Pinboard (jm)
https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/
recent bookmarks from jmDo not invite big-tech to join your digital autonomy discussion2026-06-18T09:36:04+00:00
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/do-not-invite-big-tech-to-your-digital-autonomy-discussion/
jmIf we want to discuss how to improve our digital autonomy, employees from US big tech will not usefully contribute to the conversation. They can’t. And in fact, they’ll likely actively prevent progress by restating old talking points, like how (despite tons of legal analysis to the contrary) Microsoft is somehow able to shield us from the vagaries of the US administration.
I recall Microsoft vice-president Brad Smith explaining how Microsoft would go to court to protect European rights and within a week, Microsoft told the International Criminal Court that it had to remove several employees from Microsoft services, because of US sanctions.
Microsoft pointedly did not go to court to defend the ICC.
If you invite US big tech to your event, you’ll spend some of your time listening to fairy tales. And if you are lucky someone is present to debunk these stories. But still, if Amazon just got 10 minutes of speaking time to talk about their supposedly sovereign cloud, and then someone else says it is not true, the meeting is still left with the impression that it could be true. The issue has successfully been “both-sidesed”. Also, you lost 15 minutes of your day.
]]>amazon microsoft google big-tech digital-sovereignty us-politics europe euhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0baf6f3dc2b7/I toyed around with using Language Embeddings as a way to categorize my RSS Feeds2026-05-08T08:56:13+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48046450
jmamazon bedrock llms ai embeddings language categorization classification rss texthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:32a67624f52f/Amazon Connect Talent vs. bias law2026-04-30T10:04:52+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_a-note-from-amazon-web-services-awss-share-7454936476359819264-8DqQ/?rcm=ACoAAAD7ciEBGVCp3m50-5sdPXL70GJw7TDNHVE
jmAmazon Connect Talent was just announced. It conducts AI-powered conversational interviews with candidates, generates "anonymized competency scores," and surfaces ranked candidates to recruiters who "make the call."
Fun fact: in New York City, that is an Automated Employment Decision Tool under Local Law 144. AEDTs require an annual independent bias audit with publicly posted results, plus at least ten business days of notice to candidates before use. Illinois, Colorado, and the EU AI Act impose adjacent obligations.
The launch materials mention none of this. The compliance posture appears to be: candidate names are stripped from recruiter dashboards, therefore bias is solved. That is not how any of this works. Proxies for protected class -- speech patterns, zip codes, education history, the resume already sitting in your ATS -- are exactly what bias audits exist to measure.
I don't think the product is bad. I think the announcement is conspicuously missing the guidance customers need before they can deploy it in NYC without violating Local Law 144 on day one.
(The day's other news so far: Amazon Connect now ships as a four-SKU family, and there is a new design philosophy called "humorphism" with its own .com. Both feel small next to the above.)
If you're selling automated hiring decisions in 2026, the bias-audit conversation belongs in the launch.
]]>bias law amazon aws recruiting regulation automation aihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:af7440a2d620/2 Ways to Correct the Financial Times at AWS (So Far) - Last Week in AWS Blog2026-03-18T16:32:06+00:00
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/2-ways-to-correct-the-financial-times-at-aws-so-far/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374
jm
A healthy engineering culture, when confronted with "your AI tool contributed to a production incident," responds with: "Yeah, that tracks. Here's what we're changing so it doesn't happen again." An unhealthy one responds with a condescending press release explaining why the journalist is wrong and probably an idiot, and the human is at fault.
The engineers building and operating these systems are talented people doing hard work under increasingly constrained conditions. They deserve leadership that backs them up when things go sideways, not leadership that throws them under the bus to protect a product launch narrative.]]>incidents production ai llms amazon aws communications prhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:34601cfa11ef/Adrian Cockroft's take on the AWS outage2025-10-23T15:09:59+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adriancockcroft_summary-of-the-amazon-dynamodb-service-disruption-activity-7387117492135133184-WG9Y/
jmadrian-cockroft outages post-mortems aws amazon us-east-1 dynamodb circular-dependencies depehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:806d900eaa88/Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region2025-10-23T15:08:30+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/
jmdynamodb dns aws ec2 nlb outages post-mortems cloud-computing amazon us-east-1https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4a70bf22a463/Today is when Amazon brain drain finally caught up with AWS (The Register)2025-10-21T10:01:47+00:00
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/aws_outage_amazon_brain_drain_corey_quinn/
jmAWS has given increasing levels of detail, as is their tradition, when outages strike, and as new information comes to light. Reading through it, one really gets the sense that it took them 75 minutes to go from "things are breaking" to "we've narrowed it down to a single service endpoint, but are still researching," which is something of a bitter pill to swallow. To be clear: I've seen zero signs that this stems from a lack of transparency, and every indication that they legitimately did not know what was breaking for a patently absurd length of time. [...]
At the end of 2023, Justin Garrison left AWS and roasted them on his way out the door. He stated that AWS had seen an increase in Large Scale Events (or LSEs), and predicted significant outages in 2024. It would seem that he discounted the power of inertia, but the pace of senior AWS departures certainly hasn't slowed — and now, with an outage like this, one is forced to wonder whether those departures are themselves a contributing factor.
You can hire a bunch of very smart people who will explain how DNS works at a deep technical level (or you can hire me, who will incorrect you by explaining that it's a database), but the one thing you can't hire for is the person who remembers that when DNS starts getting wonky, check that seemingly unrelated system in the corner, because it has historically played a contributing role to some outages of yesteryear.
When that tribal knowledge departs, you're left having to reinvent an awful lot of in-house expertise that didn't want to participate in your RTO games, or play Layoff Roulette yet again this cycle. This doesn't impact your service reliability — until one day it very much does, in spectacular fashion. I suspect that day is today.
Ouch. This is a very painful read and I'd say AWS are not happy to see it....]]>aws amazon layoffs tech how-we-work lses outages us-east-1 rto brain-drain workhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dfb5b53a1fe3/OVHcloud legal eagle on Microsoft's sovereignty admission2025-09-02T15:55:49+00:00
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/27/ovhcloud_interview/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374#438:%20Amazon%20Q%20Rules%20Except%20It%20Doesn't%20At%20All%20-%2018837614
jm"[Microsoft] finally told the truth!" says OVHcloud Chief Legal Officer Solange Viegas Dos Reis. "It's not a surprise," she shrugs, "we already knew that [MS could not guarantee that customer data would remain protected from US government access requests]." However, "this reply from Microsoft brought kind of a shock for customers, because they suddenly discover that what they have been taught for a while. 'Oh guys, don't worry, it will not apply to you. Don't worry.' It's false! Because, indeed, the data can be communicated."
