The shift is largely due to the rapid ex­pan­sion of so­lar en­ergy, which is grow­ing faster than any other source of elec­tric­ity. Together, wind and so­lar gen­er­ated 30 per­cent of E. U. power last year, while fos­sil fu­els pro­vided 29 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to the analy­sis from Ember, a think tank based in London. Including hy­dro, re­new­ables pro­vided nearly half of all E.U. power in 2025.

Last year, for the first time, wind and so­lar sup­plied more power than fos­sil fu­els to the E. U., ac­cord­ing to a new analy­sis.

The shift is largely due to the rapid ex­pan­sion of so­lar en­ergy, which is grow­ing faster than any other source of elec­tric­ity. Together, wind and so­lar gen­er­ated 30 per­cent of E. U. power last year, while fos­sil fu­els pro­vided 29 per­cent, ac­cord­ing to the analy­sis from Ember, a think tank based in London. Including hy­dro, re­new­ables pro­vided nearly half of all E.U. power in 2025.

Last year, for the first time, wind and so­lar sup­plied more power than fos­sil fu­els to the E. U., ac­cord­ing to a new analy­sis.

The analy­sis finds that so­lar is mak­ing gains in every E. U. coun­try, while coal is broadly in re­treat. Last year, so­lar alone sup­plied more than 20 per­cent of power in Hungary, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, and the Netherlands. Meanwhile, in 19 European coun­tries, coal ac­counted for less than 5 per­cent of power. In 2025, both Ireland and Finland joined the ranks of European coun­tries that have shut­tered their last re­main­ing coal plants.

Warming, how­ever, con­tin­ues to chal­lenge the shift to clean en­ergy as drought saps hy­dropower. Last year, hy­dro out­put dropped slightly in the E. U., and nat­ural gas power rose to com­pen­sate.

“The next pri­or­ity for the E. U. should be to put a se­ri­ous dent in re­liance on ex­pen­sive, im­ported gas,” said Ember an­a­lyst Beatrice Petrovich. “Gas not only makes the E.U. more vul­ner­a­ble to en­ergy black­mail, it’s also dri­ving up prices.”

In parts of Europe, there are signs that in­creas­ingly cheap bat­ter­ies are be­gin­ning to dis­place nat­ural gas in the early evening, when power de­mand is high, but so­lar out­put is wan­ing. Said Petrovich, “As this trend ac­cel­er­ates it could limit how much gas is needed in evening hours, there­fore sta­bi­liz­ing prices.”

An E. U. Plan to Slash Micropollutants in Wastewater Is Under Attack

The Department of Homeland Security said the man was armed with a gun and two mag­a­zines of am­mu­ni­tion and cir­cu­lated a photo of the weapon. DHS said a Border Patrol agent fired in self-de­fense. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), the state’s chief in­ves­tiga­tive agency, said it was not al­lowed ac­cess to the scene.

Windows PCs by de­fault will backup their en­cryp­tion keys to the cloud, and Microsoft is­n’t afraid to share those with the FBI if re­quested.

Windows PCs by de­fault will backup their en­cryp­tion keys to the cloud, and Microsoft is­n’t afraid to share those with the FBI if re­quested.

Microsoft has con­firmed in a state­ment to Forbes that the com­pany will pro­vide the FBI ac­cess to BitLocker en­cryp­tion keys if a valid le­gal or­der is re­quested. These keys en­able the abil­ity to de­crypt and ac­cess the data on a com­puter run­ning Windows, giv­ing law en­force­ment the means to break into a de­vice and ac­cess its data.

The news comes as Forbes re­ports that Microsoft gave the FBI the BitLocker en­cryp­tion keys to ac­cess a de­vice in Guam that law en­force­ment be­lieved to have “evidence that would help prove in­di­vid­u­als han­dling the is­land’s Covid un­em­ploy­ment as­sis­tance pro­gram were part of a plot to steal funds” in early 2025.

This was pos­si­ble be­cause the de­vice in ques­tion had its BitLocker en­cryp­tion key saved in the cloud. By de­fault, Windows 11 forces the use of a Microsoft Account, and the OS will au­to­mat­i­cally tie your BitLocker en­cryp­tion key to your on­line ac­count so that users can eas­ily re­cover their data in sce­nar­ios where they might get locked out. This can be dis­abled, let­ting you choose where to save them lo­cally, but the de­fault be­hav­ior is to store the key in Microsoft’s cloud when set­ting up a PC with a Microsoft Account.

“While key re­cov­ery of­fers con­ve­nience, it also car­ries a risk of un­wanted ac­cess, so Microsoft be­lieves cus­tomers are in the best po­si­tion to de­cide… how to man­age their keys,” Microsoft spokesper­son Charles Chamberlayne said in a state­ment to Forbes.

Microsoft told Forbes that it re­ceives around 20 re­quests for BitLocker en­cryp­tion keys from the FBI a year, but the ma­jor­ity of re­quests are un­able to be met be­cause the en­cryp­tion key was never up­loaded to the com­pa­ny’s cloud.

This is no­table as other tech com­pa­nies, such as Apple, have fa­mously re­fused to pro­vide law en­force­ment with ac­cess to en­crypted data stored on their prod­ucts. Apple has openly fought against the FBI in the past when it was asked to pro­vide a back­door into an iPhone. Other tech gi­ants, such as Meta, will store en­cryp­tion keys in the cloud, but use zero-knowl­edge ar­chi­tec­tures and en­crypt the keys server-side so that only the user can ac­cess them.

It’s frankly shock­ing that the en­cryp­tion keys that do get up­loaded to Microsoft aren’t en­crypted on the cloud side, too. That would pre­vent Microsoft from see­ing the keys, but it seems that, as things cur­rently stand, those keys are avail­able in an un­en­crypted state, and it is a pri­vacy night­mare for cus­tomers.

To see Microsoft so will­ingly hand over the keys to en­crypted Windows PCs is con­cern­ing, and should make every­body us­ing a mod­ern Windows com­puter think twice be­fore back­ing up their keys to the cloud. You can see which PCs have their BitLocker keys stored on Microsoft’s servers on the Microsoft Account web­site here, which will let you delete them if pre­sent.

Follow Windows Central on Google News to keep our lat­est news, in­sights, and fea­tures at the top of your feeds!

Today we are ex­cited to share a big mile­stone. BirdyChat is now the first chat app in Europe that can ex­change mes­sages with WhatsApp un­der the Digital Markets Act. This brings us closer to our mis­sion of giv­ing work con­ver­sa­tions a proper home.

WhatsApp is cur­rently rolling out in­ter­op­er­abil­ity sup­port across Europe. As this roll­out con­tin­ues, the fea­ture will be­come fully avail­able to both BirdyChat and WhatsApp users in the com­ing months.

