4 ms·

Amazon: The Everything Company

26 points by techdog 13y ago

spacefight 13y ago
No, you shouldn't. I don't.
- nobodysfool 13y ago
  Oh, well if spacefight doesn't trust his bits there, I certainly can't. I mean, who can we trust if not spacefight?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  I trust them with encrypted blobs, no problem.
robryk 13y ago
> No one's suggesting Amazon is actually going to spy on your business's bits and bytes (which are already encrypted anyway, right?) ... I don't get it. If I use the data in any way other than simply storing and retrieving it, I'd expect the decryption keys (ignoring very few situations, in which we are able to compute on encrypted data) to reside on the machines that provide the service, which are posited to be on EC2. So how does encryption protect anything from Amazon?
- lcampbell 13y ago
  Given the plethora of AWS services, the author may have been referring to S3 or RDS. The whole piece read like fire and brimstone, so I wouldn't necessarily give it the benefit of the doubt. There's plenty of other hyperbole in there, gems like: > [Amazon lets] you use [EC2] for pennies per hour. The author's probably referring to micro instances; everything else costs upwards of a dime. For large scale deployments, EC2 is everything except cheap.
goodside 13y ago
"This is a company that wants to be the single-source provisioner of both the protons and electrons in your world. It wants to sell you physical books (and other physical goods; the protons) as well as electronic books (electrons)." If your cute metaphor needs explaining, don't use it.
- ape4 13y ago
  Matter is made of more than protons. That's why some people say atoms and electrons.
- lucozade 13y ago
  Implying that Amazon have missed the whole neutron market. An opportunity perchance?
- sentenza 13y ago
  Without wanting to criticize the article, there is an interesting physics mistake here. Electric current is not actually moving electrons but _movement of electrons_. This means that no physical electrons make the "round trip" in an electrical circuit, but the current propagates via locally moving electrons interacting through electromagnetic force. So indeed, the electrons that Amazon is handling are definitely not identical to the electrons at your end, even in the hypothetical case in which there are no transformers and fibreoptics between you and Amazon.
blueskin_ 13y ago
For half a second, I wondered if the link was just going to be one of those novelty sites that just shows a giant "NO". (like http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/ http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/ )
Ihmahr 13y ago
I was at a meeting a week ago and there was the CTO of amazon. He was speaking about how you could do 'secure and trusted' computations on untrusted platforms, and how your users would definitely be safe when you run your services on AWS, EVEN IF they would be in bed with intelligence community (which he denied). He went on to say how safe AWS was and how it was technically impossible to spy on their customers. It was at this event: http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected Not a particularly technical crowd he spoke to, and there was no room for audience questions. He seemed like a genuine peace of shit when it came to respect for privacy and telling the truth.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  I'm sure Werner would appreciate some evidence to back up your statement that he is a piece of shit.
incision 13y ago
>"Every time it lays waste to a Blockbuster or a Best Buy, it puts tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people out of work." Two companies well-known for bad service and misleading/fraudulent business practices. >"For now, businesses that are in competition with Amazon can take comfort in the fact that Amazon is not now (and probably won't be, any time soon) all about customer service." Customer service is actually the key reason I keep coming back to Amazon and stopped using terrible businesses like Blockbuster and Best Buy years ago. Everything is hassle free and Amazon has always acted instantly to satisfy me when I've had an issue from returns to stolen packages or streaming video hiccups. Amazon makes it right, the first time, every time. Amazon didn't kill those places, they did it to themselves, years ago.
- cyanbane 13y ago
  A few months ago I preordered a video game, upon receipt of the game months latter I also received an email that stated that Amz had lowered the price of the game in the time span of between my preorder and delivery of the game. They issued me a refund for the difference. It was something on the nature of .03, but impressive none the less. A few months ago they went back through all the physical books I have ordered over the past 10 years and gifted me electronic versions of a subset of them. They did the same with all my music purchased physically a few months previous. I have never dealt with returns or the like with their customer service, but the channels in which they can deliver (physical + digital) is perfect for the time period we are currently in as physical mediums start to fall off.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
tokenadult 13y ago
Oh, gah, submissions from assertTrue( ) are showing up on HN's home page again. I've just read the short blog post kindly submitted here by the blog post author, and I don't see any added value from it that wouldn't come from any other review of the book that the blog author recommends. I am not worried about Amazon (but I don't use Amazon cloud services at all). Previous comments about this blog and its editorial practices from other HN readers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734 by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog: > > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed. [1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-your-data.html%E3%80%80 http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h... > Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog That was followed up by another set of comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084 > I'm beginning to flag these posts. I agree.
- BraveNewCurency 13y ago
  Seconded. The article doesn't even have thesis. It implies that automation/ecommerce is bad (because it's putting people out of jobs) and AWS is somehow spying on the computers it hosts (without proof that it's happening, or even that it is possible.)
judk 13y ago
I am convinced regarding Bits, but the case against Bytes wasn't persuasive.
azinman2 13y ago
FUD.
wandernotlost 13y ago
So basically, Amazon is making new businesses so efficient, they're putting old businesses out of business. So if you're an old business, you should avoid using Amazon's tech to be more like a new business, because...Amazon might someday compete with you and put you out of business? Somehow this does not seem like sound business decision making.
andrewgjohnson 13y ago
I've been shocked by the caliber of Amazon's customer service. Pleasantly shocked that is. Also imagine AWS has at least some privacy controls. I find it unlikely Bezos has Netflix's monthly AWS bcced to him in secret.

