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Dropbox Moves Accounts Outside North America To Ireland
monkeyzoo writes: Similar to a previous announcement by Twitter, Dropbox has changed its Terms of Service for users outside of North America (USA/Canada/Mexico) such that services will now be provided out of Ireland. Will other companies follow this trend and leave the USA (and the jurisdiction of the NSA)? Note, the announcement states that North American users are not able to opt into the Irish Terms of Service.
They're after the double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich.
It's about money. Not "our valued customer's security" or other bullshit.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm royal! Bow to me and when you have an audience, kiss my shoes at the start!
Seems like NSA is trying to snoop on international data that's being stored in the USA, which is why they're setting up EU versions of worldwide web services. If America wants to read international data, they need to do so only in times of need.
Notice that Microsoft's Ireland servers have been targeted by the NSA and Microsoft is in contempt of court for not giving the info so far. They will. ANY company that does business in the US, even if they are based in Ireland, MUST submit to the NSA. Anyone who tells you differently either doesn't know the law, or is telling a fib.
This has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with taxes.
It seems clear from the way that Juilian Assange is being fucked over by the UK and Sweden on behalf of the US, that the US gov already has their hand far enough up the arse of significant western countries to make them their puppet.
What makes anyone seriously think that Irish won't also just bend over for the NSA as readily?
Why leave Canada and Mexico mixed in with the US servers? USA stays in USA but CA and MX can go with the rest of the world.
Either that or let North America become one big country, the borders here are useless anyway.
This is only news if you think the NSA still couldn't easily gain access....
The NSA knows no boundaries and arguably has MORE reach outside the USA.
Companies are fleeing the US courts, following the ruling that a company with offices in the USA (i.e. Microsoft) can be compelled to produce digital evidence stored outside the USA.
They are just making sure that the three letter agencies can access the accounts of foreigners when a law limits their access to US based accounts.
looks like you are merely a court jester now
and the jurisdiction of the NSA
Actually, the rest of the world is the jurisdiction of the NSA. It's mission is to gather signals intelligence from foreign countries. If there is a jurisdiction that is off-limits to the NSA, its the US. That's why recently a US Appellate Court ruled that the NSA's wholesale spying on US citizens' phone communications is illegal. Besides, there's the British GCHQ that will be glad to spy on Dropbox and share what it gathers with the other Five-Eyes members.
What this does for Dropbox is provide a tax haven for it, and to make it difficult for US law enforcement to serve warrants to produce evidence for Dropbox's users it suspects of criminal actions like pedophiles, copyright fraudsters, drug traffickers, etc.
I moved my personal server from EC2 to a Swiss host - Swiss data center, owned by a Swiss company.
Amazon lost all of 25 USD a month :-)
I thought this was about taxes, since Ireland had that loophole for tech companies. I'm not sure what the deal is with north american users tho..
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Just because the user and the server are not in the United States doesn't mean the traffic to the server isn't going through the United States.
"Dropbox .. services will now be provided out of Ireland. Will other companies follow this trend and leave the USA (and the jurisdiction of the NSA)?"
Not really, as most/every electronic cummunication out of Ireland is monitored in real time by NSAs best buddy - GCHQ.
but you can never leave. old song.
North Americans, that is, residents from Canada, USA and Mexico, cannot use the Irish service.
The ban on people under Canada and Mexico juridiction is interesting. Either Canada and Mexico have agreements with the USA that enforce their citizen's snooping, or Dropbox does not want the transatlantic traffic increase.
Condoleezza Rice
That's cute they think Ireland is outside jurisdiction of the NSA.
Many countries are SIGINT partners with the NSA (see Fourteen Eye's etc). They share data. They almost all use vulnerable systems of the type the NSA can hit directly. Hence, data in Ireland isn't safe from the NSA by any means. It might also be used in mass collection that NSA gets to share. Der Spiegel has been reporting a lot of that sort of thing in Germany, for instance. The only well-connected, democracies listed in Snowden documents as resisting NSA cooperation were Iceland and Switzerland. Move your data there in partnership with citizens and in a way that benefits their cities. That should knock out the legal attacks. Then, you need EAL7+ security on all your systems with good supply chain and updates. Good luck with that part. ;)
Nick P, High Assurance Security Engineer/Researcher
It's as much about PR as anything. Maybe it's actually about telling the NSA et al to piss off.
