Amazon hosts websites for the US government, which no doubt the Iranian government considers a terrorist group. Probably a lot of people in Yemen and Afghanistan whose family members have been killed by drone strikes would agree. You may be too young to remember when the CIA illegally funded terrorist death squads in Nicaragua by selling arms to Iran and crack to the US, but a lot of Nicaraguans would agree, too.

Maybe we should stop trying to silence people we disagree with.

Maybe we should silence the CIA?

This is the wrong take I think, because you're trying to paint the Taliban in a positive light -- as if they're freedom fighters to disagree with.

In reality, the Talibans main export is heroine, and they get that heroine by enslaving local populaces in rural southern Afghanistan where it can grow easily and the people are defenseless economically much less educationally or physically. They do so to attain power and spread their influence to one day establish a wider Sharia based Islamic State.

I am definitely not trying to paint the Taliban in a positive light, and I don't have any idea what it is about my comment that could possibly have led you to believe that. If they were freedom fighters, I wouldn't disagree with them nearly so strongly.

Because you used the often repeated refrain of “disagreement” as if people were turning to censorship over arguments about how high taxes should be, when usually it is more about groups plotting to exterminate an ethnic group or people plotting to overturn an election violently. Calling this “just disagreement” makes many feel you are either being disingenuous or are completely oblivious.

I think it’s fairly obvious here you are extrapolating intent here that the parent clearly didn’t have. Your interpretation is likely marred by your own experiences here. It didn’t read to me (and I presume many others) the way it did to you.

You're juxtaposing legitimate beef with US policy and intervention which carries some level of nuance with the Taliban. To me, that's trying to give them some credence where they clearly have none.

Yes, but a judge should be involve. Because for the Taliban, it's clear cut, but it's not always the case.

And of course, one day, it will be abused.

Hmm, you think it's clear cut that people in the US shouldn't be allowed to read whatever official statements the new government of Afghanistan decides to release? Or do you mean something different?

No, I mean it's clear cut that it's a terrorist organization. I'm the kind of person to think people should read Mein Kampf and the little red book in order to understand history, I won't argue we should prevent people to have access to knowledge.

But I get one company may want to avoid being the one hosting it.

Oh, I agree, though I have to admit I haven't read either of those.

Note, though, that the correct idea you expressed that the Taliban are a terrorist organization would be self-contradictory to anyone who defines terrorism ahistorically as non-state or unlawful violence to achieve political aims, since now the Taliban are the Afghan state and are legalizing their terrorism.

It's Heroin. And Afghanistan is mainly exporting opium.

Thanks for the spelling correction. Afghanistan exporting opium for legitimate use and the Taliban enslaving a local populace, engaging in human trafficking, and decimating all dissent with certain death and torture is slightly different.

In case a citation is needed for the content of any of my comments on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban

this post and the top level parent literally never used the word taliban.

The focus of the story is an Islamic State website celebrating a Taliban attack. Sounds like folks came to comment and didn't realize what they're commenting on.

> Amazon made headlines in the Washington Post last week for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organization contacted Amazon, according to the Post.

~Four years ago I had an issue with Google Drive deleting things that was solved with zipping with a password. Both the plain files and zipped without password files were removed within a day or so of uploading. This is stuff like FLAC files, PhoenixMiner, and some movies I'd Handbraked from rips. Importantly, none of this was shared- it was all for my own personal use. I've since adopted the thought pattern that everything that is uploaded to a cloud is going to be inspected by people who do not have my best interests in mind, and to encrypt accordingly.

Any chance the zip password was bruteforced?

Given that only the password less zip files were removed that probably wasn't the case.

My bad, I read the OPs statement wrong.

> Hosting the websites of terrorist groups is something few people would advocate

The laws that are passed today to “protect your from terrorists” will help the government, tomorrow, to control you, and the corporations, the day after, to extract more money from you.

So please be careful what laws you advocate for.

If it restricts freedoms based on a standard that is not directly based on preventing immediate harm to others, it's probably a road to authoritarianism.

But it's okay if Apple does it.

> Hosting the websites of ___________ is something few people would advocate . . .

Tricky part is everyone fills in the blank differently.

Will AWS terminate your account for competing with Amazon in some other area?

Yes, if Amazon has an invalid patent on it. I think you actually know people personally that this has happened to.

I guess Walmart will need to find a new cloud host!

As someone who was a major vendor for Walmart, they are vehemently opposed to doing any business using AWS. They believe that AWS would gladly steal their company secrets regarding logistics and use it to gain any advantage they could possibly glean from those secrets. The logistics company I worked for also disallowed the engineering department to use AWS and settled on Azure cloud after examining that and Google’s offering instead.

>As someone who was a major vendor for Walmart, they are vehemently opposed to doing any business using AWS.

You are absolutely right. My comment was ment as a joke.

Also, I worked as a vendor for Walmart, too. They made it clear they didn't do business with vendors who were on AWS... so we "became multi cloud", but the stuff we hosted for them was TOTALLY on AWS.

Walmart has huge datacenters themselves. Whether or not they could or will compete is anyone's guess.

Hard to inspect account metadata / have chats with your engineers to learn how to build a better competitor if they do that.

Hi Slippery. Meet Slope.

I’ve stopped using cloud storage and backup now. The convenience is no longer worth the privacy and data loss risk. I’m not sure it even improved my life at the end of the day.

Back to multiple offline hard disks stored in different locations.

I think usually ends up with convenience of the backup process.

Keeping offline disk backup in sync is inconvenient, neither is more durable or secure than cloud (assuming encryption and distant off-site copies).

If Tahoe-LAFS or SiaCoin was much easier to use, e.g. with phone backup setup in a few clicks, then simple family/community distributed "clouds" would be no-brainer.

> Hosting the websites of terrorist groups is something few people would advocate

The problem is not to remove those, the problem is to do that outside of a proper legal process.

Because it's easy to say "yeah, ISIS are terrorists, remove their forum", but the word "terrorist" has been abused to much you pretty much guaranteed it's going to be the justification to remove "content we don't like".

Yes.

It’s the digital equivalent of having cocaine stuffed in your cars’ back seat. Doesn’t matter how it got there.

Actually it does. If you did not put it there but were instead set up good lawyer might be able to get you off the hook assuming you can afford good lawyer.

The so called "equal" justice truly sucks. I once saw government trying to deny legal aid to person X on a basis that the offence is minor and the risk to be imprisoned is low, never mind the fact that having criminal record can completely screw person's life later on.

It all depends on the prosecutor.

I served on a jury where a driver was being prosecuted for possession with intent to distribute for reasons nobody understood. The passenger, who wasn’t known to the driver, in the back seat confessed at the scene and plead guilty months earlier. It was obvious that something hinky was up.

In this case, the jurors were all disgusted and found the guy not guilty. One of the jurors was a retired US Attorney who was upset enough that he submitted a complaint to the bar association.

Justice was served, but going through a trial is a life altering experience.

I wish the prosecutor was criminally charged with malicious prosecution and big compensation awarded to the driver so that the next time some scumbag trying to use justice system like this will think twice.

Some cloud services already detect and delete pirate content since they do deduplication/hashing, i.e. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dropbox-dmca-position

The article you linked describes preventing the creation of a shared link, not actually deleting content from people's Dropbox accounts.

(previously worked there, not speaking on their behalf or from private knowledge)

How do they avoid liability for erasing my only copy of something I licensed?

ToS. They can do whatever they want.

To answer your last question, yes, you should worry about that.

Your system backup is not scanned by Apple - only iCloud Photos. For now.