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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

#141

Post by GrimRe »

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...

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it.

There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere.

AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot decrypt the data. Not only that, there is such a huge separation in access and rigour around governance that there is no way anyone within Amazon can simply login and see your data even if unencrypted.

Every single case of data being leaked from AWS is because the people working for the company that manage the data literally checked a box to make the contents public. Contrast this to "on-prem" where physical security can get compromised or the vendors of the physical hardware/software leave gaping holes or maintenance backdoors that get exploited.

Honestly these types of views are no more grounded in reality that flat earth conspiracy type views.

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

#142

Post by fluffything »

ghgr wrote: post #125
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…

And doing this is so simple. Just host your own gitlab server, and version all your company's IP on git. For chat we use Zulip, which we also self-host.

And honestly moving to these tools from slack, confluence, etc. has been awesome.

Zulip threading model is great. So much better than slack.

And using markdown and jupyter notebooks for documentation on gitlab? Damn awesome.

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

#143

Post by GrimRe »

switch11 wrote: post #39
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…

This: This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now At some point we need to just say it some of the largest tech companies are basically NSA+CIA partners and we're well on our way to having Big Tech completely integrated into NSA and CIA and DoD

It sounds tinfoils hat crazy because it is.

No we do need to say that because is patently untrue.

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

#144

Post by postpawl »

ghgr wrote: post #125
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…

I think you’re really overestimating the ability of most small tech companies to self-host reliably and securely.

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

#145

Post by catmanjan »

GrimRe wrote: post #141
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...

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot…

>Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere.

Prove it

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

#146

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

deathgrips wrote: post #135
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. doe…

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

>America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media

Can you say for sure, that the phone will not be seized, imaged and/or bugged at the airport/border?

Anyways you are talking about differences in what they do with the data or the person to whom that data belongs and not contending the fact that tech companies from both the countries spy internationally.

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

#147

Post by fluffything »

postpawl wrote: post #144
ghgr wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you’re really overestimating the ability of most small tech companies to self-host reliably and securely.

I'm not devops, but how hard is it to properly set up VPN / ssh ?

We have a gitlab server, and connecting requires being on VPN, which requires 2FA, and then ssh, which requires your keys to be properly set up.

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

#148

Post by gigatexal »

petre wrote: post #126
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.

Everything was done on premises with a colo to house some servers. We ran kubernetes and had some really smart ops engineers do our platform for us. I was always of the opinion that those super smart engineers (much better than I was) were wasted on reinventing the wheel when we could have used an IaaS and they could have helped us on improving the product

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

#149

Post by fluffything »

catmanjan wrote: post #145
GrimRe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot…

>Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. Prove it

Also, what happens if you find a leak? Or that it has been moved somewhere else?

They say "We are sorry", give you some free credit, and that's it ?

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

#150

Post by postpawl »

fluffything wrote: post #147
postpawl wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re really overestimating the ability of most small tech companies to self-host reliably and securely.

I'm not devops, but how hard is it to properly set up VPN / ssh ? We have a gitlab server, and connecting requires being on VPN, which requires 2FA, and then ssh, which requires your keys to be properly set up.

Parent comment is talking about self hosting “Google Docs, S3, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack“. Running all those things (and more) instead of focusing on your core business is probably a mistake for most companies.
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