Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#251

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:55 PM UTC

tankenmate wrote: post #178

Kudos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not super familiar with antitrust laws, but it feels like they might apply here.

It's not just anti-trust, it's also trade secret laws. A customer of AWS has a reasonable expectation that the information it keeps on AWS's VMs are confidential.

> A customer of AWS has a reasonable expectation that the information it keeps on AWS's VMs are confidential.

This is where End User Agreements may be worth checking. There may be a specific clause AWS customers agree to.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#252

Post by jburgess777 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 11:57 PM UTC

jbay808 wrote: post #247

abfan1127 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.

Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent. There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen…

What I was told is that if you research the patent and aware of its existence then you may be guilty of willful enfringement with treble the normal penalties:

https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2016/06/supreme-court-u...

https://www.ip-watch.org/2016/07/26/us-high-court-restores-t...

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#253

Post by akhilcacharya » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

rurp wrote: post #77

newyankee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if founders are as petty as Gavin Belson

I would imagine it's common. There was an article on here not too long ago about how the entire Amazon HQ2 fiasco came about because Bezos was jealous that Elon Musk was getting more govt subsidies than him. If one of the most successful people in the world can be so focused on petty grudges, I imagine there are plenty of others doing the same.

Why would Jeff be jealous of Elon? That makes no sense.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#254

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:07 AM UTC

jbay808 wrote: post #247

abfan1127 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Medtronic and currently work at Qualcomm. Both companies had policies matching this. Don't search patents so you are not influenced by them.

Since when did that matter in patent law? Patents are public domain, and ignorance of a patent is not a defense against having infringed. Since at least 2012, the US has had a first-to-file policy instead of first-to-invent. There's no legal reason to worry about being influenced by a patent. The only concern might be boxing your creativity where you can't think of alternative solutions to a problem once you've seen…

[deleted]

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#255

Post by VRay » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:14 AM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #137

There's no way to really know how true this is but it certainly feels true if you're on the startup side - however most startups just aren't being realistic with themselves, and thinking they are special. For example, my previous company brought our 6DOF MonoSLAM SDK, 3D model processor and OpenGL viewer to Amazon from 2014-2017 pitching the "AR View" functionality that they eventually put in 2017 [1]. Was that a res…

I dunno if they can necessarily do a better or cheaper job. A lot of the engineers at these megacorps are super burned out 9-to-5ers who don't particularly care about what they're doing, since it won't have that big an impact on their lives one way or the other if it succeeds. ("Woo, 20% bonus this year" vs "Team's being reorged, gotta hit up leetcode and find another corporate job")

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#256

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:22 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #229

jacquesm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about as bad a revelation as the original one. So the encryption key is fair game without explicit customer approval?

I think perhaps you misunderstand the architecture of KMS. KMS master keys are used to remotely decrypt the symmetric encryption keys for encrypted data that are stored alongside the encrypted data. KMS master keys don't ever leave the KMS servers themselves, and servers can't be accessed directly by anyone. AFAIK they don't have open ports except for handling production traffic and are hardened against opening a she…

I think you misunderstand my concern. What I'm missing in the above scenario is that a resource that should be 100% under the control of the customer and nobody else can be accessed by AWS personnel to open up a door that should be closed unless the customer permits access.

What the technical implications are is moot, the process that hands out these credentials should not be accessible to anybody but the customer. It implies that AWS personnel can impersonate customer representatives or processes run on behalf of those customers. That's a serious problem.

In all the years that I've been co-locating I do not remember a single instance where a representative of the hosting facilities that I've used gained access to our data or hardware without my very explicit permission.

As for audit logs: they are only as useful as those inspecting them, and more often than not are entirely passive until required for evidentiary purposes.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#257

Post by StopHammoTime » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:26 AM UTC

webo wrote: post #223

jasonjayr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence of this claim re DO? I worked with a DO on an technical issue, and they were steadfastly against me granting them temporary access to our servers even though it would have made the issue easier to diagnose. Cloud provider that verifiably get caught doing this will quickly lose the trust of all their large customers

DO doesn't have a great track record for customer trust. I run personal workload but couldn't recommend it over AWS to a larger company. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117660 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064169

Sales != Engineering (in regards to the first one), AWS have had similar issues. The second one wasn't good.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-error-exposed-godaddy-serv...

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#258

Post by StopHammoTime » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:34 AM UTC

dodobirdlord wrote: post #229

jacquesm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about as bad a revelation as the original one. So the encryption key is fair game without explicit customer approval?

I think perhaps you misunderstand the architecture of KMS. KMS master keys are used to remotely decrypt the symmetric encryption keys for encrypted data that are stored alongside the encrypted data. KMS master keys don't ever leave the KMS servers themselves, and servers can't be accessed directly by anyone. AFAIK they don't have open ports except for handling production traffic and are hardened against opening a she…

Plus, if there is any legitimate concern about AWS having access to KMS keys (at this point it would be that they own the servers, and that's about it), you can roll a CloudHSM and import your own keys.

KMS is very clear about it's usage and what it involves. It's obvious that with Symmetrical Encryption AWS obviously needs to know the other end of the key at some point so that it can decrypt the data.

However, as customers can't even export these keys and the whole system is based on using KMS to actually perform the decrypt operations it is a non-starter. It's a lot more secure than most infrastructure which probably encrypts locally but is stored in a broom cupboard with a $10 lock.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#259

Post by devindotcom » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:36 AM UTC

aws_pmthrowaway wrote: post #136

I was a senior manager on the very first product the article talks about. I was closely involved in designing the service and presenting it to Amazon senior leadership. WSJ quotes the CEO of a startup called DefinedCrowd as accusing us of stealing their ideas from a meeting 4 years earlier. What a bunch of conceit. I don't remember our team discussing DefinedCrowd even once. We focused on the many other more interest…

DefinedCrowd is pretty successful actually, just so you know this isn't sour grapes. And it isn't about a meeting 4 years ago, the very first line of the article says that Amazon was an investor (at seed stage, probably a few hundred K).

So the problem isn't that someone heard about DefinedCrowd and decided years later to make something like it. Amazon made a significant investment in an early player in this space, and then started building a direct competitor while still presumably having both access and influence over that company. Doesn't seem responsible or ethical to me.

Re: Amazon met with startups about investing, then launched competing products

#260

Post by bernardom » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:36 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #89

Isn't this just what you would expect a company of this size to do? "We want to launch a product in category X" "Ok, should we roll it ourselves, or buy something?" "Well, let's interview a few companies, see if there's any we like, and if not, we'll make it ourselves"

I don't understand how anyone is shocked by this.