I am Canadian. I’ve worked in the Financial industry for about 20 years (either directly or adjacent to it in roles like auditing). I am an IT guy.

Here’s some more examples / clarifications of it: pretty well all of Canada’s ATMs run on Windows. When questioned about why, companies that provide those systems state that its a requirement from Payments Canada.

Most Financial Institutions use USA-tied backend banking systems – there’s 1-2 “Canadian” providers, but they’re very niche (hence the note about BC’s situation, BC being the western most province in Canada). Companies like FISERV (USA) expanded into Canada a few decades ago – their initial entry to the market failed due to them not caring about differences between Canadian and US financial products. They didn’t bother porting anything, treating things like the US “401k” logic as basically the same as Canada’s RRSPs doesn’t work, and lead to massive problems for many FIs – problems that sank a couple. So they bought out a Canadian product that was called DNA (which ran on Oracle). FISERV is one of the dominant players in the Canadian market.

Canada’s Central1 Credit Union, the trade association / service provider for their Credit Unions, recently bailed on hosting in-country online banking services, after having screwed up their implementation of the ISO20022 really really badly. They ‘sold’ that whole segment of their business off to an Indian Headquartered company which hosts its products in Microsoft’s cloud, uses developers from the UAE, and has only like 1-2 security staff in Canada (so all your security events are definitely going elsewhere). Adding to this, at the start of Central1’s mismanagement of online banking, they had 2 geodistant datacenters on either side of the country – but they hired a US Banker to run their IT department, and he put all their internal stuff (beyond just the online banking) into the cloud, turfing their internal systems. Oh, and in terms of it continuing in this direction even with the turmoil – since 2025, Central has shifted their backend online cheque processing, one of the last items outstanding, into Microsoft’s cloud. So even if you’re using a small credit union in a tiny community, if you write a cheque, you’re reliant on USA cloud infrastructure.

BC’s provincial financial regulators, the BC FSA, put out an RFP about a decade ago noting some serious gaps in their IT framework – the RFP was amazing to read, as it noted things like software that had been EOL for almost a decade, which they admitted they couldn’t support properly, because they’d basically fired most of their IT staff. The RFP was a total “front”/box-checking exercise though, as they’d already chosen who they were going with – the RFP lasted only a brief time, and was tailored to ensure a specific vendor would win (issued June 17, 155 pages of specifications/environment description background, submission deadline July 31 – vendor work startingQ4. A turn around speed unheard of in govt, if they were doing any due diligence). The result was that the BC FSA moved all of its IT ecosystem stuff into Microsoft’s cloud. The industry submits member/customer personal information directly into a site that’s hosted on Microsoft’s cloud – even uses generic Microsoft cloud login infra. So a huge portion of FI customer data is exposed through the regulators of the industry.

I just recently had an issue with Access, where running a report multiple times would randomly result in errors, or clean reports. The explanation copilot gave was that Access has a built in LLM now that is “interpreting” certain queries, and may result in different outputs, even different resulting data types. So doing a join on those outputs for the report, would sometimes result in reporting errors, even without changing the underlying logic. AI has sorta taken a calculator that used to reliably return 2 + 2 = 4, and turned it into one that sometimes thinks 2 + 2 = chair.

I don’t know how comfy I am seeing AI integrated everywhere at this stage of the tech. It really doesn’t feel mature enough for production.

So Microsoft realised that people are pissed off about the genocide shit, and decided to try and distance itself a bit from all the genociding they’ve been complicit in, and will likely continue to be complicit in. The pageantry is likely to work on US investors, who mostly just care about money anyhow.

It’s probably partly being done because Microsoft sees all these foreign countries saying “We’re gonna ditch US tech” because of all the bullshit coming out of America for the past few years – and the likelihood that it’ll continue straight through 2028, and then resume again every time the Republicans get in power, with an utterly impotent democratic party as their foil – a democratic party that couldn’t even hold the people responsible for an attempted coup accountable, instead allowing those very people back into power.

