[szescstopni@circumstances.run]

@neil Interesting thoughts. Friends are almost finished moving a legal office to a self-hosted FOSS setup. Sovereign enough for the owners. And of course software comes from all over the world, but nothing requires external US services.

[lonm@social.vivaldi.net]

@neil For me as an individual the most important part is having a reasonable assurance that I'll never wake up and find someone else has turned all my stuff off overnight, and strategies if it ever did happen.

Your blog has the example if GitHub (either of their own volition or being ordered to) stopped sharing certain code - that would be a huge pain, but code still exists, through the distributed nature of git, and I could rehost elsewhere.

Contrast this with a major email provider turning off my access - far more difficult to recover from if I didn't sync mail offline, copy my address book, and have an alternate recovery account for every single service I use.

[szescstopni@circumstances.run]

@neil They will. This is a matter of days. I started talking to my legal friends, and some have expressed some interest too.

[shapr@recurse.social]

@neil lately I've been saying "landlord free" and/or "cage free" as a visceral way to express sovereignty and decentralization.

[penguin42@mastodon.org.uk]

@neil For an individual I don't think the concept makes sense - you are dependent on others; for a large country,(-group) you can choose enough software with support in that country(-group).
Maybe digital Sovereignty was to some degree xenophobic; but once the country has pulled the plug on people for no good reason, it's a real worry not just a fear.
Relying on _one_ external country is dangerous - be that the US or China or whereever.
The same is true of relying on _one_ local provider!

[cy@fedicy.us.to]

Good, but... it sounds uncomfortably like the tired old argument techbros bring up again and again, along the lines of "You can't read every line of open source you haven't done an audit of every single line of open source of every dependency and predicted every possible program state, therefore it's just as bad as closed source!"

To put it simply, security is not a boolean. Maybe you can't be sure that someone didn't sneak something malicious into open source somewhere, but you can sure as hell assume that someone did if the source isn't open. When you use binary distros, you're trusting that the distro compiled from the source they claim, but you're not trusting the original writer of the software with absolutely everything. And it's not illegal to reverse engineer open source software.

So yeah you'll rely on others. You just won't be at the whims of some crummy scam artist nearly as totally as if you use SaaSS.

[samueljohnson@mstdn.social]

@annehargreaves @neil Very good. Exploitation & consent may cover much of it in practice but I'd add one factor very explicitly because most have now encountered it

Freedom from potential imposition of unilateral changes in terms and conditions.

I say potential because even harmless but non transparent changes are undesirable.

My Brother laser printer yesterday:

New firmware found: Install Y/N?

Nothing about it online. Consent without disclosure is an oxymoron.