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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

#161

Post by paganel »

sailfast wrote: post #71

Counterpoint to a number of posts already on here regarding the bad for privacy angle. Maybe not a terrible idea to have a board member with significant experience understanding the threat nation states and other larger private hacking concerns pose to one of the United States’ largest cloud providers? I understand this is all too incestuous, but I also can’t really say it’s a bad move.

Keith Alexander is a well-known perjurer [1], he should be behind bars, not earning millions sitting on the board of directors of companies worth trillions. There's nothing "not bad" about this move, at least for our society seen as a whole.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-re...

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

#162

Post by feanaro »

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.

These use cases sound a bit like using a chainsaw to trim your beard.

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

#163

Post by robin_reala »

kube-system wrote: post #68
typon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The sinister Huawei has close ties with the Chinese government. Our companies can't compete on a level playing field!"

Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?

In this case the US really doesn’t have my interests in mind.

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

#164

Post by PeterStuer »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #134
88840-8855 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There needs to be EU based options before any of them could be replaced.

As always, if there ever threatened to emerge one it will be bought by a US company with free petrodollar.

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

#165

Post by modo_mario »

kube-system wrote: post #68
typon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The sinister Huawei has close ties with the Chinese government. Our companies can't compete on a level playing field!"

Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?

Over ehre in Small Belgium it doesn't feel like it. In bed with big internationals for other reasons some of which local like de beers sure tho but that just smells more of corruption than anything protectionist or intelligence based

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

#166

Post by mcqueenjordan »

88840-8855 wrote: post #124
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?

I think there’s a lot more to it than just sharing values. If my values are mutually exclusive with your values, then there’s a lot more reason to kick me out.

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

#167

Post by f1refly »

postpawl wrote: post #150
fluffything wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think so. The company I work for is really focused on digital independence. Their core business is industrial electronic component design. The whole supporting office runs on libreoffice, thunderbird, mattermost and nextcloud, all hosted on company premise. They employ two full-time admins, one for the windows clients, the other one for the linux clients (which one can ask for) and servers. This whole setup is, according to them, surprisingly easy to manage and maintain, you just have to find a boss who's willing to try it. Maybe it's different when you're a software shop and really need s3 or something

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

#168

Post by therealdraco »

Get real the founder of ycombinator is a fucking loser small b dick power bottom.

I know, I’m English, with a twist. How’s my wordsmith sheen of brilliance glory and bream? You plebs on hacker news, you ain’t gotta shot

Viva Nicaragua Libre! Abajo con el imperio Yankee. All English men are gay, I’m a scouser, I know for a damn fact.

How many British billionaires on Forbes? Let it go, you had your chance.

Into a canal to beat all canals, bigger than Hughes, Twain, and Van Derbilt combined

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

#169

Post by reallydontask »

GrimRe wrote: post #160
catmanjan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why don't I prove the earth isn't flat while I'm at it? Oh wait, I can't. I guess you win. Clearly my inability to prove the earth isn't flat means that it is flat. See how ridiculous you sound? You think that 25,000+ employees that work at AWS have somehow been silenced into some grand conspiracy? The underlying architecture of an AWS Region is fundamentally designed to keep data in the Region you specify. There is…

> You think that 25,000+ employees that work at AWS have somehow been silenced into some grand conspiracy?

You seem to suggest that every single employee that works at AWS is aware of everything that goes on with the company.

Isn't just possible that despite of what we know about the architecture, this might not be the whole truth and concerns about involuntary inter region transfers might just be warranted?

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

#170

Post by kilroy123 »

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

I'll never understand why people are ok installing recording devices in their home from a giant ad company or retail conglomerate.

Granted I do walk around with a smartphone.

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