Ask HN: How can I prepare my digital life for geopolitical disruptions?
I'm from Germany and currently rely on macOS and iOS, with all my personal data stored in iCloud. Recent political tensions have made me question what might happen in the event of a military conflict between the US and Europe. Could Apple be forced to shut down its services in Europe? What would happen to my devices, operating systems, and stored data in such a scenario?
Are there steps I can take now to prepare for this possibility? Alternatives like Windows and Android are also American-based, and even Linux has strong ties to the US. What options do I have to ensure access to my devices and data during such an event?
I’d appreciate any advice or strategies for preparing for this kind of situation.
I don't believe we are facing a military conflict soon, but it is clear that something fundamental has changed, and even if suddenly the US government does a 180, it's a whooole lot of toothpaste to put back in the tube.
Essentially, start freezing US dependencies out of your tech stack and take control:
- Run Linux on your machines
- Run GrapheneOS on your mobile
- Select services from this list: https://european-alternatives.eu/
- Keep local and off-line copies of your important data, and maintain frequent backups
- Block companies that comply willingly with unfair practices at your network edge (e.g. with a Pi-hole for DNS-based blocking, and you get ad blocking in addition)
Go with one of these:
Debian – France, Germany, Switzerland Ubuntu – United Kingdom Linux Mint – Ireland Manjaro – Germany, Austria, France openSUSE – Germany Zorin OS – Ireland elementary OS – Denmark Kali Linux – Switzerland (formerly Germany) Tails – France Endless OS – Portugal
You can go Canadian: Gentoo Linux – Canada ParrotOS – Canada (initially developed in Italy, but has contributors in Canada) Redcore Linux – Canada LiteOS – Canada
Stay away from these: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) – USA Fedora – USA CentOS (Discontinued, replaced by CentOS Stream) – USA Rocky Linux – USA AlmaLinux – USA Arch Linux – USA Slackware – USA Pop!_OS – USA Clear Linux – USA Tiny Core Linux – USA
Thanks for the list. It's really sad for me that Fedora is in the "stay away" section because the Asahi version of it probably would be the best one for my MacBook.
I doubt there will be a direct military conflict between US and EU. I don't see how either side gains from it. I think what the current US government really wants is to extract enough $$ from the European countries by forcing them to increase military expenditures and deployments.
But in case it does happen, I think Apple is the least of your trouble. I would just stock everything into a hard-disk and store it somewhere underground.
Linux foundation is based in US but I'm sure Europe has enough talented developers to maintain their own branches.
Linux is amazing. I have a windows VM and it’s awful. Big bloated image, constantly phoning out in parallel streams, automatic connection to cloud and copilot, and 365 ads and similar frequent pop ups
Having local copies of your data may be a sane thing to do even without a geopolitical disruption. If you can't afford to lose something, have it backed up.
But your digital life is more than just photos. If there is hostility to everything that is US based, then everything made or hosted by US based companies may be compromised in ways that you may not predict now. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, etc may have to comply with government orders, whatever they are.
Linux may be safer from that, you have Suse Linux if you want something supported locally.
I remember installing OpenSuse on my PC from a random magazine CD over 20 years ago. Back to square one I guess. But how exactly would choosing a European-based Linux distro be better than a US-based one in the event of a Transatlantic war?
The code is open. The distribution, the binaries, are built on Germany. Maybe Redhat could be forced to add something in the case of such kind of war, but a German company will be out of this.
Alternative solution: move to the US. They will need emigrants anyway when their people will be busy in the Greenland-, Canadian-, Panaman- and EU-wars :)
> Recent political tensions have made me question what might happen in the event of a military conflict between the US and Europe.
Chill out. That's not feasible. Europe lacks the military capability to sustain such a war.
Germany is still trying to figure out who was behind the Nord Stream II explosion, isn’t it? Considering that the German elite and political class have already sabotaged their own economy to please the Democrats, why would they behave any differently now? The real turning point came when Germany chose to align with the U.S. in the Ukraine conflict. The tragic irony is that despite the elites sacrificing everything for Washington, the new administration now seeks to push them out entirely and replace them with an outsider nazi Party - the AfD.
It’s wild how nothing went Germany’s way, but given what they did to Greece a decade ago… well, there’s a certain irony in how it all unfolded.
> Linux has strong ties to the US
unlike other operating systems, it's trivial to not have a cloud account on linux. And if you think it will pull some autoupdates from USA you can disable automatic updates with a single command as well.
Keep local copies of your data as well. I use USB drives.
So far every service I use has a way to download my data. I have been backing them up 4 times a year for several years now. Obviously big stuff which won't change needs to be handled differently to active stuff.
I've backed up my personal files. But they lie on a with macOS encrypted and APFS formatted hard drive. So even if I have backups I have to make sure that they are encrypted but also readable by all operating systems...
How about going for an independent cloud storage like Dropbox, they are not affiliated to any OS or Windows platforms
Dropbox has had a number of security concerns[1].
Dropbox is headquartered in the US and is subject to US law, and interpretations thereof.
Dropbox has a history of taking on US government bureaucrats for roles in the company, including members of the US Intelligence Community[2].
If any of these clash with your threat model, look elsewhere? Syncthing[3] might be your thing.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox#Privacy_and_security_c...
2. No link, because someone "sterilized" Dropbox's Wikipedia article of those particular controversies.
3. https://syncthing.net/
Dropbox is based in San Francisco - and also needs some kind of operating system to be accessed.
If you’re in Europe when a war kicks off between what used to be the USA and will soon not be Europe, you (and humanity) have bigger problems than what happened to your digital corpse.
http://collapseos.org/ https://duskos.org/
It’s fascinating to see people developing operating systems for a post-apocalyptic world. I’m not that pessimistic - yet. I just don’t want to wake up one day to some random pop-up saying all my data and software are gone because I trusted companies one the wrong side of the globe for too long.
I would personally say that the time delay between that pop-up displaying and you needing to have already been that pessimistic will be a matter of nanoseconds.
Yeah, but there are scenarios between no war and a nuclear war - and I want to be at least somehow prepared for those.