Swiss Government Backs Privacy Oriented ISP 109
judgecorp writes "The Swiss government owned telco Swisscom is pitching a "Swiss Cloud" operator which promises to keep customers' credentials private in the wake of the NSA spying scandal. Switzerland has strict privacy laws, with which the Swisscom cloud complies, and the operator now wants to offer that more widely."
strict privacy laws my ass! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:strict privacy laws my ass! (Score:5, Informative)
This. I am a dual citizen, USA and Switzerland, I live in the US. I had a bank account in Switzerland with less than $2k in it. Last year the Swiss bank closed out my account and sent me the funds. The Swiss government caved in to pressure from the US and changed it's banking laws. They will do the same thing with internet privacy.
Re:strict privacy laws my ass! (Score:5, Informative)
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What actually happened is that many Swiss banks got threatened with lawsuits in the US and decided that US customers were more hassle than they were worth it.
Small steps, but vitally important. If only others would follow this example.
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Few in EU like Swiss banking any more than US does. It's a known tax fraud heaven, and with EU has been shaken by the crisis pretty badly, tolerance for Swiss "give us your money, we'll help you not pay your fair share" policy is growing thin.
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Most of the taxes sheltered by people are on profits.
Companies are the ones who shelter money from production and consumption.
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"Most of the taxes sheltered by people are on profits."
Profits are the result of production. Income taxes, capital gains taxes, and the like are taxes on production. They are therefore, by definition, counter-productive.
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All human actions result in death. Therefore by definition, all human action are counter-productive.
Hey, that works for everything!
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Seriously... where did you learn basic logic? Sesame Street? This doesn't even remotely follow from what I wrote.
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I just tried applying your version of logic. It's called sarcasm.
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"I just tried applying your version of logic. It's called sarcasm."
I know what you were trying. The point was that you did not succeed.
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I see you have no sense of self-criticism when it comes to your beliefs. Even when they are absurd, like claiming that taxes on profits equal taxes on production.
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"I see you have no sense of self-criticism when it comes to your beliefs. Even when they are absurd, like claiming that taxes on profits equal taxes on production."
It has nothing to do with "belief". It has to do with whether your comment made any logical sense.
You can debate all day about belief. But I do know logic, and that wasn't it.
Don't bother to reply. I won't feed any more trolls today.
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1. Unable to argue logically about his points: check.
2. Unable to grasp the difference between profit and production: check.
3. Calling those who point these two fact to him trolls: check.
Who is trolling here again?
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"1. Unable to argue logically about his points: check. 2. Unable to grasp the difference between profit and production: check. 3. Calling those who point these two fact to him trolls: check."
I know I stated I wouldn't reply, but you have amazed me with your depth of misunderstanding. I am truly impressed. It's really more like this: 1. Unable to understand logic. Period. Check.
2. Unable to grasp that profit is the result of production. Check, check, and check again.
3. Calling repeated failures to understand item 2 "pointing out facts". Check.
You're a real piece of work.
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And death is the result of human actions. Above comparison applies directly, showing the absurdity of claiming that something being result of something else is the same as something being something else.
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Maybe if taxes were on consumption rather than production, productive people wouldn't have to shelter their funds.
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Most of the taxes sheltered by people are on profits.
Companies are the ones who shelter money from production and consumption.
What you missed is that taxing profits is taxing production. I did NOT write "production and profits are the same things". But when you tax the benefits of production (profits), you are in effect taxing production... you are taxing the very incentive for which most people engage in production in the first place.
Profits are the result of production. Income taxes, capital gains taxes, and the like are taxes on production. They are therefore, by definition, counter-productive.
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All human actions result in death. Therefore by definition, all human action are counter-productive.
Hey, that works for everything!
No, it doesn't, and there are numerous reasons why. But first and foremost, the very first sentence is false. Not "all
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Excellent. Let's continue to apply your logic to both statements to see if we can find a sizable difference:
Not "all human action" results in death. In fact the vast majority of human action does not result in death.
Not all production results in profit - correct. In fact the vast majority of production does not result in profit - also correct.
I'm sorry, you'll have to continue trying to twist the logic to break the obvious similarity. So far, your every attempt appears to match up perfectly between the two,
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"Not all production results in profit - correct. In fact the vast majority of production does not result in profit - also correct."
It still won't wash. The CONTEXT was economic production.
The vast majority of economic production does in fact product profit.
