cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/215371

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/36073569

We must reduce our reliance on Jeff Bezos

An ad seen in Berlin. Positive news

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35678432

As the global reputation of US brands slips, some US firms are turning to unusual marketing strategies. Coca-Cola, for instance, is now promoting itself as a "German product."

As a result of this discussion in [email protected], there is now an IRC channel about degoogling!

/join ##degoogle on irc.libera.chat:6697 (TLS). The channel name begins with a double hashtag (according to the namespace policy).

Come on down and join us through your local IRC client or the web client web.libera.chat!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/41599289

Search engines determine what information we find – and what we don't. Those who control the infrastructure of web search influence public debates, democratic processes and economic developments. Currently, this power lies with a few US companies.

The EU project OpenWebSearch.EU, coordinated by the University of Passau, has set itself the ambitious goal of changing this. A key milestone has now been reached: the European research team has launched the Open Web Index (OWI) – an open, European web index that serves as the basis for alternative search technologies.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/41557369

#europe #european #europeanalternatives #europeanalternative #privacy #opensource #software #freedom

Recently I was quite delighted to find out that galaxus.de has a "country of origin" filter. The delight quickly faded when I realized that it was quite unreliable, e.g. one size of a USB stick was made supposedly made in Germany while another was supposedly made in China (which I found quite unbelievable). To be fair, they do write "Specifications may include unverified machine translations."

Does anybody know of a (tech or other) online shop where this works? Or tipps how to quicker navigate real and fake/mistaken "country of origin" labels?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/35080815

I'm starting to play with an old laptop that I have installed Ubuntu Server on, with Nextcloud and Docker.

Using Docker Compose I installed Nginx and now I would like to try to do the DDNS thing on a domain that I registered with an Italian provider.

I looked at a few DynDns providers and they seem to me to be all American or in any case on American infrastructure (DuckDNS on AWS, etc)

Is there anything you can recommend that is EU-based and who has a good reputation in general?

Free is preferred.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.europe.pub/post/4655

With 8% commission a bit more expensive than Buy me a coffee with 5%, but it's European and that makes it worth it imo.

Basically the title. People are currently upset with Imgur for layoffs or something and instead of doing the sensible thing of stopping it's use, they're flooding it. Seems like a good opportunity to shill an european alternative if it exists.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34724034

The Document Foundation is proud to release LibreOffice 25.8.

LibreOffice is a powerful, free and open source office suite for Linux, MacOS and Microsoft Windows.

It contains no advertising, data tracking or subscriptions.

LibreOffice is used by individuals, businesses, universities, and governments around the world.

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2025/08/20/libreoffice-25-8/

New improvements

Highlights of LibreOffice 25.8 include:

• Up to 30% faster opening of files in Writer and Calc
• Support for exporting PDF 2.0
• Improved user interface
• Optimized memory management for smoother operation on virtual desktops
• Improved scrolling through large documents
• Overhauled word hyphenation and spacing
• New financial functions in Calc
• Significantly better display of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean DOC/DOCX documents
• Spell check dictionaries updates for Danish, English, Hindi, Mongolian, Spanish, Thai, and Ukrainian.

The Document Foundation

The Document Foundation is a German non-profit organization.

We believe that Free Software can provide better quality, higher reliability, increased security, and greater flexibility than proprietary alternatives.

Helping us

LibreOffice is developed by hundreds of volunteers around the world.

Join us today and help us to make it even better!

👉 https://www.libreoffice.org/community/get-involved/

Thank you to the developers, moderators, designers, translators, donors and supporters 🙏 🙏🙏.

To add to the discussion we had some month ago, where some people said the planned laws would never come to be and would never be a threat: proton decided to differ and to move parts of the infrastructure to other countries.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Surveillance-Proton-relocates-parts-of-its-infrastructure-from-Switzerland-10538664.html

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/34769063

Has anyone found a good EU laptop option? Slimbook look like they've got some good products but I'm having trouble finding reviews.

Do you guys know other brands than the ones named in the comments?

Circular Microcomputers: The embedded computers powered by repurposed smartphone components.

Cool idea.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/133958

Note: I'm not affiliated with Jolla.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39942527

European search engines Qwant and Ecosia said on Wednesday that they have both started serving search queries through an index they developed together, Staan, which aims to be a cheaper, more privacy-focused alternative to Google and Bing.

Last year, French privacy-focused search engine Qwant struck a joint venture with German non-profit search engine Ecosia, to develop a European search index. Called European Search Perspective (EUSP), the JV now aims to serve around 50% of French queries and 33% of German queries by the end of the year.

Qwant said it is using the new index to power some of its features, like AI summaries for search, and Ecosia has plans to add some AI features soon to its platform, too.

EUSP is also in talks with companies to spur the adoption of its index for enabling search within apps. Notably, it is targeting chatbots, presenting Staan as a cheaper alternative to Google and Bing.

“If you’re using ChatGPT or any other AI chatbot, they all do knowledge grounding with web search […] our index can power deep research and AI summary features. Google and Bing’s solutions are also pricey, and our index can offer power search features at a tenth of the cost,” Christian Kroll, CEO of Ecosia, told TechCrunch.

EUSP, like Proton, is pushing to develop a European tech stack that doesn’t rely on technology from the U.S. or China.

“The timing could not be more urgent. The outcome of the 2024 U.S. election has reminded European policymakers and innovators just how exposed Europe remains when it comes to core digital infrastructure. Much of Europe’s search, cloud, and AI layers are built on American Big Tech stacks, putting entire sectors – from journalism to climate tech – at the mercy of political or commercial agendas,” the companies said in a statement.

Kroll added that through this index, combined with European privacy laws, EUSP can offer a more privacy-friendly search solution as compared to its U.S. counterparts.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33995436

I am looking for a good fitness tracker to start doing cardio in a more measured way.

I was interested in Polar and Oura as EU alternatives (both Finnish companies), but both send data (health data, which is sensitive according to Article 9 of the GDPR) to AWS.

Are you aware of any EU solutions, or at least non-US, Chinese, Russian, or Israeli solutions, that do not send my data to companies in those countries?

I would like to be able to organize something self-hosted, but I don't think I'm capable of doing that yet.

Just came back from 2500 km journey. Used my new German made Kamei Husky (https://www.kamei.de/) roof box for the first time. While Husky is their budget line - no complaints.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/post/114848

It seems like there was a big leap forward for wero.

If you search for “wero” in the German news, it seems like a lot of banks activated it yesterday-ish.

Mine is covered 🙂

I’m a little bit disappointed, that my cell phone number is the unique ID for transactions.

Edit:

Tried to search which banks are supported. This is just a selection and even the selector on the wero-webpage is not up-to-date.

• Germany: Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, GLS, Savings Banks Association (DSGV), Postbank, BBBank, Sparkasse, Haspa, Volksbank, Sparda Banken, Ethikbank, Evangelische Bank e.G.,...
• France: Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, BNP Paribas.
• Other: ING, Rabobank, Revolut.