Накратко, много държави-членки на Европейския Съюз, водени от Дания, подкрепят въвеждането на принудително преглеждане на снимки и линкове споделяни в чат приложения като WhatsApp, Signal и други. Това действие се очаква да бъде автоматизирано чрез използването на изкуствен интелект (ИИ). Ако ИИ има “съмнение”, че споделеният материал има порнографско съдържание с деца, вашата снимка, местонахождение, телефонен номер и друга информация ще бъдат докладвани автоматично до Европол и местната полицейска администрация.

In het kort: onder leiding van Denemarken pleiten veel EU-lidstaten er (weer) voor om WhatsApp/Signal/etc te dwingen al onze foto’s en links te inspecteren met behulp van AI. Als de AI ook maar enige “twijfel” heeft of iets kinderpornografie zou kunnen zijn, worden je foto, locatie, telefoonnummer en andere gegevens doorgestuurd naar Europol en de lokale politie. Wat er daarna gebeurt staat niet uitgelegd, maar je vakantie op Cyprus zou zomaar kunnen eindigen met een gesprek op het lokale politiebureau om je foto’s uit te leggen.

La inițiativa Danemarcei, multe state membre ale UE cer ca WhatsApp/Signal/etc. să fie forțate să inspecteze toate pozele și linkurile noastre folosind inteligența artificială (IA). Daca IA are orice “îndoială” că acestea ar putea fi pornografie infantilă, atunci poza ta, locația ta, numărul tău de telefon și alte detalii vor fi raportate către Europol și către poliția locală. Ce se întâmplă mai departe nu e specificat, dar vacanța ta în Cipru s-ar putea termina cu tine la secția locală de poliție, nevoit să îți explici pozele.

In breve, guidati dalla Danimarca, molti stati membri dell’UE sostengono la necessità di obbligare WhatsApp/Signal/ecc. a ispezionare tutte le nostre foto e i nostri link, utilizzando l’intelligenza artificiale (IA). Se l’IA ha qualche “dubbio” che si tratti di pedopornografia, la tua foto, posizione, numero di telefono e altri dettagli vengono segnalati a Europol e a una forza di polizia locale. Non è specificato cosa accadrà in seguito, ma durante la tua vacanza a Cipro potresti dover spiegare le tue foto alla stazione di polizia locale.

En resumen: bajo el liderazgo de Dinamarca, muchos países de la Unión Europea quieren obligar a las compañías de mensajería como WhatsApp o Signal a inspeccionar todas nuestras fotos y enlaces con ayuda de inteligencia artificial (IA). Si la IA tiene la mínima duda de que pueda tratarse de material relacionado con abuso infantil, se enviarán a Europol y a la policía local tu foto, la ubicación, tu número de teléfono y otros datos personales.

En bref, sous l’impulsion du Danemark, de nombreux États membres de l’UE demandent que les messageries comme WhatsApp/Signal/etc. soient contraintes d’inspecter toutes nos photos et tous nos liens en utilisant de l’IA. Si l’IA a le moindre “doute” quant à la possibilité qu’il s’agisse de pédopornographie, votre photo, votre localisation, votre numéro de téléphone ainsi que d’autres détails sont signalés à Europol et aux forces de police locales. La suite n’est pas précisée, mais vos vacances à Chypre pourraient se vite se terminer par l’obligation d’expliquer vos photos au poste de police local.

In short, led by Denmark, many EU member states are arguing for forcing WhatsApp/Signal/etc to inspect all our photos and links, using AI. If the AI is in any “doubt” if this might be child pornography, your photo, location, phone number & other details get reported to Europol and a local police force. What happens next is not specified, but your holiday in Cyprus might end up with you having to explain your photos over at the local police station.

Kurz zusammengefasst: Unter der Führung Dänemarks fordern viele EU-Mitgliedsstaaten, WhatsApp, Signal und co dazu zu zwingen, dass alle darüber versendeten Fotos und Links mit KI durchsucht werden. Wenn die KI auch nur den geringsten Verdacht hat, dass es sich um Kinderpornografie handeln könnte, werden dein Bild, dein Standort, deine Telefonnummer und weitere Details automatisch an Europol und eine örtliche Polizeibehörde gemeldet. Jetzt gegen Chat Control aktiv werden! Auch wenn nicht festgelegt ist was danach passiert, kann dein Urlaub auf Zypern schnell damit enden, dass du deine privaten Fotos einem unbekannten Polizisten erklären musst.