But sooner or later, a nice government official will show up and say "now gimme".
I'm no sure there really is a way to take data outside of jurisdictions now. Courts seem to think they aren't constrained in their decisions, any more ... and all the governments are trading the data.
It probably actually helps the NSA. European privacy laws still apply to the company's actions, but the NSA is completely freed from the laws (and constitution) that restrain it from spying on US citizens. The NSA actually does have some limits on how it spies on US Citizens.
It sucks up pretty much every other signal on the planet.
There is almost nothing to trust about the service.
How does dropbox know where a user is from?
That's not a security move
It's also not outside the jurisdiction of the NSA.
Recall that the NSA is a DoD sub-agency --- so is quite restriced from spying on US Citizens inside the US. However DoD intel agencies are much more free to spy on international -- in fact, it's their main job.
It seems to me this moves it INSIDE the jurisdiction of the NSA.
EU privacy laws are fairly painful for US companies to comply with. To do business with EU individuals, Personal Identifiable Information needs to be handled according to a set of rules - http://ec.europa.eu/justice/da...
It is often simpler for Amazon deployed companies to set up in the Ireland AWS zone.
As others have mentioned, most foreign SIGINT/COMINT agencies can't gather intelligence domestically, so it lowers barriers. Ironically US companies that want to deal with EU customers may end up moving everything to Ireland. However this allows the NSA to gather intelligence indirectly on US citizens.
and they will still give the NSA and U.S gov everything it asks for, in fear of being jailed on bogus charges back home in the U.S, period. Don't think your files and data are safe just because it's in Ireland. If you use U.S-owned services, then you're fucked, simply. Find European alternatives if you care about privacy.
They're using Amazon right? So they're just placing their servers in AWS's Ireland region. It makes no political difference, NSA, the US govt or whoever still has full jurisdiction.
Wouldn't moving "stuff" out of USA just have USA use other more relaxed laws and practices to spy on that said stuff?
I can't see anywhere that says that data will be outside the USA, only the location of the "company".
I'm not sure that's so smart. And as far as we know, the German BND is NSA's lapdog too...
The simple solution is just not to store your stuff on someone else's servers. If you put it out there, someone else has access to it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
you have no idea how much I just laughed. thank you for injecting some quality wit and brightening a dull day .
if you see me, smile and say hello.
your transit delays are based on multiple problem of not only the pipes
A) Argentine traffic is somewhat capped and multiple companies are trying to Cache locally to keep bandwidth down
B) peering is a huge issue withing all the countries of latin america, it's slightly off balance in general to USA
C) cell phone tech is hindering this, more demand from latin america to learn about the world than the world wanting to learn about latin america ( traffic flow wise )
all these issue are being fixed, just requires more infra-structure investments
your only trans-atlantic pipe is the Atlantis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
if you see me, smile and say hello.
See the Ethan Hawke film "Predestination" (you're in particular, in for a REAL treat).
* :)
You'll understand why I stated this when you see it...
Yes - it is TRULY, that good (In fact, I've never seen a film like it, & it's so well done - Takes a "flipping the script" twist/turn of events that's nearly Quentin Tarantino-like, but needed, for character development that really adds to the plot - I was out to see a Sci-Fi film, & was like "So, when's the time part begin?" & suddenly, you know!).
(Enjoy... it put tears in my eyes in fact - & for you? I'd wager it will have a DEEP personal impact!)
Sara Snook's beautiful too -> http://www.bing.com/images/sea... & she's the 'starlet'... good actress + another beautiful "aussie" girl comes outta the woodwork too, bonus!
APK
P.S.=> Ethan Hawke does it again - it's up there with another of my all-time favorites, GATTACA, so again: Enjoy... apk
Moving servers doesn't address the real problem, even if NA could opt in to the Irish TOS.
DropBox indexes every file that is synced through their service. They are reading and cataloging everything that users sync via DropBox. But don't take my word for it — their CEO said so a year or two ago.
The problem with Latin America, actually, is the fact that no one wants to set up local servers here.
For example, Netflix released their service here. Did they put a Netflix CDN box in every street corner like they did in the US? Of course not. They're just saturating the already busy international pipes.
