Here in Finland we just might hit +20C this week. Maybe a bit over that in the south. Maybe not coldest since forever, but definetly colder than last couple of summers so far.

I did self-host bitwarden and it’s not that bad to keep updated and running after initial setup (including backups obviously) but it still requires some time and effort to keep it running. And as I was the only user for the service it just wasn’t worth the time spent for me (YMMV) so I switched to their EU servers and I’ve been a happy user ever since.

What I should do is to improve local backps on that, currently I just export my data every now and then manually to a secured storage, but doing it manually means that there’s often too long time between exports.

Based on news lately cracks on Russian economy start to show and their meat grinder in Ukraine crawls forward with massive casualties. At this rate they can’t attack a garden shed.

Putin himself can preparen and wish to conquer whatever he wants but as long as the little remains what’s left of Soviet Union might is scattered around Ukraine, Russia can’t really do anything. If Europe can’t get their shit together and Russia eventually wins (after several years at this pace) in Ukraine it would still take years to build up any kind of military force against anyone and even then they’d need to fight against whole EU and whatever remains are left of NATO.

Detroit Electric from 1907 then. They produced 13 000 units in ~30 years. Obviously small numbers compared to today, but mass produced models anyway.

The first would be the GM EV1 in 1997:

Flocken Elektrowagen, 1888

The Flocken Elektrowagen is a four-wheeled electric car designed by Andreas Flocken (1845–1913), manufactured in 1888 by Maschinenfabrik A. Flocken in Coburg. It is regarded as the first real electric car.

For example I’m not aware of any way to do upload without a login in Seafile.

You can create upload share the same way you create a download share. Then just give a link to whoever you want to and that’s it. I’m pretty sure it’ll show files already in the share while uploading, but I’m not 100% sure on that.

Companies also probably have servers in other places, meaning perhaps they’d connect through elsewhere

Depends on company, but that worst case scenario is that all US companies would shut down all their services in Europe overnight. Every big player has datacenters around the world and if it’s just the traffic between continents which is shut down then the effect is way less radical, absolute majority of Europe already connects to datacenters near them even if they use Microsoft/Google/Amazon/etc services.

For example with my employer dropping every US based company would be a hell of a work, specially if it’s needed in a hurry. We, as well as a ton of others, rely on Microsoft services for all kinds of communication and should that go away we’d need to make quite a few phone calls around couple of continents just to set up a common ground on where and how to start building new infrastructure and how to keep communication lines open.

Though if it were for a few hours, maybe let people see the consequences of their dependence, and what life would be like without these services

Few hours is a short time. There’s some problems around the globe all the time which affect various services on various levels for few hours all the time. Few days of complete blackout and C-suits start to really sweat (plus it costs significant amounts of money via lost productivity).

if anyone knows how to block connections based on location, feel free to enlighten me

You’ll need a firewall/router which can do geoblocking. Based on quick search at least pfsense seems to have some options available. If I were to try that I’d set up a pfsense on a virtual machine, set up geoblock on that and use that as a gateway for my testing devices while leaving the rest of the network as it is so that I could limit/choose what devices may behave strangely and still have normal functionality for the rest.

I assume there’s a ton of other options too besides pfsense, but the key words are ‘geoblock’, ‘firewall’ and ‘router’ or something around that. Also I assume that most of the stuff you find explains how to block incoming traffic based on geoIP, but it should be relatively simple to adapt those for outgoing traffic as well.

It’s the latter. But as a crapload of our everyday services depend on US companies and their servers it would be a service outage we’ve never seen before. Big US companies (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta…) could technically mitigate at least some effects if it’s just the actual connectivity which is missing but if they’re forced to shut down all European services it’s a whole another matter.

For your everyday consumer it would mean missing a lot of streaming services, email, personal backups of your photos on cloud services and stuff like that. On some cases even access to their bank accounts would be lost. Depending on your usage patterns a majority of your digital life could vanish overnight. For companies it would be even worse, a ton of them rely on AWS and other services to keep their business running and all that would come crashing down and a massive amount of them would not have workforce, knowledge nor resources (money mostly) to switch over to something else. Also a lot of tax paid service rely on M365 and other cloud based stuff so they would be affected too, but maybe/hopefully not quite as badly as commercial side. Also, our credit card processors are mostly US (Visa and Mastercard) so a ton of money transfers would be halted as well.

