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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

reuters.com

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#391

Post by panarky »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #363
rrr_oh_man wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

its antisemitism, not anti-setimism.

There's more meaning contained in a hyphen than I could have imagined.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism

From the outset the term "anti-Semitism" bore special racial connotations and meant specifically prejudice against Jews. The term has been described as confusing, for in modern usage 'Semitic' designates a language group, not a race. In this sense, the term is a misnomer, since there are many speakers of Semitic languages (e.g., Arabs, Ethiopians, and Assyrians) who are not the objects of antisemitic prejudices, while there are many Jews who do not speak Hebrew, a Semitic language. Though 'antisemitism' could be construed as prejudice against people who speak other Semitic languages, this is not how the term is commonly used.

The term may be spelled with or without a hyphen (antisemitism or anti-Semitism). Many scholars and institutions favor the unhyphenated form. Shmuel Almog argued, "If you use the hyphenated form, you consider the words 'Semitism', 'Semite', 'Semitic' as meaningful ... [I]n antisemitic parlance, 'Semites' really stands for Jews, just that." Emil Fackenheim supported the unhyphenated spelling, in order to "[dispel] the notion that there is an entity 'Semitism' which 'anti-Semitism' opposes."

Others endorsing an unhyphenated term for the same reason include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance," historian Deborah Lipstadt, Padraic O'Hare, professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College; and historians Yehuda Bauer and James Carroll. According to Carroll, who first cites O'Hare and Bauer on "the existence of something called 'Semitism'", "the hyphenated word thus reflects the bipolarity that is at the heart of the problem of antisemitism".

The Associated Press and its accompanying AP Stylebook adopted the unhyphenated spelling in 2021. Style guides for other news organizations such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal later adopted this spelling as well. It has also been adopted by many Holocaust museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#392

Post by breppp »

diggan wrote: post #375
breppp wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, due to privacy and contract obligations as well as this is the surest way for GCP to spectacularly commit suicide

Unless you're talking about some specific Wiz customer contracts, how do you know? AFAIK, there are no explicit laws forbidding that. Maybe you could share what law you think this would be breaking?

OP mentioned training AI on customer data

GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc, as Google has no way of knowing which data they will train on, add to that copyright and that's just off the top of my head

cloud contract obligations are also pretty clear about customer data.

furthermore it would be bad engineering and security if Wiz had actual direct access to customer data, versus having their code having access to said data. That would be a huge issue in due diligence for example

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#393

Post by jahsome »

bschmidt72 wrote: post #376
marcus0x62 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a problem with Unit 8200 alumni, you’re going to have a difficult time buying commercially available security products. Palo Alto Networks, Armis, Checkpoint, and many others were either founded by or otherwise have former 8200 folks on staff. Then there’s crowdstrike, founded by a Russian. Or Fortinet, which was founded by Ken Xie (born in Beijing.) I guess you could base your entire security stack on F…

[flagged]

I think OPs point is that it's impossible to avoid foreign (to the US) influence. You're probably closer to agreeing than you are disagreeing.

Foreign or not is binary. There's no comparison because everything boils down to a 1 or a 0.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#394

Post by hristov »

czk wrote: post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

Looks like a payoff to me.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#395

Post by diggan »

breppp wrote: post #392
diggan wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're talking about some specific Wiz customer contracts, how do you know? AFAIK, there are no explicit laws forbidding that. Maybe you could share what law you think this would be breaking?

OP mentioned training AI on customer data GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc, as Google has no way of knowing which data they will train on, add to that copyright and that's just off the top of my head cloud contract obligations are also pretty clear about customer data. furthermore it would be bad engineering and security if Wiz had actual direct access to customer data, versus having their code having access to said data. That…

Did you skim through Wiz's Privacy Policy? They're keeping a lot of stuff that isn't "direct access to customer data" and already permitted to be sent to 3rd parties, wouldn't surprise me if you could aggregate what features are most used on AWS by collating some other sources than having actual access to customers cloud.

