http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06 ... ling_down/

Stuff that in the NSA's pipe and let them choke on it.

It seems the USA is intent on destroying its IT businesses.

Not really. 'Safe Harbour' of itself is no longer legally enough in the EU but 'safe harbour plus a few other things' is. And quite a few US cloud providers already do 'the other things' anyway, so EU based businesses are fine to carry on using them.

The reality is US cloud providers will have to make a couple of changes which will be enough to comply with the judgement and then things will carry on as before.

'Destroying it's IT business'? Not at all. Allow a few contract lawyers to buy slightly bigger yachts? probably. Anyway, imagine if the legislation that came out of the judgement was so draconian that customers in EU countries couldn't use US based cloud services at all, that would only leave the whole of North America, South America, Africa, Russia, the far east and possibly China (if providers were willing to play by their rules) to sell to. How would they ever survive?

A lot of geeks got very excited about this but it was never going to be an apocalypse, just a readjustment.

Time will tell and certainly worth watching, I have a meeting with some senior MS people tomorrow regarding 365 etc etc, I raise it for some fun.

They'll probably just point you here

As I say, to believe this has caught any large US corporation completely on the hop and they're all running aroudn waving their arms in the air is foolish.

The problem is, that model clause was developed before the court decision that Safe Harbor is no longer valid.

The problem is, even if the provider uses Safe Harbor, under the PRISM programme they still have to hand that data over. They have a decision, do they break the law for their EU customers or do they break the law and earn the wrath of their home government? And that is what the EU ruled. As long as Safe Harbor doesn't protect against PRISM and US search warrants, it isn't worth the toilet paper it was scrawled on.

This is more of a problem, in the first instance, for companies like Facebook and the public cloud services from Microsoft, Apple and Google. It will also cause problems with corporate data. Microsoft isn't so badly affected as Facebook in the first instance, because they tend to keep EU data in the EU - hence the current case between Microsoft and the US Justice department, if Microsoft lose that case, then it will be the end of US based cloud services outside the continental USA.

But this is still a severe blow for their image and means that they will have to come up with new ideas. I expect the EU will have to revisit the Model Clause, now that Safe Harbor has been deemed legally invalid.

I would expect, that if the services are deemed illegal in the EU, because the US Government is "illegally" syphoning data off of these services, it won't take long before those services are a pariah in most countries.

The US Justice versus Microsoft issue will be the real nail in the coffin, because they are claiming that US law trumps EU law, even when data is still held in the EU by an EU based company (in this case, on Irish servers, belonging to an Irish company on Irish soil, but wholly owned by Microsoft USA). The US Justice department argue that Microsoft Ireland must disregard Irish and EU data protection law and hand over the data to the US Justice department, because USA.

Edit: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06 ... _analysis/

A slightly less bleak view:



http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06 ... a_sharing/

And yet...

Right, because newspaper headlines are always 100% accurate and complete.

I thought it was amusing - chill out, chap.