You can twist this as many ways as you like. You were still wrong.
And I am completely done. You're either an idiot or trolling. I really don't care which; I won't waste more of my time.
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I love you how spin and spin, and it still ends up at the starting line - that your logic is utterly absurd. You're simply incapable of understanding that taxation is not a bad thing, and that profit does not equal production, any more that profit does not equal "economic production" (listing a specific subset isn't going to change the whole).
Sorry, but pointing out your obvious doublethink that you're trying to pass as logic is not trolling. It's stating a fact. It's a shame you're apparently utterly incap
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Taxation on profit does not equal taxation on production.
Ah... now you are saying something different. Earlier, you were saying production does not equal profit.
But either way, you're still trolling, and I caught you at it. For all practical purposes, yes taxing profits is a tax on production. Even if it isn't technically, it still has the same economic effect: discouraging production.
So you can continue trolling or spinning or nitpicking or whatever it is you think you're doing: it's still just trolling. You've had nothing genuine to add to the conversatio
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So in other words, you admit you're wrong, but since you don't want to admit you're wrong, you don't actually admit you're wrong.
You doublethinkers are confusing. But nope, we're still talking about the exact same post of yours: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4409259&cid=45331133 [slashdot.org]
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What I stated was: even if there is some stretch of the imagination by which you could be considered correct, it's so thin that calling it "nitpicking" would be a complement.
What is wrong with you, anyway? Because something is.
Ah, never mind. I've already been feeding the troll too much, methinks.
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I like how in almost every post you seem to:
1. Admit to something.
2. Deny you admitted to something else in your previous post.
3. Argue that claiming "production does not equal profit" is anything from "illogical" to "nitpicking".
4. Make a personal attack against me, ranging from calling me a troll to asking what's wrong with me.
5. Promise to "stop feeding the troll".
To answer your question: I'm just tired of apologists who like to pretend that all taxes are bad because they believe in it. And they will use
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"To answer your question: I'm just tired of apologists who like to pretend that all taxes are bad because they believe in it. And they will use any doublethink necessary to argue so.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
That is so far from anything I've ever written on Slashdot! It's good to have a good laugh once in a while.
"So I like to shove their faces into the absurdity of their doublethink in hopes of eventually getting their own bullshit meters to tilt enough to see through their own doublethink. I call it a good deed of the day."
I might actually agree with you, if (A) it were justified, and (B) what you were actually doing really resembled that in some significant way.
But as it stands, I think you're delusional.
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Yes, we know. "Tax is for the poor" and all that jazz.
Re:strict privacy laws my ass! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually it was the CIA. He witnessed a Swiss banker be turned into a CIA asset through someone getting him drunk and making him drive. So not only was this an immoral entrapment scheme, but it also sounds quite dangerous (what if he had crashed?). Of course, he should have not driven when drunk, but who knows how persuasive the CIA can get. For all we know they spiked his drink.
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Yeah, and we saw how that turned out.
FYI. The Peoples Republic of China has financial institution which say they will NEVER share your personal information with any western government or corporation without your explicit written permission.
doesn't matter (Score:3, Funny)
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What is slower latency?
Re:Speed of...light. (Score:5, Funny)
What is slower latency?
Duplicate redundancy.
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'Help stamp out repetitive redundancy, completely and totally.'
That was making the rounds in the mid-70's, around the same time that T-shirts with "THINK" printed on them.
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I hate typos - T-shirts with 'THIMK' printed on them.
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Is it a typo if it is spelled correctly but not according to what it is referring to?
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It's not. Especially with CDN's.
the Swiss don't need you (Score:4, Interesting)
The nice thing about this is that short of invading, there's no way to pressure the Swiss to do anything that they don't want to do. They produce their own energy, they make a crapload of money, and every adult male owns an assault rifle (security of a free state, keep and bear arms, etc. etc.). They can afford to give the NSA the finger.
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There's the issue.
Re:the Swiss don't need you (Score:5, Interesting)
There's the issue.
What issue? [antiwar.com]
Re:the Swiss don't need you (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:the Swiss don't need you (Score:4, Funny)
The value of having a neutral territory far outweighs the value of pursuing a particular agenda.
The value of capturing a series of heavily defended localities adjacent to and in a mountain range tends to be outweighed by the cost of doing so. Rubble and ruin is a poor exchange for blood and treasure.
Re:the Swiss don't need you (Score:5, Informative)
That's a pretty hard sell. They're white...
