Given that the US forced Microsoft to stop providing email services to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands via sanctions, I expect moves like this to become more common across Europe. Bert Hubert is a Euro blogger who writes more about this.
I hate it that most people are missing the forest form the trees in this case, and see the Microsoft cutting email access as being the main newsworthy issue here, while form my PoV, the gigantic issue of planetary scale is that the US government (not just the Orange one) sees itself and acts above the international law, dismissing the ICC rulings whenever it feels like it, making the ICC a pointless "rules for thee but not for me" type of org at the end of the day.
I feel like the infamous "League of nations" keeps repeating itself since nations only act in self interest, and all these intergovernmental organizations, are just temporary gentlemens' agreements, not worth the paper they're written on, and at the end of the day the rules are still decided and enforced by who has the biggest military like in the past infinity years of human history.
So the current Microsoft issue is just the effect, but not the root cause of this. The root cause is US government becoming more and more of an unaccountable bully, and we need to address that instead of Microsoft since if it's not Microsoft who does something, it will be Google, Apple, AWS, Qualcomm, etc. they all do the bidding of the US administration.
So if US chooses to "holocaust" a minority or ethnic group, or to invade and bomb innocent countries into oblivion, the rest of the world should just be OK with it because it's what the US citizens chose?
The ICC has its roots from the trials of Nazi criminals. The US government and its military has often performed similar unspeakable and inhumane acts abroad (see the war on terror leaks and scandals) without any repercussions due to legislature form George Bush saying the US will invade the Hague if its military personnel are ever trialed for war crimes.
So if one country sees itself above the law, what do you think that does to the other countries?
> ICC has its roots from the trials of Nazi criminals
You’re mixing up the ICC and ICJ.
The ICC was formed in 2002 [1]. The U.S. is not a treaty party to its founding document, the Rome Statute. The ICJ was founded because of the Nazis; it has jurisdiction over America [2].
>The rest of the world can do nothing about it. See: Soviet Union, China.
Of course it can. During the cold war, most US aligned countries had massive trade restrictions with the USSR. The fix is easy on paper: reduce trade with countries that break the rules. Of course, that's easier said than done, but it is doable and effective.
Imagine what can be achieved if Europe, Canada, UK, AUNZ, Korea, Japan, BRICS, would collectively put restrictions on the US whoever the US decides to fling its dick around the world stage. The problem is getting countries to cooperate so it's never gonna happen. Would make a cool novel though.
> So if US chooses to "holocaust" a minority or ethnic group, or to invade and bomb innocent countries into oblivion, the rest of the world should just be OK with it because it's what the US citizens chose?
That’s not what I said. But yes, the opposite of “might is right” is an aberration. The only reason Nuremberg occurred is because it was for the Jews. This is the opposite case.
To be fair, that is exactly what the ICC is or has become. The head is already compromised with the allegations of sexual assault and the polarizing Israel thing was shaky at best.
It was a bad judgement call to indict Israel government after they were attacked. I think we don't see ICC ruling as something to be taken seriously anymore.
> US government sees itself and acts above the international law, dismissing the ICC rulings whenever it feels like it, making the ICC a pointless "rules for thee but not for me" type of org at the end of the day.
People don't talk about that because it's been obvious for a long time. How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
> How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
One, international law hasn’t ever constrained any of the great powers. (China annexed Tibet in 1951, for example.)
Two, the U.S. isn’t a treaty partner to the Rome Statute [1]. The ICC doesn’t have jurisdiction in America. One of the founding principles of the post-war system was treaty-based law—countries cede their sovereignty by agreement, not force.
America generally sees itself as being above international law. But it is far from alone in this. And the ICC isn’t an example of it.
>People don't talk about that because it's been obvious for a long time. How is it surprising a country who invades basically any country on a whim, based on false premises, also sees itself as being above international law?
Nations chose to ally with the US post-WW2 since it was the least worst option at the time. Much better to be a US ally than a USSR ally. The US was a lot more trustworthy at the time and less s.
But this situation has changed now. China is the new second superpower, and trust in the US has hit an all time low. In the past during the cold war, the US would make concessions with its allies so that everyone is happy. Now, the US foreign policy is, "America first, everyone suck our star spangled dick bitches! MAGA!", and has no issues screwing its closest allies and partners over in order to squeeze them, acting more like a mob shakedown.
