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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

How sad that this is launching after the NSA scandal has pretty much ensured it will fail, and perhaps can't be achieved for decades.

This is almost certainly the most efficient and optimal way to do desktop computing. We've been waiting really for decades for networks and CPUs to get good enough that it's actually viable for a real good experience on the client end. And when we finally get there, the NSA and others are here pissing all over the party.

I hope that some day there is a full accounting of the enormous economic damage caused by the reckless, dangerous people in charge of these organizations.

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> How sad that this is launching after the NSA scandal has pretty much ensured it will fail, and perhaps can't be achieved for decades.

I honestly doubt 99% of consumers care, since the NSA isn't concerned with their business.

That's not to say that attitude is right or wrong, but it's probably the last thing on most peoples' minds.

> I honestly doubt 99% of consumers care, since the NSA isn't concerned with their business.

The NSA is hardly the only organization/party who could exploit a service like this. Every local police force could get a warrant to search your personal computer data without you ever knowing.

I recently attended a talk on wiretaps by a lawyer recently, and when there is an investigation going on, police used to tap 1-2 cellphones a few years ago. Now 50+ people at a time are brought up on a warrant. Including a lot of people who aren't related to the crime (for ex. the targets mother).

So who is the "1%" of that 99%? Who should care about their privacy? How do consumers know they aren't in that 1%? The answer is they can't and they don't know.

But ultimately, they just don't care. Until it:

A) affects them personally (or to someone they know),

B) someone explains why it matters (if they have a technical knowledge gap)

C) widely publicized examples of abuses become part of mainstream news

Those three combined could eventually become widespread enough to destroy services like this. But right now, yes, the risk is still minimal in terms of public perception.

"Every local police force could get a warrant to search your personal computer data without you ever knowing."

They can also get a warrant and come to your house and go through all of your stuff (including your personal computer) there. Of course you'd know, but not until it happened. There's no real "protection" from a legal search warrant.

Search warrant != wiretap warrant.

The privacy implications and constitutional externalities are much larger (and easily abused) when it involves the interception of voice calls, emails, sms, locations, etc and now potentially all computer activity that happens in memory.

Wiretaps involve analyzing past data and actively monitoring new communications. Including every person you call or every website you visit. Police often have to delete 99%+ of intercepted data because it's irrelevant to the case.

That's different in many ways from a single physical search warrant on a house or computer.

And now they are becoming the go-to investigative tool for every criminal case...

I'd wager police also have to ignore 99%+ of the junk in your house when they execute a regular search warrant. They're going to look through your underwear drawer, but they're not actually going to confiscate all your underwear.

99% of the things sitting in any persons house at any moment is not as private as their ongoing phone calls, emails, websites they visit, etc. Nor does it simultaneously invade other peoples privacy in the process (any person they communicate with)... over a multi-month period.

Using your analogy, the 99% of things the police are supposed to ignore, such as their clothing drawers, does not carry equal weight in terms of privacy.

I'm not unique in having this position, lawyers/judges/courts view it as a much broader breach of privacy as well and they (often) require much stronger legal restrictions for the police than a standard search warrant.

That doesn't really scale does it. I imagine the tax man, however could set up some very nice cloud-based big data trawls for documents containing evidence of undeclared income.

Totally different level of scrutiny. Your home is your castle, and the police need to demonstrate cause to violate the sanctity of your home. The scope of warrants is usually limited as well. The police need to look for specific things. Also, unless the police demonstrate that you are associated with the crime, the police won't get a warrant to search your home because your brother committed a crime.

Third party requests for data are different, these often only require court orders or subpeonas, which don't receive nearly as much scrutiny. Your information may be accessed by an investigation relating to another person, for instance.

Your best privacy protection is to store stuff at home and access it remotely using an encrypted link, and to store your credential securely. (Think smartcard.)

> I honestly doubt 99% of consumers care

But the decision to purchase this will be made by businesses. Are you equally confident 99% of businesses won't care about literally 100% of their corporate information sitting with Amazon, which in the past has shown its willingness to subject international customers to US pressures?

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/amazon-and-wikileaks-f...

Yes.

The growth of cloud (storing all your important shit on hard drives owned and operated by someone else) has been increasing these past few years.

I thought the world had gone batshit insane even before the NSA leaks, but it appears I was part of an incredibly small minority. Some people may have come to our side, but not many. Because really, if you don't care that Company Y has access to your shit, what difference does another third-party make?

