It’s Amazon’s Swamp Now

Yeah, there is no way that this contract is not the largest target possible...

I am honestly fascinated and really interested in the cyber-warfare that has, is and will be going on.

Just thinking about Stuxnet/Duqu is pretty amazing - the things that are going on that we don't currently know about and the things that will happen are very interesting.

What I would like to determine, as an emergent tell of the electronic warfare between states is the true disposition between "enemies" -- i.e. we know that Iran and Israel really are enemies and assassinating targets of opportunity (stuxnet ++ engineers previously killed), but it should be telling when publicly on state denounces another (e.g. US denounces NK), but then doesnt take any back-channel actions against the state - or the reverse...

Here is how corruption works:

Many, many years ago, I was a contract mainframe technician and I worked on local government systems. One day, a colleague offered me a deal: he'd make sure I got a $10,000 contract for a very easy gig with a local city government, but I had to give him $2,000 and I had to give the city government purchaser $2,000. So I'd clear $6,000 for a weekend's work. (The $4,000 bribes are called "kickbacks" if you've heard that phrase before in news stories about public corruption trials.)

Now if you think that's an OK way to spend taxpayer money, you need to take an ethics class. (Hint: it's not OK, because an ethical city purchaser would have contracted it out for a much cheaper price and not tried to wet his beak.)

Obviously I said no.

Now, scale that $4,000 corruption loss on a $10,000 project up to a TEN BILLION DOLLAR project.

You ask "who cares?" I reply: everyone who pays US taxes and especially everyone who follows the anti-corruption procurement practices.

If you do a search with, for example, a minimum provider staff security clearance of DV (which is pretty high, would apply to many matters of national security), all the major cloud providers disappear from the results, and you get smaller companies based in the UK, who use UK datacenters, and who are seemingly adding their own layers of encryption on top.

As an analogy, imagine that there's a new senior job opening in your organisation, and both you and a colleague are considering applying. You're both pretty skilled, with resumes that are quite similar, albeit not identical. You hear through the grapevine that you co-worker plays golf with a couple of the people who'll be on the interview panel, but you trust them to be impartial.

Then the official job description gets published, and it's identical to your colleague's resume. It's as if somebody has gone through it line by line and translated that into the job's desirables. In some cases, the requirements are verbatim copies of some experience your colleague mentions.

Now, you're convinced that you could still do the job. And perhaps if you really knock it out of the park during the interview, and make a deliberately lowballed salary demand, you've got a chance. But, at this point, would you believe that the process is impartial? Or would you conclude that, at the very least, it is so stacked heavily in favour of your colleague that your chances of swaying the interviewers over to your side are slim, and perhaps nonexistent?

I don't get this one.

Azure's government data centers are in Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, and Texas. Their DoD data centers are Virginia and Iowa. I don't know where they are in those specific states, but the only pair that could be less than 150 miles apart are Texas and Arizona, and that is only if the Arizona one is within a few miles of the SE corner of Arizona and the Texas one is up in the NW sort-of corner of Texas.