When your government’s gone authoritarian / fascist, with your complete support, you shouldn’t be allowed to 'PR spin" your way out of it. Trump’s approach is demanding people/companies side with “America first”, or “the world”. If you choose the former, you can’t pretend like you give a shit about the latter.

Canada can’t at the moment, and its government has continued becoming more and more entrenched in US tech throughout 2025 and 2026. So, prepare to be disappointed. Most Canadians enjoyed the lip-service a bit, but didn’t really care – even things like the “Buy Local” and travel stuff is easing off already, even as the USA continues down its tech oligarch backed authoritarian villain arch.

BC for example, is likely losing its last Canadian-backend financial institution. The financial system regulators, and all the banks/credit unions, are 100% captured by US tech. Wealthsimple’s growing like crazy, built as a cloud-first business within US tech ecosystems, with deep ties to companies like Oracle and Amazon, investing heavily in San Fran tech startups etc. If you had a Data sovereignty type law come in, the entire financial sector, a “critical industry”, would disappear.

Ah, makes some sense. The mobile networks are even more erratic with how they assign IPs – though I’d still be a little surprised if it was the wrong country entirely. It’d imply the provider is using IPs from a single range in multiple legal jurisdictions, which’d inherently make things like geofencing more difficult. Sorta like VPN functionality to access foreign data regions, as a result of sloppy configuration and negligence by the ISP. Wonder if it could also be something to do with IPV6 – I think that’s more common to see amongst mobile networks, and I’m honestly not too sure how well that can get mapped to geo locations – I’d doubt the site, how its put together, would be tryin too hard to sort that out.

While I don’t disagree that most countries ought to be looking for what you imply, I think there’s a somewhat interesting counter point to it. The anonymous aspect of online interactions/actions has contributed to some really negative trends.

One easy recent example: private citizens in the Netherlands, having taken a course on ‘faceless influencing’, used youtube to push out a bunch of videos encouraging the breaking apart of Canada, while pretending to be Canadians. They allegedly did it because the rage-bait clips generated lots of clicks, and ad revenue paid to them by Google, a company which also worked to amplify their fraudulent personas – a company that’s also tied closely with America, given the administration’s ‘tight’ ties with their tech oligarchs, a country which has overtly expressed interest in breaking apart Canada. The anonymity of those users basically allowed America to crowdsource their nation-destabilizing work.

With AI junk, that’s all going in to over-drive. The ability to fake ‘people’ is likely a big part of why govts have changed their tune on trying to ID people online. Demanding transparency is likely viewed as almost a necessary evil to combat the deluge of propaganda that’s coming out of places like America these days.

There’s also the general tone of online interactions, and the breakdown of certain social-communal parts of offline-life. “The male loneliness epidemic” for example, being partly born out of guys being captured by the manosphere, or being isolated ‘in real life’ due to their excessive presence online. Also the generally combative tone most people take on sites like lemmy / reddit – which pairs with the structure of most media content, which tries for sound bite click bait rather than nuanced constructive thought: you get way more upvotes, if you respond to a small out-of-context shock-value clip with your own short one liner type rebuttal, than if you actually engage with the other parties comment more genuinely.

Like the people generally demand transparency on government actions/decisions, because having those decisions exposed, and the people making them accountable for their actions, helps to reduce corruption / bad behaviour. Same general principle when anonyuser204956 is busy spouting nazi shit, if suddenly their friends/family/coworkers can easily see what they’re doing. People keep other people in check.

Hm, wonder why that’d be – it implies heavily that it bases the country on the IP address, which in theory is done by looking at what company the address is registered to, for the most part. Like I’m guessing it got my city wrong, because it used an address that the ISP provides for the IP range, which isn’t the same as the city I’m in, because the ISP uses it to cover numerous cities around the broader region. I reckon if you’re using something like Starlink, or other similar international-ish provider that may be very loose in how they associated addresses, it’d fail most times.

Heheh, a whole lot of mocking in this thread, but I don’t mind the site / its display.