Anton Carniaux, director of public and legal affairs at Microsoft France, made the admission during a hearing in the country. In answer to whether he could guarantee that data on French citizens could not be transmitted to the US government without the explicit agreement of the French authorities, Carniaux replied: "No, I can't guarantee it," but added that the scenario had "never happened before."
"It's a question of trust," says Viegas Dos Reis. "And because of this question of trust, we have been receiving a lot of questions from our customers about, 'Hey, we know now how it works with US cloud providers. Tell me how it works from other providers.'"
]]>ovhcloud ovh data-protection data-privacy amazon microsoft google cloud-computing sovereignty eu politics surveillancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fec01f72dff5/Big tech’s selective disclosure masks AI’s real climate impact2025-08-25T16:18:41+00:00
https://ketanjoshi.co/2025/08/23/big-techs-selective-disclosure-masks-ais-real-climate-impact/
jmUsing any sort of statistical summary of the data, rather than the aggregated energy and climate impact across the whole system, will always give a misleading view. They mention their data is skewed, but they don’t mention in which direction. If there is a material number of high-energy ‘reasoning’ prompts skewing their dataset, that means the total energy consumption of all prompts will be very high, with much of the responsibility coming from a few energy-hungry queries.
Part of the reason this is important is that this week, we saw a new research paper that shows that the energy consumption of text generation massively increases for every small gain in accuracy from the use of energy-hungry ‘reasoning’ models:
It would have been pretty easy to supply the range, the skew, the average and the median, or even the actual entire dataset, to avoid any doubt. Any hint of looking at the broader system rather than individual responsibility is excised from this paper. That is clearly an intentional choice: if Google disclosed the system impacts of generation, it would probably look way worse. [....]
The per-query narrative framing paints the precise opposite picture to what we see when we look at what really matters for environment and climate: the absolute figures.
Regions with high data centre concentration are seeing accelerated growth in power demand that incentivises fossil fuels, either slowing down climate progress or reversing it entirely. The sphere of that influence is expanding from towns, to states, to countries. The companies that own them can only partially hide the steep backsliding in their aggregate disclosures.
Renewable energy that should be displacing fossil fuels ends up meeting new data centre demand, granting coal and gas extra years and decades of immediate, measurable harm to human life. The worst players don’t even bother with the grid, plugging data centres directly into new, custom-built fossil fuelled power stations that’ll hurt people for decades after the hype dissipates.
]]>llms ai environment energy climate climate-change google meta amazon openai datacentershttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:91f00b24c31a/Inside an Amazon CoE2025-03-03T15:40:49+00:00
https://beabetterdev.com/2025/02/23/why-amazon-never-makes-the-same-mistake-twice/#412:%20AWS%20%22Don't%20Mention%20TikTok%22%20for%20Containers%20-%2016799450
jmvia:lwia aws amazon post-mortems coe incidents ops processhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8fe5888b75e3/Mark Butcher on AWS sustainability claims2025-02-27T13:05:11+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/markbutcher_real-datacenter-emissions-are-a-dirty-secret-activity-7287861693383098368-LUYh/?rcm=ACoAAAAHBmAB77TLKQn7I2B3LyyoX4-5CdLspW4
jm3 years after shouting about Amazons total lack of transparency with sustainability reporting, here's a list of what I think they've achieved:
1) They let you export a CSV for 3 lines of numbers showing your last months made up numbers that are up to 99% too low
2) Urmmm.... that's about it
[....] I know of several very large enterprise orgs starting to proactively marginalise them (i.e. not move away 100%, but massively reducing consumption). The one's I know about will cost them around $1 billion of spend. Is that enough to make them pay attention?
This article from Canalys in the Register says "Amazon doesn't provide AWS-specific, location-based data, meaning: "We don't really know how big AWS's footprint truly is, which I think is a bit worrying."
They follow up with "Amazon has chosen not break out data on environmental stats such as greenhouse gas emissions for AWS from the rest of the company in its sustainability reports, making it almost impossible to determine whether these emissions are growing as they have been for its cloud rivals."
Interesting isn't it... if they were actually as sustainable as they pretend, you'd expect them to share open and honest numbers, instead what we get are marketing puff pieces making what seem like invented PUE claims backed by zero evidence.
Elsewhere he notes "AWS customers are still unable to natively measure actual power consumption, report on actual carbon emissions, report on water usage. This'll make life interesting for all those AI companies subject to legislation like the EU AI Act or needing to report to the EED and similar."
(Via ClimateAction.tech)]]>climate-change aws sustainability pue reporting amazon cloud datacenters emissionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:61cdb9b627b4/Cost-optimized archival in S3 using s3tar2025-01-22T11:21:43+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/cost-optimized-log-aggregation-and-archival-in-amazon-s3-using-s3tar/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374
jm
s3tar optimizes for cost and performance on the steps involved in downloading the objects, aggregating them into a tar, and putting the final tar in a specified Amazon S3 storage class using a configurable “–concat-in-memory” flag. ... The tool also offers the flexibility to upload directly to a user’s preferred storage class or store the tar object in S3 Standard storage and seamlessly transition it to specific archival classes using S3 Lifecycle policies.
The only downside of s3tar is that it doesn't support recompression, which is also a common enough requirement -- especially after aggregation of multiple small input files into a larger, more compressible archive. But hey, can't have everything.
s3tar: https://github.com/awslabs/amazon-s3-tar-tool]]>s3tar amazon s3 compression storage archival architecture aggregation logs glacier via:lwiahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c1cabe20cbeb/Principal Engineer Roles2024-12-20T09:38:07+00:00
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/principal-engineer-roles-framework-mai-lan-tomsen-bukovec-142df/
jm
Sponsor: A Sponsor is a project/program lead, spanning multiple teams. Yes, this role can be played by a manager but it does not have to be (at least not at Amazon). If you are a Sponsor, you have to make sure decisions are made and that people aren’t stuck in analysis paralysis. This doesn’t mean that you yourself make those decisions (that’s often a Tie-breaker’s role which you may or may not be here). But you have to drive making sure decisions get made, which can mean owning those decisions, escalating to the right people, or whatever it takes to get it done.
A Sponsor is constantly clearing obstacles and getting things moving. It is a time-consuming role. You shouldn’t have time to act as Guide or a Sponsor on more than two projects combined, and you don’t have to be a Sponsor every year. But if a few years go by, and you haven’t been a Sponsor, it might be time to think about where you can step in and play that role. It tends to build new skills because you have to operate in different dimensions to land the right outcomes for the project.
