Amazon is staffing up for its $600 million cloud for spooks

http://qz.com/95994/amazon-is-staffing-up-for-its-600-million-cloud-for-spooks/

by ferdo • 13 years ago

76 20 13 years ago

qz.com

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

Discussion from 3 months ago when the news first broke.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5403733

"Amazon and CIA ink cloud deal"

taternuts2• 13 years ago

I know the area, and their used to be a building that was pretty much known to be some kind of CIA building. They made it 'fit in' by covering the building with fake windows, although I did see them doing some renovations on it so I'm not sure if that's still the case.

stevehawk2• 13 years ago

All black one? now an all white one? didn't belong to them.

taternuts2• 13 years ago

I don't know if it had a color, really, as the whole building was covered in fake windows so there wasn't much color showing. It could be all white now, I'd have to look next time I go by.

ck2• 13 years ago

Hopefully half-billion taxpayer funding to Amazon will bring down consumer prices even further elsewhere in their network.

It's all "fun and games" until that network is hacked and info on half of the United States is copied to a foreign country or a foreign mafia.

tropicalmug2• 13 years ago

Why does Quartz allow for their menu bar to resize for any window size but prevent the article pane from doing the same thing? I get large grey space on the right side of any story that I read on a large-enough monitor.

wtvanhest• 13 years ago

Honestly, their UI is so terrible I have decided not to even click on any more of their links. Its like they designed it to be user unfriendly.

sneak• 13 years ago

I'm glad it's not just me.

I read a proposal today for bp;dr (behind paywall, didn't read). Can we have an acronym for "fucked up zoom on my ipad"/"doesnt even render with ghostery enabled"/"stupid marketing modals render it unviewable"/etc?

kryten2• 13 years ago

At least you can read it. On a windows phone it just redirects to the start page and there is no link to the article.

Utter crock.

kyllo• 13 years ago

Not to be "relevant xkcd guy" but here's the relevant xkcd for that:

http://xkcd.com/869/

saosebastiao• 13 years ago

It is better than Wired's mobile format...where they let you use the full screen to scroll, but as soon as you stop scrolling and start reading, they pop up their logo bar in front of the text you are reading.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

Their article pane resizes to an extent, but I assume it stops expanding after a certain size because they don't want to exceed an optimal width for readability [1].

Without being able to see it on your monitor, can't tell for sure.

[1] http://www.pearsonified.com/2011/12/golden-ratio-typography....

tropicalmug2• 13 years ago

Right, but couldn't they expand the pane but leave the text at the same ratio? The way it is now, the right-hand scrollbar leaves the right side of the window[1], which is kind of weird. Adding whitespace on the sides might be a better way to achieve the same goal.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/doaiMyc.jpg

xauronx• 13 years ago

Where I come from "spooks" has two meanings, and neither makes sense here as far as I can tell.

_delirium• 13 years ago

It can be a slang term for "spies", and sometimes by extension, anyone who works for a secretive government organization like the CIA or NSA.

caw• 13 years ago

Yes. There's even a TV show named "Spooks", though they renamed it for the US/Canadian audience. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160904

dfc• 13 years ago

One thing that’s mysterious, and possibly telling, about Amazon’s job announcement for a “Systems Engineer—Government Cleared” is that the location of this job—Herndon, Virginia—may or may not coincide with the location of the CIA’s own cloud computing centers.

This is not mysterious or surprising. Herndon, VA is full of entities doing TS/SCI work. It would be mysterious and surprising if the job announcement was in Kohler, Wisconsin.

Amazon is staffing up for its $600 million cloud for spooks

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