There’s a kind of po­lite fic­tion at the heart of the soft­ware in­dus­try. It goes some­thing like this:

Estimating how long soft­ware pro­jects will take is very hard, but not im­pos­si­ble. A skilled en­gi­neer­ing team can, with time and ef­fort, learn how long it will take for them to de­liver work, which will in turn al­low their or­ga­ni­za­tion to make good busi­ness plans.

This is, of course, false. As every ex­pe­ri­enced soft­ware en­gi­neer knows, it is not pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware pro­jects. The ten­sion be­tween this po­lite fic­tion and its well-un­der­stood false­ness causes a lot of strange ac­tiv­ity in tech com­pa­nies.

For in­stance, many en­gi­neer­ing teams es­ti­mate work in t-shirt sizes in­stead of time, be­cause it just feels too ob­vi­ously silly to the en­gi­neers in ques­tion to give di­rect time es­ti­mates. Naturally, these t-shirt sizes are im­me­di­ately trans­lated into hours and days when the es­ti­mates make their way up the man­age­ment chain.

Alternatively, soft­ware en­gi­neers who are gen­uinely try­ing to give good time es­ti­mates have ridicu­lous heuris­tics like “double your ini­tial es­ti­mate and add 20%“. This is ba­si­cally the same as giv­ing up and say­ing “just es­ti­mate every­thing at a month”.

Should tech com­pa­nies just stop es­ti­mat­ing? One of my guid­ing prin­ci­ples is that when a tech com­pany is do­ing some­thing silly, they’re prob­a­bly do­ing it for a good rea­son. In other words, prac­tices that ap­pear to not make sense are of­ten serv­ing some more ba­sic, il­leg­i­ble role in the or­ga­ni­za­tion. So what is the ac­tual pur­pose of es­ti­ma­tion, and how can you do it well as a soft­ware en­gi­neer?

Before I get into that, I should jus­tify my core as­sump­tion a lit­tle more. People have writ­ten a lot about this al­ready, so I’ll keep it brief.

I’m also go­ing to con­cede that some­times you can ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware work, when that work is very well-un­der­stood and very small in scope. For in­stance, if I know it takes half an hour to de­ploy a ser­vice, and I’m be­ing asked to up­date the text in a link, I can ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate the work at some­thing like 45 min­utes: five min­utes to push the change up, ten min­utes to wait for CI, thirty min­utes to de­ploy.

For most of us, the ma­jor­ity of soft­ware work is not like this. We work on poorly-un­der­stood sys­tems and can­not pre­dict ex­actly what must be done in ad­vance. Most pro­gram­ming in large sys­tems is re­search: iden­ti­fy­ing prior art, map­ping out enough of the sys­tem to un­der­stand the ef­fects of changes, and so on. Even for fairly small changes, we sim­ply do not know what’s in­volved in mak­ing the change un­til we go and look.

The pro-es­ti­ma­tion dogma says that these ques­tions ought to be an­swered dur­ing the plan­ning process, so that each in­di­vid­ual piece of work be­ing dis­cussed is scoped small enough to be ac­cu­rately es­ti­mated. I’m not im­pressed by this an­swer. It seems to me to be a throw­back to the bad old days of soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture, where one ar­chi­tect would map every­thing out in ad­vance, so that in­di­vid­ual pro­gram­mers sim­ply had to me­chan­i­cally fol­low in­struc­tions. Nobody does that now, be­cause it does­n’t work: pro­gram­mers must be em­pow­ered to make ar­chi­tec­tural de­ci­sions, be­cause they’re the ones who are ac­tu­ally in con­tact with the code. Even if it did work, that would sim­ply shift the im­pos­si­ble-to-es­ti­mate part of the process back­wards, into the plan­ning meet­ing (where of course you can’t write or run code, which makes it near-im­pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately an­swer the kind of ques­tions in­volved).

In short: soft­ware en­gi­neer­ing pro­jects are not dom­i­nated by the known work, but by the un­known work, which al­ways takes 90% of the time. However, only the known work can be ac­cu­rately es­ti­mated. It’s there­fore im­pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware pro­jects in ad­vance.

Estimates do not help en­gi­neer­ing teams de­liver work more ef­fi­ciently. Many of the most pro­duc­tive years of my ca­reer were spent on teams that did no es­ti­ma­tion at all: we were ei­ther work­ing on pro­jects that had to be done no mat­ter what, and so did­n’t re­ally need an es­ti­mate, or on pro­jects that would de­liver a con­stant drip of value as we went, so we could just keep go­ing in­def­i­nitely.

In a very real sense, es­ti­mates aren’t even made by en­gi­neers at all. If an en­gi­neer­ing team comes up with a long es­ti­mate for a pro­ject that some VP re­ally wants, they will be pres­sured into low­er­ing it (or some other, more com­pli­ant en­gi­neer­ing team will be handed the work). If the es­ti­mate on an un­de­sir­able pro­ject - or a pro­ject that’s in­tended to “hold space” for fu­ture un­planned work - is too short, the team will of­ten be en­cour­aged to in­crease it, or their man­ager will just add a 30% buffer.

One ex­cep­tion to this is pro­jects that are tech­ni­cally im­pos­si­ble, or just gen­uinely pro­hib­i­tively dif­fi­cult. If a man­ager con­sis­tently fails to pres­sure their teams into giv­ing the “right” es­ti­mates, that can send a sig­nal up that maybe the work can’t be done af­ter all. Smart VPs and di­rec­tors will try to avoid tak­ing on tech­ni­cally im­pos­si­ble pro­jects.

Another ex­cep­tion to this is ar­eas of the or­ga­ni­za­tion that se­nior lead­er­ship does­n’t re­ally care about. In a sleepy back­wa­ter, of­ten the for­mal es­ti­ma­tion process does ac­tu­ally get fol­lowed to the let­ter, be­cause there’s no di­rec­tor or VP who wants to jump in and shape the es­ti­mates to their ends. This is one way that some parts of a tech com­pany can have dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent en­gi­neer­ing cul­tures to other parts. I’ll let you imag­ine the con­se­quences when the com­pany is re-orged and these teams are pulled into the spot­light.

Estimates are po­lit­i­cal tools for non-en­gi­neers in the or­ga­ni­za­tion. They help man­agers, VPs, di­rec­tors, and C-staff de­cide on which pro­jects get funded and which pro­jects get can­celled.

The stan­dard way of think­ing about es­ti­mates is that you start with a pro­posed piece of soft­ware work, and you then go and fig­ure out how long it will take. This is en­tirely back­wards. Instead, teams will of­ten start with the es­ti­mate, and then go and fig­ure out what kind of soft­ware work they can do to meet it.

