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Comment · 4 years ago
>It also speaks to inner AWS turmoil at least at DynamoDB.

How? Rick wasn't part of the DynamoDB service team. He wasn't an engineer, nor a manager on the team, nor even a product manager. He was a salesperson that specialized in DDB. He most likely had very little interactions, if any, with the engineering team. I don't see how him leaving speaks at all to anything about the inner workings of the engineering teams.

Rick seems cool, and after skimming some of his chats he seems really knowledgeable about the customer-facing side of DDB, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to him. But I think you're making way too many assumptions about his "rank" and "influence" within the company.

Comment · 4 years ago
No, I haven't. There are thousands of reinvent sessions every year. I don't watch them all (I don't watch hardly any of them, and most people I know in Amazon watch a couple breakout sessions if that. Some don't even watch the keynotes). Their targeted audience is AWS customers, not internal engineers. Reinvent itself is a sales conference. If internal Amazonians want to learn about something like DDB, there are internal talks and documents given by the engineering leaders that we watch.

>At the same time you are able to this internal lookups?

I looked him up on LinkedIn. Nothing internal about it.

Comment · 4 years ago
There are over a thousand breakout sessions at every reinvent every year. Some of the speakers are sales people, some are engineers, some are managers. There are L5 or junior engineers who give reinvent session talks. It's a fun gig, but it doesn't mean that the speaker is some top executive or anything like that.

Rich was in the sales org. His primary job was sales. Reinvent is a sales conference. Speaking at reinvent is a sales pitch. He was a salesperson. I'm not sure why you're so offended by that. Being a salesperson isn't bad, it's just an explanation for why engineers wouldn't have heard of him.

Comment · 4 years ago
I think I've seen you post something similar on r/aws about how Rick was "top DynamoDb person at AWS" (apologies if that wasn't you). I think you are overestimating Rick's "rank".

I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of Amazon pay scales, isn't that high up. An L7 TPM gets paid about the same as, or sometimes less than, an L6 software dev (L6 is "senior", which is ~5-10 years of experience).

Also, him being in the sales org means he had practically nothing to do with the engineering of the service. AWS Sales is a revolving door of people. I mean no offense towards Rick (again, I didn't know him or even know of him before I read his name in a comment a few days ago), but I would not read anything at all into the fact that an L7 Sales TPM left for another company.

Comment · 4 years ago
>No one uses DynamoDB alone

Almost every single team at Amazon that I can think of off the top of my head uses DynamoDB (or DDB + S3) as its sole data store. I know that there are teams out there using relational DBs as well (especially in analytics), but in my day-to-day working with a constantly changing variety of teams that run customer-facing apps, I haven't seen RDS/Redis/etc being used in months.

Comment · 4 years ago
In any serious security design, "the attacker probably won't do that" would and should be shot down immediately. If your security strategy is hoping that an attacker will be kind enough to not exploit your open vulnerability, you've already failed at threat modeling and at security.

If an attacker can do it, you must assume they will do it. Because they will. That should be the starting point for any threat model.

Comment · 4 years ago
"the attacker probably won't do that" is not a security control.
Comment · 4 years ago
Why are you assuming that a determined attacker doesn't control your L4 stack? MITMs are a threat, your network could be compromised, routers (especially consumer routers) are rife with vulnerabilities. This is the entire reason "zero trust" is pushed.
Comment · 4 years ago
"My logs and firewall are less cluttered" is not at all the correct metric to measure the security of your box.

IP address spoofing is a thing. Blocking CIDR ranges might protect you from low-effort, drive-by botnets that constantly scan the entire internet (which all should be completely mitigated by using certificate based auth anyway), but blocking based on IP address is absolutely not an effective control against a determined hacker.

You must consider your threat model. For your personal instance that you host hobby things on, you probably won't be targeted via IP spoofing. For any type of company, you should not be relying on CIDR blocking as part of your security layers. CIDR blocking is only effective at reducing the clutter of your logs, which is a convenience, not a security control. The real security control is using proper auth methods, which are so easy to do at this point that it's ridiculous for even a hobbyist to not do them.

Comment · 4 years ago
That's not the point. There was a selloff in December. How crypto fared compared to anything else at any time period is irrelevant.
Comment · 4 years ago
Humanity "continuing" or "moving on" naturally due to the passage of time (which will be quite a long time) is a completely different thing than humanity "choosing" to move on. Your original comments imply/ask that humanity collectively "chooses" to move on and stop letting covid affect us, but again, that is simply not possible. It's not something we choose.

Individuals can individually choose to pretend covid isn't a thing, but society as a whole cannot simply choose to suddenly restore our medical infrastructure, fix supply chains, grow the labor market, etc. Covid's effect on those things won't magically go away just because someone says "you know what, I'm tired of waiting on covid! I'm going to be normal now!"

Adjustments to these will happen over time and humanity may "continue", but when that happens is not a choice we make.

Comment · 4 years ago
You're still not understanding. We are not "waiting". Waiting implies that we are making some type of conscious choice to put things on hold. But there is no choice. We cannot simply choose to stop waiting. We cannot move on until people are vaccinated. We are blocked, not waiting.
Comment · 4 years ago
I'll say it again: we cannot move on with it until people are vaccinated. It's not a choice. It's not something where we just say "eh well it looks like it won't get better so let's move on". It physically cannot happen.
Comment · 4 years ago
Financial markets are more than just the SP500. The sentence before that is talking about both stock markets and crypto markets. Crypto (BTC specifically, but also others) dropped ~30% in December.

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