201–210 of 465 posts
> 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…
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>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.
See, that's what I'm trying to tell, What about 'Not in America'?
Before I proceed further, I want to categorically state that I don't intend to come off as supporting privacy violations by one country vs another; My argument over this entire thread has been that it sucks for someone not in any of these countries as they all spy on us and it's taken for granted in this kind of discussions.
That said,
>use a VPN. The NSA can't stop you if you really want privacy.
Because they have 'No logs' policy? Come on, don't be naive. Even the trillion dollar fruit company has been part of the program according to documents which hasn't been disputed.
>This is illegal in China, where every VPN must be state sponsored and monitored.
So you do agree that the Amercian VPN companies or any American company have double standards when it comes to China? Btw, almost every outsider in China installs a VPN to access content outside Great Firewall once they arrive, several U.S. services work without a VPN e.g. iMessage, Skype etc. I have heard of targeted deportation/arrests at airport, but never heard of random phone seizures at Airports.
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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.
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.
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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 inadverte…
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>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.
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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 ?
This law, still on the books, theoretically allows the president to order military action against the ICC in Den Haag (The Hague) should they ever try an American Service Member.
> The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the court.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
Nonetheless that does not make the US forces in Germany an occupational force.
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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 ?
Will we see a “Drop Amazon” site (and social media campaign) on the lines of “Drop Dropbox” [1] now? Or is Amazon too big and too entrenched that it’s almost a lost cause? [2] [1]: https://www.drop-dropbox.com/ [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/technology/blocking-the-t...
Dropbox's founder said he would add end to end encryption as an option for the privacy geeks. Sadly, more than 13 years later, it still has not been implemented. Looks like it never will be. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889
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 mean I like to think the data has no value to e.g. the US or competitors, and that the sheer volume makes it worthless, but I suspect that's just a lack of imagination on my part.
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> 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?