Guide: Guides tend to be domain experts that are deeply involved in the architecture of a project. Guide will often drive the design but they’re not “The Architect.” A Guide often works through others to produce the designs, and themselves produce exemplary artifacts, like design docs or bodies of code. The code produced by a Guide is usually illustrative of a broader pattern or solving a difficult problem that the rest of the team will often run with afterwards. The difference between a Guide and a Sponsor is that the Guide focuses on the technical path for the project, and the Sponsor owns all aspects of project delivery, including product definition and organizational alignment.
Guides influence teams. If you are influencing individuals, you’re likely being a mentor and not a Guide. A Guide is a time-consuming role. You shouldn’t have time to Guide more than two projects, and that drops to one project if you are a Sponsor at the same time.
Catalyst: A Catalyst gets an idea off the ground, and it’s not always their idea. In my experience, the idea might not even come from the Catalyst—it can be something we’ve been talking about doing for years but never really got off the ground. Catalysts will create docs or prototypes and drive discussions with senior decision makers to think through the concept. Catalysts are not just “idea factories.” They take the time to develop the concept, drive buy-in for the idea, and work with the larger leadership team to assign engineers to deliver the project.
A Catalyst is a time-consuming role because of all the work that needs to be done. At Amazon, that involves prototypes, docs and discussions. It is hard to effectively Catalyze more than one or two things at once. It is important to note that Catalysts, like Tie-breakers, are not permanent roles. Once a project is catalyzed (e.g., in engineering with a dedicated team working on the project), a Catalyst moves out of the role. The Catalyst might take on a Guide or Sponsor role on the project, or not. Not every project needs a Catalyst. A Catalyst is a very helpful (arguably critical) role for your most ambitious, complex, and/or ambiguous problems to solve in the organization.
Tie Breaker: A Tie-Breaker makes a decision after a debate. At Amazon, that means deeply understanding the different positions, weighing in with a choice, and then formally closing it out with an email or a doc to the larger group. Not every project needs a Tie-Breaker. But if your project gets stuck in a consensus-seeking mode without making progress on hard decisions, a senior engineer might have to step in as a Tie-Breaker. Tie-breakers own breaking a log-jam on direction in the team by making a decision. Obviously, a Tie Breaker has to have great judgment. But, it is incredibly important that the Tie-Breaker listens well and understands all the nuances to the different positions as part of breaking the tie. When a Tie -Breaker drives a choice, they must bring other engineers into their thought process so that all the engineers in the debate understand the “why” behind the choice even if some are disappointed by the direction. A Tie-Breaker must have strong engineering and organizational acumen in this role.
Sometimes an organization will depend on a small set of senior engineers to play the role of Tie-Breaker because they are so good at it. As a successful Tie-Breaker, you want to be careful not to set a tone that every decision, no matter how small, must go through you. You’ll quickly transition from Tie-Breaker to a “decision bottleneck” at that point—and that is not a role any team needs. If a team finds itself frequently seeking out a Tie-Breaker, it could be a sign that the team needs help understanding how to make decisions. That's a topic for a different time. The Tie-Breaker role is considered a “moment in time” role, versus Sponsor/Guide which are ongoing until you reach a milestone. Once the decision is made and closed out, you’re no longer the Tie-Breaker.
Catcher: A Catcher gets a project back on track, often from a technical perspective. It requires high judgement because a Catcher drives prioritization and formulating a pragmatic plan under tight deadlines. Catchers must quickly do their own detailed analysis to understand the nuances of the problem and come up with the path forward in the right timeframe. As a comparison, a Tie-breaker tends to step in when the pros/cons of the different approaches are well known and the team needs to make a hard decision. Once “caught” (i.e., the project is back on track and moving forward), a project doesn’t need the Catcher anymore.
Sometimes Principal Engineers can do too much catching. Don’t get me wrong, we are all Catchers sometimes—including me. Any fast-paced business needs Catchers in engineering and management. It teaches important skills about leadership in difficult moments and helps the business by landing deliverables. It also teaches you what not to do next time. However, it is better to generalize a Catcher skill set across more engineers and not depend on a small set to Principal Engineers as Catchers. If a Principal Engineer plays Catcher all the time through a succession of projects, it leaves no time to develop skills in other roles.
Participant: A participant works on something without one of these explicitly assigned leadership roles. A Participant can be active or passive. Active participants are hands-on, and do things like spend a few days working through a design discussion or picking up a coding task occasionally on a project, etc. Passive participants offer up a few points in a meeting and move on. In general, if you're going to participate it's better to do so actively. Time-boxing some passive participation (e.g., office hours for engineers) can be a useful mechanism to stay connected to the team. However, keep in mind that it is easy for your time to get consumed by being a Participant in too many things.
(via Marc Brooker)]]>roles principal-engineer work projects project-management amazon aws via:marc-brookerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d8b7a78f5cce/Ex-Amazon AI exec claims she was asked to ignore IP law2024-04-24T09:14:43+00:00
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/22/ghaderi_v_amazon/
jmAccording to Ghaderi's account in the complaint, she returned to work after giving birth in January 2023, inheriting a large language model project. Part of her role was flagging violations of Amazon's internal copyright policies and escalating these concerns to the in-house legal team. In March 2023, the filing claims, her team director, Andrey Styskin, challenged Ghaderi to understand why Amazon was not meeting its goals on Alexa search quality.
The filing alleges she met with a representative from the legal department to explain her concerns and the tension they posed with the "direction she had received from upper management, which advised her to violate the direction from legal."
According to the complaint, Styskin rejected Ghaderi's concerns, allegedly telling her to ignore copyright policies to improve the results. Referring to rival AI companies, the filing alleges he said: "Everyone else is doing it."
Move fast and break laws!]]>aws amazon llms alexa maternity-leave parenting parental-leave work dont-be-evil copyright ip aihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0b221724b3a8/Deep dive into Facebook's MITM hacking of customer phones2024-03-28T10:06:10+00:00
https://twitter.com/haxrob/status/1772766039199363375
jmandroid security mitm exploits hacking facebook onavo snapchat surveillance youtube amazon vpns ssl tlshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ffe21525906c/The Mechanical Turk of Amazon Go2024-01-31T17:27:15+00:00
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/
jmA reader wrote to me this week. They're a multi-decade veteran of Amazon who had a fascinating tale about the launch of Amazon Go, the "fully automated" Amazon retail outlets that let you wander around, pick up goods and walk out again, while AI-enabled cameras totted up the goods in your basket and charged your card for them.
