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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

#271
post #267

Oh damn. This shows again, that you can do crazy shady things and still get super high paying jobs later...

Reminds me of Operation Paperclip in the United States.

After WWII ended and in amidst a “space race” with Russia, German scientists and other high ranking officials were recruited and placed into well paid positions within the government - most notably NASA. Records of any war crimes they may have committed during WWII were wiped away/ignored.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

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

#272
post #125

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…

surely encrypting at source would solve that? wouldn't matter where it's stored so long as it's unintelligible to prying eyes

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be surprised. We had security that rivaled even the standards required by the banks. Truly crazy high multiple physical key paired with vault and some faraday cage protected offline signing thing — I wasn’t privy to it all just saw bits of it while it was being implemented. Suffice to say it can be done and by going off cloud you get the flexibility to do things like this but... in the end it’s overkill

For every 1 of those crazy high security companies, there’s probably 1000’s that couldn’t secure MongoDB instances.

Even the high security ones are stuck using trash products that have to be "behind the firewall" to be "secure" because they run statistical analysis on your HR data (why?????) using peopletools with passwords and logins saved in plaintext .ini files

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company self hosts everything. They’re so bad at it. Something is always down and we waste so much time with our shorty tooling. We even had this amazing idea that we could implement our own version of GCP from scratch. The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs. We’re not a small company, we have about 1k employees and our business is softwar…

Is there yet an open-source alternative to GCP? Can you buy bare metal and just have your own cloud?

OpenStack is probably the closest but it will not have everything GCP or AWS has

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

#275
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…

My company self hosts everything. They’re so bad at it. Something is always down and we waste so much time with our shorty tooling. We even had this amazing idea that we could implement our own version of GCP from scratch. The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs. We’re not a small company, we have about 1k employees and our business is softwar…

A tradeoff might be to keep encrypted data on GCP with keys managed on-premise with transparent encryption decryption by way of a local proxy.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Europe is bigger than the USA.

OK, on some metrics. But I think nobody questions which country is still leading the world.

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

I don't agree with this or we're talking about different things.

The grip of Washington DC on the states of the USA is much stronger than Brussels' on the countries of the EU. The degree of sovereignty is very different. No matter the internal divisions inside the USA, first of all there is one USA. On the other side of the ocean first of all there are multiple competing EU countries, each of them trying to exploit the others and the EU and with different economics and foreign policy goals. About that, do (random picks among large states) California, Texas and New York have a foreign policy worth talking about?

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

#277

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?

Though I completely agree that the double standard is ridiculous, the reasoning behind it likely involves the complicated arrangement between Germany and the US military. China doesn't still have 30,000 troops "occupying" Germany.

Has Germany asked the US to leave? Taking all the US Money with it? Some how I doubt it.

Maybe Germany (and the EU as a whole) should start paying for its own defense, and paying their agreed to share of GDP into NATO while they are at it

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't they threaten to invade the Netherlands if they continue their investigation in US War Crimes ?

You are, I believe, referring to the "American Service Members Protection Act" [1], signed into law in 2002 by Bush? This law, still on the books, theoretically allows the president to order military action against the ICC in Den Haag (The Hague) should they ever try an American Service Member. > The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid…

> Nonetheless that does not make the US forces in Germany an occupational force.

A stick is a stick regardless of whether it has been used to thrash someone lately.

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

#279
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in banking in Europe, one of the internet-only ones. We have super rigid governance routines regarding cloud storage. You can’t store a single byte on any cloud service, even incidentally, without a thorough review ensuring that no customer data is present. Meaning, e.g. there are specific, rigid rules regarding how Postman can be used while developing backend services, to avoid that customer info is inadverte…

Yeah, Postman has gotten dirty. Why the hell should a REST client/testing tool transmit everything to the cloud?

Postwoman might be enough for you if looking for a replacement and it's FOSS
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