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andrewguentheron Ransomware-resistant backups with duplicity and AWS S3

You are correct, S3 lifecycle policies support deleting non-current object versions once they're X days old as well as X versions old: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/lifecy...

andrewguentheron Mozilla Rally

So rather than fighting mass data harvesting, Mozilla just wants a piece of the pie and is trying to claim the moral high ground?

Mozilla's positioning as a privacy advocate while consistently pushing projects that are antithetical to privacy is just nauseating.

andrewguentheron BreakingFormation: AWS CloudFormation Vulnerability

> Our research team believes, given the data found on the host (including credentials and data involving internal endpoints), that an attacker could abuse this vulnerability to bypass tenant boundaries, giving them privileged access to any resource in AWS.

This is bullshit and their own report indicates the opposite. Hugely irresponsible of Orca to include this kind of unfounded speculation in their report. But also this is what AWS gets for having a "if there's no customer impact, there's no disclosure" security policy, it leaves the door open for this kind of shit.

andrewguentheron BreakingFormation: AWS CloudFormation Vulnerability

https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1481682859324760070

More detail from Colm here.

andrewguentheron BreakingFormation: AWS CloudFormation Vulnerability

Even worse, they got AccessDenied when making that request and then extrapolated that they have access to $everything

andrewguentheron I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.

andrewguentheron I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

> Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful.

Surprised to read this. The tooling is what I miss most from Amazon, but I was in AWS the whole time, I've heard the retail situation is quite different.

andrewguentheron Tell HN: Rise in AWS accounts getting hacked and owner being stuck with the bill

Organization child accounts are not rootless, they're just seeded with a random password

andrewguentheron Tell HN: Rise in AWS accounts getting hacked and owner being stuck with the bill

MFA needs to be forced on by default for all new accounts created with the UI. It is utterly irresponsible for AWS to not do this. People always counter with "you should know better!" But AWS markets itself to college kids. People were all up in arms and Robinhood allowing 18 year olds to create accounts which could result in unbounded losses, but AWS somehow gets a pass?

andrewguentheron AWS us-east-1 outage

Absolutely! Anecdotally, out of all the teams I interacted with in seven years at AWS across multiple arms of the company, I saw only a handful of bad teams. But like online reviews, the unhappy people are typically the loudest. I'm happy they are though, it's always important to push to be better, but I don't believe that AWS is the hellish place to work that HN discourse would lead many to believe.

andrewguentheron Amazon packages pile up after AWS outage spawns delivery havoc

Region outages happen, which is why the guidance is to build in multiple regions, but even Amazon sometimes doesn't take their own advice. Sometimes the reason is good, sometimes it isn't.

andrewguentheron AWS us-east-1 outage

Because there's a VP approval step for updating the status page and no repercussions for VPs who don't approve updates in a timely manner. Updating the status page is fully automated on both sides of VP approval. If the status page doesn't update, it's because a VP wouldn't do it.

andrewguentheron AWS us-east-1 outage

They aren't meant to be, but shitty teams are shitty. You can also create a COE and assign it to another team. When I was at AWS, I had a few COEs assigned to me by disgruntled teams just trying to make me suffer and I told them to pound sand. For my own team, I wrote COEs quite often and found it to be a really great process for surfacing systemic issues with our management chain and making real improvements, but it needs to be used correctly.

andrewguentheron AWS us-east-1 outage

> Yes, VP approval is needed to make any updates on the status dashboard. But that's not as hard as it may seem. AWS executives are extremely operation-obsessed, and when there is an outage of any size are engaged with their service teams immediately.

My experience generally aligns with amzn-throw, but this right here is why. There's a manual step here and there's always drama surrounding it. The process to update the status page is fully automated on both sides of this step, if you removed VP approval, the page would update immediately. So if the page doesn't update, it is always a VP dragging their feet. Even worse is that lags in this step were never discussed in the postmortem reviews that I was a part of.

andrewguentheron GoDaddy Security Breach

There's tons. Google domains, name.com, almost anyone but GoDaddy

andrewguentheron Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

If only it were once a year. Every quarter I get a whole thread spread out over a couple weeks. "Did you see our last email?" "There's still time to save Wikipedia!"

andrewguentheron Jimmy Wales’ Final Email

I get a ton of value out of Wikipedia and I donate annually.