26 points by techdog 13y ago

spacefight 13y ago

No, you shouldn't. I don't.

nobodysfool 13y ago
Oh, well if spacefight doesn't trust his bits there, I certainly can't. I mean, who can we trust if not spacefight?
sliverstorm 13y ago
I trust them with encrypted blobs, no problem.

robryk 13y ago

> No one's suggesting Amazon is actually going to spy on your business's bits and bytes (which are already encrypted anyway, right?) ... I don't get it. If I use the data in any way other than simply storing and retrieving it, I'd expect the decryption keys (ignoring very few situations, in which we are able to compute on encrypted data) to reside on the machines that provide the service, which are posited to be on EC2. So how does encryption protect anything from Amazon?

lcampbell 13y ago
Given the plethora of AWS services, the author may have been referring to S3 or RDS. The whole piece read like fire and brimstone, so I wouldn't necessarily give it the benefit of the doubt. There's plenty of other hyperbole in there, gems like: > [Amazon lets] you use [EC2] for pennies per hour. The author's probably referring to micro instances; everything else costs upwards of a dime. For large scale deployments, EC2 is everything except cheap.

goodside 13y ago

"This is a company that wants to be the single-source provisioner of both the protons and electrons in your world. It wants to sell you physical books (and other physical goods; the protons) as well as electronic books (electrons)." If your cute metaphor needs explaining, don't use it.

ape4 13y ago
Matter is made of more than protons. That's why some people say atoms and electrons.
lucozade 13y ago
Implying that Amazon have missed the whole neutron market. An opportunity perchance?
sentenza 13y ago
Without wanting to criticize the article, there is an interesting physics mistake here. Electric current is not actually moving electrons but _movement of electrons_. This means that no physical electrons make the "round trip" in an electrical circuit, but the current propagates via locally moving electrons interacting through electromagnetic force. So indeed, the electrons that Amazon is handling are definitely not identical to the electrons at your end, even in the hypothetical case in which there are no transformers and fibreoptics between you and Amazon.

blueskin_ 13y ago

For half a second, I wondered if the link was just going to be one of those novelty sites that just shows a giant "NO". (like http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/ http://hasthelhcdestroyedtheearthyet.com/ )

Ihmahr 13y ago

I was at a meeting a week ago and there was the CTO of amazon. He was speaking about how you could do 'secure and trusted' computations on untrusted platforms, and how your users would definitely be safe when you run your services on AWS, EVEN IF they would be in bed with intelligence community (which he denied). He went on to say how safe AWS was and how it was technically impossible to spy on their customers. It was at this event: http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected http://www.dezwijger.nl/86924/nl/amsterdam-connected Not a particularly technical crowd he spoke to, and there was no room for audience questions. He seemed like a genuine peace of shit when it came to respect for privacy and telling the truth.

res0nat0r 13y ago
I'm sure Werner would appreciate some evidence to back up your statement that he is a piece of shit.

incision 13y ago

>"Every time it lays waste to a Blockbuster or a Best Buy, it puts tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of people out of work." Two companies well-known for bad service and misleading/fraudulent business practices. >"For now, businesses that are in competition with Amazon can take comfort in the fact that Amazon is not now (and probably won't be, any time soon) all about customer service." Customer service is actually the key reason I keep coming back to Amazon and stopped using terrible businesses like Blockbuster and Best Buy years ago. Everything is hassle free and Amazon has always acted instantly to satisfy me when I've had an issue from returns to stolen packages or streaming video hiccups. Amazon makes it right, the first time, every time. Amazon didn't kill those places, they did it to themselves, years ago.

cyanbane 13y ago
A few months ago I preordered a video game, upon receipt of the game months latter I also received an email that stated that Amz had lowered the price of the game in the time span of between my preorder and delivery of the game. They issued me a refund for the difference. It was something on the nature of .03, but impressive none the less. A few months ago they went back through all the physical books I have ordered over the past 10 years and gifted me electronic versions of a subset of them. They did the same with all my music purchased physically a few months previous. I have never dealt with returns or the like with their customer service, but the channels in which they can deliver (physical + digital) is perfect for the time period we are currently in as physical mediums start to fall off.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

tokenadult 13y ago

Oh, gah, submissions from assertTrue( ) are showing up on HN's home page again. I've just read the short blog post kindly submitted here by the blog post author, and I don't see any added value from it that wouldn't come from any other review of the book that the blog author recommends. I am not worried about Amazon (but I don't use Amazon cloud services at all). Previous comments about this blog and its editorial practices from other HN readers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734 by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog: > > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories dont get reviewed. [1] http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-your-data.html%E3%80%80 http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-h... > Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog That was followed up by another set of comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084 > I'm beginning to flag these posts. I agree.

BraveNewCurency 13y ago
Seconded. The article doesn't even have thesis. It implies that automation/ecommerce is bad (because it's putting people out of jobs) and AWS is somehow spying on the computers it hosts (without proof that it's happening, or even that it is possible.)

judk 13y ago

I am convinced regarding Bits, but the case against Bytes wasn't persuasive.

azinman2 13y ago

FUD.

wandernotlost 13y ago

So basically, Amazon is making new businesses so efficient, they're putting old businesses out of business. So if you're an old business, you should avoid using Amazon's tech to be more like a new business, because...Amazon might someday compete with you and put you out of business? Somehow this does not seem like sound business decision making.

andrewgjohnson 13y ago

I've been shocked by the caliber of Amazon's customer service. Pleasantly shocked that is. Also imagine AWS has at least some privacy controls. I find it unlikely Bezos has Netflix's monthly AWS bcced to him in secret.