Yeah, it’s overly melodramatic in its setup, and a bunch of the information doomerism is silly in terms of the info basically being required to provide data comms etc. It also tends to get things a bit wrong in a few categories – like for me, it said I was in a totally different city (still the right country at least - Canada), then it said my time zone was in iceland, which is kinda… no.

But the general message of the site, and the awareness its trying to raise in regards to how much data gets shared for basic comms establishment, and how that information gets used to fingerprint people, is worthwhile.

So… they’re taking advantage of one of the selling-features of streaming services, that being the ability to scale your spend pending your own personal preferences. In the early days of streaming services, they had enough content to justify paying a monthly subscription each month – it’s not the customer’s fault that streaming got enshitified. Hell, a bunch of them switching to ‘weekly episodes’ was just a very poorly disguised attempt to drag out how many months they thought their one flagship show could capture audiences. The old practice of dumping a whole season all at once in one month, because you knew you’d have another season of some other good show the next month, is practically gone – with streaming reverting back to the old network practices they’d usurped.

Same with games. Tons of titles are just shitty early access things, things that get abandoned mid-development, things that rely on a live-service platform that companies’ll shut down a month or two later, and so on. And some titles are askin like $80+ for their shitty offerings. Yeah, that’s not the customers fault in the slightest. They’re right to look for discounted offers, what sane person wouldn’t?

Nah, they think you’re powerless. And they’re generally right.

Did you seriously think I was saying it should be public beatings for all? Why on earth wouldn’t you default to thinking that someone pointing out the inequity, would be advocating for “no public beatings / caning”??

Sure, I’m also saying there are issues with the narrative that men are by default getting privileged by “systems” – with the very clear evidence being that the system says its ok to publicly beat / be physically violent towards the boy students, while providing more humane/reasonable punishments for girl students.

Your interpretation is just batshit, and your insults are totally misplaced.

Yeah – I think a lot of people who took even just one stats course are in a similar boat. Though I think it’s a bit easier to understand the shift if you frame it within the context of Social Media sites controlling the population’s opinions / propaganda.

Most govts understand at this point, internally at least, that if a message is repeated often, loudly, and it saturates a people’s media, they start to believe it / agree with it. The survey, and the reporting storm surrounding a survey, isn’t so much about showing people an accurate representation of how people’s viewpoints vary, but rather a vehicle for govts/companies to tell people how to think. Sites like Facebook don’t so much as sell advertising, as they sell the ability to socially engineer its users to like your product / political stance: make enough general noise about a niche position, and people will think it’s a majority opinion.

Where the bots get used in the workflow, isn’t really that big of a concern.

Boys get caned, girls get detention? All that systemic male privilege condensed into a wonderfully explicit public beating.

Seeing as the vast majority of “polls” I’ve seen in the last 5-6 years have been “this was a poll done online, so we can’t assign any certainty or margin of error, cause we have no idea who actually responded and it could’ve been just like, two dickheads with bots spamming nonsense, but the results were click baity enough for us to run a story” … I don’t see how them cutting out the two dickhead middle-men, and just using their own bots, is really that much different.

I’m shocked! Shocked I say! You mean to say that Israel, the most moral genocidal regime around, is going to use the cover of increased hostility between the USA and Iran, to ramp up their violent genocidal agenda?!? Shocked!!!

When was the last time you visited cuba / talked to their people directly?

I went around 2018ish, and your take doesn’t track. You’re right, Russia doesn’t have the heft to support Cuba – but they haven’t had the heft to support Cuba for decades. Most Cubans in their 40s that I met, looked back at the days of a stronger Russia as an ideal time period, where they had more goods available – they literally long for the good old days when Communism was bigger on the world stage. They clearly associate/blame the USA’s actions for causing unnecessary famines and issues. Why on earth would you think people would be favorable to a foreign nation that is literally enacting economic warfare to starve the population?? “Thank you for the boot, may I have another?” What??

