It started out as a tv-documentary series on Dutch television. It's presenter was called Teun (Tony) and he wanted to be convicted for eating chocolate which he knew was produced by making use of slavery. This failed and he then created his own brand that should have been 'slavery free', which proved very difficult indeed. The brand was later taken over and made into what it is now.
Still, sovereignty is a very vague concept. ASML is Dutch, has a near monopoly in the market of lithographic Chip design but it's the Americans deciding if it can sell to China. Also, ASML is very dependent on an American supplier.
Likewise, Mistrall is using NVIDIA all over the place and has used the NVIDIA cloud for training and inferencing. Mistrals partnership with NVIDIA does not seem any different to me when compared to AWS European Sovereign cloud.
Like any elephant, you eat it one piece at a time. They probably can’t big bang this project. Now more than ever, EU could lose access to OpenAI et al overnight.
Exactly. This is where vision and commitment comes in. It's just a starting point. China was hugely dependent on foreign semiconductor imports, and their domestic semiconductor companies were laughable. Chinese companies were entirely unmotivated to help with sovereignty and just sourced from the global market because it's so easy. All the Chinese government succeeded in doing was keeping a minimum talent pool alive.
But the US sanction flipped something in the collective consciousness, and Chinese companies finally took the threat seriously. For the past 6 years they have worked tirelessly to de-Americanize the supply chain. Every step was criticized by western "experts" as "oh this doesn't mean much"/"still need ASML/Lam Research/whatever". And they're right, when viewed each step in isolation. Some projects failed, so it was 3 steps forward 1 step back. But now, 6 years later, they're on the cusp of being sanction-proof and even taking a good chunk of global market share.
The reason why the latest two rounds of US semiconductor sanctions didn't completely kill off the Chinese semiconductor industry, and Chinese semiconductor equipment companies kept growing 100%-200% per year, was exactly because 1) the Chinese government kept the minimum talent pool alive even during peaceful times, and 2) they started ramping up de-Americanization a few years before the worst attacks hit.
I hope the EU leaders recognize this partnership is a start and don't just pat themselves on the back with "we've done it, let's bask in electoral glory". Chinese leadership have regular study sessions to study foreign states' policies and their effectiveness. EU leaders should be humble, smart and motivated enough to do the same rather than winging things based on vibes.
That's not what that article says - it says they didn't completely cut off service to the entire ICC. The headline is confusing, but the quotes are pretty clear:
> A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services."
I always found Tuta's exaggerated reaction ridiculous. What makes their stand even more questionable when I visit their EU alternatives [1] webpage, first category they list is 'Email', under this category only "eligible" alternative is Tuta Mail.
Now, out of all alternative EU email providers they list only themselves as an alternative and expect alternative seekers to trust them?
Not the whole ICC but the sanctioned prosecutor has been disconnected !
>A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
That article, and its many versions in other outlets, is a weird (successful) attempt at changing the narrative. The news that triggered all of it was that Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email. Microsoft comes out saying "we did not cut services to the ICC, just its chief prosecutor". The media widely announces "Microsoft did not cut services to the ICC". That's not news, that's just marketing for Microsoft.
The original news, and the claims by Tuta, are still correct: Microsoft cut off the ICC chief prosecutor's access to his email due to US sanctions.
The top six contributors to Open Source globally are American Companies. In the top 10 there are no European companies, 9 are American and 1 is Chinese. https://opensourceindex.io/
Yes that's right. There used to be quite a cult around Alice in Wonderland amongst Computer Scientists. Caroll (or Dodgson as his real name was) was also a mathematician.
Dutch Teletekst is very much alive online. https://nos.nl/teletekst the mobile version is quite popular: +1M downloads on the Google Play store. Somehow news here is faster than regular sites, especially live sports scores.
