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Microsoft Opens Up Azure Cloud in Germany Even It Can't Access (windowsitpro.com)
Reader v3rgEz writes: International customers are becoming increasingly concerned about the U.S.'s data snooping practices, and it appears Microsoft has devised a solution to make them happy: Set up Azure cloud in a foreign region. Because it's under the technical ownership of a German company named Deutsche Telekom, even Microsoft doesn't have access to the data. The move is not surprising, but it could set a precedent that encourages others to move their corporate data away from U.S. shores to countries that take a friendlier view of encryption and data privacy. From the official blog post, "Microsoft has -- in this new model -- no rights at all to access customer data. Only for special purpose like a support call from a customer a temporary access will be granted by the Data Trustee to the Microsoft engineer, and only for the specified area. After that time (using a technology similar to what you might know as JIT) all access is revoked automatically. So to repeat: Access is granted to the Microsoft engineer only by the Data Trustee. Microsoft has no way to grant that access to itself."
After betraying their customers for years by doing stupid shit like uploading their encryption keys to OneDrive by default, Microsoft wants to jump in on the fame and honor that Apple is getting for refusing to make malware in order to unlock a terrorist's iPhone. Hurray, off-shore data lodging! Ultimately though this'll mean nothing but a teeny bit more latency for PRISM, which Microsoft has oh-so-willingly cooperated with the NSA to power for years.
Not quite. This thing is a response to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Basically, Microsoft has been fighting this case for years now. If the US wins, then it can mandate that Microsoft must turn over data anywhere in the world with just a warrant. That doesn't pass muster with EU laws. So, if the US wins, then all of a sudden it becomes illegal for an EU business to use any Microsoft cloud service, or at least extremely risky for them to do so.
This new service is something where they can tell the US government, "We phisically can't do that." Just like how Apple will probably push out an IOS upgrade that prevents flashing new firmware to a phone while locked without wiping the device.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
Well, Deutche Telekom is (or was) the German State telephone company, kind of like the Post Office in Britain, owned and operated by the government. They have many subsidiary companies, in the U.S. we know them as T-Mobile and T-Systems.
So, they are one step closer to ease of mass surveillance than we are in the US, in that the "cloud" data or whatever is _already_ in the German Gov't.'s hands, basically.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Well, Deutche Telekom is (or was) the German State telephone company
"Was". It was privatized a long time ago. So there is no direct control of the Deutsche Telekom by the German government.
Of, course, when the German government asks Deutsche Telekom for a "favor", they are not going to say no. Especially if there are some laws backing the government up. There's another set of secret squirrels in Germany called "Verfassungsschutz", which means something like "protection of the constitution". They have broad powers for snooping on folks that are deemed enemies of the state.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!