Suppose you’re work­ing on a LLM chat­bot, and your di­rec­tor wants to im­ple­ment “talk with a PDF”. If you have six months to do the work, you might im­ple­ment a ro­bust file up­load sys­tem, some pipeline to chunk and em­bed the PDF con­tent for se­man­tic search, a way to ex­tract PDF pages as im­age con­tent to cap­ture for­mat­ting and di­a­grams, and so on. If you have one day to do the work, you will nat­u­rally search for sim­pler ap­proaches: for in­stance, con­vert­ing the PDF to text client-side and stick­ing the en­tire thing in the LLM con­text, or of­fer­ing a plain-text “grep the PDF” tool.

This is true at even at the level of in­di­vid­ual lines of code. When you have weeks or months un­til your dead­line, you might spend a lot of time think­ing air­ily about how you could refac­tor the code­base to make your new fea­ture fit in as el­e­gantly as pos­si­ble. When you have hours, you will typ­i­cally be laser-fo­cused on find­ing an ap­proach that will ac­tu­ally work. There are al­ways many dif­fer­ent ways to solve soft­ware prob­lems. Engineers thus have quite a lot of dis­cre­tion about how to get it done.

So how do I es­ti­mate, given all that?

I gather as much po­lit­i­cal con­text as pos­si­ble be­fore I even look at the code. How much pres­sure is on this pro­ject? Is it a ca­sual ask, or do we have to find a way to do this? What kind of es­ti­mate is my man­age­ment chain look­ing for? There’s a huge dif­fer­ence be­tween “the CTO re­ally wants this in one week” and “we were look­ing for work for your team and this seemed like it could fit”.

Ideally, I go to the code with an es­ti­mate al­ready in hand. Instead of ask­ing my­self “how long would it take to do this”, where “this” could be any one of a hun­dred dif­fer­ent soft­ware de­signs, I ask my­self “which ap­proaches could be done in one week?“.

I spend more time wor­ry­ing about un­knowns than knowns. As I said above, un­known work al­ways dom­i­nates soft­ware pro­jects. The more “dark forests” in the code­base this fea­ture has to touch, the higher my es­ti­mate will be - or, more con­cretely, the tighter I need to con­strain the set of ap­proaches to the known work.

Finally, I go back to my man­ager with a risk as­sess­ment, not with a con­crete es­ti­mate. I don’t ever say “this is a four-week pro­ject”. I say some­thing like “I don’t think we’ll get this done in one week, be­cause X Y Z would need to all go right, and at least one of those things is bound to take a lot more work than we ex­pect. Ideally, I go back to my man­ager with a se­ries of plans, not just one:

* We tackle X Y Z di­rectly, which might all go smoothly but if it blows out we’ll be here for a month

* We by­pass Y and Z en­tirely, which would in­tro­duce these other risks but pos­si­bly al­low us to hit the dead­line

* We bring in help from an­other team who’s more fa­mil­iar with X and Y, so we just have to fo­cus on Z

In other words, I don’t “break down the work to de­ter­mine how long it will take”. My man­age­ment chain al­ready knows how long they want it to take. My job is to fig­ure out the set of soft­ware ap­proaches that match that es­ti­mate.

Sometimes that set is empty: the pro­ject is just im­pos­si­ble, no mat­ter how you slice it. In that case, my man­age­ment chain needs to get to­gether and fig­ure out some way to al­ter the re­quire­ments. But if I al­ways said “this is im­pos­si­ble”, my man­agers would find some­one else to do their es­ti­mates. When I do that, I’m draw­ing on a well of trust that I build up by mak­ing prag­matic es­ti­mates the rest of the time.

Many en­gi­neers find this ap­proach dis­taste­ful. One rea­son is that they don’t like es­ti­mat­ing in con­di­tions of un­cer­tainty, so they in­sist on hav­ing all the un­known ques­tions an­swered in ad­vance. I have writ­ten a lot about this in Engineers who won’t com­mit and How I pro­vide tech­ni­cal clar­ity to non-tech­ni­cal lead­ers, but suf­fice to say that I think it’s cow­ardly. If you refuse to es­ti­mate, you’re forc­ing some­one less tech­ni­cal to es­ti­mate for you.

Some en­gi­neers think that their job is to con­stantly push back against en­gi­neer­ing man­age­ment, and that help­ing their man­ager find tech­ni­cal com­pro­mises is be­tray­ing some kind of sa­cred en­gi­neer­ing trust. I wrote about this in Software en­gi­neers should be a lit­tle bit cyn­i­cal. If you want to spend your ca­reer do­ing that, that’s fine, but I per­son­ally find it more re­ward­ing to find ways to work with my man­agers (who have al­most ex­clu­sively been nice peo­ple).

Other en­gi­neers might say that they rarely feel this kind of pres­sure from their di­rec­tors or VPs to al­ter es­ti­mates, and that this is re­ally just the sign of a dys­func­tional en­gi­neer­ing or­ga­ni­za­tion. Maybe! I can only speak for the en­gi­neer­ing or­ga­ni­za­tions I’ve worked in. But my sus­pi­cion is that these en­gi­neers are re­ally just say­ing that they work “out of the spot­light”, where there’s not much pres­sure in gen­eral and teams can adopt what­ever processes they want. There’s noth­ing wrong with that. But I don’t think it qual­i­fies you to give help­ful ad­vice to en­gi­neers who do feel this kind of pres­sure.

The com­mon view is that a man­ager pro­poses some tech­ni­cal pro­ject, the team gets to­gether to fig­ure out how long it would take to build, and then the man­ager makes staffing and plan­ning de­ci­sions with that in­for­ma­tion. In fact, it’s the re­verse: a man­ager comes to the team with an es­ti­mate al­ready in hand (though they might not come out and ad­mit it), and then the team must fig­ure out what kind of tech­ni­cal pro­ject might be pos­si­ble within that es­ti­mate.

This is be­cause es­ti­mates are not by or for en­gi­neer­ing teams. They are tools used for man­agers to ne­go­ti­ate with each other about planned work. Very oc­ca­sion­ally, when a pro­ject is lit­er­ally im­pos­si­ble, the es­ti­mate can serve as a way for the team to com­mu­ni­cate that fact up­wards. But that re­quires trust. A team that is al­ways push­ing back on es­ti­mates will not be be­lieved when they do en­counter a gen­uinely im­pos­si­ble pro­posal.

When I es­ti­mate, I ex­tract the range my man­ager is look­ing for, and only then do I go through the code and fig­ure out what can be done in that time. I never come back with a flat “two weeks” fig­ure. Instead, I come back with a range of pos­si­bil­i­ties, each with their own risks, and let my man­ager make that trade­off.