Given this, it's normal to see the US as much more dangerous ally now than in the past, and try to remove dependency on them.
>Meanwhile, the cutting of email access is new, and hasn't happened before, so it is quite literally "news", while the other stuff you mention is basically an opinion-piece and not new information.
This only happened because the US gov got too comfy doing whatever it wanted and never facing any consequences for it. It's the natural evolution of things. "Spare the rod, spoil the child", as they say.
That certainly sets a precedent... if the us can cut off email as a leverage, i wouldn't trust US baking, communication services or cloud providers either if i was a foreign nation. (Ally or not)
Sorry, it was meant to be a lighthearted joke, the spelling mistake was made twice and I found the premise of baking being discussed funny. I didn’t mean to mock you.
Worth noting, there is this follow-up statement from Microsoft, which is frankly as clear as mud. (Essentially Microsoft saying they didn't cut off services, with no explanation of what did happen)
> 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.”
> Microsoft declined to comment further in response to questions regarding the exact process that led to Khan's email disconnection, and exactly what it meant by “disconnection.”
I think you have described it well. Clear as mud. I think the political impact on Open Source going forward may be very interesting.
Other comics that have left hiveworks that I know of: Daughter of the Lilies (weird christian fantasy, currently on hiatus) In Blood We Rise (idk, I don't read it, looks like gay vampires)
There was a rumor going around that Hiveworks is having financial issues, linked to a post that was then taken down and vagueposting from the DotL person. When I saw DotL move, I figured it was personal drama, and when I saw the one rumor post get taken down, I figured it was inaccurate to the point of being lawsuit material, but SMBC is kind of a big deal. If the rumor is anything, I wouldn't be surprised if SMBC is causation instead of response though and the SMBC move is driven entirely by the annoying ads / shop issues mentioned in their post. Most webcomics do not make a profit.
It's also quite possible Hiveworks is getting bought by someone that the creators in question don't want to touch with a long, long pole.
My personal guess, though, would be that Hiveworks wanted creators to sign an updated contract that had some terms around feeding their stuff into genAI and creators who could are NOPEing out of that.
I cannot overstate how much comic creators don't want to touch managing any of this, so n=2 or more of them leaving in a short window is a really, really bad smell.
I'm still getting dopamine off getting a team member promoted, two years later. Every success they make reminds me that I helped them build that confidence and those skills. Manager-side successes might not be obvious and daily, but they have staying power like you wouldn't believe.
* The use of tree-based knowledge extraction with manual review + the graph of the resulting information by principle component extraction demonstrates the effective base of the context.
* The use of a Sentence-BERT model specifically for tool matching avoids the hallucination problem of LLMS offering fake solutions/diagnosis steps.
* The tree-based multi-LLM-expert diagnosis by vote system also addresses hallucination and failures like looping through the same solutions over and over in complex cases, and is reminiscent of the monte-carlo advance for AlphaGo and paxos consensus protocols. AND it provides output in an auditable way, which is important for incidents.
When testing, they evaluate against a human DBA with two years of experience, which seems kind of junior to me. Notably, in the results the D-Bot usually (9/12 cases) comes close to the junior DBA, but does not exceed it. However, the D-Bot definitely exceeds the results of raw LLM prompting and it has the obvious speed advantage over a human.
Overall, this gives me confidence that some of the LLM projects at my own company can be useful, since auditability + specific knowledge extraction are relevant to our work.
* However, you can still deliver services without US clouds
* Massive outsourcing has made organizations somewhat helpless
* Don’t say ‘Europe Must Invest in XYZ’.
* GAIA-X will not save us
* The cloud is not just one thing. On many important levels, Europe can deliver
* However, we should be clear on what we don’t have here
* When “going to the cloud”, do be clear how deeply dependent you want to become
* IT systems are already brittle. Getting your cloud from another continent is then not helpful
* It is not the case that only the hyperest of hyperscalers can compete
* You can’t run a government without privacy & if you need US permission to function at all
* The EU-US privacy framework is near-death and you can’t rely on it anymore
* Open source will be part of the solution, but much more is needed
* We have amazing open (source) technology, but it needs to up its game
* European Governments are already overly deep into US clouds
* Trump 2.0 will exploit our total dependency on US services
* European governments will need to do industrial policy to get us out of this mess
* Is this a sovereign cloud?