Yes, all data stored in data centers administered by US companies like Apple/Google/Amazon/Microsoft should be considered available to the US Government and US competitors. There are known examples of the US government doing industrial espionage for US businesses in the past.
This is an extremely uncomfortable truth that European businesses really don't want to acknowledge and just keep pretending it's not true, not a big deal, and even if it was there is nothing they can do about it.
Instead they focus on complying with endless security check lists with unlikely scenarios while ignoring the elephant in the room.
> This is an extremely uncomfortable truth that European businesses really don't want to acknowledge and just keep pretending it's not true, not a big deal, and even if it was there is nothing they can do about it.
Doesn't seem true. We have to use local hosting. Hetzner, OVH or a local DC are popular options. Using US services for sensitive data is just not legal.
With the Cold War ended, officials of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have acknowledged that they are redirecting efforts away from traditional spying toward gathering information aimed at ensuring that the United States remains economically and technologically competitive.
and Operation Eikonal hoovered up more than it should have:
After the revelations made by whistleblower Edward Snowden the BND decided to investigate the issue; their October 2013 conclusion was that at least 2,000 of these selectors were aimed at Western European or even German interests
That's less direct than "ECHELON was used for industrial espionage", which is the specific question being asked. Everyone should be aware of Five (and 18) Eyes, but the TLAs having personal information about individuals is different from them passing Boeing data from Siemen's private business documents.
I think that so much data is currently shared with third parties that warrants are obsolete. One can build a data heavy case long before needing a court issued warrant.
I would actually argue that once the masses are aware about certain technology existing and being in widespread use it becomes much easier to convince someone that a particular instance that the data is not trustworthy, so the ability to detect it through technological means becomes less important.
In the stage before widespread use people are much more easily tricked because they are unaware that others have certain capabilities which they never experienced first hand.
You're missing the flip side: falsely believing something is forged.
Now that the technology is so accessible and widespread, someone could deny truth by saying whatever audio/visual evidence was deepfaked, and people will believe it.
I gave up on trying to read it on the desktop. I have Firefox with JavaScript enabled but after expanding every paragraph by clicking on it, it automatically collapses when I try to scroll using the cursor keys and completely disoriented me while the content I was trying to read dissapears from my view and the page stutters and different collapse paragraphs light up.
I guess I'll never know the details of the greatest user interface disasters in history but at least got to experience a smaller one myself.
I also have ethical standards for employers. I do feel like it has limited my career in some ways and that I did not accumulate as much wealth as I could have had if I had different standards. I do have the peace of mind that I can tell myself that I tried to make things better, of course there is more I could have done but I have accepted that there are limits to what to expect of yourself and others.
I did struggle finding work that would actively make the world better, and have limited my ambitions in that regards. I now settle for not actively making things worse.
I now work on software for accountants to automate and streamline workflows for them and their customers so everybody can spend less time on doing accounting and filing their taxes and just do whatever they are trying to do.
One benefit is that avoiding exploitative businesses also seems to have a good correlation of avoiding toxic work environments.
I am still often disappointed that many people seem to totally absolve any responsibility by deferring ethical decision making to whatever organization they are involved in. It's a chilling realization after interacting with someone to realize that their ethical compass just does not seem there, and they are completely unaware or OK with that.
I remember so many history classes in school where we would learn about how average people became involved in horrible things, and the few people that would stand up against it and face hardships because of it. Maybe the lesson was not that you should strive to be one of those people that stands up for what is right, but that it just the way it is that most people don't would rather keep their heads down.
My city removed all plastic recycling bins several years ago in favor of using trash sorting robots after collecting mixed waste.
The robots could pick sort 70% effectively while the population of humans after years of training was stuck at 50%. I imagine the efficiency of the robots may even have increased a bit since then.
You missed crucisl detail- humans were sorting for free, owner of robots is paid.
Another crucial detail: producers of platic packaging engage is deliberate fraud to conflate recycleable and non recycleable plastic. Plastics that say 'commonly recycled' may be unrecycleable anywhere except a leading technology lab.
Another detail: massive fraud in recycling industry:
Like Tomovo above already said; your workflow would benefit from using an intermediate format that is faster to encode. You can then automate the conversion to the output format to occur unattended at a more convenient time.
The use of intermediate formats is a well proven technique in video editing where encoding real time to AVC/HEVC at high quality is not possible. Codecs like ProRes are used that are much easier to encode to at the expense of storage space.
Communication goes both ways. It is a very reasonable assumption that a life story is about your whole life, not just your education and professional career.
The recruiters should explain what they mean if they are redefining terms, especially since people regularly interpret it differently.
This is what Shopify has to say about the Life Story:
> For the Life Story, you can expect an informal 60-minute conversation via video with a Recruiter from our team. Interviews at Shopify are two-sided conversations. We are genuinely interested in getting to know you and we want you to get to know us, too.
It seemed so out of the blue to be asked the typical questions contract recruiters ask about programming languages and years of experience in those languages.
Yeah this sort of language was what threw me off. It explicitly states that they want to "get to know you" in a way that, presumably, extends beyond "how many years JavaScript experience."
I actually remember thinking "perhaps figuring out that the question they asked is not the question they actually want answered is the test. Figuring out that a stakeholder wants something very different than what they initially ask for is a very important skill for developers." If so, good on shopify recruiters! They're playing 3D chess.
I once had an interviewer tell me that he loved working there so much that he was happy to go to work every single day. Even when I explicitly asked him if there never was a single day where felt less happy he denied ever feeling anything other than pure joy for work.
At that point I concluded that he was either lying or unable to relate to people who are not happy all the time since he was supposed to be the supervisor it was one of the reasons to decline the job.
But we should also not underestimate the ability of the enemy to train dolphins.
It would be hard to send an strike team of just dolphins but I imagine a strike team of both humans and dolphins trained to fend of the defending dolphins and protect the divers would stand a chance.
This is an extremely uncomfortable truth that European businesses really don't want to acknowledge and just keep pretending it's not true, not a big deal, and even if it was there is nothing they can do about it.
Instead they focus on complying with endless security check lists with unlikely scenarios while ignoring the elephant in the room.