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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

#211

Post by hulitu »

PeterStuer wrote: post #159
postpawl wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could still host it in a country with a less bad track record of industrial espionage.

> You could still host it in a country with a less bad track record of industrial espionage.

Good luck finding one. The world is divided in 3 spheres of influence: US, China and Russia. To make business you must obey one of them.

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

#212

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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 work for a relatively small company (about 15-20 odd people) and we've got a server rack in the office. It's positioned in a very specific angle (with tape on the floor) along an AC unit because of cooling, but we self-host a lot of our stuff.

It's done on a budget as well so we're kinda forced to use open source software.

Weirdly enough we use Skype for work chat and Zoom for video meetings, so it feels a bit inconsistent.

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

#213

Post by martinlaz »

Snowden: It turns out "Hey Alexa" is short for "Hey Keith Alexander." Yes, the Keith Alexander personally responsible for the unlawful mass surveillance programs that caused a global scandal. And Amazon Web Services (AWS) host ~6% of all websites.

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1303829551999602688

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

#214

Post by KSteffensen »

deathgrips wrote: post #180
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

In America you can buy privacy if you really want it. Buy a laptop here, install linux on it, and use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy. This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.

I'm fairly sure that if the NSA want your data they will get it, if necessary using rubber hose cryptanalysis.

Regardless of legality.

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

#215

Post by oliwarner »

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…

But you have to follow through. You can't stop at the cloud and happily use closed source software from (eg) Microsoft or Apple. Or letting people carry Google-powered microphone arrays into meetings in their pockets.

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

#216

Post by rtx »

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.

This is a new thing. Earlier tech companies use to start with an on premise server.

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

#217

Post by esperent »

oliwarner wrote: post #215
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…

But you have to follow through. You can't stop at the cloud and happily use closed source software from (eg) Microsoft or Apple. Or letting people carry Google-powered microphone arrays into meetings in their pockets.

I think there's big a difference between using Windows (with local account only) and using Amazon cloud services, in terms of data safety.

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

#218

Post by arethuza »

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

Even if they weren't explicit partners it seems highly likely that intelligence agencies would get covert access to the resources of the main web companies - they are just too tempting a target not to.

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

#219

Post by Hokusai »

pmontra wrote: post #189
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?

Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. Even China has problems with sourcing components (the TSMC/USA licenses case). It also doesn't help to be a collection of small countries that can be played one against the other by USA, China and Russia and possibly others.

> Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry.

It works the other way around. We cannot have an European industry meanwhile USA government backed-up companies are competing with our startups.

> collection of small countries

Europe is bigger than the USA. And the division within the USA is as big or bigger than Europe. And, we cannot talk about China.

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

#220

Post by esperent »

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.

This bullshit game of "which is worse" between the US and China, with both countries constantly moving the goalposts, is just tiring. Yes, China is currently worse. But with children locked up in cages and a massive prison-slavery industry, not to mention crazy NSA spying and so on, you're kidding yourself if you say the US is that far behind.

You can say, as a US citizen, that all this stuff doesn't affect you much. But I can tell you, from considerable first hand experience, that the average Chinese citizen says the same about China.

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