It is not pos­si­ble to ac­cu­rately es­ti­mate soft­ware work. Software pro­jects spend most of their time grap­pling with un­known prob­lems, which by de­f­i­n­i­tion can’t be es­ti­mated in ad­vance. To es­ti­mate well, you must there­fore ba­si­cally ig­nore all the known as­pects of the work, and in­stead try and make ed­u­cated guesses about how many un­knowns there are, and how scary each un­known is.

edit: I should thank one of my read­ers, Karthik, who emailed me to ask about es­ti­mates, thus re­veal­ing to me that I had many more opin­ions than I thought.

edit: This post got a bunch of com­ments on Hacker News. Some non-en­gi­neers made the point that well-paid pro­fes­sion­als should be ex­pected to es­ti­mate their work, even if the es­ti­mate is com­pletely fic­tional. Sure, I agree, as long as we’re on the same page that it’s fic­tional!

A cou­ple of en­gi­neers ar­gued that es­ti­ma­tion was a solved prob­lem. I’m not con­vinced by their ex­am­ples. I agree you can prob­a­bly es­ti­mate “build a user flow in Svelte”, but it’s much harder to es­ti­mate “build a user flow in Svelte on top of an ex­ist­ing large code­base”. I should have been more clear in the post that I think that’s the hard part, for the nor­mal rea­sons that it’s very hard to work in large code­bases, which I write about end­lessly on this blog.

edit: There are also some com­ments on Lobste.rs, in­clud­ing a good note that the ca­pa­bil­ity of the team ob­vi­ously has a huge im­pact on any es­ti­mates. In my ex­pe­ri­ence, this is not com­monly un­der­stood: com­pa­nies ex­pect es­ti­mates to be fun­gi­ble be­tween en­gi­neers or teams, when in fact some en­gi­neers and teams can de­liver work ten times more quickly (and oth­ers can­not de­liver work at all, no mat­ter how much time they have).

Another com­menter po­litely sug­gested I read Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art, which I’ve never heard of. I’ll put it on my list.

Disclaimer: None of this is writ­ten by AI, I’m still a real per­son writ­ing my own blog like its 1999

I fi­nally fig­ured out how to do Gigabit Ethernet over my ex­ist­ing phone wires.

I’ve mostly lived with pow­er­line adapters over re­cent years. Some worked well, some did not (try few and re­turn what does­n’t work in your home). One I had for a while gave me sta­ble 30 Mbps, which was lit­tle but good enough for in­ter­net at the time. I care very much about hav­ing sta­ble low la­tency for gam­ing, more than band­width.

Fast for­ward to my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, that pow­er­line adapter reg­u­larly lost con­nec­tion which was a ma­jor prob­lem. I got some new ones with the lat­est and great­est G.hn 2400 stan­dard. The fi­nal con­tender served around 180 Mbps to my of­fice (with high vari­ance 120 to 280 Mbps), or around 80 Mbps to the top floor. It’s good enough to watch YouTube/TV yet it’s far from im­pres­sive.

One pe­cu­liar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly of­fer gi­ga­bit in­ter­net. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps — 75 Mbps — 150 Mbps — 300 Mbps — 500 Mbps — 900 Mbps, each one cost­ing a few more pounds per month than the last. This makes the UK si­mul­ta­ne­ously one of the cheap­est and one of the most ex­pen­sive coun­tries to get Internet.

Long story short, new place, new hard­ware, new deals, the in­ter­net has been run­ning at 500 Mbps for some time now.

Every 50 GB of Helldivers 2 up­date (because these id­iots shipped the same con­tent in du­pli­cate 5 times) is a painful re­minder that the setup is not op­er­at­ing at ca­pac­ity.

Problem: How to get 500 Mbps to my room?

I’ve been look­ing for a way to reuse phone wires for a while, be­cause British houses are full of phone sock­ets. There are 2 sock­ets in my of­fice room.

I can’t stress enough how much we love our phone sock­ets. It’s not un­com­mon to have a one bed flat with 2 phone sock­ets in the liv­ing room and 2 phone sock­ets in the bed­room and a mas­ter socket in the tech­ni­cal room. It’s ridicu­lous.

A new house bought to­day could have 10 phone sock­ets and 0 Ethernet sock­ets. There is still no reg­u­la­tion that re­quires new build to get Ethernet wiring (as far as I know).

There’s got to be a way to use the ex­ist­ing phone in­fra­struc­ture.

I know the tech­nol­ogy ex­ists. It’s one of the rare cases where the tech­nol­ogy ex­ists and is ma­ture, but no­body can be both­ered to make prod­ucts for it.

The stan­dards that run pow­er­line adapters (HomePlug AV200, AV500, G.hn 2400) can work with any pair of wires. It should work ten times bet­ter on ded­i­cated phone wires in­stead of noisy power wires, if only man­u­fac­tur­ers could be both­ered to pull their fin­gers out of their arse and make the prod­ucts that are needed.

After count­less years of re­search, I fi­nally found one German man­u­fac­turer that’s mak­ing what needs to be made https://​www.gi­ga­cop­per.net/​wp/​en/​home-net­work­ing/

I was lazy so I or­dered on­line in self-ser­vice (which is def­i­nitely the wrong way to go about it). It’s avail­able on Ebay DE and Amazon DE, it’s pos­si­ble to or­der from ei­ther with a UK ac­count, make sure to en­ter a UK ad­dress for de­liv­ery (some items don’t al­low it).

The bet­ter ap­proach is al­most cer­tainly to speak to the seller to get a quote, with in­ter­na­tional ship­ping and the im­port in­voice ex­clud­ing VAT (to avoid pay­ing VAT on VAT).

The pack­age got the usual Royal Mail treat­ment:

* The pack­age was shipped by DHL Germany

* The pack­age was trans­ferred to Royal Mail when en­ter­ing the UK

* After some days, the DHL web­site said they tried to de­liver but no­body home, this is bull­shit

* Royal web­site said the pack­age reached the de­pot and was await­ing de­liv­ery, this is bull­shit

* In re­al­ity, the pack­age was stuck at the bor­der, as usual

* Google to find “website to pay im­port fee on par­cel”

* Entered the DHL track­ing num­ber into the Royal Mail form for a Royal Mail track­ing num­ber

* The web­site said that the par­cel had im­port fees to pay, this is cor­rect

* Paid the fee on­line, 20% VAT + a few pounds of han­dling fees

* The pack­age will be sched­uled for de­liv­ery a few days later

* Royal Mail and DHL up­dated their sta­tus an­other two or three times with false in­for­ma­tion

* Royal Mail de­liv­ered a let­ter say­ing there was a pack­age wait­ing on fees, though it was paid

Basically, you need to fol­low the track­ing reg­u­larly un­til the pack­age is tagged as lost or failed de­liv­ery, which is the cue to pay im­port fees.

