AWS takedown notice to third-party Re:Invent session trackers | Hacker News Reader

AWS takedown notice to third-party Re:Invent session trackers

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135 pointscebert51 comments

I once signed up to attend an AWS event way in advance, and provided my email address and phone number when I signed up. Plus, I had chatted with our rep/salesperson about how I was attending this event.

Then, on the day of the event, I drove 5 hours to the conference hall, but when I arrive there, none of the staff know anything about an AWS event! there is some other event happening for high school teachers, and that's it. I double and triple check the AwS event website. It's still up, and still has the same location and date. I call our rep, who reaches out to some other people and eventually gets back to me and tells me the event was cancelled!

Why did nobody reached out to let me know, and why didn't they even take the website down! it was bizarre. I really had thought I was going insane.

I had brunch, and then drove back another 5 hours. At least I got reimbursed for the mileage!

This is when I contact my AWS rep and get credits for the amount I’d be contracting you out for over those 12 hours.

I would expect a full on junket at my favorite place in my town, with the presenters I want to see.

Driving 10 hours both ways to an AWS event to look at some slide decks you can already find online and eat some mid-tier catering doesn't seem like a great use of a day to me.

It's not just slide decks, and also the networking at those events is quite good. Swag and catering vary wildly though (even in France where poor catering is somewhat insulting).

Poor catering is insulting in America too, we just happen to be a society that insults by default.

Besides the slide content, the purpose of conferences like this is to get to know other people in the industry, have organic discussion, talk about common issues or needs from the vendors, and learn from one another. The sessions are the frame for that. And, if the company you work for is paying for it, then it's a nice vacation, if it's a multi-day event.

Nor me, but if they're going to advertise an event, they should hold it, and if they're going to cancel then they should inform the people who RSVP-ed.

I will add that, if it is on company time, I may use it as a networking opportunity.

Probably live in Texas or the midwest where 5 hours is considered a short drive

LA - San Jose?

It was on company time, my boss wanted me to attend, and I was much younger than I am now :shrug:

Nothing wrong with a life full of interesting experiences. Looking back, would you rather say:

- remember that Tuesday last October, when I spent 10 hours driving to ... AWS ... or

- remember that Tuesday last October, when I debugged my Flexbox CSS?

The best part about traveling is sampling the local buffet in more ways than one.

I had coworkers fly out to a training class and met up with some other attendees in the lobby prior to the training. That's when they all realized that there was no training course and no one had told any of them.

Glad to see they are focussing on the right things. They couldn't give me a account manager that stayed longer then a few months, or understood their own processes and products, or could do anything useful beyond link support documentation...

But glad to see they took care of these terrible grifters! How dare they make the exprerience for our guests/user better! /s

tbf, they've invested a lot in messing up the UX the last 6 years, so maybe this is part of that effort..

And can you blame them? Werner has gone from smart dude doing cool stuff to a drunk that makes his presentations the night before.

Loved aws from the start and still use the platform but frankly it’s expensive, feels very hard to get help from and when there’s alternatives it’s hard to want to continue to reward their mediocre customer experience.

> that makes his presentations the night before

is that not how we all make presentations?

Haha i had hoped when you invite that many people to a conference you’re a little more organized :P

> account manager that stayed longer then a few months

Average tenure at amazon for corporate employees is less than a year.

> could do anything useful beyond link support documentation

There is no incentive to do so, on the contrary, the metrics for the SA are quantitative and focused on scale, not one-on-one interactions.

Of course, if you are a large customer, have interesting projects that can be used to improve one's promodoc, the SA has a good manager etc., it's another story.

Host an event you where you're hoping to co-opt third party developers into using and evangelizing your platform. Provide a lousy interface to navigate the event. Send cease and desist notices to those same developers when they try to improve it. Hmm.

Well, for one reason, having third-party apps for an AWS event that might confuse users about how official/genuine what they're saying is... could be a big security problem.

(For example, you just know that some users would be willing to enter their IAM credentials when prompted at some point.)

There's also all the marketing data leakage, and access to the users to promote other companies' products, or maybe even get an affiliate/intermediate cut for AWS sales that were already AWS's leads to begin with.

There's a fair amount of precedent for third party sites hosting schedules, descriptions, and other info about other entities events. Google, as one example, has quite a few widget type things that pop up if you use a search query asking about specific events, concert tours, etc. Try "upcoming conferences", "taylor swift concert dates". Or, similar things like airline and train schedules.

Timing is unfortunate. They should have done it since the beginning, months ago.

> might confuse users

The email from AWS could easily have said:

We request you put a notice on every page saying "This is a copy of data from <Official Site>. Please check there to verify correctness". If you don't want to add such a notice, then we respectfully request you take this data down, since it is against our terms to host the data in this fashion.