According to this reader, the AI cameras didn't work any better than Tesla's full-self driving mode, and had to be backstopped by a minimum of three camera operators in an Indian call center, "so that there could be a quorum system for deciding on a customer's activity – three autopilots good, two autopilots bad."
Amazon got a ton of press from the launch of the Amazon Go stores. A lot of it was very favorable, of course: Mister Market is insatiably horny for firing human beings and replacing them with robots, so any announcement that you've got a human-replacing robot is a surefire way to make Line Go Up. But there was also plenty of critical press about this – pieces that took Amazon to task for replacing human beings with robots.
What was missing from the criticism? Articles that said that Amazon was probably lying about its robots, that it had replaced low-waged clerks in the USA with even-lower-waged camera-jockeys in India.
Which is a shame, because that criticism would have hit Amazon where it hurts, right there in the ole Line Go Up. Amazon's stock price boost off the back of the Amazon Go announcements represented the market's bet that Amazon would evert out of cyberspace and fill all of our physical retail corridors with monopolistic robot stores, moated with IP that prevented other retailers from similarly slashing their wage bills. That unbridgeable moat would guarantee Amazon generations of monopoly rents, which it would share with any shareholders who piled into the stock at that moment.
]]>mechanical-turk amazon-go fakes amazon call-centers absent-indian ai fakery line-go-up automation capitalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8508b08c7940/Amazon price drop monitor2024-01-26T13:46:09+00:00
https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09JPCNS3X
jmshopping amazon prices price-watchhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:24d8898c4de7/Amazon Employees Fear Increased 'Quiet Firing'2024-01-16T23:06:51+00:00
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-jobs-layoffs-quiet-firing-tactics-employees-2024-1?r=US&IR=T
jmOne manager told [Business Insider] they were told to target 10% of all [their team's] employees for performance improvement plans. [...] Another manager said their ["unregretted employee attrition"] target is now as high as 12%.
Senior staff are predicting that this will soon have externally-visible impact on system stability:
The loss of senior engineers who can lead in crisis situations is a growing risk, these people said. One person who works on Amazon's cloud infrastructure service told BI that they lost a third of their team following the layoffs, leaving them with more junior engineers in charge. If a large-scale outage happens, for example, those engineers will have to learn how to be in crisis mode on the job. Another AWS employee told BI they feel like they are "doing the job of three people." A similar question was also raised during a recent internal all-hands meeting, BI previously reported.
yikes.]]>amazon quiet-firing how-we-work ura pips work grim aws working hrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4917b26b3c4e/Signs that it’s time to leave a company… | by adrian cockcroft2024-01-05T11:19:29+00:00
https://adrianco.medium.com/signs-that-its-time-to-leave-a-company-5f8759ad018e
jm
Founder led companies often have problems maintaining their innovation culture when the founder moves on. I think this is part of the problem at Amazon, and I was happy to be leaving as Andy Jassy took over from Jeff Bezos and Adam Selipsky took over AWS. Jeff Bezos was always focused on keeping the “Day 1” culture at Amazon, and everyone I talk to there is clear that it’s now “Day 2”. Politics and micromanagement have taken over, and HR processes take up far too much of everyone’s time.
There’s another red flag for me when large real estate construction projects take up too much management attention.
[...] We now have the situation that Amazon management care more about real estate than product. Where is the customer obsession in that?
There’s lessons to be learned, and that the delusion that they can roll back work from home and enforce RTO without killing off innovation is a big problem that will increasingly hurt them over time. I personally hired a bunch of people into AWS, in my own team and by encouraging people to join elsewhere. Nowadays I’d say a hard no to anyone thinking of working there. Try and get a job at somewhere like NVIDIA instead.
See also https://justingarrison.com/blog/2023-12-30-amazons-silent-sacking/ -- Justin Garrison's post about Amazon's Return-To-Office strategy really being "silent sacking" to downsize Amazon's staff, which has been confirmed by other AWS insiders.]]>aws amazon adrian-cockcroft how-we-work culture rto silent-sacking downsizinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bd4683ce8d26/Inside AWS: AI Fatigue, Sales Issues, and the Problem of Getting Big2023-12-01T09:21:36+00:00
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-aws-ai-fatigue-sales-challenges-2023-11?r=US&IR=T
jm
One employee said their team is instructed to always try to sell AWS's coding assistant app, CodeWhisperer, even if the customer doesn't necessarily need it [....]
Amazon is also scrambling internally to brainstorm generative AI projects, and CEO Andy Jassy said in a recent call that "every one of our businesses" is working on something in the space. [...]
Late last month, one AWS staffer unleashed a rant about this in an internal Slack channel with more than 21,000 people, according to screenshots viewed by [Business Insider].
"All of the conversations from our leadership are around GenAI, all of the conferences are about GenAI, all of the trainings are about GenAI…it's too much," the employee wrote. "I'm starting to not even want to have conversations with customers about it because it's starting to become one big buzzword. Anyone have any ideas for how to combat this burn out or change my mindset?"
Archive.is nag-free copy: https://archive.is/pUP2p]]>aws amazon generative-ai ai llms cloud-computinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:988cb67509c5/Creating a Correction Of Errors document2023-11-14T12:41:22+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/creating-a-correction-of-errors-document/?ck_subscriber_id=512829374
jmcoes ops processes aws amazon work outages post-mortems operational-excellence best-practiceshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7f5a95ec03a2/Anatomy of an AI System2023-11-10T10:22:52+00:00
https://anatomyof.ai/
jmAt this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed.
The stack that is required to interact with an Amazon Echo goes well beyond the multi-layered ‘technical stack’ of data modeling, hardware, servers and networks. The full stack reaches much further into capital, labor and nature, and demands an enormous amount of each. The true costs of these systems – social, environmental, economic, and political – remain hidden and may stay that way for some time.
]]>ai amazon echo extractivism ml data future capitalismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:92ea9880f3a0/Massive Alexa hole used to stalk Richard Morrell2023-06-29T12:44:40+00:00
https://practical-tech.com/2023/06/13/how-an-amazon-fire-kids-tablet-was-allegedly-used-to-stalk-a-security-pro/
jmIn Morrell’s case, he says an Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet was been used to turn his Echo gadgets in his house into listening devices. ... When he found himself the target of a sophisticated stalking attack via an Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet that he didn’t know was still connected to his account, he was shocked. Someone was listening in to him and looked into his activities and records for approximately two years.