MaxCDN, one of the most well known CDN services, do they have servers in Latin America? From what I see: No, they don't. We rely on US servers. At least that's what I noticed when using the Bootstrap3 CDN, which uses MaxCDN: it was faster for me to serve the library from my own host than using the CDN.
Now, other big players have set up servers. Many years ago Youtube set up a local server for Cablevision users in Buenos Aires (serving all of Argentina). Youtube is the only streaming service that works fine.
Amazon has local servers. My business website is hosted on EC2 in Brazil and it's VERY FAST. It's less than 60ms away so it feels really snappy.
Facebook has shown zero interest in serving users here. They have gladly set up offices everywhere to SELL ADS, but they haven't bothered to set up any datacenters here. And, of all services, facebook DEFINITELY SHOULD set up a datacenter here. Facebook isn't bandwidth hungry, but it definitely needs low latency to be responsive.
And this is something that bothers me, honestly. I'm all for net neutrality, but this is really an abuse of net neutrality. Netflix is investing ZERO for providing service here. They charge the same amount as they charge in the US, but their service is lacking. They don't bother serving content locally and just saturate the pipes ISPs here can barely afford. My ISP has to pay more to serve a few Netflix users and this is reflected in my bill.
So, answering to your points:
A) Maybe Argentina has problems, but I have a friend in Colombia who's also complaining about the HORRIBLE performance on Facebook.
B) That's an issue the US Embassies around Latin America should fix. Push for legislation around this issue (since US embassies do this all the time, they might as well force stupid ISPs here to behave).
C) This doesn't make sense. Of course there's more demand from LATAM to the world, since everyone's servers are outside. If big companies (Google, Facebook and some of the larger CDNs) placed their servers here, it would be a completely different story. I've run tests on smaller ISPs and found that 80% of traffic, by volume, is Youtube. If Google sets up local caching all over these countries the pipes "get unclogged" really fast.
Well that was well written...
But more to the point.
YouTube has a lot of it's own fiber, so it makes sense that the services for ad revenue balance out.
Netflix ... hahaha you just made me laugh.... did you not read the nightmare ???
I have weird views on this entire issue and I respect sides of it so let me vent it out.
the business view is that comcast want's to make money ( and that is a legal mandate of a for profit business ). the subscription model they sell is known as a yield management model, maximize the return for keeping the pipe full.
Netflix model is, get as many people on the pipe and screw the comcast model ( don't go into the box at the hub crap )
comcast sells some cheap transit and netflix bought it from 3rd party.
comcast delivers something to the consumer under the contract it provides, otherwise class action lawsuits would be all over and the model would fail
comcast owns the pipes and the speed which it will deliver it, netflix would love to fill that pipe, and to do so it would have to pay more. Netflix won't pay, and comcast won't deliver. the market will decide in time whom will win.
I think netflix will win in the long run ... .... ... how the heck can I legally get money out of the country at the blue rate and not the bank rate. and with the way that country is going, how soon does it become another Venezuela ( which I hope that would never happen, I want to visit soon ) . ... too much work.
Argentina
that's why brazil is a better investment option at this time, money flow is legal, while if I want to do anything in Argentina I'm screwed. do you know how Porsche transfers it's profits out of BA??? they have to trade the profits with alcohol producers and export it out of BA
things should get better in 14 to 16 months, then performance will improve.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
Yes. The way I see it, Comcast, slimebags as they are, are right. Netflix expects everyone to keep up with their unreasonable bandwidth needs at their pace, which just won't happen.
You have the USD thing backwards: You want to get USD out of the country at bank rate, but into the country at blue rate!
I don't think Porsche is the one in your example. It's BMW. Porsche is part of VW and they don't have any issues importing, since they export a lot of cars to Brazil so they meet their export-import quota. BMW *could* install any sort of factory here, and meet the quota. But they're just not interested.
BTW: bandwidth isn't really that bad. I have Arnet 30/10 (recently released service, up for 6/768k) for $20/mo, and it works at 30mbit except at 6-10pm
Hi Again, ... so I would stick to blue. .... ....
While yes out at black and in at blue, that's a huge spread and just tooo much of a legal nightmare
No it's Porsche, My client set up the trade a few years back.
now if you want a mystery to research ...
look a the Iron Mountain fire in BA that happened I think about 18 months ago
hmmm does the state know that IM copy documents for it's clients in multiple locations LOL
if you see me, smile and say hello.