Jack’s Magic Coffee Shop (April 2022)

The Last Refuge ^ | April 17th 2022 | Sundance

[monkeyshine]

Not sure I agree with the premise. Amazon AWS services has plenty of scale as do many other private companies. Twitter raised almost $13 billion over many private funding rounds from venture capital firms before going public. That amount of money could have provided them plenty of opportunities to scale. They didn’t start with 200 million users on day one. As it grew it became more attractive to investors.

[freeandfreezing]

I think the theory presented by Sundance is just a wild conjecture with nothing to back it up. It is quite likely that major social media organizations sell data to the government, and they may voluntarily or involuntarily share information with the government.

But why would the government buy a lot of data processing services from vendors like IBM and Amazon AWS if they themselves had "free" server capacity?

And why do organizations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter buy and operate vast amounts of servers if as Sundance claims they are actually running their businesses on government owned servers?

[freeandfreezing]

Here is what Twitter insiders say about their servers and systems. Probably more informative than speculation from somebody who is unlikely to know anything about large scale internet services.

The Infrastructure Behind Twitter Scale

[freeandfreezing]

Twitter makes plenty of money. In 2020 reportedly they had revenues of around 3.7 billion dollars, and close to 1 million dollars per employee. They have plenty of income to support significant data processing capability. Their financials indicate they spent about 1.3 billion dollars for their IT systems and hosting.

In 2020 they included a provision for over 1 billion dollars in income taxes, which generated an on-paper loss for the company compared to prior years.

[Jacquerie]

It is wild conjecture for those who don’t read his posts.

[T.B. Yoits]

But why would the government buy a lot of data processing services from vendors like IBM and Amazon AWS if they themselves had "free" server capacity?

The government doesn't have free server capacity; it has what it rents on others' servers, including overseas. It also rents a portion of satellite bandwidth.

Keep the encrypted spyware on distinct servers; spyware for Amazon on IBM servers and vice versa, and they're good. Allow portals for their Five Eyes cohorts and everyone gets to violate citizens' rights.

[Jacquerie]

Yeah, trust the FBI.

[ConservativeMind]

I am an IT guy. I know how this is done, cheaply.

Twitter can, most definitely, do this without breaking the bank.

He has no proof of government servers being used for either the front-end, or back-end work.

[Jacquerie]

Irrelevant. But thanks anyway.

[BubbaBasher]

The author has obviously never been to the data center of a Fortune 500 company.