Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#231

Post by dodobirdlord » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

acruns wrote: post #124

KorfmannArno wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the measures being implemented to ensure that no employee can look into customer's data?

I can tell you generally how this works in Azure, I can't speak for AWS, but unless a customer is using BYOK for encryption of their data, I can't imagine how AWS c o u l d n ' t be capable of accessing data, and even then I wouldn't gurantee they couldn't still get your data. In Azure (as of a couple years ago), in order to access a customer's tenant it required VP approval, the support engineer was granted access f…

At the end of the day there's obviously nothing other than remotely storing your keys that will keep your data opaque. Even supposing that the IAM team doesn't have a way to forge a valid credential if they need to, the confirm/deny response of their service to authorization checks is the source-of-truth for whether a credential is valid, and they could update their service endpoint to affirm bad credentials if they wanted to. Presumably for law enforcement purposes they have a way to forge a credential that doesn't show up in audit logs.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#232

Post by dodobirdlord » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

KorfmannArno wrote: post #82

bg24 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can speak for AWS. Only the later. Basically the usage information for cloud resources. This constitutes the foundation for billing. BTW, this is be true for any cloud, any SAAS. There is no way an employee can look into customer data. There's enough trail inside AWS to prove that without any doubt.

What are the measures being implemented to ensure that no employee can look into customer's data?

Other than the data each service actually retains themselves (i.e. the Lambda service themselves store your Lambda Functions because they need to execute them) customer data is generally stored encrypted at rest with KMS keys belonging to the customer (or sometimes managed by the storage team). It wouldn't be possible to peer into unencrypted data without persuading the KMS API to authenticate your access to the key. Presumably this capability exists, because otherwise Amazon wouldn't be able to honor warrants for customer data, but the premise that KMS is handing out decryption tokens for customer data for the benefit of Amazon Retail's business analysts is pretty silly.

And of course, you're always vulnerable to someone with access to the physical host of an EC2 instance where your workload is running. Only GCP AFAIK offers an encrypted-in-processing compute service, and it's like a week old.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/identity-security/int...

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#233

Post by ctvo » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:58 PM UTC

throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…

A single comment from a throwaway account with no evidence but confirms my personal bias that Amazon is evil? I'm fully bought in before I catch myself.

The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care about optimizing profit and are long term focused.

Please provide evidence for your extraordinary claim.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#234

Post by fizx » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

aws_pmthrowaway wrote: post #136

I was a senior manager on the very first product the article talks about. I was closely involved in designing the service and presenting it to Amazon senior leadership. WSJ quotes the CEO of a startup called DefinedCrowd as accusing us of stealing their ideas from a meeting 4 years earlier. What a bunch of conceit. I don't remember our team discussing DefinedCrowd even once. We focused on the many other more interest…

Four years in the AI space is like two lifetimes.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#235

Post by Tinyyy » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:04 PM UTC

Ijumfs wrote: post #225

8note wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that comparable to the owner of a mall watching who goes in and out of which shops to decide what stores to add to the mall?

Isn't it more like the mall owner opening a clone of your store right next to yours while charging themselves no rent in order to gain an advantage, all the while promoting their own store they opened to steal your business on the ad boards situated around the mall?

Is that illegal?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#236

Post by wolco » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:09 PM UTC

ctvo wrote: post #233

throwaway_aws wrote: post #12

"An Amazon spokesman said the company doesn’t use confidential information that companies share with it to build competing products" Maybe...but in the past, AWS proactively looked at traction of products hosted on its platform, built competing products, and then scraped & targeted customer list of those hosted products. In fact, I was on a team in AWS that did exactly that. Why wouldn't their investing arm do the sa…

A single comment from a throwaway account with no evidence but confirms my personal bias that Amazon is evil? I'm fully bought in before I catch myself. The economic and reputation cost Amazon would take in ever accessing customer data to come up with some competing B-list product (say ElasticSearch as a managed service) is astronomical compared to potential profits. One thing I know about that company... they care a…

Whenever anyone asks for evidence I start to wonder why they need the proof. Why did you need this link? Do you have a business relationship with Amazon?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/amazon...

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#237

Post by avalanche123 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:10 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #210

jessaustin wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither "traction of products hosted on its platform" nor "customer list of those hosted products" are typically public information. They are information to which a trusted vendor might have access. There seems to be a fine line between trusting Amazon to sell and ship one's products and services without using its position to sell competing products and services, and trusting AWS to host one's confidential data witho…

You're right - but this isn't the first time we've heard about this exact practice. It's been reported on extensively, so if anyone was going to investigate something illegal, it would have happened. It is however, good ground for an Anti-Trust case. Using your position as a market maker to push your own products is literally illegal anti-competitive behavior and can trigger a court order to break up the company.

I believe anti trust is triggered when it negatively affects consumers, with Amazon’s aggressive competition consumers usually win. At least short term...

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#238

Post by Ijumfs » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:11 PM UTC

Tinyyy wrote: post #235

Ijumfs wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it more like the mall owner opening a clone of your store right next to yours while charging themselves no rent in order to gain an advantage, all the while promoting their own store they opened to steal your business on the ad boards situated around the mall?

Is that illegal?

Is it?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#239

Post by anonymousDan » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:18 PM UTC

kapilvt wrote: post #215

rckoepke wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What types of AWS data would be trawled? Are we talking about data inside S3 buckets, database schemas, particular architecure styles, the fact that a product is consuming {x, y, z} amounts of cloud resources, or simply "spending $m / year" in gross?

aggregated api usage stats, api client headers is often enough to identify competitor products and their traction, and is non-sensitive, coupled with account id to customers.

Do you have to use AWS to sell on Amazon?

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#240

Post by novalis78 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:19 PM UTC

Good friend of mine said his company invented the book preview and had tons of publisher relationships due to their service for public libraries and preview snippets. They sat in a meeting with Amazon executives early 2000s - allegedly similar story. They were first offered a partnership then Amazon canceled all talks after getting a good grip on the business and launched their version shortly thereafter.