Tech
Amid Trump attacks and weaponized sanctions, Europeans look to rely less on US tech
Imagine a world where your credit card no longer works, your Amazon account is shut down, and using U.S. tech companies is no longer an option. It’s almost impossible to shop online, wire bank transfers to an overseas family member, or rely on anything that involves the United States, including the U.S. dollar.
For one Canadian, this is now her reality.
Last year, the Trump administration added Kimberly Prost, a judge on the International Criminal Court, to its economic sanctions list, after she served on an appeals chamber that in 2020 unanimously authorized the ICC’s prosecutor to investigate alleged war crimes in Afghanistan since 2003, including U.S. service personnel. The United States is not a member of the ICC and does not recognize its authority. Several other ICC judges and prosecutors have also been sanctioned by the Trump administration.
Prost, whose name now shares the same list as some of the world’s most dangerous people, from terrorists to North Korean hackers and Iranian spies, described the effect of sanctions on her life as “paralyzing” in an interview by The Irish Times.
This high-profile case provides a glimpse into the disruption that being cut off from the U.S. can have on a person’s everyday life; lawmakers and government leaders across Europe are growing more aware of the looming threat facing them at home, and their over-reliance on U.S. technology.
Trump’s diplomatic escalations and the upending of international norms, including the capture a foreign leader and threatening to invade a NATO and European ally, have caused some EU countries to consider moving away from U.S. tech and reclaiming their digital sovereignty. This shift in thinking comes as the Trump administration has become increasingly unpredictable and vindictive.
In Belgium, the country’s cybersecurity chief Miguel De Bruycker conceded in a recent interview that Europe has “lost the internet” to the United States, which has hoarded much of the world’s tech and financial systems. De Bruycker said it is “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe as a result of U.S. dominating digital infrastructure, and urged the European Union to strengthen its tech across the bloc.
The European Parliament voted January 22 to adopt a report directing the European Commission to identify areas where the EU can reduce its reliance on foreign providers. Parliamentarians said the European Union and its 27 member states rely on non-EU countries for more than 80% of its digital products, services, and infrastructure. The vote was non-binding, but comes at a time when the European Commission is moving to bring more of its technologies and dependencies onto its own turf.
The French government said Tuesday it would replace Zoom and Microsoft Teams with its own domestically made video conferencing software Visio, according to the French minister for civil service and state reform David Amiel.
Concerns about digital sovereignty are not new and date back decades to at least 2001 when the U.S. introduced the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The Patriot Act allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to surveil the world in ways it had never been allowed to before, including spying on the communications of citizens of its closest allies in Europe, despite the bloc’s strict data protection and privacy rules.
Microsoft conceded years later in 2011 that as an American tech company it could be compelled to hand over Europeans’ data in response to a secret U.S. government order; it wasn’t until 2013 when much of this surveillance was revealed in practice through classified documents leaked by then-NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
At the individual consumer level, there has also been a concerted push to urge users to switch away from U.S. tech providers and technologies, with tech workers calling on their chief executives to speak up against the rising brutality of U.S. federal immigration agents.
Independent journalist Paris Marx has a guide for getting off of U.S. tech services, while several other websites, such as switch-to.eu and European Alternatives, encourage users to use alternatives to Big Tech products and services, such as open source tools.
Tech
Some kids are bypassing age verification checks with a fake mustache
Some age verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites.
U.K.-based nonprofit Internet Matters surveyed a thousand children about age verification checks online, and about half said that age checks were easy to bypass.
“Children demonstrated a clear awareness of how to bypass age checks, either through their own experiences or by hearing about methods from others,” the report says.
“One technique brought up was children drawing facial hair on themselves so that the tools verifying them would think they were older, which was reported as working in multiple instances,” it added.
Age verification laws continue to roll out around the world, often under the guise of online child safety, but whereby adults are required to prove their age, typically by uploading a copy of their driver’s license or passport to a third-party company before being allowed into an adult website. Critics say these laws allow the creation of databases that can be hacked or leaked, and threaten the open and decentralized internet.
Half of all U.S. states have some form of age-checking law in place, as does the United Kingdom, which spurred much of the global effort.
As such, companies like Apple have rolled out software updates to device owners to comply with the growing number of age-checking laws. Web companies like Reddit and Meta are using a mix of requiring users to upload their government-issued documents and creepy guesswork that involves algorithmically guessing a person’s age. Others, like Discord, have delayed their rollouts amid user backlash and security issues.
This is not the first known bypass that kids have figured out in recent months since the rise in rollouts of age verification checks. Some kids have found that pointing their webcam at adult-looking characters in video games also worked, or in other cases, simply pulling obscure or funny faces was enough to skirt the checks altogether.
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Tech
AI boom pushes Samsung to $1T
Samsung reached a $1 trillion valuation on Wednesday as shares of the South Korean tech giant surged more than 10%, driven by the ongoing artificial intelligence frenzy fueling demand for chips. The milestone makes Samsung only the second Asian company to cross the trillion-dollar threshold, after TSMC.
The news comes on the heels of a blockbuster earnings report last week, in which Samsung posted profits eight times higher than the same period a year ago.
Every company building AI right now needs chips, and Samsung makes the memory chips that power those AI systems. Demand is surging while supply struggles to keep up, pushing prices higher and boosting Samsung’s profits.
There’s another reason shares surged on Wednesday. Reports came out yesterday that Apple has been in talks with both Samsung and Intel to manufacture chips for Apple devices on U.S. soil. Apple has long relied almost exclusively on TSMC in Taiwan for its chip production. If Samsung lands the deal, it would mark a significant shift in the global semiconductor supply chain.
At the heart of Samsung’s profit boom is high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a type of chip critical to running AI systems, which has dramatically improved the company’s margins. But the competition is intense. Rival SK Hynix, a South Korean semiconductor giant, is aggressively vying for the same market, keeping the pressure on Samsung to maintain its edge.
The AI boom is driving a chip shortage across the semiconductor industry, as the world’s three largest memory chip makers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, struggle to meet runaway demand from AI data centers. All three companies have pulled investment away from their consumer chip businesses to ramp up production of HBM, which carries substantially higher margins and has become essential to powering large-scale AI infrastructure.
Despite Wednesday’s historic surge, Samsung still faces headwinds. Workers are threatening an 18-day strike later this month, demanding a bigger slice of the AI-driven profits. Meanwhile, the company’s phone and TV divisions, which also need to buy those same memory chips to build their products, are paying a steep price for the same chips powering Samsung’s record profits.
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Tech
3 days left to lock in 50% off a second ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
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Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
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October 13-15, 2026
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Some kids are bypassing age verification checks with a fake mustache
AI boom pushes Samsung to $1T
