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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

#251

Post by deathgrips »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #249
deathgrips wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What about 'Not in America'? Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides. >Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Contract with a VPN that is audited and resides in a legally favorable country. I hesitate to endorse any particular company, but they're out there. Maybe privacy just isn't convenient enough for you. >So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any Ameri…

>What are you talking about? This - > >Same advice, buy a VPN if you want the services that it provides. >You are allowed to do this at their law enforcement's mercy.

Oh, I see. Yes. In America you are free to use whatever VPN you pay for, regardless of what country it's hosted in. The NSA won't prohibit it and cannot break it if it's using the right algorithms. If they wanted to intentionally examine your network traffic, that would require a court order. If they wanted to get past your VPN encryption, that would require targeted hacking of a US citizen, which is typically handled by regular law enforcement. The NSA doesn't primarily concern itself with US citizens because investigating them is, in short, a huge pain in the ass. If you have any evidence to the contrary I'd gladly read it.

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

#252

Post by nicoburns »

nix23 wrote: post #203
brobdingnagians wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to appreciate the value of a really good, dedicated sysadmin. I used to think I was pretty good at it and that was fine, but I've come to realize that the skillset for an awesome sysadmin are quite a bit different than a developer, even though there is some overlap. And there is definitely a range.

>quite a bit different than a developer Exactly! I'm a sysadmin (sometimes a Dev), but sysadmin is what i'm really good at. The most important thing is to see a solution from another perspective.

As a developer I completely agree. I have some knowledge of system administration, but I much prefer with dedicated professional where possible. It's partly just a different set of expertise, but I think it's partly also why it's best to have dedicated people doing QA work. The attitude required to do the work is completely different to dev work, and it's hard for one person to wear both hats.

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

#253

Post by danielheath »

deathgrips wrote: post #240
unionpivo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way. After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them. Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respon…

If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of…

Only the latter two, but at least you won’t get sent to mainland China by us police.

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

#254

Post by teekert »

znpy wrote: post #248
TomSwirly wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon got too creepy for me five years ago. I have avoided doing business with them ever since.

what happened five years ago?

It got too creepy for him. (sorry, couldn't resist)

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

#255

Post by pilsetnieks »

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.

Parent comment is also talking about small companies. Below a certain size all those things (well, equivalent services, not those exactly) don't need more than a single server which is fairly painless. When you grow to a size where you need it at scale, that's where the pain starts.

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

#256

Post by duncan_bayne »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #128
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. doe…

That's because spying was his job (or at least, directing the spies).

The moral criticism here is that he violated the law he swore to uphold by also spying on his own citizens, and then lied about it.

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

#257

Post by schoen »

leptoniscool wrote: post #4

Amazon does have devices listening in every home. Is the concern here that hiring Keith Alexander would make it easier for government to get people's conversation data?

I think I'd be more worried that he might discourage investments that could help Amazon better protect its foreign customers against U.S. and partners' espionage efforts.

Or perhaps affect Amazon's procurement with non-transparent motives. Suppose these is a certain microarchitectural vulnerability in one vendor's hardware but not another's. If Amazon could be induced to buy the vulnerable hardware over the non-vulnerable hardware, that could help people who knew about the vulnerability spy on AWS customers. Or if there were a company to be rewarded or punished for its decision to cooperate or not to cooperate with some covert activity, the reward or punishment could be done through procurement decisions.

Or perhaps affect Amazon's lobbying at home or abroad about privacy legislation or something.

(It's not obvious to me whether the danger is particularly greater from a former DIRNSA than from someone with undisclosed connections to a spy agency. Maybe Alexander's recommendations would get extra scrutiny!)

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

#258

Post by jacobush »

fluffything wrote: post #149
catmanjan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ?

No, that won't happen.

"Sorry not sorry" and no credit.

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

#259

Post by raverbashing »

kortilla wrote: post #244
Hokusai wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Google, Apple, Amazon, ... are not startups, they are behemoths backed up by the USA government. Europe has many very good startups that are just purchased with USA dollars once they are successful. > we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US That would only ruin Europe standards of living and…

> USA is not successful because capitalism, USA is successful were the government puts a lot of money: Military, I+D. This is incorrect. The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals. Google dominated search, Microsoft dominated all business and home PCs for decades, Apple and Google dominated mobile for consumers and businesses, Amazon beat them all to cloud and at…

> The current big tech companies became successful and massive without any special government deals

Where did their finance came from: previous SF companies and angel investors

Where did these companies get their funding from: US government

The current companies are only the "daughters and granddaughters" of massively government funded companies in Silicon Valley

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

#260

Post by schoen »

sjs382 wrote: post #76
fennecfoxen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, want to hear something else a little tinfoil hat crazy and also 100% true? - Checking out on Amazon was always encrypted. - Browsing on Amazon was not encrypted until quite recently. Add To Cart wasn't encrypted. - High end network equipment includes support for monitoring your browsing on the guest wifi to send URLs from you browsing Amazon to price-compare or buy. See, for instance, Cisco Analytics for Retail.

> Browsing on Amazon was not encrypted until quite recently. Add To Cart wasn't encrypted. What do you mean by this? HTTPS has always been supported for browsing and adding to cart.

I think this varied by country. I was working on some HTTPS advocacy targeted at web sites before it was so ubiquitous, and I remember Amazon in the U.S. not allowing you to browse items with HTTPS probably sometime around 2010 (I think they would send a redirect back to the HTTP site).
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