It’s the nor­mal pro­ce­dure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s ac­tu­ally quite shock­ing that Royal Mail still has­n’t up­dated their track­ing sys­tem to be able to give a sta­tus “waiting on im­port fees to be paid on­line”. They had 6 years!

This is the gi­ga­cop­per G4201TM: 1 RJ11 phone line, 1 RJ45 gi­ga­bit Ethernet port, 1 power

* It came with a German to UK power adapter (unexpected and use­ful)

* It came with a stan­dard RJ11 ca­ble (expected and use­less)

* 3M re­mov­able hang­ing strip to stick to the wall, the de­vice is very light

There is a gi­ga­cop­per G4202TM: with an RJ45 to con­nect to the phone line in­stead of a RJ11 (not sure if it’s a newer model or just a vari­ant, as that one has two gi­ga­bit Ethernet ports). Don’t be con­fused by hav­ing a RJ45 port that is not a RJ45 port.

There is a gi­ga­cop­per G4201C (1 port) and G4204C (4 port) for Ethernet over coax­ial. Some coun­tries have coax in every room for TV/satellite. This may be of in­ter­est to some read­ers.

Plugged it and it works!

I dis­cov­ered soon af­ter­wards that I bought the wrong item. There is an InHome and a Client/Server vari­ant of the prod­uct. Make sure to buy the InHome vari­ant.

* The InHome vari­ant can have up to 16 de­vices, com­mu­ni­cat­ing to any peer on the medium, with sub mil­lisec­ond la­tency.

* The client-server vari­ant is pre­con­fig­ured as a pair, split­ting the band­width 70% down­load / 30% up­load, with few mil­lisec­onds la­tency. I think it’s a use case for ISP and long range con­nec­tions.

Thankfully the dif­fer­ence is only the firmware. I spoke to the ven­dor who was very help­ful and re­spon­sive. They sent me the firmware and the tools to patch.

I have a fetish for low la­tency. This screen­shot is oddly sat­is­fy­ing.

The web in­ter­face says 1713 Mbps on the phys­i­cal layer, the de­bug­ging tool says PHONE 200MHz — Connected 1385 Mbps.

I wanted to ver­ify whether the de­vice can do a full Gigabit. Unfortunately I re­al­ized I don’t have any de­vice that can test that.

Phones are wire­less, which is too slow to test any­thing. I checked out of cu­rios­ity, my phone did 100 Mbps to 400 Mbps right next to the router. Grabbed two lap­tops only to re­al­ize they did­n’t have any Ethernet port. I dug up an old lap­top from stor­age with an Ethernet port. The lap­top could­n’t boot, the CPU fan did­n’t start and the lap­top re­fused to boot with a dead fan.

There is a hard les­son here: 1 Gbps ought to be enough for any home. Using the phone line is as good as hav­ing Ethernet wiring through the house if it can de­liver a (shared) 1.7 Gbps link to mul­ti­ple rooms.

Still, I re­ally wanted to ver­ify that the de­vice can do a full Gbps, I pro­cured an USB-C to Ethernet adapter.

Full speed achieved, test­ing from a phone to a com­puter with iperf3.

Some read­ers might won­der about the wiring.

I did­n’t check the wiring be­fore buy­ing any­thing be­cause it’s point­less. British sock­ets are al­ways daisy chained in an in­com­pre­hen­si­ble maze.

Phone sock­ets need 2 wires and can be daisy chained. Ethernet sock­ets need 8 wires. They of­ten use the same Cat5 ca­ble be­cause it’s the most widely avail­able (8 wires ca­ble, the 6 ex­tra wires can re­main un­con­nected).

It’s pos­si­ble to swap the phone socket for an RJ45 socket, if you only have 2 sock­ets con­nected with the right ca­ble. It’s not pos­si­ble when sock­ets are daisy chained. (You could put a dou­ble or triple RJ45 socket with a switch to break a daisy chain, but it quickly be­comes im­prac­ti­cal in a British house with 5 to 10 sock­ets in an ar­bi­trary lay­out.)

I opened one socket in the of­fice room. There are two Cat5 ca­bles daisy chained. There are 3 wires con­nected.

It’s prob­a­bly daisy chained with the other socket in the room, or it’s daisy chained with the socket in the other room that’s closer. Who knows.

I opened the BT mas­ter socket in the tech­ni­cal room. It should have the ca­bles com­ing from the other rooms. It should con­nect the in­ter­nal phone wires with the ex­ter­nal phone line.

There is one sin­gle Cat5 ca­ble. There are 4 wires con­nected. It’s def­i­nitely not a mas­ter socket. WTF?!

It’s in­ter­est­ing that this socket has 4 wires con­nected but the socket in the of­fice has 3 wires con­nected. The id­iot who did the wiring was in­con­sis­tent. The gi­ga­cop­per de­vice can op­er­ate over 2 wires (200 MHz Phone SISO) or over 4 wires (100 MHz Phone MIMO). I can try the other modes if I fin­ish the job.

The search for the mas­ter socket con­tin­ues. The ca­bles from the other floors should all be com­ing down some­where around here. There is a blank plate next to it (right).

This might be the ex­ter­nal phone line? A bunch of wires are crimped to­gether, colours do not match. It’s the hell of a mess.

Only sure thing, they are dif­fer­ent ca­bles be­cause they are dif­fer­ent colours. They might be go­ing to a junc­tion box some­where else. Probably be­hind a wall that’s im­pos­si­ble to ac­cess!

Conclusion: There is zero chance to get proper Ethernet wiring out of this mess.

The gi­ga­cop­per de­vice to do gi­ga­bit Ethernet over phone line is a mir­a­cle!

There is an enor­mous un­tapped mar­ket for gi­ga­bit Ethernet over phone sock­ets in the UK.

Small slights from a man­ager may seem like no big deal, but new re­search from Wharton re­veals that even the mildest of mis­treat­ment at work can af­fect more than just em­ployee morale.

The study finds that when man­agers at a na­tional re­tail chain failed to de­liver birth­day greet­ings on time, it re­sulted in a 50% in­crease in ab­sen­teeism and a re­duc­tion of more than two work­ing hours per month. The lost pro­duc­tiv­ity was a form of re­venge, with slighted em­ploy­ees tak­ing more paid sick time, ar­riv­ing late, leav­ing early, and tak­ing longer breaks.

“Insults are about a lack of re­spect, and that’s what this is re­ally all about. There are huge and small lacks of re­spect, but they all leave a mark,” says Wharton man­age­ment pro­fes­sor Peter Cappelli, who con­ducted the study with Liat Eldor and Michal Hodor, both as­sis­tant pro­fes­sors at Tel Aviv University’s Coller School of Management.

