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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

#381

Post by gigatexal »

tristor wrote: post #359
brobdingnagians wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately the market doesn't appreciate systems operations skills as much as software development, despite those skills being rarer and having a wider organizational impact in more industry verticals. Software developer salaries trend 20-30% higher at every single career stage than sysadmin/ops salaries, and at the top, there's usually management adjacent engineering track stages at larger firms for software deve…

Probably because of places like Netflix and Google where everyone is a software engineer they just happen to have different titles. If the industry wanted to counter the move to cloud raising the salaries of truly competent ops people would be a thing.

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

#382

Post by srean »

londons_explore wrote: post #349
srean wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tradeoff might be to keep encrypted data on GCP with keys managed on-premise with transparent encryption decryption by way of a local proxy.

Most businesses need a lot more than dumb storage from their IT systems though... As soon as you start using the full suite of cloud tools, it's impossible to not give the provider the encryption key...

I see what you mean. If those 'value additions' can work on metadata, the separation of data and metadata might help some, but that will become complex very quickly.

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

#383

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

londons_explore wrote: post #351
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what is desired... theoretically using Proxmox and VMs containing CapRover hosting docker containers should get you everything you want... but the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself.

> the ability instantly scale upwards is difficult to do yourself. If your business involves any amount of low priority bulk compute, this gets much much easier. You simply let the low priority stuff fall behind while your order to Dell for new servers is being delivered... Also, if you have compute that could be on-prem or could be in the cloud, you can set up a kubernetes cluster spanning both and let non-privacy-s…

To be honest, it depends on your SLA for uptime.

We've built out something homebrew like this using cheap compute desktops but you're still going to pay a lot upfront.

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

#384

Post by leahey »

This kind of revolving door stuff has been going on for as long as there has been government and private industry. It's just as scary as ever, but no more.

The good news/bad news reality is Alexander is looking for a big payday after years in government service -- not assist the government is using Amazon for its own surveillance purposes, or assist Amazon in becoming better at surveillance.

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

#386

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

derivagral wrote: post #379
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'?

I think you could take the FBI's very different approach towards Ghislaine Maxwell as evidence that while the Epstein result was... questionable, there is some amount of vested interest in not just disappearing the related actors. Occam's razor, etc.

That remains to be seen.

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

#387

Post by coolgeek »

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…

> Man in a position to have reams of compromising intel on the current president hired by a man in an ongoing battle with the president.

I want the NSA to know everything a US President does while in office. I want the NSA to know everything a candidate for US President does while they are running for office.

The President of the US is not a regular citizen. The cost of being handed almost unlimited power is that you forfeit the assumption that you will use that power always and only to the benefit of the country.

If Alexander has compromising intel on the current president there is only one man to blame for that - the man who put himself in compromising situations.

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

#388

Post by ornornor »

tw04 wrote: post #370
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…

> 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 ma…

Oh no that’s the best part: we built it in-house! Easily the worst place I’ve ever worked at, technically wise.

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

#389

Post by squibbles »

It is about money. High-level government employees used to retire and work for contractors that sold directly to the organizations the government retirees came from. That is called a revolving door and occurred with both military and civilian employees. The practice of the revolving door is recognized widely as unethical.

To avoid concerns about ethics, many high-level government employees retire and join either investment groups or boards of directors. This puts them once removed from the money chain, but still allows them to line their pockets by leveraging the power they accrued while working for the government.

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

#390

Post by ryanisnan »

doukdouk wrote: post #374
taftster wrote: post #368

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/be…

> Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance. Architect of (illegal) government surveillance gets influential role in a major Internet company. I do not expect him to strongly criticize Amazon's privacy violations or questionable data collection. I fully expect him to be supportive of Amazon initiatives that will make for an easier government surveillance (even if only for improving their chan…

Totally this. It's highly unlikely Alexander will encourage overtly illegal practices within Amazon, but he will have full knowledge of the "gray" areas ripe for exploitation, and will utilize them to the best of his abilities.
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