The US has fought repeatedly against nations populated primarily by white people when there was cause. That includes Britain (1776, 1812), Germany (1917, 1941), Italy (1941), Spain (1898), France (1798), and the whites and white government of the Confederate States of America (1861). The US was ready to go to war for 50 years (1947-1991) against the largely white Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania) in Eastern Europe, and intervened in the Russian civil war (1918). There appears to be a problem with your race based theory. Too many people here have "brown on the brain." (We'll pass in silence over the wars in Asia.) The issue is the behavior of the nation in question, not the color of its population.
Re:the Swiss don't need you (Score:5, Informative)
As a swiss guy (born and living here): you have some good point, unfortunately and sadly they are wrong.
* Guns: Adult males (which are required to do military service) have a gun, but no ammo at home. No self-defence for us.
* Energy: we produce some energy and sell it during the day to other countries. During night, we buy it back at a far lower price to fill up the dams. There is give and take, and economic mostly us as winners.
* Crapload of money: yes there are some, like banks/etc. The common rabble doesn't. Life is very expensive here in Switzerland, except the iPhones.
* Finger to the NSA: I'd wish, but but our ministers do *always* what the USA is asking, often in advance.
So: no. We are USAs bitch like many, many others.
(unfortunately I forgot my password, therefore: anonymous swiss coward)
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No, I'm aware of the changing sentiment towards the USA. Some of the policital caste has lost touch with its cows^w^w^w^w population, as in many other countries arround the globe.
I'm not saying, everything is wrong in Switzerland. But please, let's stop pretending it is heaven. There is much room for improvement.
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I think it's mostly just Americans who think Switzerland is pure heaven (they tend to have a very black & white view of "foreign" countries)... The point I was trying to make is that in most democratic countries, expect "protection from NSA and America" to be a major issue in the next election and the one after that. Of course it's partly up to us to make that happen. We need to repeatedly ask the candidates and the media "what do you plan to do against mass surveillance by other governments and our own
Re:the Swiss don't need you (Score:5, Informative)
Buy ammunition, get arrested, go to jail.
Many people don't know that beyond the weird NRA-based claims of "armed nation", swiss men have assault rifles at home disassembled and with no ammunition. Assembling the rifle and taking it out of your home without special permission is a crime. Having ammunition for it without special permission is also a crime. They brought down their mainly assault rifle based gun crime down hard with that policy.
That said, their army has excellent plans on how to distribute ammo in event of threat of war.
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This used to be the case, but it changed a few years ago. Ammo for the issue rifle is only made available at the ranges now.
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This "Oclahoma pig fucker" actually comes from the only other nation in Europe with universal conscription - Finland.
As far as I know, you have rules for ammunition that are fairly similar to ours. Have a permit or you're breaking the law. The only difference is that you choose to keep your reservist guns at homes, while we keep them buried in the ground or stored in army storage all over the country..
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They brought down their mainly assault rifle based gun crime down hard with that policy.
Can you cite some examples of that "mainly assault rifle based gun crime"? I am only aware of a single case, where the guy shot up the canton (?) parliament with his Stgw. This was back when ammo was still issued for storage alongside with the rifle.
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As far as I remember they had similar pattern of domestic violence that Kosovo has. I.e. instead of knives, or small arms most wounds were high energy ballistic (caused by high power assault rifles), which are far more serious in nature.
It's not that they had a lot of it. It's that the pattern of this particular form of crime, which usually takes form of "most accessible weapon" was significantly more fatal than that in neighboring countries. By removing easy access to ammo, domestic violence cases went to
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Your password is 228ghx!@.
Kind regards,
Swiss Federal Intelligence Service.
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The nice thing about this is that short of invading, there's no way to pressure the Swiss to do anything that they don't want to do. They produce their own energy, they make a crapload of money, and every adult male owns an assault rifle (security of a free state, keep and bear arms, etc. etc.). They can afford to give the NSA the finger.
Wrong, economic coercion works as well if not better than military invasion. Switzerland is a prosperous country because of the EU it trades with. EU has a lot of clout in Switzerland. That's how the EU managed to break the Swiss's famouse bank secrecy laws.
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What many foreign states want is actually unlimited access to any and all customers data without the need for probable cause, which is against the Swiss constitution.
Not us. Access without probable cause is against the U.S. constitution too.
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What can be done is to use the Swiss data center as a passthrough for encryption.
