Pro-Palestine activists blockaded an Amazon distribution center in the northwestern Minneapolis suburb of Maple Grove as part of A15 Action, a global day of action against Israel’s war on Gaza. In a separate action in the Twin Cities, a Wells Fargo Bank branch in South Minneapolis was vandalized and had its windows broken.
Archiv: Amazon Inc. / Amazon Web Services (monopolies)
The Details About the CIA‘s Deal With Amazon
(July 17, 2014)
This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community. If the technology plays out as officials envision, it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
For the first time, agencies within the intelligence community will be able to order a variety of on-demand computing and analytic services from the CIA and National Security Agency
Amid layoffs and lost games, Amazon Luna comes to Canada, Germany, and the UK
Remember: Google Stadia is dead as a doornail, and Amazon Luna, the company’s rival cloud gaming service, wasn’t doing much better.
Amazon has rolled out contactless tech to 200 locations including Panera cafes
On Wednesday the U.S. cafe chain Panera Bread unveiled Amazon One devices, which let customers scan their palms to pay, for two locations in greater St. Louis. Kumar said the deployment would expand to 10 to 20 Panera cafes in coming months.
A palm swipe would also let Panera pull up restaurant goers‘ rewards accounts and order histories, the companies said.
Kumar declined to state the deal‘s value but described the business model as selling software and devices as a service.
The privacy loophole in your doorbell
(07.03.2023)
Larkin, now incensed that police were requesting footage from inside his home for an investigation that didn’t even involve him, wanted to fight the warrant. He estimated that a lawyer would have been too expensive, and he only had about seven days to challenge it before Ring would comply. He still doesn’t understand how a judge could have signed off on a warrant asking for footage from a camera inside his home, when the investigation was on his neighbor.
“That says to me that the cops can go in and subpoena anybody, no matter how weak their evidence is,” he said.
Amazon Ring: Selbst Wohnzimmer-Aufnahmen sind nicht vor Polizei sicher
(09.03.2023)
Michael Larkin erzählt Politico, dass er sich gegen die Herausgabe seiner privaten Aufnahmen wehren wollte. Schließlich sollte sie für eine Ermittlung genutzt werden, in der er nicht einmal Verdächtiger war. Doch Larkin konnte sich keinen Anwalt leisten. Das Unternehmen schickte deshalb nach der kurzen Einspruchsfrist von sieben Tagen alle auf ihren Servern gespeicherten Aufnahmen an die Polizei. Zum Glück hatte Larkin die Kameras in seinem Haus so eingestellt, dass sie nur im Falle eines Einbruchs filmen. Dennoch wurde auch jede Menge Material, das Larkin selbst zeigt, an die Polizei verschickt.
„Das ist das, was mich am meisten aufregt – die Tatsache, dass ein Richter das einfach so absegnet“, sagt Larkin gegenüber Politico. „Er gibt einfach Material von mir heraus, ohne dass ich in irgendeiner Form an dem Fall beteiligt bin.“
When I opposed this Amazon project coming to New York bc it was a scam of public funds, the whole power establishment came after us. Billboards went up in Times Sq denouncing me. Powerful pols promised revenge. Op-Eds & CEOs insulted my intelligence. In the end, we were right.
Amazon‘s labor exploitation is a return to the 1920s — and unions are our best hope out
(14.06.2021)
Amazon claims to be innovative, but its strategies of market dominance and labor exploitation are as old as capitalism itself, and were perfected by predecessors like Standard Oil, General Motors, US Steel, AT&T, Walmart and Microsoft. My union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, views this as history repeating itself.
The Roaring ‘20s were great for those at the top, but meant massive exploitation of workers. As we embark further into the 2020s, the Teamsters will make sure that Amazon cannot repeat a history where workers suffered acutely to make ends meet and were frequently injured or even killed on the job while company executives stuffed their pockets with the profits.
How companies like Amazon, Nike and FedEx avoid paying federal taxes
(14.04.2022)
The 55 corporations cited by ITEP would have paid a collective total of $8.5 billion. Instead, they received $3.5 billion in tax rebates, collectively draining $12 billion from the U.S. government, according to the institute.
