It’s still partially true. While consumer stuff is constantly being updated and rewritten, a lot of corporate stuff is stuck to whatever system it was originally designed for. Mainframes are still around for a reason

Only as long as the US has something to offer in return, but the Chinese are gaining ground in a lot of countries

What exactly would you like? If you want something like an EC2 instance (or the google/azure equivalent), those have volumes are encrypted at rest, and you can install all your services you need including a VPN and SSL certificates.

Amazon Rekgnition struggles a little more but it’s still reading the blurry text instead of the lines

You can take a screenshot or save the image directly. My iPhone reads the blurry text without issue, so this may be more related to LLMs in particular, or of the image is compressed before the analysis, the illusion is broken