This came even after he changed his Amazon account, refactored his two-factor authentication, and used a secure password generator to create a complex password. He assumed he was safe. He wasn’t. Because the adult account on the Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet was his, this gave the person who had the tablet full access to his Amazon accounts and data.
Further, when he checked on his Amazon account portal, he could not see the two Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablets registered to his account in the Manage Your Content and Devices page. Here, you’re supposed to find your Fire tablets, Echo devices, and other Alexa API-enabled devices. But the two tablets were not listed. Had they appeared, he would have deregistered them. Morrell felt safe from unauthorized snooping.
He wasn’t. The Amazon Fire 7 Kids tablet acted as a trusted software token — a skeleton key to his Amazon records and devices. With it, this person could obtain access not just to his Alexa devices, but to his Alexa Auto and the Alexa instance on his Android and Apple phones as well.
Amazon replied that the company has been unable to discern how this could have happened, but it is looking into the issue. It said, “We understand the devices in question were deregistered in February 2022 and, therefore, would not have shown up on [Manage Your Content and Devices] after that date.”
]]>amazon privacy security fail alexa infosec dick-morrell fire-tabletshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:425dbb9f0361/"Data protection IS AI regulation"2023-06-01T14:15:40+00:00
https://twitter.com/mer__edith/status/1664057265958055939
jmregulation ai ml training data-protection privacy ring amazon ftchttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:238381e75a4a/The privacy loophole in your doorbell2023-03-10T10:28:33+00:00
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/07/privacy-loophole-ring-doorbell-00084979
jmamazon police privacy surveillance dystopia us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f88e33e127c0/AWS' proprietary SRD protocol2023-02-16T11:48:02+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/02/ena-express-15-new-ec2-instances/
jmsrd networking protocols ip ena-express aws amazon multi-pathing congestion-control nitrohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:adb42574c16a/"FAANG promo committees are killing Kubernetes"2022-04-07T10:01:42+00:00
https://twitter.com/kantrn/status/1511791378497384454
jmPromo committees have, for years now, been consistently undervaluing the work of full-time Kubernetes contributors. Or really of open source work more broadly. Attributable revenue has been taking over as one of the most important factors at most companies. And Kubernetes has very little of that. It's happened gradually, and I don't think this was ever an intended outcome but it's a thing and we have to live with it.
It's too indirect, fixing a bug in kube-apiserver might retain a GCP customer or avoid a costly Apple services outage, but can you put a dollar value on that? How much is CI stability worth? Or community happiness?
And then add on top of it, the time cost. "FOSS maintainers are overloaded" should not be news to anyone, but now add 20/hours a week of campaigning to other high-level folks to "build buzz" for your work and let me know how that goes.
]]>k8s open-source google amazon faang work promotions careerhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0e5c1b6b53ce/Why you should develop a correction of error (COE) | AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog2022-03-02T14:33:45+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/why-you-should-develop-a-correction-of-error-coe/
jmWhen documenting times, be sure to include a time zone, and make sure that you’re using it correctly (e.g., PDT vs. PST). Better yet, either use UTC or omit the middle letter of the time zone (e.g., “PT”).
As Brian Scanlan sez: "A good 1/4 of the neurons in my brain were wired to quickly add and subtract 8 hours from timestamps by the time I left there"
Just. Use. UTC.]]>amazon aws timezones coe process postmortems dates pdt pst utchttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:66f5a94c1203/Overview of "sustainable software" groups2022-01-02T15:11:57+00:00
https://blog.container-solutions.com/what-has-cop26-ever-done-for-us
jmThere are now a number of groups and foundations pushing a green agenda for developers. [...] The most obvious players who are specifically focussed on software and operations appear to be:
The Green Software Foundation (a Linux Foundation started with Microsoft). [...]
The Green Web Foundation (a not-for-profit group).
Amazon, through their sustainability initiative.
The EU’s Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA).
OpenUK (a not-for-profit organisation).
This blog post gives a quick once-over for each one.]]>green sustainability software coding gsf gwf amazon sdia openuk ops climatehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e3e62e9d7d0d/Big tech relies on refugee labour2021-09-30T09:19:57+00:00
https://restofworld.org/2021/refugees-machine-learning-big-tech/
jmAll of the largest companies in the world are today powered by a covert crowd of the system’s castoffs. Platforms have found amid those struggling to stay afloat in informal work — or else barely clinging onto a life in formal employment — a desperate mass to be tempted with the promise of a better life. Such a promise, however, is broken as soon as it is made; the petty services of the informal sector resemble little more than a blueprint for the microtasks of big tech, without offering anything in the way of rights, routine, role, security, or a future.
]]>colonialism refugees ai data machine-learning amazon google tesla uber mechanical-turkhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:74e3b26de6c2/Introducing Echo Show 152021-09-30T08:35:50+00:00
https://www.amazon.co.uk/echo-show-15-full-hd-156-smart-display-for-family-organisation-with-alexa/dp/B08MQRDDYB/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=echo+show+15&qid=1632942281&sr=8-1
jmalexa amazon echo-show devices home familyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:efe21ee51748/Buying From Amazon UK After Brexit2021-01-19T23:18:33+00:00
https://www.moneyguideireland.com/buying-from-amazon-uk-after-brexit.html
jmbrexit shipping shopping amazon uk irelandhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c2e64064d882/Building dashboards for operational visibility | Amazon Builders' Library2020-08-09T22:04:28+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/building-dashboards-for-operational-visibility/
jmdashboards aws monitoring metrics alerts amazonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:bf2682c8188c/AWS User Data is Being Stored, Used Outside User's Chosen Regions2020-07-27T16:07:48+00:00
https://www.cbronline.com/news/aws-user-data
jm[AWS] is using customers’ “AI content” for its own product development purposes. It also reserves the right in its small print to store this material outside the geographic regions that AWS customers have explicitly selected. It may also share this with AWS “affiliates” it says, without naming them.
]]>via:corey-quinn aws amazon machine-learning corpora training data data-privacy data-protectionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:972c5d9fad5f/Automating safe, hands-off deployments2020-06-23T22:53:17+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/automating-safe-hands-off-deployments/
jmEach team needs to balance the safety of small-scoped deployments with the speed at which we can deliver changes to customers in all Regions. Deploying changes to 24 Regions or 76 Availability Zones through the pipeline one at a time has the lowest risk of causing broad impact, but it could take weeks for the pipeline to deliver a change to customers globally. We have found that grouping deployments into “waves” of increasing size, as seen in the previous sample prod pipeline, helps us achieve a good balance between deployment risk and speed. Each wave’s stage in the pipeline orchestrates deployments to a group of Regions, with changes being promoted from wave to wave. New changes can enter the production phase of the pipeline at any time. After a set of changes is promoted from the first step to the second step in wave 1, the next set of changes from gamma is promoted into the first step of wave 1, so we don’t end up with large bundles of changes waiting to be deployed to production.
