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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

#301

Post by imglorp »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #27
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #24

How can an ostensibly consumer and business targeted company company allow someone so anti-consumer on the board? Why doesn't anyone have the balls to say "this guy shouldn't be on our board because if we have someone in cahoots with the spooks on our board people will buy less dragon dildos and .223 fuel filters and the sketchy SAAS providers will use less AWS for their crap because their customers will be worried a…

Who's buying dragon dildos on Amazon? Well ... I just searched and it seems they are available there. I did not know that. The real question is why is an ex-NSA agent working at a place that sells dragon dildos? In all seriousness though, if Amazon can predict what consumers want, they will make more sales. An ex-NSA should have at least some experience in analyzing behavioral data and predicting what large numbers o…

No, no, no this is not about selling junk to people.

If you thought selling cheap junk to people was profitable, wait until you see what selling mass surveillance to the government pays. Everyone that said, it's an Orwell problem to have pervasive "assistant" devices was right. Look how many billions NSA poured into scanning and indexing everyone's mails and calls in Utah. Now you have OP and a few days ago Amazon PR objected calling Echo a "microphone": all these dumbasses paid for these things and now it's really here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24418854

We already know Eric Schmidt's Google is tight with the government, and look, they make home assistants also.

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

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

#302

Post by ZuLuuuuuu »

fluffything wrote: post #297
ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

Thanks for the answers. The reason I asked these questions was because your previous reply started with "And doing this is so simple.". But having full-time teams of devops, cybersecurity and IT is not so simple or cheap after all.

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

#303

Post by phist_mcgee »

nicoburns wrote: post #252
nix23 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Seconded. A sysadmin dedicates their professional life to deeply understanding systems, networks, and their interconnection. I am lucky if I can keep up with changes to my languages and frameworks as a programmer! Thank goodness there are sysadmins out there who can help us poor programmers out when our relatively basic understanding knowledge of linux fails us.

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

#304

Post by fauigerzigerk »

Dahoon wrote: post #293
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Do you really feel the poor homeless person has more power in the US elections than in those you just compared it to ?

Yes I do. It follows from the simple fact that there are no free and fair elections on those countries. Freedom of speech in combination with elections gives us some power to change things. People in dictotorships don't have those powers, regardless of whether or not they are homeless.

Homelessless exists in Europe as well by the way.

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

#305

Post by marcusjt »

hulitu wrote: post #211
PeterStuer wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Plus the EU, surely?

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

#306

Post by kuschku »

867-5309 wrote: post #272
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…

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

As the recent court ruling on privacy shield decided: no, it's not, you have to treat encrypted user data just like unencrypted user data, and giving it to US hosters violates EU privacy laws.

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

#308

Post by paulryanrogers »

ZuLuuuuuu wrote: post #302
fluffything wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

Thanks for the answers. The reason I asked these questions was because your previous reply started with "And doing this is so simple.". But having full-time teams of devops, cybersecurity and IT is not so simple or cheap after all.

SAAS it's increasingly requiring security experts in house anyway. Yes the cloud providers can help, but they may also be an unknown liability.

Obviously we're not all going to build our own CPUs from sand at a local beach. So there is a balance between DIY and vetted suppliers

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

#310

Post by thdrdt »

agustif wrote: post #279
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or Insomnia https://insomnia.rest/
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