That way, you have your site -> intermediate storage provider -> destination cloud provider, with both your site and the intermediate provider doing passthrough encryption. This can be changed with public key encryption to the intermediate providers only stepping in to decrypt data with their private key [1]. Encrypted data would just go directly from the client to the end cloud provider.
That way, for data to be accesse
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The nice thing about this is that short of invading, there's no way to pressure the Swiss to do anything that they don't want to do. They produce their own energy, they make a crapload of money, and every adult male owns an assault rifle (security of a free state, keep and bear arms, etc. etc.). They can afford to give the NSA the finger.
Actually, there is a way to pressure them. Have foreign banks stop doing business with their banks. It's actually a very effective tool; one that is used on the North Koreans very effectively. It essentially cuts off access to their money which results in their rethinking what they are doing. We'd never do that to Switzerland but it is a little know but effective weapon.
Horrible pun ahead. (Score:5, Funny)
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Cheesy joke.
Why did Swisscom exec commit suicide? (Score:3, Interesting)
I notice there's a lot of suicides connected to telecoms.
Kostas Tsalikidis, shortly after the Vodafone bugging of the Greek government was discovered.,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostas_Tsalikidis
Adamo Bove, committed suicide by throwing himself onto a freeway after finding out about 'Radar' (like an Italian Tempora):
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.15/italy
Just out of interest, I noticed a senior Swisscom exec killed himself in July this year, shortly after the Snowden leaks, it could be unrelated and maybe it was related to his marriage breakup 4 years earlier, but worth digging in light of the other two deaths and the timing.
I recall Snowden mentioned CIA's activities in Geneva from his days there, (getting bankers on drunk driving charges to gain leverage). Which puts a question mark in my mind about a Swisscom cloud:
http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-describes-cia-tricks-2013-6
Swisscom (Score:2, Interesting)
Swisscom is the last company you would want to do this - I was working for one of the large banks here and to VPN from home to the office on Swisscom you had to have a static IP otherwise it was routed through Germany which wasn't good for Swiss banking secrecy.
This is going to be huge (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it just my cynicism.... (Score:3)
...or are all these proposals for 'new' 'secure' cloud and email systems probably doing nothing more than waking up the NSA that they can't just doze through bulk downloads of foreign-traffic data any longer?
I mean seriously, the tyros in the NSA are probably *welcoming* the new challenge of some serious crypto to crack...and most of these new programs are going to be hacked and downloading again almost unhindered by lunchtime of launch day.
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Even if the company can be trusted, still got to get the data through NSA-tapped pipes each way. NSA with their ability to easily coerce certificate signing by any of the US-based CAs, and a policy of getting companies to insert backdoors in products. And if they really want what's in the cloud, they can just have a deniable operative use the classic bribery or extortion techniques to get access.
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"the tyros in the NSA"
N.B. I don't think tyro means what you think it means, i.e., tyro is a beginner.
As for the rest? Who knows? You could well be right.
Re: We see how the Swiss bank secrecy thing worked (Score:1)
They haven't. Not yet at least. It keeps getting voted down.
And how can they guarantee that (Score:5, Interesting)
the NSA and other spy agencies aren't able to get at their traffic? Swiss privacy laws protect against legal attacks, not NSA attacks.
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So far the most effective NSA attack has been the $3 wrench; they put people in a room and tell them they need to comply or a man with a gun will put them in a metal box forever. Secret laws, secret courts, gag orders preventing you from even talking to a lawyer? These are fundamentally incompatible with the legitimate rule of law.
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Or just as easily, invite a crusading congressman for a tour and while there show him what they have on him; he comes out being quite supportive of agency's programs. We had one example just a few months back, for those following the news.
Crypto AG was Swiss, wasn't it? (Score:2)
And then you realize that (Score:4, Funny)
- the swiss also have their intelligence services
- the swiss also have lawful interception
- you still need to encrypt everything as your data in transit to Switzerland might be intercepted elsewhere
Go dark. Now.
Regards from Switzerland
Problem with Switzerland though (Score:2)
... is that it has so much foreign soil.
there is a cost (Score:2)
witness the positive and contrapositve:
1. the slow but steady growth of app.net, a paid subscription social web SERVICE/platform [handily the equal or better of
2. the way all the "free" web services provided by Google, Farcebook, (and god knows what Twitter will suck out of you for the stockholder
Tax fraud heaven? (Score:2)
And although this system can be ab