I Heckled an Amazon AWS Presentation
I got an email a couple of weeks ago letting me know that Amazon was coming to my town - (Brisbane, Australia) to do a little talk about Amazon Web Services (AWS) . For those not in the biz, the same Amazon that sells books, has a separate B2B division that sells cloud services. These are servers and databases in the cloud that provide a cost effective way for start-ups and big companies to scale websites on demand.
The basic gist is that instead of buying or renting a dedicated server, you can rent "server instances" by the hour and have the quantity of servers scale up or down, intraday depending on your traffic. It's a pretty cool service, though others may be doing it better and more cheaply - (Racskpace and Microsoft's Azure to name a couple).
The room was packed and the Amazon presenter gave a good presentation with a demo on how the service works. I was surprised though, that during the Q&A at the end, the first question was "When will you have a datacentre in Australia?" The presenter shucked and jived and basically said "I don't know".
The next question was from an IT lawyer about the legal ramifications of hosting Australian content in the United States legal jurisiction. More shucking and jiving - and the presenter actually said "this question's above my pay grade". I was really proud that my Australian cohorts were asking these questions. It laid the groundwork for me to ask my question. I raised my hand, and the presenter chose me hopefully - I could tell he was praying for a technical question - he didn't seem in his element defending the legality issues. Now was my chance - "I don't mean to badger you on the legal stuff" (I did) "but didn't Amazon shut down Wikileaks at the behest of the US government?"
Immediate uproar of laughter, and the guy looked pretty unhappy. More, desperate shucking and jiving - he told us that Amazon made a statement on this, it's online - and he had nothing more to say on the matter. We all left shortly after that, but I heard people talking about it on the way out.
I didn't go there to poison his seminar - but I feel no remorse for it. If corporations are going to be treated as people in the United States - then they need to be held personally accountable for misdeeds and weasel actions.
The statement from Amazon says that Wikileaks violated the AWS terms of service because Wikileaks did not "own" the documents stored on Wikileaks. This seems particularly weasely to me. So many websites hosting with AWS have text content that they don't "own". Comments, embeds, uploaded documents, email addresses, images - the list is endless.
I hope they get heckled more about this, because they deserve it. I also hope that Paypal comes to town ...
13 Comments
MarineGunrockNice.
dystopianfuturetodayRight on, dag.
HybridHeckling totally warranted. It always surprises me when corporations do talks like this and send people who can't answer inevitable questions. How could they not have predicted these kind of questions? They are lecturing to people who care and know about these issues!
It's annoying for both parties. For them, they feel stupid, and for the audience, they don't get the answers they want.
campionidelmondoThat poor guy most likely had no hand in the shutdown of the WikiLeaks servers, I don't see how he deserves to be heckled. Also, it's just a (conspiracy) theory that they shut down the WikiLeaks servers because of the US Gov't, or because of massive DDOS attacks.
Very likely Amazon told the guy to refer to their statement if any questions about WikiLeaks arise. I dunno, it's a free seminar, don't ruin it for the people who actually go there for constructive reasons.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
Look, I wasn't personally abusive to the guy, but he's a representative of his company - and I think his potential Australian customers have a right to know that Amazon may not be a good place for their sensitive data.
>> ^campionidelmondo:
That poor guy most likely had no hand in the shutdown of the WikiLeaks servers, I don't see how he deserves to be heckled. Also, it's just a (conspiracy) theory that they shut down the WikiLeaks servers because of the US Gov't, or because of massive DDOS attacks.
Very likely Amazon told the guy to refer to their statement if any questions about WikiLeaks arise. I dunno, it's a free seminar, don't ruin it for the people who actually go there for constructive reasons.
campionidelmondo>> ^dag:
Look, I wasn't personally abusive to the guy, but he's a representative of his company - and I think his potential Australian customers have a right to know that Amazon may not be a good place for their sensitive data.
Ok, fair enough.
KnivesOutIn related news, apparently the Sony PSN hack was perpetrated using insecurities in the Amazon cloud infrastructure.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Sony-PSN-Hack-Attack-Launched-from-Amazon-s-Servers-200441.shtml
Ryjkyj>> ^dag:
Look, I wasn't personally abusive to the guy, but he's a representative of his company - and I think his potential Australian customers have a right to know that Amazon may not be a good place for their sensitive data.
>> ^campionidelmondo:
That poor guy most likely had no hand in the shutdown of the WikiLeaks servers, I don't see how he deserves to be heckled. Also, it's just a (conspiracy) theory that they shut down the WikiLeaks servers because of the US Gov't, or because of massive DDOS attacks.
Very likely Amazon told the guy to refer to their statement if any questions about WikiLeaks arise. I dunno, it's a free seminar, don't ruin it for the people who actually go there for constructive reasons.
Meanwhile, the guy will probably go back to his boss and say something to the effect of, "man, that meeting was pretty intense. These guys want way more than just tech specs, they want assurance that the service will be quality on a lot of levels. One guy even mentioned our role in wikileaks."
And here's what his boss will hear, "blah, blah, blah, you should hold a meeting about where you want to eat lunch today."
cosmovitelli says...Right on. They decided to screw their customers when the senate gets worked up, so caveat emptor.
deathcow*noflylist
rottenseedThat night, his family learned that their bread winner would once again need to seek another job.
"it's ok kids, we'll be fine," he tells is children. "We don't want to go back to uncle Sal and aunt Patricia's house!" they cry.
They didn't want to go back because uncle Sal had touched them sexually on their last visit. Thanks to you, a little boy and a little girl are experiencing things they should never know...
Peroxidehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X_Ot0k4XJc
Boise_LibGood for you, sir, good for you.
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