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Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

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Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When companies are able to do this, they should be broken up, period. Unfortunately we are in a system that's essentially the worst of capitalism with none of the good (and especially not with regulations), so there is no hope left and more jobs will migrate to China. That's what Trump should tackle if he wants to stop job migration, but it seems like he's focused on anything but regulating BigCos.

I've long wondered, with the rise of the internet, is prosecution really necessary to address unsavory business practices like these? Why not force the company into the light, posting this information in a useful form that informs the public and shames the malefactor? I'm a strong proponent of open . If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a modera…

> I'm a strong proponent of open . If shady behavior arises in business, government, public services, and even public discourse, I'd love to see a moderated form of public disclosure become the standard way to reveal and address such 'discrepancies'. Now that the 'net is ubiquitous, I don't see why age-old small town arbitration principles can't be applied to redress virtually all forms of grievance, as long as the public exchange is conducted decorously, as a judge or strict moderator rules could ensure.

The problem is, there is no such thing as a moderated public exchange. Everything can be bought off, be it a journalist, a policeman or a judge. Mass media outside of countries with well-funded public media stations (think BBC or the German TV/radio stations) is always aligned to corporate interest, not to public/journalistic interest. And for what it's worth, state-funded journalism is often enough also subject to meddling by politicians.

> IMO, the state of AI is getting pretty close to enabling this sort of moderator service

lol even Facebook's content AI, which may very well be the strongest in moderating (Google's strength is lying more in content comprehension!) is not able to distinguish between an iconic Vietnam picture and child porn or remotely good at detecting propaganda. I certainly would not want the Facebook AI as a political moderator.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon has been forcing cheaper books back when it was mainly a book store. What do you do about something like that? In Germany, book prices are regulated: the printer sets the price, and the price the customer pays must be this price. Only exception are damaged (e.g. books with CD-ROM, but the CD is missing) or used books. The prices the retailers have to pay at the printer are of course different and may well be…

Copyright is the much larger "danger to culture". We invented it to try to keep artistic recompense safe, but like most idealistic propositions, the sharks have moved in and gamed it and now we are all worse off. Allowing anyone to make any type of contribution without fear of a crackdown from Big Legal leads to a much more prosperous culture. This is already becoming reality as the internet has made traditional copy…

I've heard that the golden post-copyright era ushered in by the internet is coming for a long time, but all I've seen is indie game companies going out of business, games/applications including online features no matter how unnecessary, and much of Hollywood switching to a spitfire methodology. Not exactly advances for culture.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#324

Seems as if this is a reasonable request, which is being framed as an unreasonable one. WalMart has asked a Data-Warehousing service (via its customer) to please not do what it does - data-warehouse internal information about sales, revenue, etc - on their retail-competitor's servers. Data which could give Amazon sensitive inside information on WalMart's operations and financials.. I dono if they've made other less-r…

I don't use AWS, but it's not against their ToS to encrypt data at all stages, right? How does that not that solve this problem? I would hope that anyone using a cloud provider follows that practice.

Honest question, I apologize if it's stupid...

But how do you guarantee encryption at all stages such that Amazon cannot snoop it when you have to do final mile encryption on hardware controlled by Amazon?

I mean encryption for messenger services where each end is not controlled by a third-party is one thing...but how do you guarantee the third-party in control of the hardware responsible for performing the encryption isn't snooping?

The only thing I can think of (and again this isn't my strongest area) is to not handle any data on an Amazon server that isn't already encrypted...but how does that work if you are using a service like RDS or Redshift?

And even if you could work out a super complicated security-conscious solution...is it unreasonable for Walmart to not trust all it's vendors to take such extreme measures and therefore just create a general policy against the use of AWS?

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me as I don't know xen that well, but... Couldn't they just make a copy of the vm, isolate it, and then break into that one? sure the data will be "old", but not by a lot, and it would theoretically be undetectable.

That only gives them the data that's in-flight and already decrypted for processing, but any security conscious company will have their data segmented into many sections that are broken up into smaller pieces with their contents encrypted separately with a decryption key that's stored in a hardware HSM. If they want to capture the entire data stream, they'll need to capture it in real-time.

A) I think you way overestimate the security practices of most companies. I have no knowledge of WM's practices.

B) That's likely still going to be a large amount of very usable data

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#327
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've got plenty of great content. A good roster of original shows, lots of classic and new movies and on and on. The fact that you can rent/buy new releases before they are typically on Netflix or Hulu, is a major bonus of the service if you ask me.

Maybe its just harder to parse through then. Whenever I go through the prime videos, I have a hard time finding good content to watch outside of Amazon created series. Where as with netflix, lots of good new, exclusive stand up content and newer videos such as disney classics. Amazon outside of its own created content seems to lack.

As far as I'm concerned Netflix and Amazon Video are pretty much interchangeable except for exclusive content where Netflix wipes the floor with Amazon.

I've exceedingly rarely been able to find someone on Netflix I wanted to watch when it was not on Amazon. Amazon actually I'd say is the better experience for me, since they'll typically have an option to rent/buy content that they don't have in their unlimited library, where Netflix you're just SoL.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#328
post #215

This is... Not the best? That Wal-Mart is powerful enough to dictate the internal business practice and tech decisions of it's vendor. On the other hand, Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. It's rapidly approaching a "too big to be allowed to fail" status, and that's awful for Americans. Since anti-trust laws weren't written by a ge…

Amazon is a massive immoral monster devouring the US economy and replacing it with something vaguely worse, year by year. Not so long ago, people were saying exactly the same thing about Walmart.

Because there was no Amazon to compare to at the time. Walmart's reach never once approached modern AZ's.

Re: Wal-Mart is telling some vendors they can’t run applications on AWS

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use AWS, but it's not against their ToS to encrypt data at all stages, right? How does that not that solve this problem? I would hope that anyone using a cloud provider follows that practice.

Honest question, I apologize if it's stupid... But how do you guarantee encryption at all stages such that Amazon cannot snoop it when you have to do final mile encryption on hardware controlled by Amazon? I mean encryption for messenger services where each end is not controlled by a third-party is one thing...but how do you guarantee the third-party in control of the hardware responsible for performing the encryptio…

You can't (and they don't promise) encryption such that AWS can't see everything, if they were in fact malicious. This is true of every cloud.

That said, it's not illegal for them to see that xxx vendor increased their storage costs/bandwidth costs by $yyy every month, and that you could look into it - without using one piece of encrypted data.

Disclosure: Former AWS

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