A friend of mine worked on the team that wrote the EU AI legislation. He is a fucking genius and so are his colleagues. There is little chance he can simply “change the definition of open source”. He might be able to challenge the EU definition in court and postpone paying,but be will pay.

The brussels bureaucracy is a absolutely fed up with US tech bro antics by now and both Microsoft and Google have already learned their lesson. Zuckerbergs Meta still tries to resist,but he will fall as well.

Funnily this is absolutely speed up by their antics in the US as this leads to more and more lawmakers here realising that the European societies need to be protected from them the same way it needs to be protected from China.

If you are really sure about the disk space requirements you can easily get one of the endless mini PCs with a N100 or a small Intel on it and chuck two NVMe’s in it and let these run as RAID1.

Have a decent backup plan,though.

I really really would love them…if only they would allow ECC RAM and more RAM in total. Then they would have built a killer device.

And then your house burns down,you get robbed or the cops come and take your devices away.

And your local database is encrypted?

Vaultwarden is selfhosted and audited.

Besides: Not everyone wants to selfhost and not everyone should self host.

Posteo is another alternative for Mail that a lot of people overlook.(And far more “real privacy” than fucking Proton)

Bitwarden sadly still is a US company and while it hosts in EU as well, some might not think this is enough. In that case Vaultwarden can be selfhosted easily.

It is not that much work to actually get rid of most possibly unreliable US services,but it’s far more work to get other people to switch as not all services are interoperable yet…

Hetzner is rock solid in my experience (and I run multiple server with them both for private and business use). I really can’t complain.

I have my S3 backups at Ionos these days, they are also fairly large, only marginally more expensive and so far it’s working well. Their cloud/VPS service (the proper one,not the consumer one) is also decent and offers a few (rarely needed) options that Hetzner doesn’t have.

Proton has always been sketchy - and I caught flak for it countless times, especially here. But: A company claiming they are "private’ and “secure” because they operate under Swiss privacy laws is already sketchy from the beginning. Why? Because Swiss privacy laws suck,are the worst in Europe and Switzerland is a country known for multiple cases of major intelligence agency overreach - especially towards foreigners and cross-border traffic.

Legally the Swiss intelligence services can order any “service provider” (that includes proton) to provide them access to traffic coming from foreign countries - this also includes the mandate to provide “technical means”, which is often seen as backdoors. And to make things better the service providers are not allowed to talk about it.

This alone is a problem. In Protons case what makes matters even worse is the fact that they are an US company de facto operating from the US and therefore are bound by the homeland security act and similar legislation.

So in the end both the Swiss and US services might read your data.

And in two weeks there will be a special executive order to free his Tech Bro oligarch buddies from these tarrifs so Meta and Elmo are not forced to pay a dollar extra.