The first two waves in the pipeline build the most confidence in the change: The first wave deploys to a Region with a low number of requests to limit the possible impact of the first production deployment of the new change. The wave deploys to only one Availability Zone (or cell) at a time within that Region to cautiously deploy the change across the Region. The second wave then deploys to one Availability Zone (or cell) at a time in a Region with a high number of requests where it is highly likely that customers will exercise all the new code paths and where we get good validation of the changes.
After we have higher confidence in the safety of the change from the initial pipeline waves’ deployments, we can deploy to more and more Regions in parallel in the same wave. For example, the previous sample prod pipeline deploys to three Regions in wave 3, then to up to 12 Regions in wave 4, then to the remaining Regions in wave 5. The exact number and choice of Regions in each of these waves and the number of waves in a service team’s pipeline depend on the individual service’s usage patterns and scale. The later waves in the pipeline still help us achieve our objective to prevent negative impact to multiple Availability Zones in the same Region. When a wave deploys to multiple Regions in parallel, it follows the same cautious rollout behavior for each Region that was used in the initial waves. Each step in the wave only deploys to a single Availability Zone or cell from each Region in the wave.
]]>automation ops devops amazon aws deployment waves az multi-region ci cdhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7ecaa0ea15ea/Tim Bray: Bye, Amazon2020-05-05T11:02:28+00:00
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon
jmMay 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
]]>amazon aws ethics tim-bray covid-19 pandemics health workers-rights taking-a-standhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:53de5fdd3f91/Amazon may be running Folding@Home on their unused EC2 spot instances2020-04-08T09:07:50+00:00
https://twitter.com/avibryant/status/1247754254212665344
jmaws amazon ec2 spot-instances foldingathome covid-19https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e4917664327c/Amazon's Principal Tenets2020-02-27T10:32:18+00:00
https://twitter.com/tomk_/status/1232762801309044741
jm
Exemplary Practitioner;
Technically Fearless;
Balanced and Pragmatic;
Illuminate and Clarify;
Flexible in Approach;
Respect What Came Before;
Learn, Educate, and Advocate;
Have Resounding Impact
One thing I admire about Amazon's internal culture is that they really do try to pin down a set of values, and encourage their adoption and practice internally.
]]>amazon values tenets work principal-engineers engineering codinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:00bc7f933def/re:Invent 2019: From CAPCOM to Deliveroo – My pick of the sessions2019-12-13T12:01:32+00:00
https://extricate.org/2019/12/09/reinvent-2019-from-capcom-to-deliveroo-my-pick-of-the-sessions/
jmreinvent aws talks youtube videos architecture coding amazonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:3981493724d9/How to Build a Smart Home Where Everything Might Actually Work2019-12-11T12:22:50+00:00
https://gizmodo.com/how-to-build-a-smart-home-where-everything-might-actual-1795448925
jmsmart-home home iot gadgets homekit google amazon alexahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:eae55670fa60/The Amazon Builders' Library2019-12-06T11:23:07+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/?cards-body.sort-by=item.additionalFields.customSort&cards-body.sort-order=asc
jmguides library howto advice principal-engineers aws amazon principalshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:caa8ba8daa9e/"Brushing"2019-11-12T10:47:22+00:00
https://clark.com/shopping-retail/amazon-scam-brushing-warning-deliveries-you-didnt-order/
jmThe end game here in many cases is for the seller to be able to pose as a verified purchaser and write a glowing review of their own product. Gaming the review system in this way pushes their products up higher in Amazon search results — regardless of whether the product is actually “good” or not.
Amazon told CBS News that it investigates all customer reports of unsolicited packages like those made by the Gallivans. The company will shut down the accounts of vendors or reviewers found abusing the review system.
]]>reviews brushing scams amazon crime ecommercehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9169dd23dc18/We aren’t terrified enough about losing the Amazon - MIT Technology Review2019-08-27T09:38:30+00:00
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614222/we-arent-terrified-enough-about-losing-the-amazon/
jm
“Even if it’s a remote possibility, we cannot afford to ignore it,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, a research group focused on decarbonization. “It would be absolutely catastrophic to the Earth’s carbon cycle, water cycle, climate, and biodiversity — not to mention the people who live there.” [...]
“We believe that the sensible course is not only to strictly curb further deforestation, but also to build back a margin of safety against the Amazon tipping point, by reducing the deforested area to less than 20%, for the commonsense reason that there is no point in discovering the precise tipping point by tipping it.”
]]>amazon climate-change climate tipping-points brazil futurehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:60dfcdda2ba3/A Twitter thread about where P99s came from2019-05-27T14:46:14+00:00
https://twitter.com/tacertain/status/1132391299733000193
jmp99 percentiles quantiles history performance analysis measurement metrics amazon aws pmethttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fef50c5c9713/Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions2019-04-11T14:56:54+00:00
https://medium.com/@inowland/using-6-page-and-2-page-documents-to-make-organizational-decisions-3216badde909
jmA challenge of organizations is the aggregation of local information to a point where a globally optimal decision can be made in a way all stakeholders have seen their feedback heard and so can “disagree and commit" on the result. This document describes the “6 pager” and “2 pager” document and review meeting process, as a mechanism to address this challenge, as practiced by the document’s author in his time in the EC2 team at Amazon, and then at Two Sigma.
[...] The major variant I have also seen is 2 pages with 30 minute review; when the decision is smaller in terms of stakeholders, options or impact. That being said, there is nothing magical about 2 pages, i.e., a 3 page document is fine, it just should be expected to take more than 30 minutes to review.
]]>amazon business decisions teams documents planninghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c1451430378c/Amazon workers call for zero carbon emissions and cancellation of an AWS fossil-fuel friendly program2019-04-11T09:31:39+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/technology/amazon-climate-change-letter.html
jmThen the activists saw an article in Gizmodo, a technology news site, that outlined how Amazon’s cloud computing division was building special offerings for oil and gas companies. On its website, Amazon says its customers include BP and Royal Dutch Shell, and its products can “find oil faster,” “recover more oil” and “reduce the cost per barrel.”