So, it would be pretty much a digital catastrophe on government, commercial and consumer fronts for majority of the people. Technically there’s nothing we couldn’t rebuild on our own, but it would take at least months and more likely several years to get everything back online and the bill for that would be astronomical. And if it’s a total kill-switch for US services then Europe would need new mobile operating systems to replace Android/IOS, new OS for their computers as Windows wouldn’t work anymore and so on. And on top of that, GPS would go too, but with Galileo that might not be the biggest problem around. And also a ton of other stuff I can’t remember right off the bat.

Sure, US would be stranded on the internet (and in the real world too at least to some point) after that and EU/UN/some other entity would take the role which is now on ICANN (and the same for other administrative entities). US would of course get a massive economical hit as well by losing all European customers, but on the worst case that would pretty much mean that the Europe’s internet access, at least as we know it now, would end and something else would be built on the ashes.

But hey, at least I personally wouldn’t have a problem to find a new job should I want to.

The “keeping it weak” approach, after all, has already led to Putin.

No one kept Russia weak when Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia and it was heavily leaning towards west on multiple areas. Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.

But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.

You could get around with a normal file share service (assuming you already are using one) via tinyurl or similar redirect. I don’t know how much the free services track you or if they have other security implications, but I have couple of domains laying around and it would be pretty trivial to just create HTTP redirect from “class-a.up.mydomain.foo” to my nextcloud upload link.

Or, if you’re using only one or few distributions you can preseed the image and have the installer do the stuff for you.

That’s something along the lines I do as well, but your methods are far more in depth than mine. I just glance around documentations, how active the development is and get a rough idea if the thing is just a single person hobby-project or something which has a bit more momentum.

And it of course also depends on if I’m looking for solutions just for myself or is it for others and spesifically if it’s work related. But full audits? No. There’s no way my lifetime would be enough to audit everything I use and even with infinite time I don’t have the skills to do that (which of course wouldn’t be an issue if I had infinite time, but I don’t see that happening).

You don’t even need to push. Just wait a while until the toddler finds something else to focus on and forget what happened today.

It was some time ago but a response from Canadian supplier to US customer went few rounds on social media. They informed that the item customer was buying was under a tariff and gave options to either pay up the tariffs, cancel the sale with no extra cost or just wait for few days and see what happens. And the really stupid part is that it was (and largely is) a viable strategy, at least on customer sales. For businesses that’s obviously a total nightmare, but that’s just one example on how ridiculous any kind of trade with the US is right now.

You are absolutely correct on that, but I find it a bit ironic anyways. Trump seems to be quite fond of royalty, at least UK kind, and this underlines even more that relationship with Europe is going down the drain and fast. Royal families across the Europe are more or less either family or at least friends together and this will play it’s small part on US failures to maintain any kind of political or other power across the pond.

which was a ‘neutral’ border back then

There’s quite a few unmarked graves along that border and immense effort from my countrymen to keep the border where it is. It hasn’t been “neutral” for too long. And being prepared to keep that border where it is plays a part on why our president from a small country is on discussions with Ukraine, EU leaders and that orange clown across the pond today.

Murmansk is few hundred kilometers from Finnish border and it’s been there for “a while”, it’s no more bigger problem now than it has ever been. And Norway border is slightly closer than ours and Norway has been a NATO country for quite a while.

Their bases have been about where the tent villages now are for decades. They’re training grounds for new conscripts until they’re moved to die in some ditch in Ukraine. Who knows why they’re more active now, maybe Ukraine is getting pretty good to hit their targets deep in Russia so they need to move further away from the front line or whatever.

This has absolutely nothing to do with Finland, beyond the fact that our border just happens to be nearby. And should they actually try start an active war with NATO from there, these grounds are mostly in reach of Finnish artillery and our artillery is pretty damn efficient on what they do.

There’s also Mars Climate Orbiter which crashed to the planet since NASA used SI-units and Lockheed Martin (who manufactured the thing) used imperial units.

US will not succeed in spinning this as something positive if they help Russia occupy part of Europe

On that you’re correct. But what they can at least try to do is make Ukraine look bad or difficult/subborn/whatever after rejecting their “peace offer”.

It’s not that much about choosing a side. Europe has been sleeping on their defences for decaes and should US just pull all their hardware and troops back home tomorrow there’s no immediately available replacements on that. And that’s a sad state for the whole continent. So it’s not about honest opinion but, as everything between countries is, a political question on how badly some countries depend on US defences.

I have no doubt that should US side with Russians it would be widely condemned in global west, but I don’t think global south or China really give a damn. But Europe almost as a whole need to get their shit together really fast and so far, even if the movement seems to be into the right direction, it’s been really slow to show up any actual results.