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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

#181

Post by brobdingnagians »

ornornor wrote: post #175
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…

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've come to appreciate the value of a really good, dedicated sysadmin. I used to think I was pretty good at it and that was fine, but I've come to realize that the skillset for an awesome sysadmin are quite a bit different than a developer, even though there is some overlap. And there is definitely a range.

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

#183

Post by CyanBird »

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.

I got to use zulip for a big project last year, I do very much recommend it, lots of emotes too which was pretty fun

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

#185

Post by INTPenis »

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 in, just hoping for an exit.

That's a very strange phenomenon, sort of like the .com bubble never burst but just got bigger.

I'm afraid that in order to see the same rapid development of cloud companies here in Europe we'd have to adopt the lax corporate regulations of the US. Which in turn would lead to other issues like workers losing rights.

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

#186

Post by CyanBird »

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…

Your innocence is quite charming, specially in a post-snowden world

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

#187

Post by cpeterso »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #118
propogandist wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google bought Keyhole (now Google Maps) from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's VC firm [1] -- this was when Eric Schmidt was CEO. Maps was caught wardriving [2] with Google Streetview, linking Wifi access point names to physical locations early on. After getting caught, they settled for $13 Million last year. Now Google Maps and even location services on all Android devices uses wifi scanning and bluetooth scanning as part of loca…

Correction: Keyhole became Google Earth. (Fun fact: the K in KML is Keyhole.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth#History Google Maps stems from an Australian company called Where2, which AFAIK was not funded by spooks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps#Acquisitions

More history about Google's mapping products is available in Bill Kilday's book "Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality". Kilday was a founder at Keyhole, the startup acquired by Google to become Google Earth.

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

#188

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

modo_mario wrote: post #165
kube-system wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech is in bed with the government everywhere on the planet, and has been for a long time. The question has never been about fairness, it is: who has your interests in mind?

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.

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

#189

Post by pmontra »

88840-8855 wrote: post #124
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...

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?

Maybe when we (re)create our own electronics industry. Even China has problems with sourcing components (the TSMC/USA licenses case). It also doesn't help to be a collection of small countries that can be played one against the other by USA, China and Russia and possibly others.

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

#190

Post by CyanBird »

01100011 wrote: post #73
switch11 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This: This sounds tinfoil hat crazy, but here we are. Not so crazy now At some point we need to just say it some of the largest tech companies are basically NSA+CIA partners and we're well on our way to having Big Tech completely integrated into NSA and CIA and DoD

The government created Silicon Valley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo I have no evidence other than the sheer obviousness of it, but the ties still continue to this day. I have no doubt it is kept hidden from most employees due to the general political leanings of most Valley engineers. For instance, my work does a ton of work for the DoE and you hear them mentioned all the time. The DoD is also a custom…

> I have no evidence

I mean, there are several books about it such as Surveillance Valley, or these two sister pieces

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/why-google-made-the-...

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