Obviously, existing agreements would need to continue to be run properly, no question about that. But there is always plenty of other data that probably could be used by Google to gain some insights.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#396

Post by hello_moto »

bschmidt72 wrote: post #376
marcus0x62 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a problem with Unit 8200 alumni, you’re going to have a difficult time buying commercially available security products. Palo Alto Networks, Armis, Checkpoint, and many others were either founded by or otherwise have former 8200 folks on staff. Then there’s crowdstrike, founded by a Russian. Or Fortinet, which was founded by Ken Xie (born in Beijing.) I guess you could base your entire security stack on F…

[flagged]

I think parent was saying that if someone has a problem with Wiz being ex 8200, they would have problems buying cybersecurity solutions in general because the more established companies founders with foreign non-allies background.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#397

Post by bilater »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #356
majestik wrote: post #318

This deal isn't about security, it's about data. Google already have one of the best security teams in the industry - Project Zero [0]. They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security. This deal is about DATA. Wiz, as a cybersecurity vendor, have full remote access to their customers cloud compute storage (EC2 EBS volumes, etc) in the name of "security scanning" - this is actually part of their unique selli…

I find it hard to believe (or maybe I don’t want to believe) that this could ever happen? Even if Wiz has T&C’s that allow full access to clients’ data, and even if the T&C allow some sort of “use” of that data that includes training an LLM, surely you can’t release an AI trained on private information to the public? You can’t have Gemini spitting out internal/private/confidential information? Am I just naive?

na you're right this would be a dumb move with a huge blow back

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#398

Post by marcus0x62 »

bschmidt72 wrote: post #376
marcus0x62 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a problem with Unit 8200 alumni, you’re going to have a difficult time buying commercially available security products. Palo Alto Networks, Armis, Checkpoint, and many others were either founded by or otherwise have former 8200 folks on staff. Then there’s crowdstrike, founded by a Russian. Or Fortinet, which was founded by Ken Xie (born in Beijing.) I guess you could base your entire security stack on F…

[flagged]

Quick question: are you related to the bschmidt69 that is also a brand new account posting in this thread?

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#399

Post by peanut-walrus »

bschmidt69 wrote: post #286
czk wrote: post #256

> Wiz has raised a total of $1.9 billion from a combination of venture capital funds and private investors > Wiz agreed to acquire Tel Aviv-based Raftt, a cloud-based developer collaboration platform, for $50 million in December 2023. In April 2024, the company acquired cloud detection and response startup, Gem Security, for around $350 million > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy…

[flagged]

We use them. The product is genuinely great and I hope Google doesn't mess with it.

For us they replaced a bunch of different tools and a hodgepodge of custom scripts and hacks.

For those who have not heard of them - it's basically asset and vulnerability management for absolutely everything you have running in the cloud. This includes stuff running in your k8s clusters, etc. And they do all this without having to manage a fleet of agents on everything and costing you money in resource usage. Not that Wiz is cheap, far from it :(

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#400

Post by billjings »

breppp wrote: post #329
majestik wrote: post #318

This deal isn't about security, it's about data. Google already have one of the best security teams in the industry - Project Zero [0]. They don't need Wiz's "enterprise" expertise for security. This deal is about DATA. Wiz, as a cybersecurity vendor, have full remote access to their customers cloud compute storage (EC2 EBS volumes, etc) in the name of "security scanning" - this is actually part of their unique selli…

So many sources yet no source of the actually outrageous claim that Google will use this to illegally siphon customer data maybe this deal is about a company with a lot of revenue in an area google is heavily investing in: cloud security?

Facebook did exactly this with a VPN acquisition. They didn't break into customer data; they just mined it for usage patterns.

So as a pure speculation on Goog's motives, it doesn't sound farfetched enough to call ridiculous. Competitive data is valuable, particularly if you want to strangle the youth in their cradles (or acquire them).

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