In a second meeting with Amazon, the workers raised the oil industry connections with the company’s sustainability team; its members did not seem to be aware of the business, according to several employees at the meeting.
“That really showed us Amazon is not taking climate change seriously if the highest levels of the sustainability team are not even aware that we have an oil and gas business,” said Ms. Cunningham, who was at the meeting.
]]>amazon aws fossil-fuels zero-carbon emissions climate-change sustainabilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4161a943d61c/camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price tracker2019-03-06T13:04:14+00:00
https://uk.camelcamelcamel.com/
jmamazon shopping deals buying moneyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4eb7da184e44/_Amazon Aurora: On Avoiding Distributed Consensus for I/Os, Commits, and Membership Changes_, SIGMOD '182019-01-16T10:08:18+00:00
https://www.dropbox.com/s/47xbjrkni9bx0g3/aurora2.pdf?dl=0
jmOne of the more novel differences between Aurora and other relational databases is how it pushes redo processing to a multi-tenant scale-out storage service, purpose-built for Aurora. Doing so reduces networking traffic, avoids checkpoints and crash recovery, enables failovers to replicas without loss of data, and enables fault-tolerant storage that heals without database involvement. Traditional implementations that leverage distributed storage would use distributed consensus algorithms for commits, reads, replication, and membership changes and amplify cost of underlying storage. In this paper, we describe how Aurora avoids distributed consensus under most circumstances by establishing invariants and leveraging local transient state. Doing so improves performance, reduces variability, and lowers costs.
]]>papers toread aurora amazon aws pdf scalability distcomp state sql mysql postgresql distributed-consensushttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:db64811fffaf/AWS Service SLAs2019-01-08T12:19:42+00:00
https://summitroute.github.io/aws_research/service_support.html
jmThe goal of this page is to high-light the lack of coverage AWS provides for its services across different security factors. These limitations are not well-understood by many. Further, the "Y" fields are meant to indicate that this service has any capability for the relevant factor. In many cases, this is not full coverage for the service, or there are exceptions or special cases.
]]>amazon aws services slas ops reliabilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ccd898c6775e/House Democrats Sent A New Letter To Jeff Bezos About Amazon’s Facial Recognition Tool2018-11-30T11:01:47+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/daveyalba/house-democrats-send-another-letter-to-amazon-ceo-jeff
jmThe House Democrats’ questions focus largely on possible embedded bias in Amazon Rekognition, including how the tool’s accuracy breaks down by race, gender, ethnicity, and age. Also of particular concern is whether Amazon will build privacy protections into its facial recognition system and how it will ensure it is not abused for secret government surveillance. [....]
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has yet to address mounting criticism of Amazon’s Rekognition technology by Amazon employees, shareholders, and civil rights groups. In November, Amazon executives defended the company’s controversial facial recognition technology at an all-hands staff meeting after employees raised civil rights concerns about the tech’s potential misuse.
“It’s hard to trust that harm and abuse can be prevented if it is only post-mortem and through the Terms of Service,” an Amazon employee who requested anonymity told BuzzFeed News at the time.
]]>rekognition aws privacy data-protection surveillance amazon us-politics civil-rightshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2f59e52da8f2/Introducing Predictive Scaling for Amazon EC2 in AWS Auto Scaling2018-11-21T10:48:42+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/introducing-predictive-scaling-for-amazon-EC2-in-aws-auto-scaling/
jmPredictive Scaling predicts future traffic based on daily and weekly trends, including regularly-occurring spikes, and provisions the right number of EC2 instances in advance of anticipated changes. Provisioning the capacity just in time for an impending load change makes Auto Scaling faster than ever before. Predictive Scaling’s machine learning algorithms detect changes in daily and weekly patterns, automatically adjusting their forecasts. This removes the need for manual adjustment of Auto Scaling parameters over time, making Auto Scaling simpler to configure and consume. Auto Scaling enhanced with Predictive Scaling delivers faster, simpler, and more accurate capacity provisioning to our customers.
Fantastic! More heavy lifting taken care of.]]>aws amazon scaling autoscaling predictive-scaling ml ec2 asghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e3499386f7d2/Jeff Bezos is wrong, tech workers are not bullies2018-11-14T10:59:32+00:00
https://outline.com/rhV4je
jmI decided to leave my job as a staff engineer at Google because of Project Maven, and because I believe that the artificial intelligence ethical guidelines they published afterwards were not strict enough: they allowed surveillance within “internationally accepted norms”.
I am now joining forces with current and former Google employees who also opposed Maven and the Dragonfly search engine. We do not wish to be complicit in human rights violations and we believe that workers, and the public, deserve a voice. We support employees at Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, McKinsey and Deloitte who have similarly stood up to their employers.
We also have a right to not contribute to killing. Most workers at Google or Amazon did not join those companies to work on military applications. Both companies are international employers with engineering offices across the world, and many of their workers are neither US citizens nor residents. I worked as an engineer in Google's European headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. To me, the US military is not our military (as Google Cloud chief executive Diane Greene referred to it in a blog post), nor is it a force we should automatically support as a matter of patriotism.
As an engineer, I believe it is my responsibility to speak up for human rights and accountable decision making. As an industry, we in technology cannot compromise our principles or allow ourselves to be bullied by billionaires who stand to be enriched by our silence.
]]>project-maven dragonfly google amazon surveillance us-politics politics ai silicon-valley ethics work lifehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a9908b189f82/Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women | Reuters2018-10-10T12:26:36+00:00
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G
jmAmazon’s computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. […] Amazon’s system taught itself that male candidates were preferable. It penalized resumes that included the word “women’s,” as in “women’s chess club captain.” And it downgraded graduates of two all-women’s colleges, according to people familiar with the matter.’
nice demo of algorithmic bias right there. Worrying that there are plenty of other places carrying on with the concept though....]]>algorithmic-bias amazon hiring resumes bias feminism machine-learning mlhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9348f4d93aa9/The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies - Bloomberg2018-10-04T11:15:11+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies
jmNested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. [...] investigators determined that the chips allowed the attackers to create a stealth doorway into any network that included the altered machines. Multiple people familiar with the matter say investigators found that the chips had been inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China.
