The entire country has been clamouring for this for weeks, and the government has been completely silent about it. A couple of weeks ago, the entire parliament (with only a single party dissenting) voted for a motion to end the contract with Solvinity, but the government extended it anyway, leaving blocking the takeover as the only option, and there wasn't a lot of confidence that the government would do that.
The whole reason for this is that Solvinity host DigiD, the Dutch e-ID system that handles authentication to all government and many other sensitive systems (healthcare). With the US law that the US government should be able to get access to any data held by a US company, regardless of where it's hosted, this system clearly should be kept out of American hands.
Of course there's still plenty of sensitive data in the hands of Microsoft, Amazon and other US companies. No idea when they're going to do something about that.
Given what we know now, this seems perfectly logical. It's just that we don't know what else is going on behind the scenes.
I'm sure there was some negotiations on how to keep the data separate or something, with the threat of blocking it altogether as a final solution.
But agreed, this is a good outcome
which i'm sure the current administration would honour
There should be grave consequences alone for the fact that the goverment acted against the parliament
Like in this case. The technology here utterly depends on Google Play Services on Android or App Attest on Apple (or "secure enclave"), and that is in fact eseentially the only functionality.
This could have been solved instead switching to a standard (switching to OATH, RFC 4226 and RFC 6238), thus killing the dependency on Google/Apple while still allowing those devices to work smoothly, but allowing, for example, a Linux implementation. Plenty of European companies provide implementations for this, some with and some without the dependency on Google/Apple attestation.
I find it okay'ish. At least it's unique. Say, as much as I like Mario Zechner (who doesn't like HNers anymore for whatever reason), naming your product "Pi" is just terribly bad.
Facebook was a good name (hate the company but the name was good). But "Meta" is just dumbfucktarded.
Wait... I've got an idea: I'm going to make a product and name it "Alt". Or "Control".
Really: there are a lot of totally unhelpful name that just confuses everybody, including search engines, humans, and LLMs but I don't think "Solvinity" is that bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyndryl
> Officially formed in late 2021, Kyndryl was created from the spin-off of IBM's infrastructure services
> Kyndryl operated in 63 countries in November 2021
The Netherlands blocking a US acquisition due to technology control concerns is sure to ruffle some feathers in Washington.
vrganj•1h ago