People that think like me are definitely the minority, unfortunately.

This service really doesn't strike me as something the average consumer would use, at least not directly. This seems to be targeted at businesses, which are much more likely to care about potential NSA or other similar snooping.

Here's the reality, as I see it - most businesses, that is to say, (US) commercial enterprises that operate within the confines of the USA already comply with any and all search warrants, FISA letters, government requests, and so on.

In fact, most of the traditional large enterprises in the US keep teams of people around to operate policy and software solutions solely to archive and protect data that may apply to government and civil investigations.

Large enterprises are concerned about individual actors - "hackers", competitors, unscrupulous investors who want to gain access to sensitive information. If the government comes calling, they'll just give up the information, because why do they care? The vast majority of large companies in the US don't store sensitive information on behalf of their users like Google does. If Exxon-Mobil can save $30m/year by running VDI on Amazon, they will - if the government wanted the contents of any employee laptop, they'd turn it over anyway.

It's end-users, service providers, and politically active organizations who don't want to put their compute on centralized infrastructure.

> I honestly doubt 99% of consumers care, since the NSA isn't concerned with their business.

True, but some of the rest (like me) are more concerned with Amazon (or Google, or Facebook, or Apple) having access to their information than with the NSA. Personally, I'd rather have a government spying on me than a corporation.

This is aimed at business. I already know for sure that my work computer, email, chat, etc can be read at will by my IT department. They can also hand over absolutely all of it to law enforcement at the slightest whiff of liability. So, really the NSA business is not relevnt.

So, really the NSA business is not relevnt.

Until the industrial espionage and insider trading leaks come out. Then all hell will break loose.

>Then all hell will break loose

Or they will still not care.

If that's something that affects 0.001% of business, and if some culprits have been found and punished (for the leaks to come out), then businesses will probably continue using AWS and not caring, thinking "what are the chances"?

Except if something causes direct and measurable money loss, they wont really care, even if it's proven to have hurt this or that other company.

I count that as highly unlikely. I think it's more likely for hackers to find an exploit than for the NSA to willingly collect and sell information.

> I already know for sure that my work computer, email, chat, etc can be read at will by my IT department

Yes, but it's not about you. It's about your company, the legal obligations they have to protect your data, their customers data, and their internal IP from outside intervention.

Consider that you have a legal obligation to protect the privacy of your data. Now if you are served a warrant to give up the data or to secretly tap connections to your server, you are probably legally covered. But when they just go straight to Amazon to get your data you have no such cover. Users can rightly ask why you put their data in a place out of your own control, your own legal accountability.

Prior to this year, one would have said that such events were so extremely rare, and in such exceptional circumstances (on credible threat of an immediate major terrorist attack, etc) that it was an acceptable risk for a business to take. That's now flipped. The presumption is that if you store data in the cloud then it is being routinely intercepted and is freely available to a multitude of parties outside of your control. That's the crucial change that is going to put cloud storage and services off the table for anyone with sensitive data.

There's nothing you cand do and nobody will sue you. They can use other methods to grab the data, if they really wanted to. It's not as if you'll be completely secure if you don't use Amazon's services.

Not trying to deflect any blame away from the NSA, but I think its likely there are other nations' spy agencies (and cyber-criminals) doing similar things that have not come out into the open yet. What I mean is that if it wasn't the NSA revelations, then it would have been other ones coming out at some point, with the same effect upon cloud services.

Only most other nations doing such either are already bedfellows with the US (the "Five Eyes" et al), or don't have any real reach and power to do anything major spying or even to take advantage of any data they can gather.

>How sad that this is launching after the NSA scandal has pretty much ensured it will fail

I very much doubt 95% of the potential audience will even care about that.

>This is almost certainly the most efficient and optimal way to do desktop computing

I fail to see how it's the "most efficient" and "optimal". I don't see anything optimal about struggling with network level latencies in some remote shared system.

>We've been waiting really for decades for networks and CPUs to get good enough that it's actually viable for a real good experience on the client end. And when we finally get there

For tons of applications we'll never "get there" (compared to client computer). The latency, even the one caused by the speed of light limit (200 ms for a roundtrip around earth), is big enough to be disturbing for a lot of desktopy stuff -- much more if you add all the additional latencies and factor in common connection speeds.

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