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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

#361

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

deathgrips wrote: post #240
unionpivo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The difference is that here we have the freedom to criticize and organize against it. Edit: I am mostly addressing the organize against it part. USA has far better free speech protections than China Do you ? As an outsider it doesn't really look that way. After watching events and protest around BLM, suddenly all those rights have gotchas in them. Watching USA protesters and Honkong protesters, and goverment respon…

If we were like China, Joe Biden would be in jail. It's a different level entirely. Also please use some judgment when seeing America through the lens of our news media. They have every incentive to exaggerate stories so they can get more clicks and sell more ads. The police brutality at the protests is bad, but it's in a different ballpark than the Hong Kong protests. Here protesters don't have a reasonable fear of…

Regarding the reality distortion fields of Phox Noise and friends, what makes you think the news you get from the HK protesters are any different? Furthermore, please explain why the cameras were off when Jeffrey Epstein died? And the autopsy has been... err 'inconclusive'?

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

#362

Post by myartsev »

ffpip wrote: post #108
newscracker wrote: post #103

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

Impatiently waiting for ProtonDrive to come out!

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

#363

Post by robertlagrant »

tw04 wrote: post #49
ciarannolan wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did? With 11% of the company? > Amazon's chief executive officer (CEO) and founder, Jeff Bezos, is the company's biggest shareholder, with 55.5 million shares representing 11.1% of outstanding shares.

Which would make him the majority shareholder. By a margin of 5% - almost double the next largest shareholder and more than the next dozen shareholders combined. In other words: he has unilateral control of the company. Welcome to publicly traded companies. You don't need 51% to control the company.

No, welcome to online opinions of companies.

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

#364

Post by mcdevilkiller »

Kinrany wrote: post #268
ornornor wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there yet an open-source alternative to GCP? Can you buy bare metal and just have your own cloud?

Yep, you have OpenStack, which is the standard, and running some huge deployments, like these: https://www.openstack.org/use-cases/

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

#365

Post by Dirlewanger »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #86
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?

None of them particularly care about the average citizens interests, so treating the two similarly seems fair.

Who would you rather have logs of all your Internet activity: your own government, or another government thousands of miles away that is increasingly at odds with country's?

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

#366

Post by whatshisface »

dwd wrote: post #70
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

All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests - for a long time that was primarily the military/industrial complex followed by oil/gas. We're now just seeing the focus switch to supporting big tech as a priority.

>All these 3-letter acronyms exists to further American interests

That's a strangely Aristotelian view of organizations. It is as if you are suggesting that the 3-letter agencies have a fundamental essence outside of the intentions of the people who work there.

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

#367

Post by Dirlewanger »

person3 wrote: post #18
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…

Except that The Washington Post operates independently, and has strong editorial standards, something that a lot of "news" sites on the Internet today don't even pretend to have. The Post continues to publish articles about surveillance, as well as articles critical of Amazon. For example, here's reporting on an interview with Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor: Mr. Bezos holds conference calls with The Post’…

Look at it this way: the next time Amazon is in the news for some scandal, WaPo won't be covering it.

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

#368

Post by taftster »

I understand the general sentiment here, and don't disagree. But I think ultimately this is about dollars.

There is a LOT of money in the government defense sector. AWS is in an excellent position to capture a lot of that money, but their primary competitor in this space, Microsoft, has been preventing a complete domination and monopoly by Amazon.

With Alexander on the board, this will ultimately lead to different/better insights for how Amazon positions itself in this government sector. Alexander can bring a ton of value, just with his contacts and networking alone, let alone the insight into how security and data operations work in the intelligence community.

Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance. The government can't coerce Amazon any more with Alexander on the board or not; the rules are still the same. This is fundamentally about Amazon's desire to get in on the lucrative big dollar contracts that would otherwise end up going to traditional defense contractors like Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop.

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

#369

Post by tw04 »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #128
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…

>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…

>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. does privately, China does openly and that's not limited to just spying.

Maybe for someone outside the US and China who doesn't travel and never intends on traveling. On the flip side if you ever plan on visiting either country there is a pacific-ocean sized gap in what you'll face visiting the two countries. I can't recall the last time someone was "disappeared" for criticizing Trump on twitter. The same can't be said for those who criticize Xi on Weibo.

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

#370

Post by tw04 »

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…

> The result is dismal, we dread using it because it’s very unreliable, and it costs double or triple what GCP costs.

I'll be honest - you guys need to find a new technology partner then. Creating a private cloud that's reliable and offers the basic services that the major providers have is not difficult in 2020. Some of the aaS stuff can get tricky but is still entirely do-able.

Regardless, if they found a way to make your infrastructure MORE expensive than the public clouds they either have no idea how to negotiate or are really, really bad at their jobs. The public cloud is a lot of things - but cheap isn't one of them.

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