]]>chips security technology china subcontracting business hardware hacking amazon supermicro manufacturing supply-chainshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f5d79288bcaa/Yahoo! are scanning your email contents and selling data to advertisers2018-08-29T21:03:24+00:00
https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1034908215513964544
jmyahoo privacy email mail amazonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9b062df3f31f/15 Key Takeaways from the Serverless Talk at AWS Startup Day2018-07-16T14:45:50+00:00
https://www.jeremydaly.com/15-key-takeaways-from-the-serverless-talk-at-aws-startup-day/
jmaws lambda serverless ops hacks amazonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8e575f5419bf/AWS Developer Forums: m5.xlarge in us-east-1 has intermittent DNS resolution failures2018-06-26T16:29:41+00:00
https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=831922&tstart=0
jmc5 m5 instances ec2 aws amazon ops dnshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4b578d96708c/AWS Region Table2018-06-06T09:32:06+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regional-product-services/
jmamazon aws regions azs services architecture opshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:94e3251bc6d3/ACLU to Amazon: Get out of the surveillance business2018-05-23T16:49:45+00:00
https://action.aclu.org/petition/amazon-stop-selling-surveillance
jmAlready, Rekognition is in use in Florida and Oregon. Government agencies in California and Arizona have sought information about it, too. And Amazon didn't just sell Rekognition to law enforcement, it's actively partnering with them to ensure that authorities can fully utilize Rekognition's capabilities.
Amazon has branded itself as customer-centric, opposed secret government surveillance, and has a CEO who publicly supported First Amendment freedoms and spoke out against the discriminatory Muslim Ban. Yet, Amazon is powering dangerous surveillance that poses a grave threat to customers and communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate.
We must make it clear to Amazon that we won't stand by and let it pad its bottom line by selling out our civil rights.
]]>aclu amazon rekognition facial-recognition faces law privacy data-privacy civil-rightshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:02ca62bc9d24/Amazon Aurora Parallel Query is Available for Preview2018-02-02T10:39:00+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/02/amazon-aurora-parallel-query-is-available-for-preview/
jmParallel Query improves the performance of large analytic queries by pushing processing down to the Aurora storage layer, spreading processing across hundreds of nodes.
With Parallel Query, you can run sophisticated analytic queries on Aurora tables with an order of magnitude performance improvement over serial query processing, in many cases. Parallel Query currently pushes down predicates used to filter tables and hash joins.
]]>parallel aurora amazon mysql sql performance joins architecture data-modelhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:035caa846548/AWS re:Invent 2017 slides: STG306 - Deep Dive on Amazon EBS2017-12-14T10:23:04+00:00
https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/stg306deep-dive-on-amazon-ebs
jmec2 ebs aws amazon ops tips slides reinventhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:043c7cccb5c5/AWS re:Invent 2017 slides: DAT302 - Deep Dive on Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)2017-12-14T10:22:46+00:00
https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/dat302deep-dive-on-amazon-relational-database-service-rds
jmec2 ebs aws amazon ops tips slides reinventhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6bbf7316c9fb/AWS re:Invent 2017 slides: CMP301 - Deep Dive on Amazon EC2 Instances2017-12-14T10:22:27+00:00
https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/cmp301deep-dive-on-amazon-ec2-instances
jmec2 ebs aws amazon ops tips slides reinventhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4674fd1ed517/auto532017-12-13T12:13:28+00:00
https://github.com/cirocosta/auto53/blob/master/README.md?__s=gf36pf8g1gjugcqh6ppo
jmauto53 route-53 dns aws amazon ops hostnames asg autoscalinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:26158dc9b1b6/Spot Fleet now supports Target Tracking2017-11-20T10:23:58+00:00
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/11/spot-fleet-now-supports-target-tracking-and-new-plug-in-for-atlassian-bamboo/
jmspot-fleet spot-instances ec2 amazon aws scaling ops architecturehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b0bd09164e4c/'Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in we've ever seen in the history of humanity' • The Register2017-11-07T10:25:09+00:00
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/coreos_kubernetes_v_world/
jmThat doesn't mean Polvi is a fan. "Lambda and serverless is one of the worst forms of proprietary lock-in that we've ever seen in the history of humanity," said Polvi, only partly in jest, referring to the most widely used serverless offering, AWS Lambda. "It's seriously as bad as it gets."
He elaborated: "It's code that tied not just to hardware – which we've seen before – but to a data center, you can't even get the hardware yourself. And that hardware is now custom fabbed for the cloud providers with dark fiber that runs all around the world, just for them. So literally the application you write will never get the performance or responsiveness or the ability to be ported somewhere else without having the deployment footprint of Amazon."
Absolutely agreed...]]>lambda amazon aws containers coreos deployment lockin proprietary serverless alex-polvi kuberneteshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8417fb02298a/Amazon Shipping Filter - Chrome Web Store2017-10-12T11:13:35+00:00
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amazon-shipping-filter/alfkindkahgpcihepceidgnbpolhhmmk?hl=en
jmireland shipping amazon buying extensions chrome userscripts shoppinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:39aaa4a40b3a/How to operate reliable AWS Lambda applications in production2017-10-12T10:57:33+00:00
https://www.concurrencylabs.com/blog/how-to-operate-aws-lambda/
jmrunning a reliable Lambda application in production requires you to still follow operational best practices. In this article I am including some recommendations, based on my experience with operations in general as well as working with AWS Lambda.
]]>aws cloud lambda ops amazonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e1434327aa56/A Decade of Dynamo: Powering the next wave of high-performance, internet-scale applications - All Things Distributed2017-10-09T15:29:38+00:00
http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2017/10/a-decade-of-dynamo.html?__s=gf36pf8g1gjugcqh6ppo
jmA deep dive on how we were using our existing databases revealed that they were frequently not used for their relational capabilities. About 70 percent of operations were of the key-value kind, where only a primary key was used and a single row would be returned. About 20 percent would return a set of rows, but still operate on only a single table.
With these requirements in mind, and a willingness to question the status quo, a small group of distributed systems experts came together and designed a horizontally scalable distributed database that would scale out for both reads and writes to meet the long-term needs of our business. This was the genesis of the Amazon Dynamo database.
The success of our early results with the Dynamo database encouraged us to write Amazon's Dynamo whitepaper and share it at the 2007 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP conference), so that others in the industry could benefit. The Dynamo paper was well-received and served as a catalyst to create the category of distributed database technologies commonly known today as "NoSQL."
That's not an exaggeration. Nice one Werner et al!]]>dynamo history nosql storage databases distcomp amazon papers acm data-storeshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:34ce49c8b5d2/Amazon Global Product Price Check2017-07-19T12:00:20+00:00
https://www.heidoc.net/amazon/amazon_global_check.php?asin=B01E3SNO1G
jmprices amazon via:its price-check comparison shopping eu uk asinhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:07331145a519/