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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

#171

Post by foolmeonce »

postpawl wrote: post #155
gigatexal wrote: post #153

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.

And they will host it on Amazon, Google or Azure where their firewall admin won't possibly notice..

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

#172

Post by cb504 »

hobofan wrote: post #156
GrimRe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot…

My bigger worry would be continued data access. So even if the data is in Germany, access to it is still controlled by an US entity, which can be forced by the US government to shut off access. Given that the current administration seems to enact embargos on a whim, this doesn't seem too unlikely.

In my limited experience, Germans are more sensitive to personal privacy than other Europeans, even the rest of the world. To non-Germans they might seem paranoid. Maybe we can all learn from their historical mistake.

The problem I see with the DIY-attitude is that security is easy to get wrong and is moving target. The other opinion here is "keep it in the country". If someone really wants your data, the locale won't save you. And yet, if there is a breach, I could see an foreign company like AWS trying to hush it, where a German company would make a bigger fuss (diplomatic issue).

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

#173

Post by therealdraco »

blub wrote: post #151
GrimRe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot…

Your fancy view of the world is not as fancy as you think and your aggressive, disrespectful rhetoric is doing you a disservice. The measures you've enumerated (EU zones, encryption, etc) are mitigations for working with a potentially compromised vendor and should be done anyway. Not using the vendor is such a blindingly obvious countermeasure that one has to be either unprofessional or have a hidden interest to dism…

Shut the fuck up and go sit in that corner: there is no honor in humility. A gold hacker knows a feeble wannabe who is here to make friends. If you want a friend, get a cocker spaniel. You ass kissing Java but kissing assholes, with the hacker ness karma And my ycombinator súper scanner for un semantic web? But I knew RUST YOU GUIIISEEEE

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

#174

Post by msh »

fluffything wrote: post #147
postpawl wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re really overestimating the ability of most small tech companies to self-host reliably and securely.

I'm not devops, but how hard is it to properly set up VPN / ssh ? We have a gitlab server, and connecting requires being on VPN, which requires 2FA, and then ssh, which requires your keys to be properly set up.

It might not be hard, but now you need a number of skilled sysadmin devops people who can also be availble oncall.

Thats not a insignificant cost.

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

#175

Post by ornornor »

ghgr wrote: post #125
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...

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 software.

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

#176

Post by PeterStuer »

GrimRe wrote: post #160
catmanjan wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. Prove it

Why don't I prove the earth isn't flat while I'm at it? Oh wait, I can't. I guess you win. Clearly my inability to prove the earth isn't flat means that it is flat. See how ridiculous you sound? You think that 25,000+ employees that work at AWS have somehow been silenced into some grand conspiracy? The underlying architecture of an AWS Region is fundamentally designed to keep data in the Region you specify. There is…

The arrangements brought to light through amongst others the Snowdon files did involve extremely few people at huge companies. We are talking a literal hand full, not '25.000'. Are you really suggesting there are no three letter acronym operators embedded into the large US tech companies? Modern US systemic tech industrial espionage was brought to light as far back as Echelon. so deriding people who are cautious about it as 'flat earthers' seems disingenuous.

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

#177

Post by msh »

catmanjan wrote: post #145
GrimRe wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a ridiculously primitive view of the world it beggars belief. By taking this view you are significantly reducing your security posture, no improving it. There is an AWS Region in Germany. Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. AWS also provide you with the tools to encrypt everything and if done correctly means that Amazon no matter how "evil" they are cannot…

>Your data will stay in Germany unless you specifically decide to move it elsewhere. Prove it

How do you prove that a german company does not have secret data sharing agreements? Think cryptoAG.

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

#178

Post by pestaa »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #31
aazaa wrote: post #8

> For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade. This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now. Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current presiden…

> reams of compromising intel on the current president Worth nothing that those reams of compromising intel on the current president only exist because the current president... has, himself, generated reams of compromising intel .

Yea, it seemed a weird speculation that going after Trump using WaPo would be a serious reason behind the onboarding.

They already publish a ton of heavyweight criticism... and I think there is no new information that could persuade those that still support Trump.

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

#179

Post by llarsson »

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...

With the Schrems 2 ruling of this summer finding the Privacy Shield inadequate for storing personal data in US-owned clouds, your previous employer made the right choice for GDPR compliance.

Cloud Act and National Security Letters really fuck things up for American cloud providers with regard to doing business with European customers.

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

#180

Post by deathgrips »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #146
deathgrips wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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.
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