The study, “The Lower Boundary of Workplace Mistreatment: Do Small Slights Matter?”, is pub­lished in the jour­nal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. While there are a grow­ing num­ber of pa­pers that ex­am­ine the ef­fects of se­vere work­place mis­treat­ment such as sex­ual and phys­i­cal ha­rass­ment, the study is the first to mea­sure the cause and ef­fect of mi­nor in­frac­tions.

Read more at Knowledge at Wharton.

When California neigh­bor­hoods in­creased their num­ber of zero-emis­sions ve­hi­cles (ZEV) be­tween 2019 and 2023, they also ex­pe­ri­enced a re­duc­tion in air pol­lu­tion. For every 200 ve­hi­cles added, ni­tro­gen diox­ide (NO₂) lev­els dropped 1.1%. The re­sults, ob­tained from a new analy­sis based on statewide satel­lite data, are among the first to con­firm the en­vi­ron­men­tal health ben­e­fits of ZEVs, which in­clude fully elec­tric and plug-in hy­brid cars, in the real world. The study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and just pub­lished in The Lancet Planetary Health.

While the shift to elec­tric ve­hi­cles is largely aimed at curb­ing cli­mate change in the fu­ture, it is also ex­pected to im­prove air qual­ity and ben­e­fit pub­lic health in the near term. But few stud­ies have tested that as­sump­tion with ac­tual data, partly be­cause ground-level air pol­lu­tion mon­i­tors have lim­ited spa­tial cov­er­age. A 2023 study from the Keck School of Medicine of USC us­ing these ground-level mon­i­tors sug­gested that ZEV adop­tion was linked to lower air pol­lu­tion, but the re­sults were not de­fin­i­tive.

Now, the same re­search team has con­firmed the link with high-res­o­lu­tion satel­lite data, which can de­tect NO₂ in the at­mos­phere by mea­sur­ing how the gas ab­sorbs and re­flects sun­light. The pol­lu­tant, re­leased from burn­ing fos­sil fu­els, can trig­ger asthma at­tacks, cause bron­chi­tis, and in­crease the risk of heart dis­ease and stroke.

“This im­me­di­ate im­pact on air pol­lu­tion is re­ally im­por­tant be­cause it also has an im­me­di­ate im­pact on health. We know that traf­fic-re­lated air pol­lu­tion can harm res­pi­ra­tory and car­dio­vas­cu­lar health over both the short and long term,” said Erika Garcia, PhD, MPH, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of pop­u­la­tion and pub­lic health sci­ences at the Keck School of Medicine and the study’s se­nior au­thor.

The find­ings of­fer sup­port for the con­tin­ued adop­tion of elec­tric ve­hi­cles. Over the study pe­riod, ZEV reg­is­tra­tions in­creased from 2% to 5% of all light-duty ve­hi­cles (a cat­e­gory that in­cludes cars, SUVs, pickup trucks and vans) across California, sug­gest­ing that the po­ten­tial for im­prov­ing air pol­lu­tion and pub­lic health re­mains largely un­tapped.

“We’re not even fully there in terms of elec­tri­fy­ing, but our re­search shows that California’s tran­si­tion to elec­tric ve­hi­cles is al­ready mak­ing mea­sur­able dif­fer­ences in the air we breathe,” said the study’s lead au­thor, San­drah Eckel, PhD, as­so­ci­ate pro­fes­sor of pop­u­la­tion and pub­lic health sci­ences at the Keck School of Medicine.

For the analy­sis, the re­searchers di­vided California into 1,692 neigh­bor­hoods, us­ing a ge­o­graphic unit sim­i­lar to zip codes. They ob­tained pub­licly avail­able data from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles on the num­ber of ZEVs reg­is­tered in each neigh­bor­hood. ZEVs in­clude full-bat­tery elec­tric cars, plug-in hy­brids and fuel-cell cars, but not heav­ier duty ve­hi­cles like de­liv­ery trucks and semi trucks.

Next, the re­search team ob­tained data from the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI), a high-res­o­lu­tion satel­lite sen­sor that pro­vides daily, global mea­sure­ments of NO₂ and other pol­lu­tants. They used this data to cal­cu­late an­nual av­er­age NO₂ lev­els in each California neigh­bor­hood from 2019 to 2023.

Over the study pe­riod, a typ­i­cal neigh­bor­hood gained 272 ZEVs, with most neigh­bor­hoods adding be­tween 18 and 839. For every 200 new ZEVs reg­is­tered, NO₂ lev­els dropped 1.1%, a mea­sur­able im­prove­ment in air qual­ity.

“These find­ings show that cleaner air is­n’t just a the­ory—it’s al­ready hap­pen­ing in com­mu­ni­ties across California,” Eckel said.

To con­firm that these re­sults were re­li­able, the re­searchers con­ducted sev­eral ad­di­tional analy­ses. They ac­counted for pan­demic-re­lated changes as a con­trib­u­tor to NO₂ de­cline, such as ex­clud­ing the year 2020 and con­trol­ling for chang­ing gas prices and work-from-home pat­terns. The re­searchers also con­firmed that neigh­bor­hoods that added more gas-pow­ered cars saw the ex­pected rise in pol­lu­tion. Finally, they repli­cated their re­sults us­ing up­dated data from ground-level mon­i­tors from 2012 to 2023.

“We tested our analy­sis in many dif­fer­ent ways, and the re­sults con­sis­tently sup­port our main find­ing,” Garcia said.

These re­sults show that TROPOMI satel­lite data—which cov­ers nearly the en­tire planet—can re­li­ably track changes in com­bus­tion-re­lated air pol­lu­tion, of­fer­ing a new way to study the ef­fects of the tran­si­tion to elec­tric ve­hi­cles and other en­vi­ron­men­tal in­ter­ven­tions.

Next, Garcia, Eckel and their team are com­par­ing data on ZEV adop­tion with data on asthma-re­lated emer­gency room vis­its and hos­pi­tal­iza­tions across California. The study could be one of the first to doc­u­ment real-world health im­prove­ments as California con­tin­ues to em­brace elec­tric ve­hi­cles.

In ad­di­tion to Garcia and Eckel, the study’s other au­thors are Futu Chen, Sam J. Silva and Jill Johnston from the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences, Keck School of Medicine of USC, University of Southern California; Daniel L. Goldberg from the Milken Institute School of Public Health, The George Washington University; Lawrence A. Palinkas from the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science, University of California, San Diego; and Alberto Campos and Wilma Franco from the Southeast Los Angeles Collaborative.

This work was sup­ported by the National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [R01ES035137, P30ES007048]; the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team [80NSSC21K0511]; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Atmospheric Composition Modeling and Analysis Program [80NSSC23K1002].

You can now view replies to this blog post made on Bluesky di­rectly on this web­site. Check it out here!

