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Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

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

#291

Post by tekknik »

3gg wrote: post #284
otterley wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attorney here!* That is totally false. Conspiracy requires two elements: an agreement to commit a crime, and an act in furtherance of said crime. There is nothing unlawful about looking the other way. You might be a scumbag, but that's a different problem. The elements of criminal accessory require one to harbor, conceal, or act in such a way as to help someone avoid or escape arrest or punishment (CA law here, other…

We need more attorneys. Attorney saves the day.

We need more attorneys only in that their services will get cheaper.

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

#292

Post by tekknik »

httpsterio wrote: post #205
former-aws wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.

Considering that OP created this account today and that they're admitting to what would be a felony and against Amazon's own privacy policy, I doubt this statement is true. Even if the customer had a misconfigured S3 bucket that was exposed to the public, it would still constitute as accessing customer data you're not meant to see. As other users have provided insight on, everything you do as an Amazon employee basic…

Definitely not defending parent here, but in this day in age many people create burner accounts specifically to avoid tying any statements back to them. It’s pretty acceptable practice to create burner accounts on HN. That said, I agree, I doubt any of these claims are true.

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

#293

Post by cameronh90 »

TimSchumann wrote: post #285
Aperocky wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SOMEONE That's not necessary unless SOMEONE includes computer programs. Yes, when things go very seriously wrong, I believe AWS can have literal people override that permission, which will leave a mile long audit trail and likely accompanied by an internet scale outage.

The point I’m trying to get across is that the default viewpoint of many knowledgeable developers I know is ‘Of course AWS can’t see inside my EC2 instance because X’ — where X is some magical technology that doesn't exist. I don’t want to devolve into audit logs and permissions and multi user key signing and wether they actually do or not. The statement that ‘they can’t’ is 100% false, full stop. That’s all I’m tryi…

The technology to do it does exist likely on hardware you possess. The trusted computed platform lets you build a signed OS that encrypts its data using keys on the TPM. Using this, you could build an S3 implementation that stores customer data, but doesn’t let you access it.

It’s probably not a good idea to make a system with no human fallback, but it IS possible with current, non-magic technology.

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

#294

Post by tekknik »

Aperocky wrote: post #272
wolco wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[flagged]

It also uses AMP, thanks for being part of the problem parent.

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

#295

Post by munk-a »

former-aws wrote: post #20
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…

Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.

I know it's hard to do when you're making good money and would be going against co-workers.

But, if you see something, say something. This crap continues because there are too many folks that are happy to help support immoral business practices for some extra scratch. This isn't all on you in particular but when google folks started raising hell about Chinese censorship the company was forced to move. We all have the power to withdraw consent over how our labour will be used and, as software developers, we've got a strong enough employment market that we have real power to help make companies behave better - power that folks working in the warehouse are absolutely deprived of.

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

#296

Post by tekknik »

kbenson wrote: post #24
throwaway_aws wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I joined after the team had gotten traction already. Both the GM and senior most product person on the team told me about their tactics independently. To be honest, I didn't think of it as anything sinister at that time. AWS had such high octane culture to move fast and innovate that I actually felt what they had done was quite smart. It was a super competitive culture and people did whatever was needed to build new…

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair. I wish we went into this in much more detail in high school when covering economics and ethics (if the school even bothers to teach ethics). It should be a prerequisite in any capitalistic economy (but not only those, it can easily be extended to other things). I've also worked in industries…

A large personal change like going hungry? Not feeding your family?

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

#297

Post by balls187 »

This is like 1/2 the RFP world.

RFP, then build in-house.

I mean, I'm betting Facebook's "Small Business Grant" program is going to harvest that data and put it to use too.

As a startup, if your only defensibility is that you had a head start in product development, that's not much of a moat.

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

#298

Post by donavanm »

StopHammoTime wrote: post #258
dodobirdlord wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think perhaps you misunderstand the architecture of KMS. KMS master keys are used to remotely decrypt the symmetric encryption keys for encrypted data that are stored alongside the encrypted data. KMS master keys don't ever leave the KMS servers themselves, and servers can't be accessed directly by anyone. AFAIK they don't have open ports except for handling production traffic and are hardened against opening a she…

Plus, if there is any legitimate concern about AWS having access to KMS keys (at this point it would be that they own the servers, and that's about it), you can roll a CloudHSM and import your own keys. KMS is very clear about it's usage and what it involves. It's obvious that with Symmetrical Encryption AWS obviously needs to know the other end of the key at some point so that it can decrypt the data. However, as cu…

> It's obvious that with Symmetrical Encryption AWS obviously needs to know the other end of the key at some point so that it can decrypt the data.

Its worth noting that even symmetric keys dont imply direct access to the secret itself. You can instead use the highly controlled secret material to derive less sensitive material. For example a hash derived from a known input + the secret. A third party can use this to prove that two other parties both have/had access to the shared secret. But the third party never needs to access the secret itself.

Theres a great example of this in the chained hashes that make up an AWS sigv4 API request signature. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/sigv4-calculat...

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

#299

Post by jacques_chester »

jburgess777 wrote: post #252
jbay808 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent. There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen…

What I was told is that if you research the patent and aware of its existence then you may be guilty of willful enfringement with treble the normal penalties: https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2016/06/supreme-court-u... https://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/26/us-high-court-restores-t...

More precisely, a standing policy that researching patents is forbidden is prima facie evidence that your employees couldn't have possibly known about an existing patent. That means that a plaintiff suing for willful infringement will need to find evidence that someone went out of their way to ignore the policy. That might be quite difficult.

(Of course: not a lawyer, this is not legal advice)

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

#300

Post by flak48 »

thoraway1010 wrote: post #158
former-aws wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot up vote this enough. During my time both at Retail and AWS it was perfectly normal to trawl production customer data and come up with ideas to launch competing products. Prices were always set lower or free offering justified as data-driven and customer obsession. I hated the gas lighting their customers and left in disgust of the company and its leadership which encourages that behavior.

This frankly doesn't match my experience and I have to say I find it unlikely. Before going into our AWS production S3 buckets, looking at our databases for customer lists AWS seems to be pretty careful to get an OK. Now we are being told that production customer data was normal to trawl? How in the HELL are they passing all their certs with all production data so wide open. I do customer managed keys - I mean, this…

I would assume the comment you're replying to means things like resource usage patterns and costs to estimate a client's profits for example. Rather than reading actual data from S3 or a database.
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