When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.
The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor’s access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.
While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.
Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.
It is a framework that looks to tackle the government’s digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation.
As a European (British) I hope Europe can become as autonomous as possible.
We can trade with foreign entities when they’re being reasonable, but at the moment a few of them are being unreasonable.
As a European (British)
Still feels weird seeing that sentence.
In a way maybe it is weird. Anyway, whether the UK rejoins the EU in the coming years or not, I hope the UK cooperates with the EU where it makes sense. The UK and the EU both have an interest in a prosperous Europe which doesn’t need to rely on unreliable or unfriendly states (US, China, Russia).
It’s also weird that those three countries, Russia, China and USA, are becoming so frequently talked about in the same light. The speed that the US has joined the other two in being referred to as both unreliable and unfriendly is incredible, and kinda scary really. I know it will take time to repair the damage but I hope they turn it around soon.
I guess the American people need to decide whether they want to be friends with Europe again. Trump got 49.8% of the popular vote in 2024, so not a majority, but still a lot of people. So they need to choose between continuing isolation in 2028 (e.g. Vance) or a leader who is a bit more sensible (e.g. Gavin Newsom).
In all likelihood, the vote was compromised. And anyway, the majority of the people of the U.S. do want to be friends with Europe. The problem is, once a fascist gets into power with a vote, it is very unlikely for them to leave power until they are dead. History shows us this much.
Many experts in the US have said that US votes are reliable though, right? Trump kept casting doubt on US votes, saying that Biden could only have won in 2020 due to manipulation, and experts were saying that actually the US voting system is reliable.
I definitely believe that many Americans want to be friends with Europe, yes. I also think there are quite a few Americans who love Trump and dislike Europe for whatever reasons. I hope America will elect somebody more sensible than Trump in 2028, but I don’t think it’s yet clear what will happen.
It’s already been established that it’s definitely possible, but we haven’t had any vote audits, so if it did happen, we wouldn’t necessarily even know. Alao, with all the crap that Elon was pulling in the last election, I find it really difficult to believe that there was no manipulation, and at this point going forward, it’s out in the open entirely.
We have cases of Republicans stealing voting machine, hard drives prior to the presidential election too.
https://electiontruthalliance.org/ has enough convincing content for me.
Am I cynical? Sure, but the nationwide and widespread efforts at voter disenfranchisement are enough for me to be satisfied that my doubt is valid. If this is what they’re doing right in front of their faces, then why wouldn’t they also be taking actions that we don’t know about?
The US really pissed away any strategic advantage it may have had with that little stunt sanctioning a few justices and prosecutors.
It made it plainly obvious to anyone paying attention that American software cannot be trusted, and caused a bunch of countries to start preparing their exit strategy for building down their dependence on American software.
And for what?.. So that they could be an annoyance to some people prosecuting the war criminal, and friend of the US government, Benjamin Netanyahu? That sounds like such a small win, if it causes you to lose the leverage completely.
Edit: Not that I mind. It’s a good thing that it’s this plainly obvious that we cannot trust a reliance on anything American.
It makes it cost a whole lot less political capital in order to get governments to move away from these dependencies.The damage done by this president is literally irrepairable.
We can only hope…
Some innocent people live there.
There is innocent people in my country too. That doesn’t mean we are somehow owed the same privileged position that the US has held for decades.
Unless they’re using Chinese microprocessors like LoongArm, their CPUs were partly designed in Israel, and may well have backdoors for Mossad to use in the direst emergencies. Running a sovereign Linux (or OpenBSD or 9front or TempleOS for that matter) doesn’t mitigate these.
If they are running Chinese CPUs, replace “Mossad” with “PLA”.
Hardware sovereignty is another whole chapter that takes a lot more time and preparation to tackle. Modern semiconductor production capabilities cannot be created by a bunch of coders like adapting NixOS - you need to plan and construct high-tech facilities, and those are dependent on an actual nightmare of logistic problems that have only been solved a number of times all over the world - for the latest silicon using EUV that number is one.
There is a push to create the capability for Europe to be sovereign in this space too, but this will probably take decades to finish regardless of how many ressources you throw at it.
But making sure that the US cannot turn off your administration by remote switch is a lot easier to accomplish, and very much needed.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
“I want to improve society somewhat”
Good point. Better keep using Windows until we can build 100% of the components in our own living rooms.
Ah yes, only perfection counts.
If you’re not doing 101% of what you could and then some, why even bother in the first place?