I’ve al­ways wanted to host a com­ment sec­tion on my site, but it’s dif­fi­cult be­cause the con­tent is sta­t­i­cally gen­er­ated and hosted on a CDN. I could host com­ments on a sep­a­rate VPS or cloud ser­vice. But main­tain­ing a dy­namic web ser­vice like this can be ex­pen­sive and time-con­sum­ing — in gen­eral, I’m not in­ter­ested in be­ing an un­paid, part-time DevOps en­gi­neer.

Recently, how­ever, I read a blog post by Cory Zue about how he em­bed­ded a com­ment sec­tion from Bluesky on his blog. I im­me­di­ately un­der­stood to ben­e­fits of this ap­proach. With this ap­proach, Bluesky could han­dle all of the dif­fi­cult work in­volved in man­ag­ing a so­cial me­dia like ac­count ver­i­fi­ca­tion, host­ing, stor­age, spam, and mod­er­a­tion. Meanwhile be­cause Bluesky is an open plat­form with a pub­lic API, it’s easy to di­rectly em­bed com­ments on my own site.

There are other ser­vices that could be used for this pur­pose in­stead. Notably, I could em­bed replies from the so­cial me­dia for­merly known as Twitter. Or I could use a plat­form like Disqus or even gis­cus, which hosts com­ments on GitHub Discussions. But I see Bluesky as a clearly su­pe­rior choice among these op­tions. For one, Bluesky is built on top of an open so­cial me­dia plat­form in AT Proto, mean­ing it can’t eas­ily be taken over by an au­thor­i­tar­ian bil­lion­aire creep. Moreover, Bluesky is a full-fledged so­cial me­dia plat­form, which nat­u­rally makes it a bet­ter op­tion for host­ing a con­ver­sa­tion than GitHub.

Zue pub­lished a stand­alone pack­age called bluesky-com­ments that al­lows em­bed­ding com­ments in a React com­po­nent as he did. But I de­cided to build this fea­ture my­self in­stead. Mainly this is be­cause I wanted to make a few styling changes any­way to match the rest of my site. But I also wanted to leave the op­tion open to adding more fea­tures in the fu­ture, which would be eas­ier to do if I wrote the code my­self. The en­tire im­ple­men­ta­tion is small re­gard­less, amount­ing to only ~200 LOC be­tween the UI com­po­nents and API func­tions.

Initially, I planned to al­low peo­ple to di­rectly post on Bluesky via my site. This would work by pro­vid­ing an OAuth flow that gives my site per­mis­sion to post on Bluesky on be­half of the user. I ac­tu­ally did get the auth flow work­ing, but build­ing out a UI for post­ing and re­ply­ing to ex­ist­ing com­ments is dif­fi­cult to do well. Going down this path quickly leads to build­ing what is es­sen­tially a cus­tom Bluesky client, which I did­n’t have the time or in­ter­est in do­ing right now. Moreover, be­cause the user needs to go through the auth flow and sign-in to their Bluesky ac­count, the process is not re­ally much eas­ier than post­ing di­rectly on a linked Bluesky post.

Without the re­quire­ment of al­low­ing oth­ers to di­rectly post on my site, the im­ple­men­ta­tion be­came much sim­pler. Essentially, my task was to spec­ify a Bluesky post that cor­re­sponds to the ar­ti­cle in the site’s meta­data. Then, when the page loads I fetch the replies to that post from Bluesky, parse the re­sponse, and dis­play the re­sults in a sim­ple com­ment sec­tion UI.

As ex­plained in my last post, this site is built us­ing React Server Components and Parcel. The con­tent of my ar­ti­cles are writ­ten us­ing MDX, an ex­ten­sion to Markdown that al­lows di­rectly em­bed­ding JavaScript and JSX. In each post, I ex­port a meta­data ob­ject that I val­i­date us­ing a Zod schema. For in­stance, the meta­data for this post looks like this:

The value of bsky­PostId ref­er­ences the Bluesky post from which I’ll pull replies to dis­play in the com­ment sec­tion. Because my pro­ject is built in TypeScript, it was easy to in­te­grate with the Bluesky TypeScript SDK (@bluesky/api on NPM). Reading the Bluesky API doc­u­men­ta­tion and Zue’s im­ple­men­ta­tion led me to the get­Post­Thread end­point. Given an AT Protocol URI, this end­point re­turns an ob­ject with data on the given post and its replies.

I could have in­ter­acted di­rectly with the Bluesky API from my React com­po­nent us­ing fetch and use­Ef­fect. However, it can be a bit tricky to cor­rectly han­dle load­ing and a er­ror states, even for a sim­ple fea­ture like this. Because of this, I de­cided to use the Tanstack re­act-query pack­age to man­age the API re­quest/​re­sponse cy­cle. This li­brary takes care of the messy work of han­dling er­rors, re­tries, and load­ing states while I sim­ply pro­vide it a func­tion to fetch the post data.

Once I ob­tain the Bluesky re­sponse, the next task is pars­ing out the con­tent and meta­data for the replies. Bluesky sup­ports a rich con­tent struc­ture in its posts for rep­re­sent­ing markup, ref­er­ences, and at­tach­ments. Building out a UI that fully re­spects this rich con­tent would be dif­fi­cult. Instead, I de­cided to keep it sim­ple by just pulling out the text con­tent from each re­ply.

Even so, build­ing a UI that prop­erly dis­plays threaded com­ments, par­tic­u­larly one that is for­mat­ted well on small mo­bile de­vices, can be tricky. For now, my ap­proach was to again keep it sim­ple. I in­dented each re­ply and added a left bor­der to make it eas­ier to fol­low re­ply threads. Otherwise, I mostly copied de­sign el­e­ments for lay­out of the pro­file pic­ture and post date from Bluesky.

Lastly, I added a UI com­po­nent link­ing to the par­ent post on Bluesky, and en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to add to the con­ver­sa­tion there. With this, the read-only com­ment sec­tion im­ple­men­ta­tion was com­plete. If there’s in­ter­est, I could pub­lish my ver­sion of Bluesky com­ments as a stand­alone pack­age. But sev­eral of the choices I made were rel­a­tively spe­cific to my own site. Moreover, the im­ple­men­ta­tion is sim­ple enough that oth­ers could prob­a­bly build their own ver­sion from read­ing the source code, just as I did us­ing Zue’s ver­sion.

Let me know what you think by re­ply­ing on Bluesky. Hopefully this can help in­crease en­gage­ment with my blog posts, but then again, my last ar­ti­cle gen­er­ated no replies, so maybe not 😭.

Join the con­ver­sa­tion by re­ply­ing on Bluesky…

Imagine the in­ter­net sud­denly stops work­ing. Payment sys­tems in your lo­cal food store go down. Healthcare sys­tems in the re­gional hos­pi­tal flat­line. Your work soft­ware tools, and all the in­for­ma­tion they con­tain, dis­ap­pear.

