alt Hacker NewsFinally!
The entire country has been clamouring for this for weeks, and the government has been completely silent about it. A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option, and there wasn't a lot of confidence that the government would do that.
The whole reason for this is that Solvinity host DigiD, the Dutch e-ID system that handles authentication to all government and many other sensitive systems (healthcare). With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company, regardless of where it's hosted, this system clearly should be kept out of American hands.
Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies. No idea when they're going to do something about that.
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> A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option,
Given what we know now, this seems perfectly logical. It's just that we don't know what else is going on behind the scenes.
I'm sure there was some negotiations on how to keep the data separate or something, with the threat of blocking it altogether as a final solution.
But agreed, this is a good outcome
*for months
lets be frank, these are changes caused by the downgrading of the American administration to a subscription services behind a paywall that requires DLC, root based encryption bypasses and a Clippy popup that instead of trying to be helpful is indistinguishable from a mafia racket.
>> Finally!
You are behind the curve. You read here first. Lets revisit this comment in 2 years...
This will be overturned by both Dutch and European courts after the company appeals, and specially after Mark Rutte Daddy calls. The only purpose of this action is for the Dutch government to save face, and its for internal consumption. They already have the internal legal advice stating this, hidden away in some closet. But then they will say: You see, we wanted to do it but a court blocked us.
>>Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies.
The WHOLE Dutch diplomatic and broader civil service, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, runs extensively on Microsoft infrastructure for its daily operations, cloud services, and email. And they leak....
"Microsoft Accused Of Sharing Dutch Officials’ Data with U.S. Government" - https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/microsoft-accus...
This will also be the core legal argument by the appealing company. They will argue that the decision was politicized, insufficiently reasoned, or disproportionate because binding technical/legal safeguards would have solved the risks... And they will use as example, the diplomatic service extensive use of Microsoft :-)
So is nothing more than another Polder hypocritical take, by the Dutch government.
It is a bit more complex tham that.
Logius is the company that actually owns and manages the DigiD stack, it's just that they hired Solvinity for their expertise. AFAIK Solvinity can't access the data.
I can't find it right now, but on Tweakers there was a long comment by someone on the inside that explained Logius basically had almost no know-how of how the current stack works, and there's lots of bespoke stuff. Basically classic vendor lock-in. The government (rather, Logius) now really wants to transition away from Solvinity, but that will likely be a 5+ year process.
I also feel like this is another thing that the "fast ring" of the EU should do together. Take Estonia's stack as a base, and then countries like Sweden, Denmark, Finland, The Netherlands adopt it and co- develop it. Make it extensible for the bespoke things the countries need, and every few years check which bespoke extensions can actually be generalized and modularized. Would lead to a much better product. A man can dream :)