Fun fact: If you unsubscribe from the donation email list, you are re-subscribed the next time you donate. It's scummy and infuriating and I hate to think that this kind of crap is what my money is actually going towards.

andrewguentheron Amazon Kindles with 3G will start to lose cellular network access in December

I mean, free for as long as the cellular infrastructure exists is still pretty damn good

andrewguentheron Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

You can fix the bug but emit a metric on the original code path to estimate the impact after the fix is made. It wouldn't tell you who sent what to who, but would give you a better idea of impact for an incident report or postmortem.

andrewguentheron Signal on Android: Images sent to wrong contacts

> This bug was extraordinarily rare, and because we have no metrics/remote log collection, there was an initial period where we had to spend time adding logging and collecting user-submitted logs to try to track it down.

Without telemetry, can you actually back up the claim that this issue was extremely rare?

andrewguentheron AWS's Egregious Egress

Thanks for pointing this out, I've gone ahead and removed mentions of Cloudflare's pricing from my comment since I can't find an authoritative source for their egress pricing in their docs. The point general point still stands, all cloud provider egress costs suck and Cloudflare is just trying to strongarm AWS into entering a bandwidth agreement with them.

andrewguentheron AWS's Egregious Egress

The original version of my post called out that you cannot actually see Cloudflare's pricing without an account, that link was the best I could find. Funny to be calling out their competitors for pricing when they won't even publish theirs...

andrewguentheron AWS's Egregious Egress

AWS Egress - $0.09/GB

Azure Egress - $0.0875/GB

GCP Egress - $0.11/GB

Alibaba Egress - $0.123

Interesting that no mention is made of the other cloud providers pricing here when AWS isn't even the most expensive egress...Oh! I wonder if it is because Cloudflare has data transfer agreements with GCP, Azure, and Alibaba! But that would mean this is a shoddy hit piece to strong arm AWS into an agreement with them. Nonsense, I'm sure Cloudflare would never do that...

Edit: I've removed claims about Cloudfront's pricing since it isn't actually clear what they charge for egress and seems to vary on a number of factors. Thanks Dylan16807 for pointing that out.

andrewguentheron Amazon S3 quietly deprecates BitTorrent support

If AWS is deprecating something, then it's likely that literally no one was using it and the few that might have been were given complimentary consulting to move them off of it.

andrewguentheron Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

Opera Mini used a resource compression proxy. That's not what this patent is for.

andrewguentheron Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

Yep, this is exactly what I was getting at. Shadow is one of many examples of application streaming services which aren't limited to the browser and offer similar hardware (or even flexible hardware) at a lower price point.

andrewguentheron Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

Very different projects than what Blimp was. Blimp was integrated into Chromium's rendering pipeline itself to stream draw commands directly to the client browser.

andrewguentheron Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

I agree they would pay more, but I'm still skeptical of $30-50. As I mentioned in a comment below, why limit it to the browser? If you've got all these resources just offer a full VDI which more typically prices in this ballpark.

andrewguentheron Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

I'm not skeptical at all the people would pay for this. I worked on a cloud browser for seven years, there's a bunch of different market needs for this stuff. But $30-50 feels really high. We got feedback from enterprise customers that they were looking in the $5-15 range per user per month. That said, we pushed the security angle much more than performance, so the dynamics are a bit different.

Congrats on all the work here. Browser streaming isn't easy stuff!

andrewguentheron Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

I actually worked on browser isolation products for seven years. No need to be rude.

EDIT: Just because the attitude of this comment really grinds my gears: Here's my patent for network-based content rendering which was submitted back in 2017: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10878187B1

Believe me, I've thought about this a little more than 5 minutes.