One of Cuba’s main ‘exports’, are doctors/medical staff for disasters facing other countries. Becoming a doctor in Cuba is basically free of charge, but you gotta work for the govt for a few years after you graduate – as a low paid, outsourced worker as part of these relief teams. Cuba’s govt charges western-ish rates for assistance, but pays those docs a lot less, pocketing the margin for funding govt activities / programs, such as their medical programs. Practically any country that has had a major natural disaster, has gotten assistance from Cuba in this way, because of how they’ve structured the program – so I reckon most of those countries would be friendly to Cuba. “Big” western nations aren’t the only ‘friends’ Cuba can have. Heck, there’ve been articles from numerous news sources even just recently, noting that increased American aggression on this front is impacting health services in various other countries.

America has a lopsided, bully-oriented, military approach at present. They spend an absolutely absurd amount on their military – hell, they could probably blow up most of the UKs government if they wanted to, which is why your politicians are being such pussies when it comes to the US going rogue and openly boasting about committing war crimes. They have the operational capacity to attack/destroy most other governments. It’s not clear they have the capability to occupy and control additional land / regions though, as evidenced by their fumblings in the middle east in recent past, and in that they didn’t stick around in Venezuela (they didn’t even topple that regime, just abducted the dictator at the top). Having soft power / the support of the people, is an essential component to that sort of thing – and seeing as America’s recent actions are pissing off / alienating even Western powers, I see no reason why anyone would think they’d have much ‘success’ in occupying foreign lands. They’d meet active resistance, just like their attempts to setup in Iraq/Afghanistan – likely to a much larger degree even.

Yes yes, Mr .ML propagandist, tell me more about how the people who I work with, who grew up in Communist states, describe their experiences and reasons for fleeing those states are totally wrong, and that I should tow the .ML bootlicker line. Shitheels online are far more worthwhile a news source than actual people I know / interact with regularly, who lived in those countries! I can do my own online research, just like all those American dimwits who are shunning vaccines because facebook is true and doctors are fakenews!

Mmmm tastey communist boot! Comes in one size, only left shoe, because communism in practice is so wonderfully functional! And all stats produced by communist leader are true and trustworthy! All hail .ML!

Practically, there’s little they can do to win back the USA’s soft power at this point – bridges take seconds to burn, generations to build.

A starting point would be to hold the various people from the previous administration accountable for what’s gone on. That’s practically impossible, as we’ve seen them unable to hold people like Trump accountable for a literal attempted insurrection/coup the last time he was defeated at the polls. Putting people like Hegseth in front of the Hague, to answer for his war crimes in regards to killing civilians near venezuela, for example, would be a step in regaining trust from the international community (basically “We committed international crimes, and we’ll allow the international community to determine the punishment”). The USA would never do that, and has never done that historically. The democrats would never sign off on it, no matter how nazi-like the republicans may get – and the American people, even now, view themselves as exceptional/special to the point that they feel no ‘real’ accountability for the shit their government is doing.

Trade relations/integrations are screwed, as every western partner of the USA now knows/sees very clearly that the USA is just “one election cycle away” from using those very integrations to attack and destabilize their “allies”. The USA spent decades/generations building up that trust, it’ll take decades/generations of similar effort to try and rebuild it. I don’t imagine it’ll happen in my life time.

Electing Trump once may’ve been an outlier, but Americans re-elected him even as he was being transparent in his intentions to become a dictator and to dramatically re-orient America’s international position - the current administration people published project 2025, and numerous other “pro fascism” essays/books prior to the 2025 election. Vance, their VP, literally lauds people like Posobiecs work, wherein he calls for democrats to be hunted/targeted/killed. The Americans voted in favour of fucking over western allies, voted in favour of alienating the EU, Canada, Mexico, etc. They voted in favour of a guy wanting to be buddies with Putin, Kim Jong, and any other ruthless dictator he met / exchanged love letters with. They voted for a literal convicted criminal, who any person with an IQ above room temperature would realise would conduct themselves like a criminal in office – no one is shocked that he openly takes bribes and there’s overt corruption going on, because America quite explicitly voted for those things. Why would the world forgive and forget that?

