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Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

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Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#121

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

wololo wrote: post #95
propogandist wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO. Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year. Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of loca…

Regarding [2], the sensationalized, alarmist way the media reported this was not remotely accurate, nor would the conspiracy theory angle on this story make any practical sense.

Is there a solid source on what was actually collected?

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#122

Post by [deleted] »

aazaa wrote: post #8

> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade. This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now. Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current presiden…

[deleted]

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#123

Post by divbzero »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #121
wololo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding [2], the sensationalized, alarmist way the media reported this was not remotely accurate, nor would the conspiracy theory angle on this story make any practical sense.

Is there a solid source on what was actually collected?

Google’s official statement admitted to collecting payload data from unsecured WiFi networks but said it was a mistake from including a library with extraneous code. [1]

The statement also linked to a third-party analysis of the relevant code which concluded: [2]

“Gslite is an executable program that captures, parses, and writes to disk 802.11 wireless frame data. In particular, it parses all frame header data and associates it with its GPS coordinates for easy storage and use in mapping network locations. The program does not analyze or parse the body of Data frames, which contain user content. The data in the Data frame body passes through memory and is written to disk in unparsed format if the frame is sent over an unencrypted wireless network, and is discarded if the frame is sent over an encrypted network.”

[1]: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection...

[2]: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#124

Post by 88840-8855 »

gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

Are you sure you didnt spell "China cloud" and "Huawei" wrong? /s

Just because we (Germans, Europeans) are culturally closer to Americans and share certain values does not mean that we should have a double standard on our external affairs.

We are kicking out Huawei. When will we kick out Amazon, Google, Apple and Cisco?

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#125

Post by ghgr »

gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

Exactly. I'm constantly surprised how many companies carelessly upload all their internal documents to Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack et al. I'd suggest that anything that's not supposed to be public never be uploaded to such services, specially if you are not from the US. The way to go even for small tech companies is self hosting, except maybe for email, due to GMail marking your emails as spam from what I've heard.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#126

Post by petre »

gigatexal wrote: post #119

Here in Germany I used to work for a company that swore off Amazon and other US cloud vendors because of things like this: the relationships between them and the government are too tight. They didn’t want German user data being compromised. It could have been FUD to do things on premises or what not but it seemed to make sense at the time and now with this...

What did they use instead? Ovh, Scaleway?

Never trusted Bezos and the Amazon offerings are too expensive anyway.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#127

Post by kaonwarb »

aazaa wrote: post #8

> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade. This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now. Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current presiden…

Amazon does not own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos does.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#128

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

aazaa wrote: post #8

> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade. This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now. Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current presiden…

>figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans

I like the way you included just 'Americans', may be because it's just the domestic spying which is against U.S. law, may be because you thought 'spied on Americans' hits harder for an American reader than just 'spied on everyone'.

But, for someone outside USA or China; there's absolutely no difference between U.S. tech or Chinese Tech w.r.t Privacy, what U.S. does privately, China does openly and that's not limited to just spying.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#129

Post by luckylion »

birdyrooster wrote: post #94
propogandist wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO. Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year. Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of loca…

Allegedly, Schmidt also games politics, albeit unsuccessfully, he spent millions on The Groundwork trying to prop up Hillary's 2016 campaign only charging them ~$700k (at one point they had 70 SWE/SRE on staff with most focusing on her campaign's needs for an entire year, they were only a couple blocks away in NYC from Hillary HQ). The company he invested in, Timshel, folded the same year as Hillary lost the election…

Coincidentally, it was his daughter who pushed for Cambridge Analytica's parent company to connect with Palantir while she was an intern.

Re: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors

#130

Post by lmedinas »

cheeze wrote: post #114
adamsiem wrote: post #111

Not installing any Alexa’s in my new house. They suck anyway. Literally no practical use cases after 3 years other than being surveiled upon. Oh, and “what’s the weather on the other side of this sheet of glass I’m standing looking through? “ Lol

Lots of people use them to turn on lights or listen to music. Maybe not your workflow but IMO you sound a little silly strawmanning like that. I don't own Alexas either, but it's obvious why 'normal folk' would like the convenience.

People can also use the Assistant on their phones like Siri or Google Assistant which does basically the same.
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