You reach out for in­for­ma­tion but strug­gle to com­mu­ni­cate with fam­ily and friends, or to get the lat­est up­dates on what is hap­pen­ing, as so­cial me­dia plat­forms are all down. Just as some­one can pull the plug on your com­puter, it’s pos­si­ble to shut down the sys­tem it con­nects to.

This is­n’t an out­landish sce­nario. Technical fail­ures, cy­ber-at­tacks and nat­ural dis­as­ters can all bring down key parts of the in­ter­net. And as the US gov­ern­ment makes in­creas­ing de­mands of European lead­ers, it is pos­si­ble to imag­ine Europe los­ing ac­cess to the dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture pro­vided by US firms as part of the geopo­lit­i­cal bar­gain­ing process.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the EU’s pres­i­dent, Ursula von der Leyen, has high­lighted the “structural im­per­a­tive” for Europe to “build a new form of in­de­pen­dence” — in­clud­ing in its tech­no­log­i­cal ca­pac­ity and se­cu­rity. And, in fact, moves are al­ready be­ing made across the con­ti­nent to start re­gain­ing some in­de­pen­dence from US tech­nol­ogy.

A small num­ber of US-headquartered big tech com­pa­nies now con­trol a large pro­por­tion of the world’s cloud com­put­ing in­fra­struc­ture, that is the global net­work of re­mote servers that store, man­age and process all our apps and data. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are re­ported to hold about 70% of the European mar­ket, while European cloud providers have only 15%.

My re­search sup­ports the idea that re­ly­ing on a few global providers in­creases vul­ner­a­bilty for Europe’s pri­vate and pub­lic sec­tors — in­clud­ing the risk of cloud com­put­ing dis­rup­tion, whether caused by tech­ni­cal is­sues, geopo­lit­i­cal dis­putes or ma­li­cious ac­tiv­ity.

Two re­cent ex­am­ples — both the re­sult of ap­par­ent tech­ni­cal fail­ures — were the hours‑long AWS in­ci­dent in October 2025, which dis­rupted thou­sands of ser­vices such as bank­ing apps across the world, and the ma­jor Cloudflare in­ci­dent two months later, which took LinkedIn, Zoom and other com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms of­fline.

The im­pact of a ma­jor power dis­rup­tion on cloud com­put­ing ser­vices was also demon­strated when Spain, Portugal and some of south-west France en­dured a mas­sive power cut in April 2025.

There are signs that Europe is start­ing to take the need for greater dig­i­tal in­de­pen­dence more se­ri­ously. In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for ex­am­ple, a one-year pro­ject is test­ing how var­i­ous pub­lic ser­vices would func­tion in the sce­nario of a dig­i­tal black­out.

Would el­derly peo­ple still re­ceive their med­ical pre­scrip­tions? Can so­cial ser­vices con­tinue to pro­vide care and ben­e­fits to all the city’s res­i­dents?

This pi­o­neer­ing pro­ject seeks to quan­tify the full range of hu­man, tech­ni­cal and le­gal chal­lenges that a col­lapse of tech­ni­cal ser­vices would cre­ate, and to un­der­stand what level of risk is ac­cept­able in each sec­tor. The aim is to build a model of cri­sis pre­pared­ness that can be shared with other mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties and re­gions later this year.

Elsewhere in Europe, other fore­run­ners are tak­ing ac­tion to strengthen their dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty by wean­ing them­selves off re­liance on global big tech com­pa­nies — in part through col­lab­o­ra­tion and adop­tion of open source soft­ware. This tech­nol­ogy is treated as a dig­i­tal pub­lic good that can be moved be­tween dif­fer­ent clouds and op­er­ated un­der sov­er­eign con­di­tions.

In north­ern Germany, the state of Schleswig-Holstein has made per­haps the clear­est break with dig­i­tal de­pen­dency. The state gov­ern­ment has re­placed most of its Microsoft-powered com­puter sys­tems with open-source al­ter­na­tives, can­celling nearly 70% of its li­censes. Its tar­get is to use big tech ser­vices only in ex­cep­tional cases by the end of the decade.

Across France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, gov­ern­ments are in­vest­ing both na­tion­ally and transna­tion­ally in the de­vel­op­ment of dig­i­tal open-source plat­forms and tools for chat, video and doc­u­ment man­age­ment — akin to dig­i­tal Lego bricks that ad­min­is­tra­tions can host on their own terms.

In Sweden, a sim­i­lar sys­tem for chat, video and on­line col­lab­o­ra­tion, de­vel­oped by the National Insurance Agency, runs in do­mes­tic data cen­tres rather than for­eign clouds. It is be­ing of­fered as a ser­vice for Swedish pub­lic au­thor­i­ties look­ing for sov­er­eign dig­i­tal al­ter­na­tives.

For Europe — and any na­tion — to mean­ing­fully ad­dress the risks posed by dig­i­tal black­out and cloud col­lapse, dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture needs to be treated with the same se­ri­ous­ness as phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture such as ports, roads and power grids.

Control, main­te­nance and cri­sis pre­pared­ness of dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture should be seen as core pub­lic re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, rather than some­thing to be out­sourced to global big tech firms, open for for­eign in­flu­ence.

To en­cour­age greater fo­cus on dig­i­tal re­silience among its mem­ber states, the EU has de­vel­oped a cloud sov­er­eignty frame­work to guide pro­cure­ment of cloud ser­vices — with the in­ten­tion of keep­ing European data un­der European con­trol. The up­com­ing Cloud and AI Development Act is ex­pected to bring more fo­cus and re­sources to this area.

Governments and pri­vate com­pa­nies should be en­cour­aged to de­mand se­cu­rity, open­ness and in­ter­op­er­abil­ity when seek­ing bids for pro­vi­sion of their cloud ser­vices — not merely low prices. But in the same way, as in­di­vid­u­als, we can all make a dif­fer­ence with the choices we make.

Just as it’s ad­vis­able to en­sure your own ac­cess to food, wa­ter and med­i­cine in a time of cri­sis, be mind­ful of what ser­vices you use per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally. Consider where your emails, per­sonal pho­tos and con­ver­sa­tions are stored. Who can ac­cess and use your data, and un­der what con­di­tions? How eas­ily can every­thing be backed up, re­trieved and trans­ferred to an­other ser­vice?

No coun­try, let alone con­ti­nent, will ever be com­pletely dig­i­tally in­de­pen­dent, and nor should they be. But by pulling to­gether, Europe can en­sure its dig­i­tal sys­tems re­main ac­ces­si­ble even in a cri­sis — just as is ex­pected from its phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture.