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Ask HN: How can I prepare my digital life for geopolitical disruptions?

by mwinatschek on 2/20/25, 9:16 AM with 28 comments

• by yeyeyeyeyeyeyee on 2/20/25, 5:08 PM

  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)

• by ipaddr on 2/21/25, 6:16 AM

  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

• by barriteau on 2/22/25, 10:54 AM

  After living since forever in what they call an "outlaw state", I can assure you, Mr OP, that all of your concerns are extremely valid, and, indeed, you don't need an open war to start having REAL problems with your digital life.

  Something as simple as a few bans or sanctions are more than enough to stop you, for example, from using your credit cards to pay for everything you take for granted, call it Netflix, iCloud or even a $0.99 app. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

  My advice on this? Be a pragmatic fuck. For example:

  #1 Switch to open source or at least free alternatives for everything you can. #2 If you see it coming, temporarily suspend your "good citizen" behaviour and pirate what can't be solved with #1. (assume the risks and learn to deal with them). #3 Stay as local - your house local, not your country/union local - as possible, avoid "the cloud" if possible or create your own if it makes sense for you, a homelab or whatever. #4 Stay as anonymous and low profile as you can; even if you support your government in a conflict situation, they can turn on you in a blink, for the right or wrong reasons. #5 Familiarise yourself with things like Tor, VPNs and anything else that can help you bypass censorship and access blocked sites and services. #6 Consider having additional ISPs as failover options, something as different as possible from your main ISP. #7 Buy stuff to protect your electrical equipment: regulators, protectors, UPS and so on.

  I'm not saying you have to do it all, take only what makes sense for you, but keep an open mind and consider that permanent peace and stability could be your lifelong situation if you are lucky, but maybe not. Says the guy who had it.

  Trust me on this, I have become something of a cheap prepper, and not because of a war, it's far from that in here; just a few disagreements between governments, a few nationwide bans/prohibitions/sanctions, or a little bit of government incompetence/stupidity, are all you need to start having problems with international payments, problems accessing certain websites and services, problems with your Internet access, and even power outages, it doesn't take too much to start having a shitty digital life.

• by yawpitch on 2/20/25, 9:45 AM

  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/

• by gmuslera on 2/20/25, 12:49 PM

  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.

• by markus_zhang on 2/20/25, 3:40 PM

  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.

• by gfkclzhzo on 2/26/25, 2:05 PM

  Transition to cloud infrastructure that you control - open source SW running on personal HW.

  Credentials - KeepassXC + Aegis/WinAuth

  File Sync - Syncthing

  Video - Jellyfin

  Music - Navidrome

  Audiobooks & Podcasts - Audiobookshelf

  Books - Calibre Web

  Pictures - Immich

  Finances - ActualBudget + SimpleFIN

  DNS Filter - AdGuard

  Email - FowardEmail + Thunderbird and RoundCube

  Git server - Forgejo

• by not_your_vase on 2/20/25, 12:00 PM

  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 :)

• by alp1n3_eth on 2/21/25, 3:20 PM

  War between the EU and US, however unlikely, probably wouldn't mean all your devices stop working right away. At absolute worst, patches would stop rolling out to EU-owned and operated devices, so you'd still have your hardware, the current version of your OS, your local files, etc.

  Back up all of your iCloud(it can be exported). Keep a copy on hand, and keep a copy encrypted in the cloud using something like BackBlaze.

  Even though Linux has strong ties to the US, some of the distros aren't wouldn't be completely restricted (I'd wager most of them), and aren't all fully US-based. Keep a copy of Asahi / whatever flavor can run on your Mac handy on a bootable USB stick.

  You could grab a cheap android phone as a backup to your current iPhone and flash it with a fork, like Graphene.

  The general data protection and backup strategies largely apply and work well for this scenario.

• by cutthegrass2 on 2/24/25, 9:11 AM

  - disable iCloud - disable any apps that sync via iCloud - backup phone to local machine and enable encryption (doesn't have to be macOS) - use something like PGP to re-encrypt the encrypted backup file generated - store encrypted backup file in a way that provides the durability guarantees you want

  Boils down to, don't use iCloud - making the assumption that Germany and the rest of the EU countries aren't far behind the UK in authoritarianism and apple will remove ADP from those regions also.

• by tryauuum on 2/20/25, 8:02 PM

  > 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.

• by beardyw on 2/20/25, 11:30 AM

  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.

• by z3wasoft3r on 2/20/25, 9:40 PM

  > 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.

• by aborsy on 2/21/25, 8:45 AM

  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

• by uscneps on 2/23/25, 11:21 AM

  i wrote some US alternatives : https://github.com/uscneps/Awesome-European-Tech

• by prophoto on 2/20/25, 10:03 AM

  How about going for an independent cloud storage like Dropbox, they are not affiliated to any OS or Windows platforms