Amazon had sales income of €44bn in Europe in 2020 but paid no corporation tax
(4, May 2021)
Accounts for Amazon EU Sarl, through which it sells products to hundreds of millions of households in the UK and across Europe, show that despite collecting record income, the Luxembourg unit made a €1.2bn loss and therefore paid no tax. (…)
The Luxembourg unit – which handles sales for the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden – employs just 5,262 staff meaning that the income per employ amounts to €8.4m.
Amazon Income Taxes 2010-2022 | AMZN
Amazon annual income taxes for 2022 were $–3.217B, a 167.15% decline from 2021.
Amazon annual income taxes for 2021 were $4.791B, a 67.34% increase from 2020.
Amazon annual income taxes for 2020 were $2.863B, a 20.6% increase from 2019.
Amazon Gross Profit 2010-2022 | AMZN
Amazon annual gross profit for 2022 was $225.152B, a 14.01% increase from 2021.
Amazon annual gross profit for 2021 was $197.478B, a 29.28% increase from 2020.
Amazon annual gross profit for 2020 was $152.757B, a 32.85% increase from 2019.
Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism – Membership
Founding Members:
YouTube
Twitter
Microsoft
facebook
General Members:
zoom
tumblr
WordPress.com
JustPaste
airbnb
mailchimp
Discord
Instagram
WhatsApp
Pinterest
amazon
Dropbox
MEGA
Linkedin
YouTube
Twitter
Microsoft
facebook
Black Hat 2021: DNS loophole makes nation-state level spying as easy as registering a domain
(Aug 4, 2021)
We have no way of knowing whether the loophole has already been exploited: Anyone could have collected data undetected for over a decade.
We do know this is still an active threat vector – while two major DNS providers (Amazon and Google) have fixed the issue, others may still be vulnerable. As a result, millions of devices are potentially vulnerable.
(…)
After analyzing it, we learned it was dynamic DNS traffic from Windows machines that were querying the hijacked name server about itself. Dynamic DNS keeps DNS records automatically up to date when an IP address changes. It’s traditionally been used in large networks that host internal services, and use their own internal servers. In short, the traffic we received contained sensitive information that was never supposed to leave an organizations internal network.
The dynamic DNS traffic we “wiretapped” came from over 15,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, 45 U.S. government agencies, and 85 international government agencies. The data included a wealth of valuable intel like internal and external IP addresses, computer names, employee names and office locations.
Ex-Amazon Cloud Worker Found Guilty in Capital One Hack: The huge hack affected more than 100 million US customers.
(June 18, 2022)
„She wanted data, she wanted money, and she wanted to brag,“ Assistant United States Attorney Andrew Friedman said in closing arguments, according to the release. The Justice Department didn‘t identify the other organizations affected by Thompson‘s activity.
Firefox is making connections to cloudfront.net and locprod.prod.mozaws.net on startup
(27.07.2020)
No replies
(…)
Why does make Firefox makes those connections?
What is transmitted?
And How can I disable them?
Amazon Disables NSO Group CloudFront Accounts To Prevent “Pegasus” PR Crisis
(July 19, 2021)
While this was unearthed in 2020 itself, Amazon declined to take any action or even comment on the story. Now, Pegasus is linked to human rights abuse around the world. So Amazon has shut down the CloudFront accounts linked to NSO Group. For the uninitiated, CloudFront is a content delivery network by Amazon.
The Details About the CIA‘s Deal With Amazon
(July 17, 2014)
This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community. If the technology plays out as officials envision, it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
For the first time, agencies within the intelligence community will be able to order a variety of on-demand computing and analytic services from the CIA and National Security Agency
EU excludes cloud services from 6th sanctions package for unknown reasons – Podoliak
„At first, the EU Council announces the blockage of Russia from EU cloud services in the Sixth Sanction Package. Then, the EU Council edits the message, removing these references. No clarifications or explanations from the officials,“ Podoliak said on Twitter.