That would be nice. But how would they check that the trackers comply?

Taking down has the advantage of being easy to enforce.

I think the enforceability of these things is roughly equivalent.

What’s most frustrating about this decision is that these planning apps existed for months, but AWS chose to wait to pull them down the day before registration. I spent several hours planning my sessions out. This is a disappointing move. All these apps did was present these sessions listings in more usable calendar views and allowed you to bookmark them.

I thought you couldn't copyright facts, like what times certain events are scheduled to be held.

The C&Ds on Twitter offer no rationale for the takedown request (i.e. DMCA claims or whatever). It looks like they're just "asking nicely" at this point.

Anyone can send a take down notice to anything for any reason -- the burden of proof is on the creator (and nobody seems to care whether or not you're the copyright holder when you file). In this case, it was probably copyright violations in descriptions and/or photos. Once they remove the offending content, they can go back up.

I'm still waiting for someone to send a take-down notice to ToS's on major platforms. That'll be entertaining.

Yeah, copyrighting the descriptions seems fair to me. It's not an identifier but rather a creative description of the talk. (I feel like most speakers would want their abstracts distributed far and wide, but obviously AWS feels differently.)

I suppose at the end of the day, everyone receiving nastygrams could have a contract with AWS that prohibits disclosing the names of talks at their conference. That is a shitty condition to attach to a cloud service and should not be legal, but it probably is. (I wonder what speech conditions I agree to for receiving electricity at my house. I've never checked.)

The tools could also invite the speakers to submit a description on their site (I assume contact information for speakers is available). If they have to submit the same description a bunch of times, they’d probably advocate for them to AWS.

> It looks like they're just "asking nicely" at this point.

That's precisely what a cease and desist is: asking nicely, possibly with legal merit, possibly not.

Maybe AWS should hire (even on a contract basis) these folks and let them build the tools users want. The AWS reinvent site/tooling in years past has had a horrendous UI, was slow/unresponsive...basically unusable especially in the bowels of a casino with already spotty wifi or cell service.

I guess AWS just wants the analytics data, what sessions you clicked, what were your search queries, etc.

https://nitter.net/donkersgood/status/1714161357510095292?s=...

I don't understand why AWS events have such terrible scheduling tools. I attended one in NYC and all I wanted was a calendar of all events so I could see what was going on when. Seems like such a simple request, but it's not offered. What benefit does the complexity of the existing system give to Amazon?

What happened to customer obsession?

Yet another day 2 decision by our day 2 CEO

We had a good run on the back of these cloud providers.

It’s about time to take some of the learnings and prepare to slowly move away from them again.

People never learn. If your app is dependant on another system you are in their hands. The only real solution is not to be dependant like that.

Or at least always be prepared to get the rug pulled. I also have a hard time to understand why anyone would use their free time and energy to help a billion dollar company to get richer for no reward.

These are developers and enthusiasts actively interested and invested in AWS tech and as a hobby project they build these apps and sites to share among the like minded community. Usually nothing commercial nor with any long term usage in mind.

> If your app is dependant on another system you are in their hands. The only real solution is not to be dependant like that.

I don't see how this tracks when it's scheduling for an AWS run conference. The source of data for the event schedule is AWS.

> no reward.

The reward for some is just having a better UX for planning their attendance.

You shouldn't be downvoted - you're not wrong. The problem is that moves like this are counter to Amazons "customer obsessed" model.

These weren't startups monetizing calendar software. It was geeks who were going to AWS who threw together a better UI for it. They didn't do it for Amazon, they did it for themselves, the challenge, and as the kids call it, the "clout".

Is there any clout in providing unpaid labor to a body shop? I'd think the opposite, but I am probably an outlier.

I don't know what you mean by "body shop". If you're talking about a literal car body shop, your analogy is broken.

Again, it isn't "providing unpaid labor to AWS". It's "problem solving and exhibiting talents to others that are in your field". It's showing you have the skill to throw such a thing together quickly. It's a resume builder. And most importantly, what you seem to be missing, it's a fun challenge to some people.

If I stretched your analogy a bit, I would say it's like seeing a body shop do a shitty job on a car, and then buying $30 worth of tools and doing a better job in an hour than they did, then posting the video to Youtube to show all your fellow car enthusiasts.

Can a lawyer say whether those terms would claim to preclude training an LLM on the site?

And will that stand up?

Ah, that's the new "clean room" approach? Just train an LLM and anything it outputs is wholly unencumbered by any intellectual property laws. That does seem to be roughly what the big players are claiming.

Funny how "cleanroom" and "laundering" have very different connotations.

The official re:invent app with session tracker is really atrocious. I already decided to skip re:invent this year because the content just wasn't worth the time/effort/expense but this makes me feel even better about my decision.

There is no cloud. It's just someone else's computer.

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