So … the US navy are basically pirates now?

AWS sign-up requires that you have a valid credit card on file.

Right, that’s the question — where can you do that and get a VPS with sufficient bandwidth for $5/month?

Bear in mind that paying with crypto doesn’t make you anonymous unless you’re careful about it and use monero or something. If you did that and avoided giving any other identifying info to the provider, I’d be curious to know where to sign up for that.

Come to think of it I was wondering how Elon Musk would go about turning Starlink, his massive international ISP, into a tool for oppression. Get the government to outlaw all the ways for its customers to shield themselves from its data collection, I guess.

Yeah it does look like maybe that’s got easier since I looked into it, although the prices I see are maybe 3x the cost of the average VPN and of course being securely anonymous is still beyond the abilities of most of us.

You ever tried setting up such a server anonymously in a way that can’t be tracked by American authorities? It can be done, but they’ve already made that difficult and/or expensive.

Yeah I would prefer to move my data from the cloud to my personal computer. With fully automated cloud-based end-to-end encrypted backups, of course. Even web apps have good access to local storage now. If I want to share my personal data with someone, I can send it to them.

I’m sure there are a few applications where something more complicated is required. Neither lemmy comments nor biometric data from a “smartwatch” are among them.

Hundreds of farmers ask struggling federal government to save them.