To quote/paraphrase the previous person thought to be the bottom of the barrel of American leaders: “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice… uh… well you can’t get fooled again, right?”. Part of that sentiment, is that if you do it the second time, knowing how things went the last time around, you’re basically accepting the result of being made a fool – you’re not getting ‘fooled’, but instead you are accepting your role as a fool by trusting the same untrustworthy group again, you’re complicit in your poor treatment. Other countries cannot trust the states again, because we’ve all been shown the states is untrustworthy, and that they’re intent on harming our people/countries. We cannot go back to ‘trusting’ the states, unless we want to do harm to our own citizens/interests.

Besides, there’s still a few more years of insults and bullshit to come from the USA. We haven’t even hit the bottom for this massive betrayal of western allies. It’s a bit early to be pretending like they have a hope of digging themselves out of this pit, while they’re still actively digging deeper.

My take on it is that socialism is still fundamentally a capitalist approach to resource distribution, while Communism does away with most private property. Some people like to try and dress it up more with ideals, but that’s the basic difference in practice – it doesn’t make sense in this context, from my pov, to talk about the imaginary “ideal” of communism, rather than the realistic implementations of it that have occurred.

So, like under communism everything is basically state owned. People who’ve lived under communism will hear things like “state owned grocery stores” and think “Oh shit, I’ve lived this – you get food stamps/allocations of food assigned by the govt, and that’s what you’re allowed to ‘buy’/‘eat’. And the govt workers will get better stamps/allocations, cause it’ll be inevitably corrupt. This is bad!”. (I’ve heard this very sentiment from people who fled communist states, when topics like Mamdani’s govt run stores comes up). Applied communism isn’t some idyllic fairytale, it’s more “The state has declared the university system too elitist, so we’re forcing you all to do back breaking labour in the fields. Refusal means firing squad”.

Under a socialist approach, you get things like private stores, honoring things like food stamps that are provided to people in need, but most of the transactions are done without government involvement. The talk of setting up government run grocery stores, is viewed more as “We want to provide a baseline that can sell food at cost, but we still want private stores too, especially for more luxury/foreign goods and other options/competition in the market. Having a market option that is providing cheap generic products should have a stabilizing effect on food prices, and downward pressure on cost of living in general for folks”. To provide these services, socialist regimes typically have higher tax rates on private citizens – but those taxes are still fundamentally driven by a capitalist system of private property and individual choice/freedom.

Any westerner who’s paid attention to the media a bit, has seen / knows of things like Israel flattening cities and genociding palestinians, and have seen things like the USA’s attacks on civilian infrastructure. Heck, the US started off their ‘operation’ by blowing up a girls school, and is routinely threatening to “blow up all the bridges and power plants” – they also joked/bragged about killing fishermen/war crimes at their state of the union.

The UAE whining about civilian targets getting hit, isn’t something the west cares about any more – the west is literally hitting civilian targets at this point, with the US wanting to maximize the “terror” aspects of their military. It’s the whole reason they renamed it to the department of war, and why Hegseth called all his generals in to a meeting last year to say “Let’s commit war crimes, anyone who doesn’t want to is fired! Ignore rules of engagement, we want our ‘war fighters’ to be feared!”. The United States isn’t a force for good, it’s not pretending like it’s bringing freedom/liberty, it’s not trying to improve the quality of life of people in any way shape or form anymore. Like they kidnapped Maduro, left the authoritarian regime intact, so that they could basically steal oil without changing anything else. Having the opposition leader win the Nobel Prize likely also contributed to it, as the diaper-wearing convicted felon that the USA chose as their dictator has such a brittle ego.

The US basically rebranded itself into a very overt global terrorist organisation. Western nations can’t decouple from the USA fast enough to be able to call it out / push back on it, so they all just sorta go along with it. But realistically, if we’re pretending that Israel’s justified in flattening whole cities because of “terrorist elements somewhere in there”, then the same would apply to anyone hosting US assets – especially while the US is actively blowing up civilian targets.