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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

#331

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

INTPenis wrote: post #185
gigatexal wrote: post #119

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...

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…

Eh. I don't get it. There have been so many postings and comments here on HN and elsewhere about how the cloud is NOT cheap, how they saw they burnt money there, and saved large amounts by doing it for themselves. Not to mention vendor lock in.

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

#332

Post by wlesieutre »

koheripbal wrote: post #322
gigatexal wrote: post #119

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...

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

> What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business?

I mean, there's this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

> The online retailing giant has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary.

> Yet interviews with more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private-label business and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reveal that employees did just that. Such information can help Amazon decide how to price an item, which features to copy or whether to enter a product segment based on its earning potential, according to people familiar with the practice, including a current employee and some former employees who participated in it.

If you're a regular business and Amazon doesn't want to launch a new hosted product competing with you, then maybe you're safe. But if they want your data, why not just take it while repeatedly insisting that they don't?

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

#333

Post by ethbr0 »

srean wrote: post #286
ethbr0 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> The advertisers react to "wrong" coverage by withdrawing support

Easily attributable to business decisions / climate.

> the chief editor is very attuned so he assigns the right people to the right jobs before trouble starts

Staff assignment as a smoking gun? That's going to be a stretch.

> and the journalists so assigned naturally work quite sincerely

Indeed, just people doing their jobs.

Who, pray tell, is going to leak what?

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

#334

Post by scsilver »

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…

I mean, there are still monarchies in Europe. How are you suspect of the US and not the british if you are concerned about an over powerful executive.

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

#335

Post by krapp »

scsilver wrote: post #334
Dahoon wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I mean, there are still monarchies in Europe. How are you suspect of the US and not the british if you are concerned about an over powerful executive.

> I mean, there are still monarchies in Europe. How are you suspect of the US and not the british if you are concerned about an over powerful executive.

Umm... the British monarchy hasn't held executive authority in centuries. They're window dressing like almost all European monarchs.

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

#336

Post by boomboomsubban »

dwd wrote: post #232
boomboomsubban wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still distressing to see those intelligence agencies further entrench themselves into fields perfectly suited for a surveillance state. Their reputation makes trusting that they won't abuse it difficult. It may suit national interest, but it bodes poorly for the public interest.

They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who. Where the public suffers is that it's their tax money that funds this rather than going towards education, health, essential services, better wages, social and economic mobility - the list goes on.

>They help the companies, who help the Government in return. And the whole conspiracy is carried on via the revolving doors of influence and networks of who knows who.

Except now one of the ways the companies can help the government is with readymade worldwide surveillance. That is much scarier than anything Dole could offer.

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

#337

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

Kinrany wrote: post #268
ornornor wrote: post #175

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?

Depends on what is desired... theoretically using Proxmox and VMs containing CapRover hosting docker containers should get you everything you want... but the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.

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

#338

Post by boomboomsubban »

puszczyk wrote: post #196
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.

How are they occupying Germany? When was the last time they’ve intervened or even threatened to intervene? Don’t blow it out of proportion.

I put it in quotes in an attempt to highlight that it was not a formal military occupation. Their presence does show some level of influence the US military has and it is a threat to prevent Germany from making any truly radical moves.

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

#339

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

deathgrips wrote: post #135
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

America won't arrest you on your vacation here just because you criticized the country on social media. I'd take American hegemony over Chinese hegemony any day of the week.

No, they just deny entry, or (try to) clone your data, insist on passwords/unlock of all sorts of devices, and so on. And email addresses/social media accounts, other online presences.

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

#340

Post by koheripbal »

gigatexal wrote: post #326
koheripbal wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know... I don't think there's a strong business case or CSO case for ditching Amazon for ties to yhe US gov't. What are the realistic odds that someone internally at Amazon is going to break into your instances to look at your data if you're just a regular business? If you're in a German cloud, those risks are probably higher since your business has local competition, and if you're self-hosting, then your ove…

Personally I have 100% confidence that the big clouds are not going to compromise customer data for their own benefit. Perhaps Amazon did this on an abstract level to understand video streaming and the Netflix business to create Amazon Video but I doubt Amazon would have cared for the tiny startup I worked at here in Hamburg. But the hysteria and the “but what if?” thinking is real and it was really codified in bank…

> BaFin stipulated that the tech stacks could be audited

It's hard to imagine that this includes the code within a Cloud provider. If you're using a Windows server, are they expecting Microsoft to fork over MS source code?

This just sounds like an overly-conservative interpretation of the rules.

It basically rules out ANY cloud solutions - which is unreasonable and wouldn't ever hold up under scrutiny even if the Bank or regulators explicitly asked for it.

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