I'm still stunned by the ICC having their evidence on Azure.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

Public bodies need to have their own infrastructure. Especially when their storage is somewhere that serves shareholders and the country where they are incorporated.

Kinda hope the UN is on independent infrastructure.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

"Multiple sources in the prosecutor’s office said Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is critical to its operations and suspending access would paralyse its investigations. “We essentially store all of our evidence in the cloud,” one said."

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/jan/20/international-criminal-court-icc-braces-swift-trump-sanctions-over-israeli-arrest-warrants

Alex Holst

@onepict That seems unlikely:

$ host un.org
un.org has address 157.150.185.49
un.org has address 157.150.185.92
un.org mail is handled by 0 un-org.mail.protection.outlook.com.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@holsta ouf.

Curioso 🍉 🇺🇦 (jgg)

@onepict

The trend is exactly the opposite.

Even something as basic as email is nearly always managed by Microsoft's Outlook or Google's Gmail nearly everywhere (mail addresses show each organization's domain, but the servers are the same). Otherwise, Outlook and Gmail servers manage your mails as spam.

At this pace, the only public bodies storing data in their own infrastructure will be the ones required by law to do so. Subcontracted to some private company, of course.

I agree, it is a really bad idea, but it is usually cheaper and easier to do so.

Jared “Indie Social Web” White

@onepict

https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/113/895/382/216/537/050/original/2fc8d1f77d6a8885.mp4

Dr Know

@onepict institutions like the ICC and the UN need to be on public infrastructure.
Hosted correctly and securely for them by the public for the public.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@jaredwhite Digital sovereignty is so important.

I do hope @EUCommission is paying attention.

No matter what the salesfolks and the lobbyists say, any public body using products who's companies are incorporated in the US may be subject to USA sanctions.

This is the time to start moving. Soon enough you will be in #Trump and his allies sights.

Don't just trust that this is strongman theater. We can see just where the tech oligarchy sat. With Trump.

…might work for coffee…

@onepict
I am not so sure.
Working with Copernicus Data and seeing the amount of remote sensing data that is needed, you cannot sanely manage that on tight budgets. You will need bigger partners to help you manage it.

Does that mean you should all be in your commercial partner? no.
Ofc you have backups and can migrate to whoever, because your platform is build on decent standards and you have decent Infrastructure documented that can easily be recreated.

…might work for coffee…

@holsta @onepict

This enrages me even more.
GET IPv6. Especially if you are worldwide. The not so rich countries will need it to access your stuff sooner or later.

Angela Scholder

@onepict @jaredwhite @EUCommission I really hope they are making overtime with copying all their data an e-mail...

Angela Scholder

@onepict And the Dutch government, municipalities, etc. have acted just as utterly insane with their, our (!), data in Azure, AWS, and Google clouds.
And that is just only a part of our dependency on US provides services.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@AngelaScholder @jaredwhite @EUCommission western digital black do some external 5tb hard drives for a reasonable price.

They could do a job lot

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict Hey. I've worked on the UN infrastructure, and while there's extensive, secure and self-hosted infrastructure located in places such as Valencia and Brindisi, each body and agency chooses how or if they use it.

Needless to say, everything is severely underfunded and the UN may not attract the best of the best for its ICT teams, so they often choose the path of least resistance and use business grade services such as Microsoft 365.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@alda Yeah, there was a point in time where you could do no wrong picking a Microsoft solution.

Generations of us now were weaned on Microsoft from Windows 3.1 onwards.

It's been the corporate choice. The large organisation choice.

Our landscape just changed.

Angela Scholder

@onepict @jaredwhite @EUCommission Well,5TB is probably a bit small.

I'm generally usingcthe WD Elements 4TB, the Toshiba Canvio 4TB, and the Seagate Expansion 5TB in exFAT to backup project data.
I also have a few Seagate Expansion 10TB disks for backups of our data on a NAS (one 58TB, an other 64TB).

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:

@AngelaScholder @jaredwhite it would take a lot of drives and some organisation.

Be nice if we had those European public clouds

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict Very much, yes. But competence is not something that brings you far in the public sector.

Alda Vigdís 🇵🇸 🇱🇧

@onepict Now, the UN hosting infrastructure exists, it is highly secure and available to any UN body.

But you can imagine that I can't always wait until next Tuesday when they have a committee meeting about my request to have ports 443 and 80 opened in my VMWare instance group's firewall.

Self-hosting requires competence and capacity that simply isn't always available and often depends on US vendors as well.

Angela Scholder

@onepict @jaredwhite We have plenty of Cloud Storage in the EU, but Azure is very easily implemented with Windooze computers.

And, as we have managers without any real digital literacy make the decisions it's very easy to go for the relatively consistent and known cost for the services from MakroSof than having, or keeping, the knowledge in house.