I just got back from the most awesome WHY2025, the tenth installment of the four-yearly Dutch hacker festival series. I’ve been attending these things since 1993, so it is a big deal for me. By being among the hacker community for nearly a week, you start seeing the world differently. I usually spend (too much) time on policy and writing stuff, and this was a much needed reset. My badge for HEU 1993, the first Dutch hacker camp

Na bijna een jaar werk publiceerde de overheid recent alsnog de Nederlandse Digitaliseringsstrategie (ik heb ook een klein beetje bij mogen dragen), met daarin gevleugelde woorden als “Nederland moet de kansen die digitalisering biedt pakken. Met de NDS moeten we vernieuwen en blijven investeren in ons digitaal fundament”. En ook, “We kunnen onze digitale ambities alleen waarmaken als we beschikken over voldoende digitaliseringskennis binnen de overheid.” Vorige week startte de werving van een nieuwe plaatsvervangende Rijks Chief Technology Officer (CTO), wat een mooi begin zou kunnen zijn van dit beleid.

The short version For decades, governments and organizations could run services based on servers we actually owned. These days, we’ve allowed the IT world to convince us no computing is possible outside of US-style clouds, for which we have no European equivalents. And because of this conviction, we are now moving our most precious data and most critical services to US controlled servers. Yet most of European government software still runs on locally owned systems.

A brief addition to the 50000 words I wrote earlier on the cloud: what is the European situation? Software Initially, companies and governments would buy licenses to software. You’d typically have a piece of software in your office, on one of your computers, to calculate payroll with. Most other computers would have copies of WordPerfect installed. This software would function for years without updates or maintenance. If WordPerfect-the-company would disappear, you would not even notice.

There is a lot of recent discussion about digital autonomy and Europe’s “position in the cloud”. Here, I want to break down and refute a commonly made argument: that the lead of American cloud providers is so great that we can never catch up. In the recent and excellent policy initiative “Clouds on the Horizon” (by Dutch political parties GL-PvdA and NSC), we can read on page 23 why this can’t be a reason to just give up.

Advanced cloud services are based on good hardware, decent software, and surrounding infrastructure that combines these both into solid solutions that can be provided as a business activity. Europe is good with operating the hardware. And surprisingly, we are also good with writing software. Much of the software used by the main cloud providers is based on open source, and lots of that open source is authored by European programmers. What we sorely lack here are providers of higher level cloud services, the kind that businesses clamor for.

tl;dr: The European Commission is honestly asking for experts to advise them on ways to institute “effective and lawful access to data for law enforcement”. If you are an expert, I urge you to apply to join this group. You have until September 1st. Do read on for more details! The never-ending battle where police and intelligence services demand more/total access to communications shows no sign of stopping, even in the face of mathematical and practical impossibilities.

Zoals ik gisteren schreef, onze maatschappij en overheden draaien in steeds grotere mate op Amerikaanse clouds, en we maken ons hier nu terecht zorgen over. Want het is toch niet leuk dat de Amerikanen mee kunnen lezen in onze (overheids)gegevens, of zonder pardon de steker eruit kunnen trekken. We zouden dit graag snel op willen lossen, maar er zijn geen makkelijke en goedkope keuzes. Inmiddels heeft (volgens geruchten) bijna de hele centrale rijksoverheid besloten om de email toch nog op eigen servers te houden, wat echt heel goed nieuws is.

Onze maatschappij en overheden draaien in steeds grotere mate op Amerikaanse clouds, en we maken ons hier nu terecht zorgen over. Als we dit op willen lossen zullen er meer en betere Europese producten moeten gaan komen. En vervolgens moeten we die ook nog gaan kopen, en niet makkelijk weer voor dezelfde VS big tech spullen kiezen. Wordt hard werken allemaal. En niemand houdt van hard werken, en dus springt iedereen vol enthousiasme op ieder bericht dat er een makkelijkere oplossing gevonden is.

De hele korte versie: De kern van de Nederlandse overheid draait nu op eigen emailservers, in eigen beheer. Op 14 oktober 2025 verloopt de ondersteuning op de gebruikte software. Microsoft stimuleert sterk om dan alle email over te dragen aan de Amerikaanse cloud, met alle gevolgen van dien. Maar het is ook mogelijk (met wat moeite) om een nieuwe versie van de email software aan te schaffen, zoals 9 ministeries van plan zijn.

