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Distributed systems store information in different databases and warehouses. You don't want your Amazon.com retail data co-mingled with Alexa data for multiple
by whoknew1122 5y ago
Distributed systems store information in different databases and warehouses. You don't want your Amazon.com retail data co-mingled with Alexa data for multiple reasons. Two of the preeminent security concepts is least privilege and data segregation.
Your data exists in different files and databases. That's why you get multiple files containing your data. And let's ignore that the zip archives contain files of different types.
If all the files were of the same type, what would you prefer, that Amazon edit these files and combine them into a single file? How could you prove that Amazon didn't edit out any files maliciously?
The typical way to verify file integrity is by checking hash sums. But here you don't have access to the original hashes (because they're internal Amazon files). Even if you had access to the hashes, we know the hashes wouldn't match because we're presupposing that the files have been modified to combine them.
If they were to combine all the files together, there would be no way for Amazon to document that nothing was changed. Which means the process isn't auditable, and people will come up with conspiracies about how big bad Amazon is sanitizing files before sending them out.
- jkaplowitz 5y ago74 zip files could themselves be added unmodified as 74 individual entries within a parent zip file, optionally, for ease of download convenience. The hashes of those 74 zip files within the parent zip file would be just as auditable as with the current process.
- whoknew1122 5y agoThat's true, but then people will complain that they had to unzip 75 files instead of 74. The real issue here is that there are 74 files. Which is an issue without a good solution.
- folmar 5y agoUnzipping 75 files is a one click job on any reasonably current system I know of.
- shadowgovt 5y ago> what would you prefer, that Amazon edit these files and combine them into a single file This, additionally, adds the complication that they could be accused of making the data onerous to access by providing it as a monolithic zip, too big for some users to download over unreliable connections.