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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

#191

Post by cblconfederate »

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…

well why wouldn't they? Every government would love to have silicon valley. The question is why the rest of the world blindly trusts the narrative about data security

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

#192

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

pestaa wrote: post #178
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Donald Trump's very own Twitter account is a steam of hard-hitting criticism ;)

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

#193

Post by marvin »

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…

I work in banking in Europe, one of the internet-only ones. We have super rigid governance routines regarding cloud storage. You can’t store a single byte on any cloud service, even incidentally, without a thorough review ensuring that no customer data is present.

Meaning, e.g. there are specific, rigid rules regarding how Postman can be used while developing backend services, to avoid that customer info is inadvertently transmitted during testing.

Of course, it’s a PITA, but it serves its purpose.

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

#194

Post by teknopaul »

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.

Perimiter security is not vouge but its better than publicly accessible on the Internet. I would argue if are not comfortable with security take it off the Internet and put it in a dmz. You still need security, but it's a more forgiving environment if you get it wrong between setup and pen test.

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

#195

Post by LycheeKing »

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 .

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

No innocent man or woman becomes president of the United States. Some are just better at keeping their shady dealings hidden, especially with a mainstream media walking on eggshells in order to appear progressive.

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

#196

Post by puszczyk »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #136
88840-8855 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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

#197

Post by puszczyk »

paganel wrote: post #152
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…

> there is such a huge separation in access and rigour around governance that there is no way anyone within Amazon can simply login and see your data even if unencrypted. I personally choose not to believe a company which puts on its board of directors a well-known perjurer [1]. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/25/nsa-re...

Which companies do you believe?

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

#199

Post by schoen »

adamsiem wrote: post #111

Not installing any Alexa’s in my new house. They suck anyway. Literally no practical use cases after 3 years other than being surveiled upon. Oh, and “what’s the weather on the other side of this sheet of glass I’m standing looking through? “ Lol

I don't think cloud service linked smart speakers are a wise idea, but I visited a family (before COVID, when you could still visit a family) that was making tremendous use of it: playing music, setting alarms, looking up recipes, ordering stuff from Amazon, and I think looking up reference material and doing arithmetic. Three generations of family members had all clearly made it a nearly unconscious habit. So I don't think this technology can be dismissed as useless to everyone.

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

#200

Post by fvdessen »

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.

Didn't they threaten to invade the Netherlands if they continue their investigation in US War Crimes ?
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