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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

#281

Post by phkahler »

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.

What do you think they did before the cloud?

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

#283

Post by Semaphor »

syshum wrote: post #277
boomboomsubban wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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

Huh, and here I thought it was 2020 and not 2024. Weird.

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

#284

Post by INTPenis »

Hokusai wrote: post #222
INTPenis wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's hard to avoid the cheap offerings of US cloud. I'm from Sweden myself and I'm only speaking as a layperson who is observing the IT industry. It feels like the rampant capitalism in the United States, and lack of regulations, fuels the VC economy. Making startups like Google, Amazon and others possible. I can't imagine a company running on hundreds of millions in dollars of VC money with no real profit coming…

> 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…

>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.

What I meant was that they were startups at one point.

I could have given other examples but there are so many that it's hard to decide. Dropbox, Reddit, imgur just to name a few. This site should know plenty of VC fueled startups.

The point was not which startups to name as examples, the point was that lack of regulations make this whole VC system go around.

I could never see that system working here because bureaucracy slows everything down and forces corporations to do things like care for employees and pay taxes.

But with that said, recent news shows that Sweden has given tax exemptions to Facebook and Amazon just like everyone else. To curry their favor. It's frankly disgusting.

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

#285

Post by ZuLuuuuuu »

fluffything wrote: post #142
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…

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.

A few questions:

- Is your company mainly a software company?

- How much time do you spend on a week on maintaining your servers?

- How do you make sure that your servers are secure? Maybe you are being hacked every night, does your company have the means to check if there has been a security breach?

- Do you follow/apply the security patches for the OS you are using on the server and all the software you are using on the server?

- Do you have regular offline backups? What would happen if there is a fire in your offices?

These are some of the reasons to go for a cloud solution, especially when you are not a software company (hence you don't have many people who have the knowledge for setting up/maintaining such stuff) or when you don't have the resources to hire dedicated sysadmins.

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

#286

Post by srean »

ethbr0 wrote: post #101
DenisM wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how editorial pressure works. Chomsky detailed it quite well, but in a few words: The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support, the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts, and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely. No actual orders to publish or withdraw articles need to happen.

Unfalsifiable conspiracies are my favorite kind! There's got to be a natural law that, for any given situation, one can compose a scheme whereby no proof of anything would actually exist, but evil would still be done.

That's not unfalsifiable. A verifiable leak will suffice. Perhaps what you meant is "what has not been falsified yet"

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

#287

Post by srean »

qiqitori wrote: post #82
bartleby_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon man. I have firsthand knowledge of an editor asking a contributor to remove mentioning Amazon in a story because it cast the company in a negative light.

Well... You may have firsthand knowledge or claim to have firsthand knowledge, but the rest of us don't. When you saw that happening, did you just let it slide? Where did it happen? Was the story originally about Amazon or was it just an off-topic side remark that didn't really fit in?

Not everyone is willing to martyr themselves for a cause. Just because no such information has leaked yet does not mean it has not happened or that there will not be such leaks in the future.

Why should I stop sawing this branch I am sitting on, I havent fallen yet ?

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

#288

Post by Dahoon »

pmontra wrote: post #276
Hokusai wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sover…

You make it sound very benign and positive; "leading the world". In actuality it is more often than not bullying, forcing, coercing, buying. You can of course call that leading the world but really it is leading in the same way wolfpacks are leading their pray. There's no doubt that leading -when meant in a positive way- the US is not in any way a leader or near the top. Being number one in say use of military force around the world, most incarcerated, worst foreign aid by any western country (tied to the defence industry), etc. isn't something anyone else is striving for.

So yes, the US might be "a leader", but so was Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, and yes it migh be able to bully others to do what it want, but it is in no positive way a leader of the world. So in short, yes many many people is most definitely questioning that the US is a world leader.

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

#289

Post by srean »

deathgrips wrote: post #224
esperent wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. One of the presidential candidates wants to tear down all the stuff you pointed out. I can say that the surveillance doesn't affect me because it's almost unheard of for Americans to get arrested with evidence that the NSA collected. The NSA is not a law enforcement agency. In China arresting people based on data from surveillance i…

> here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it

Ask those who wanted to protest against recent disproportionate police actions and those who did and became targets.

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

#290

Post by srean »

deathgrips wrote: post #251
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 handle…

How hard was it to get that room at AT&T with or without "court order" that you speak about.

Do you consider secret courts to be in scope of this discussion.

Then there is this That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

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