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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

#291

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

I'm very sure that you're wrong. Do you have any evidence that the NSA kidnaps and tortures people?

There are other 3 letter agencies and 3rd country jails for that and That and this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix I would not be hard to convince me that NSA inputs can place a person on these.

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

#292
All those countries that migrated their national data into AWS with assurances data was not within arms length of the US Spying Apparatus are slowly waking up to the fact that their data is in fact within arms length of the US Spying Apparatus.

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

#293

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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 find that neither pragmatic nor ethically sound. If you're in a security alliance with countries you share values and goals with, how can you not apply different standards in terms of data sharing? And how can you not react somewhat differently to any transgressions, mistakes and imperfections? I know Trump has made this very difficult by making his personal whims indistinguishable from the interests and commitment…

>And I do see good reasons to side with them against completely illegitimate regimes that use their security services to keep themselves in power without a democratic mandate.

Really though, with the system in place in the US it isn't in a position to point fingers. Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ? I really don't. So yes democratic countries should work together but the question is, does the US belong in that club or did it force itself on it? The answer isn't really that easy.

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

#295
post #125

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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…

you can encrypt. In face isn't it best practice to encrypt in storage and in transit?

This is way too high level a statement, only good for satisfying an auditor. For actual security, it's much harder.

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

#296

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Super curious about this as well, Amazon has advertised their "we're not an ad business" to me before when looking into whether they were reselling my shopping data. This man plays the person to not only sell it but also use it against me.

This is ridiculous. That board position was clearly given with the intention of getting more strategic advice on how to win more three-letter agencies business, it’s clear as sun (on a normal day that’s not today in California).

Yes that's obvious but is it worth the cost of the bad PR?

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

#297

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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 o…

> Is your company mainly a software company?

Mostly yes. We obviously have sales, marketing, etc. as well.

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

I don't do devops. There is a team of people that works full-time on IT infrastructure. No idea how time they spend. Gitlab and Zulip servers are updated every couple of weeks. No idea how much time these cost.

> - 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?

There is a team of people that work on cybersecurity monitoring. No idea what they do. Normal IT people just make sure that everyone's computer is encrypted, setting up people's credentials, etc.

> 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?

I don't do anything, somebody does this for me.

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

We have multiple locations and the backups are replicated across our own locations.

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

#298
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…

I use both MS and Google at various locations. The result is also dismal... But we can all be exasperated together and vent about how awful it is without upsetting anyone.

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

#299

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>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 going to go out on a limb here and say that a good number of commercial VPN services are monitored by the US of A.

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

#300

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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

Because EU countries don't have mammoth sized, trillion dollar SW companies with a global monopoly. If your country's software industry is comprised mostly of 10-200 person web shops and consultancies there's no real gain for the Goverment agencies to be in bed with them.

If you follow that thought through to other industries, what do you think Denmark learns of US military movement and equipment from the armies biggest heavy lifter, Danish Maersk shipping? It can't be much since outside the software world companies don't sift through every single piece of "cargo" and goes to show why you shouldn't trust foreign software companies at all, allies or not.
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