„We must increase the sanctions pressure, not decrease,“ the adviser to the head of the President‘s Office said.
TLS 1.3 is nearing its 4th birthday, and @awscloud still doesn‘t support it in ALB. @AWSSecurityInfo, what‘s up?
New DNS Flaw Enables ‘Nation-State Level Spying’ on Companies
(7. August 2021)
DNSaaS providers (also referred to as managed DNS providers) rent DNS to other businesses who don’t want to maintain and protect yet additional network resources on their own.
(…)
The Wiz researchers stated, “We found a simple loophole that allowed us to intercept a portion of worldwide dynamic DNS traffic going through managed DNS providers like Amazon and Google,”
“The dynamic DNS traffic we ‘wiretapped’ came from over 15,000 organizations, including Fortune 500 companies, 45 U.S. government agencies, and 85 international government agencies.”
Employee/computer identities and locations and extremely sensitive data about organizations’ infrastructure, such as Internet-exposed network equipment, were among the
Cloud Firewall
Block connections to pages and web resources hosted in major cloud services if the user wishes to do so. Supports blocking Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Cloudflare.
Lawsuit accusing tech giants of spying is allowed to proceed
(September 14, 2022)
In the legal battles with a focus on listening devices like “smart speakers,” etc, that are currently active in the US, Google and Amazon are not spared either. Reports, including by Reuters, say that a number of filings allege that their devices and apps are recording users’ conversations without their consent, and that Big Tech companies use this material to make money by giving it to advertisers, who can then more precisely target people based on knowledge of their behavior and interests.
NSO Is an Arm of Israel‘s Government
In 2019 NSO agreed to reconnect the Pegasus system in Saudi Arabia, in the context of Netanyahu’s contacts regarding the Abraham Accords. Until the accords were announced, Israel gave NSO a permit to sell Pegasus to almost all of the countries that signed the agreements.
The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon
(Jan. 28, 2022)
The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.
F.B.I. Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones
(Jan. 28, 2022)
The Times found that sales of Pegasus played a critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements, signed at a Trump White House ceremony, that normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab adversaries.
The U.S. had also moved to acquire Pegasus, The Times found. The F.B.I., in a deal never previously reported, bought the spyware in 2019, despite multiple reports that it had been used against activists and political opponents in other countries. It also spent two years discussing whether to deploy a newer product, called Phantom, inside the United States.
Biotechnologie, Staat und Kapital
Dieser Markt ließe sich unermesslich steigern, sollte die Propaganda, dass die gesamte Menschheit (B. Gates) und in Deutschland fast die gesamte Bevölkerung (A. Merkel) geimpft werden solle und auch müsse, umgesetzt werden. Deshalb schätzt das Finanz- und Analyseunternehmen „Morningstar“ für 2021 zu erwartenden Umsatz von 67 Milliarden US-Dollar für Covid-19-Impfstoffe. Der Umsatz der Rüstungsindustrie umfasste 2019 166 Mrd. US-Dollar.
Zwei dieser Biotech-Unternehmen sollen näher betrachtet werden: Biontech und Curevac.
Blue Origin unveils next flight, TMZ says Captain Kirk to be aboard
Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, announced plans on Monday for its next flight and the news and entertainment website TMZ said it may include a celebrity astronaut — William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on „Star Trek.“
Facebook will soon be able to scan your texts – sparking privacy panic
(06.08.2021)
Other companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are also said to be working on homomorphic encryption.
NSO Spyware Scandal May Threaten Israel’s Love Affair With Amazon and Google
he idea is that computing services will be supplied by local cloud sites, and the information – from the government, the IDF and private bodies – will be processed and stored within the borders of Israel and subject to state laws. This will take place by establishing Israeli subsidiaries to large companies like Amazon and Google that will do business with the government.
Coronavirus data contractors engaged in dirty tricks and disinformation campaigns
(10.05.2020)
Palantir was co-founded in 2004 by Paypal owner and billionaire Peter Thiel. What the blog doesn’t reveal is that Palantir’s client list has included amomgst others, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS.
