What do I call it, kif? Ugh..... Sex-lexia

In April, Nigeria asked Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to set concrete deadlines for opening data centers in the country. Nigeria has been making this demand for about four years, but the companies have so far failed to fulfill their promises. Now, Nigeria has set up a working group with the companies to ensure that data is stored within its shores. Just onshoring the data center does not solve the problems. You can't be sure no data travels to the US servers, some data does need to travel to the US servers, and the entire DC is still subject to US software and certificate keychains. It's better, but not good or safe. I need to channel my inner Mike Ehrmantrout to the US tech companies and government: you had a good thing going you stupid son of a bitch. You had everything you needed and it all ran like clockwork. You could have shut your mouth, cooked, and made as much money as you needed, but you just had to blow it up, you and your pride and your ego. Seriously, this is a massive own goal by the US government. This is a massive loss to US hegemony and influence around the world that's never coming back. It has never been easier to build sovereign clouds with off the shelf and open source tooling. The best practices are largely documented, software is commoditized, and there are plenty of qualified people out there these days and governments staring down the barrel of existential risk have finally got the incentive to fund these efforts.

Sorry what? You mean post to technology@lemmy.world?

This is also going to be used against the general populace. Setting up the Techno-Fuedal Surveillance state. The Militaries of the future will be policing their own countries more and more. Very soon the regular police will all have masks and blacked out helmets.

So glad I never got on WhatsApp

I think you're missing some key points. Any file hosting service, no matter what, will have to deal with CSAM as long as people are able to upload to it. No matter what. This is an inescapable fact of hosting and the internet in general. Because CSAM is so ubiquitous and constant, one can only do so much to moderate any services, whether they're a large corporation are someone with a server in their closet. All of the larger platforms like 'meta', google, etc., mostly outsource that moderation to workers in developing countries so they don't have to also provide mental health counselling, but that's another story. The reason they own their own hardware is because the hosting services can and will disable your account and take down your servers if there's even a whiff of CSAM. Since it's a constant threat, it's better to own your own hardware and host everything from your closet so you don't have to eat the downtime and wait for some poor bastard in Nigeria to look through your logs and reinstate your account (not sure how that works exactly though).