Vanochtend 2 juni was er in de Tweede Kamer een nota overleg over de initiatiefnota “Wolken aan de Horizon” van Barbara Kathmann (GL-PvdA) en Jesse Six Dijkstra (NSC). Er is vandaag ook al een voorlopig verslag gepubliceerd door de Tweede Kamer, dat doen ze echt onvoorstelbaar snel! Ik was er vandaag bij en heb daar op Mastodon een liveverslag getypt, en dat heb ik ook hieronder geplaatst. Omdat het live ingetikt is is het goed mogelijk dat er fouten in staan, dus check vooral met het Tweede Kamer verslag, of bekijk de video.

So as a bit of a followup to my earlier post “What we in the open world are messing up in trying to compete with big tech ”: please (mostly) stop harassing people doing the right thing from the wrong platforms. We often see journalists, politicians, writers, NGOs and even software developers writing good things on independence from (US) big tech proprietary platforms. But also quite often, their work is hosted or syndicated on the very platforms they decry.

When Galileo (the European satellite navigation system) was proposed there was a lot of criticism. “We already have the US GPS”, and we’d always be able to rely on our historical partner to take care of us. The US very much also said this. Yet, the EU persevered and now we have an independent worldwide navigation capability. And given recent developments, I think we can be well pleased that we don’t have to rely on the US, China or Russia for this vital need!

Our societies and governments now largely run on American proprietary big-tech platforms. Many of us want to decrease this dependency, or even end it altogether. Everyone in the open tech scene is full of good intentions and we all want to improve things, but mostly we are not succeeding. By our nature, we would like to build fun, open, federated, and standards-based things. But that’s not enough — that’s not what the world is waiting for (right now).

Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about the cloud, and what it means for Europe. Here I want to pull the various articles together into a coherent story. Note, nothing what follows is in any way novel or original. While the facts presented in the articles are pretty inconvenient and in parts depressing, they are not controversial. To start with, “the cloud” by now is a large catalog of services.

In the earlier post ‘But how to get to that European cloud?’ I alluded to a coherent strategy that might get us to such a non-US cloud. In the present article I hope to clarify what this could mean, and why I think it could work. Here I focus especially on what should happen concretely, and who should do it. Note that this page is compatible/congruent with the latest EuroStack document.

I do a lot of talks and because of this I also attend quite a lot of them. I’ve previously shared some hopefully useful advice on how to give a decent presentation. But there’s something I’d like to add. I’m still somewhat on hiatus, but things appear to be going better! To give the most effective presentation, you must always think about the audience. You are not there for your personal enjoyment.

The very brief version: “going to the cloud” can mean renting services/servers that you could get from anywhere. There’s little lock-in. The same four words “going to the cloud” might also mean locking your operations to a specific cloud provider, whose proprietary services will now be part of your business processes “forever”. Be specific which variant of cloud you are signing off on! I’m mostly out of the office but this post was already in the pipeline and I thought it might be useful to get it out.

It is written that into each life some rain must fall, and currently a lot is falling on my family. We’re getting very good care and lots of support, so please don’t worry about us. I’m told we’ll get out of this. Consider this my ‘out of office reply’ on many of my projects and activities. I’m out of it for a bit. I know lots of people have seen me drop out of meetings and presentations, now you know why.

Ik moet ook nog even wennen aan het idee, maar “motie Cloud Kootwijk” is aangenomen (al heet ‘ie anders): "Motie van het lid Kathmann over een aanbesteding voor een rijkscloud in volledig Nederlands beheer" Deze motie kreeg van de regering de appreciatie Oordeel kamer (“👍”), en vervolgens stemden alle partijen behalve PVV er ook nog voor. Overigens legde het kabinet uit dat ze in plaats van ‘aanbesteden’ het oppakken als ‘het initiatief nemen tot’, wat ook prima is.

Earlier, I wrote that there isn’t just one type of cloud; it ranges from renting out servers to fully managed office software as a service. One relevant type of cloud use is what’s informally called “cloud-native.” I wrote in that earlier page that a “cloud-native developer” does not work based on servers. If you rent out virtual servers and call yourself a cloud company, a cloud-native developer won’t understand you at all.

Eerder schreef ik dat er niet één soort cloud is, het loopt van servers verhuren tot kant en klare kantoorsoftware as a service. Een relevant soort cloud is wat informeel wel ‘cloud native’ wordt genoemd. Ik schreef daarover dat een ‘cloud native programmeur’ niet werkt op basis van servers. Als je virtuele servers verhuurt en je noemt jezelf een cloudbedrijf, dan snapt die cloud native programmeur daar niets van. Die kan niet uit de voeten met computers, die heeft diensten nodig.