Furthermore, in 2016, it was revealed Palantir had a $34.6m contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and helped the Customs and Border Protection Agency create the Analytical Framework for Intelligence (AFI) system to track immigrants.
Nor does the blog mention that Palantir worked for UK intelligence and was awarded contracts to handle vast data sets on UK citizens for British spy agency GCHQ.
JEDI: Microsoft vs. Amazon (II)
… Das Projekt für den Aufbau eines Cloud-Systems namens Jedi entspreche nicht mehr den Bedürfnissen des Militärs, erklärte das Pentagon.“
Bundestagsanhörung: Eco warnt vor Komplettzugriff des BND auf das Internet
(22.02.2021)
Ebenfalls wurde bemängelt, dass der Kontrollrat über kein Verfahrensrecht verfüge. Daher könne das Gremium externe Personen nicht zu einer Zeugenaussage oder zur Abgabe eines eidesstattlichen Gutachtens verpflichten. Die Zeugen müssten daher auch nicht die Wahrheit sagen, weil, anders als beispielsweise bei einem Untersuchungsausschuss des Bundestags, eine uneidliche Falschaussage nicht strafbar sei. Damit falle die Kontrollintensität hinter die eines normalen Gerichts zurück.
Hauptkritik zum Gesetzesentwurf zur Reform des BND-G (BT-Drs. 19/26103
(18.02.2021)
eco bewertet die Befugnis zum staatlichen Hacking aus §19 Abs. 6 grundsätzlich sehr kritisch. Gegenstand der Regelung ist der Zugriff des BND auf Bestands-, Verkehrs- und Inhaltsdaten ohne Wissen des jeweiligen Betreibers. Die Regelung ist auch auf Plattformbetreiber wie Google, Facebook, Amazon und Apple anwendbar. Grundsätzlich wären alle Dienstanbieter von Telekommunikation, Clouddiensten und sonstigen Telemediendiensten im Ausland potentielle Ziele eines staatlichen Eindringens.
SolarWinds, Microsoft, FireEye, CrowdStrike defend actions in major hack – U.S. Senate hearing
Lawmakers started the hearing by criticizing Amazon representatives, who they said were invited to testify and whose servers were used to launch the cyberattack, for declining to attend the hearing.
60 Years After Eisenhower‘s Warning, Distinct Signs Of A ‚Digital-Intelligence Complex‘
In June 2019, Susan Gordon stood on a stage at the Washington Convention Center. Behind her loomed three giant letters, “AWS,” the abbreviation for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the giant Internet retailer.
After three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, Gordon had risen to one of the top jobs in the cloak-and-dagger world: principal deputy director of national intelligence. From that perch she publicly extolled the virtues of Amazon Web Services and the cloud services the tech giant provides the CIA.
Part 2 of my 3 part series on how NHS does not manage, own, present its own COVID data, but for-profits such as Amazon, Palantir, Transunion, Boots, Microsoft, Google and G4S do. So they can say anything, profit from ‘lockdown’ .
(…)
Der Internet-Putsch
Die großen Medientechnologiekonzerne der Wall Street haben eine beispiellose Säuberungswelle im Internet gestartet. Big Tech löscht nicht mehr länger nur Nutzerbeiträge. Nun wollen Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple und Amazon aller Welt zeigen, dass sie als Meinungswächter frei entscheiden können, wer sich im Internet äußern darf – und wer nicht.
Patriot Act 2, Censorship, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
“We need to stop fascism so let’s give massive sweeping powers to an elite alliance of unelected authoritarians.”
“Well I’m a leftist and I haven’t been banned on social media.”
That’s because the left is politically impotent in our society. Unless this is just a hobby for you, at some point you should plan on the left becoming a threat to the oligarchs and warmongers. What do you think happens then?
Do you really think if the left actually becomes a threat to the status quo the Neera Tandens and Rachel Maddows aren’t going to suddenly discover a reason why you’re dangerous and need to be censored? The only way to be fine with censorship is to plan on never challenging power.