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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

#331

Post by conductr »

burtonator wrote: post #301
munk-a wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean the problem is corruption begets corruption. They WANT do to these things because you're going to get a massive bonus when the product you 'invented' does well because you stole the idea from an Amazon customer. Amazon needs to be properly taxed so that this crap doesn't happen anymore. The idea that they shouldn't pay taxes simply because they're large should absolutely enrage everyone.

This topic has nothing to do with taxes. They will always be trying to increase their bottom line whether that line is before or after taxes makes no difference. What is needed is a whistleblower. Not just a “when I worked for Amazon we did bad stuff”. We need that person to contact startup X, whose software and customer list was compromised. And then, this is key, share knowledge and proof of these accusations. Hell, do so through an attorney where you negotiate x% of resulting litigation proceeds of you’re worried about your privacy and financial situation. I’m pretty sure this would play out badly for Amazon in court.

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

#332

Post by mapgrep »

jjeaff wrote: post #329
discodave wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that groups of people inside AWS have access to your stuff. A given person might only be on the S3 or EC2 team... but each of those teams can ssh to hosts in production, or has other access that could be used to compromise your data. Amazon does take privacy and security very seriously, but these systems are run by people. Attacks like the recent Twitter attack could work for various AWS services. Sour…

Are you sure about that? Most of the aws provided S3 sdks include the option of client side encryption. Not to mention that there are plenty of third party options for that as well. AWS could I guess look at your s3 data, but it will just look like gibberish.

I think it’s pretty clear the person you are responding to is not suggesting AWS can magically break encryption, but rather that they “have access to your stuff” that is actually on AWS. There are plenty of AWS customers running data through, or storing data on, AWS that is sensitive in the form it is in on AWS. If you have an rdbms (database) actively running on AWS for example it is not e2e encrypted. If you are terminating a customer TLS connection on an ec2 hosted web server their web form upload is exposed to that machine. Etc etc.

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

#333

Post by cycomanic »

ampersandy wrote: post #318
devin wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say is openly contradictory. They receive certain exemptions due to their size, but their tax bill has nothing to do with their size. ???

No, I said quite clearly there are no exemptions due to their size. There's a difference between an exemption for companies with N+ employees and tax credits/exemptions you can capitalize on because you are a company that makes billions of dollars and can afford to take on different behaviors to take advantage of them. That's not the same thing at all.

Nobody said that there is a tax exemption for companies over N+ employees. The OP said that amazon doesn't have to pay taxes.

Can we please stop arguing like influencing is only true if it is done in the most direct way (similar to the quid pro quo debate). Obviously if big company lobbyists try to get tax law in their favour they are not pushing for "please write a law which exempts companies over N employees from taxes." They push for laws that sound innocent but only they will be able to take advantage of, just like it is at the moment. The outcome is still the same they pay less or zero taxes.

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

#335

Post by wdwecewc »

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.

Antitrust isn't about stealing business from your competitors, it is about colluding with them to rip off consumers by fixing prices.

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

#337

Post by mcqueenjordan »

discodave wrote: post #325
throwawaybkhv wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for its faults aws takes data privacy super serious. if you are in support you cant even see attachments customers put on cases without providing auditable justification and you def cant see in s3 buckets or instances. hell if a customer sends you a link to an object in their s3 youre not supposed to open it

Some group of people on the S3 team likely have root access to the machines where your objects are stored. If you don't have encryption turned on...

You keep making factually incorrect statements. I'm not going to go into detail to refute them, because I don't feel comfortable sharing internal design details and security mechanisms, but your comfort in confidently asserting falsehoods is disconcerting, to say the least.

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

#338

Post by Gibbon1 »

discodave wrote: post #325
throwawaybkhv wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for its faults aws takes data privacy super serious. if you are in support you cant even see attachments customers put on cases without providing auditable justification and you def cant see in s3 buckets or instances. hell if a customer sends you a link to an object in their s3 youre not supposed to open it

Some group of people on the S3 team likely have root access to the machines where your objects are stored. If you don't have encryption turned on...

I find it funny that none of the people here arguing really understand what data is important from a strategic sales point from view and what's not. The customers databases and other crap they store on the cloud. Not really important.

The raw billing information, oh motherfucking yes.

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

#339

Post by mcqueenjordan »

swiftcoder wrote: post #303
httpsterio wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> everything you do as an Amazon employee basically leaves a trail with your employee ID That might be true in retail, but it wasn't anywhere close to true in AWS. When I left most engineers still had SSH access to the production hosts (and a not-insignificant portion of operations relied on that fact).

Leaving aside the question of what SSH access looks like today versus whenever you left...

There are many easy mechanisms to audit and monitor SSH sessions. So... no?

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

#340

Post by donavanm »

kerng wrote: post #179
whoisjuan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confidently tell you that Amazon's employees cannot see customers data inside S3 buckets or EC2 instances. They are extremely serious about that stuff since they know that will erode their customer's confidence. But there's probably other superficial business data that's helpful to evaluate that.

This is incorrect, at least from a logical POV and why it's hard to trust what cloud vendors say. A statement like this is either naive (most likely) or actively attempting to mislead. Technically, its absolutely possible. Most likely you'll just need a support ticket or bug, and then you can troll around as engineer. Also, security teams also usually have access to stuff when things get interesting. Better to say th…

> Ideally customer is notified each time it happens - that would be cool, but likely technically not possible

You're underestimating the investments that AWS (and Amazon at large) make in to security, confidentiality, and auditing. You're also missing a fundamental implication of building AWS on AWS primitives.

As a relevant example there is only one AWS IAM and one CloudTrail. It's a core tenant of AWS IAM to put that control and root of trust in to the customers control. That means when developer support is helping with your ticket they do so via your accounts AWSServiceRoleForSupport role. That means you can control whether that role exists, which principals can assume it, the capabilities it has, and you can see those same API calls in your CloudTrail logs. Although it would make support difficult you're welcome to delete that service linked role and prevent support.amazonaws.com from assuming said role in your account.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awssupport/latest/user/using-ser...

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