Recent content by BakedA|aska

I have worked in the Seattle tech sector for years now and can say that while it's a predominantly male workplace, I have never witnessed a culture of misogyny or sexual discrimination. I have, however, seen plenty of people (mostly men) whose bad attitudes limited their upward mobility. I'm...

So, what you're saying is that it should be illegal to research security vulnerabilities? Fascinating.

As if Seattle needed its Amazon infection to grow any worse. You may as well be giving your money to a messianic brainwashing cult. Two words, from a former Amazon insider of 8 years. Fuck. Amazon. Say it with me, folks. Fuck. Amazon.

One time, at an all hands meeting, when Jeff Bezos was faced with the question "With so many organizations offering better salary and benefits while requiring less time in the office, what is Amazon's plan for retaining its workers?" His answer? "Well, they can fucking choose to work somewhere...

Amazon does the same. They have a complicit relationship with the NSA and federal government's spying programs, and have furnished them with the means to take a peek at any customer assets hosted in the whole of AWS. I can say with 100% certainty that after Amazon's transparency report...

I was an Amazon insider for 8 years. This article actually understates the brutal treatment of workers there. I'll chime in with my two hundred thousand cents later, when I'm not at work and can discuss it at length.

Well, for a couple hundred dollars you can buy a device that clamps on to a fiber and can tell you if there is light present, and which direction it is traveling through the fiber. That's with a mild radius tapping less than 1db worth of signal from the cable. Given an unlimited budget for...

Most people don't realize this, but "tapping" fiber is as simple as putting a mild radius (i.e. a bend) in to it. Every bend causes fiber optic cable to "leak" light as some of it escapes the cladding. It's conceivable that a sensitive enough eavesdropping device has been developed, to capture...

You know how companies like Google, Apple, IBM, et al, tend to force the government to leverage the FISA process before revealing customer information in response to an investigation of potential acts of terrorism? Well, let's just say that the government doesn't need to go through that process...

That happened several years ago, when Amazon formed a complicit relationship with the likes of the NSA and CIA. Amazon is one of the world's foremost data mining companies, and you better believe that the federal government is a big customer of theirs.

I've worked in pretty much all of them, globally, and sad to say they started implementing some downright draconian security processes over the last year or so. Definitely not the same employer they were several years ago.

If they think that's bad, they should try working in an Amazon datacenter, where someone might need to subject themselves to as many as four screenings, bag checks, and pat downs, just to replace parts in a broken server or network device.

Amazon operates its datacenters under the operating corp "VA Data", with the original intent being to circumvent sales taxes. That said, just about every time a state comes to them demanding tax money, they have been forced to comply. Even though "VA Data" is the operating company, all of the...

Yeah, that GPL code is never going to do anybody any good, ever, is it?

They maintained huge dev teams of highly talented developers, to develop software, for free. That's a great business model if you are killing it on sale of value added services (see: RedHat), but nobody was buying their overpriced 1U servers, much less the value-added services to support a...