It's not, I still have the email exchange from a couple years back - I thought of posting it somewhere because it was so odd, but I dont have a blog and I am not interested in publicity.
Amazon still doesn't offer a bug bounty program to my knowledge. Also, it's the only cloud provider my active security researcher friends tell me that attempts to regulate them by some weird pen test authorization requirements which are very foreign to industry standards of other cloud providers.
I'm just on the side lines watching, but there is a difference of how transparent AWS vs. GCP vs. Azure are when it comes to security. GCP > Azure > AWS
This sounds..
awful. I'm sure there are reasons, but hiding information this way makes you seem incompetent and unsure of yourself (you as Amazon, not you personally) in my eyes.
Edit: I assume you are speaking as employee of Amazon of course, which is not necessarily true.
Unfortunately, while I agree with you on the monoculture angle, I'm not sure this article covered it in any meaningful way.
It's really sad to grow food and know what it looks like, and then go into a grocery where everything looks like an identical twin. A forked carrot? Must have been mutated by nuclear waste! A strawberry that isn't the size of a Snickers bar? Can't possibly be good!
It's consumer attitudes and opinions that need to change to make this better. It's interesting in America especially where one of the foundational attributes of the culture is "individuality" that the consumers expect the opposite of their produce.
Of course. I've worked in and around the OSS DBMS market for over a decade. But the numbers were really big. It seems to me that out of a 2015 US $30B DBMS market Oracle and MS were collecting something like US $29B. The rest of the market,which included products like MongoDB and Cassandra was close to a rounding error. (I don't have the Gartner report handy, sorry.)
It's popular on HN to focus on OSS products, but there's a very large proprietary RDBMS market measured both in terms of revenue as well as users. That's how Oracle and MS got to be the behemoths they are today.
Cell cultures are plain cells growing in a plastic bottle. Human cells have only a cell membrane made of phospholipids around them, which can get easily disrupted by detergents. Humans don't die when exposed to a drop of soap, cell cultures do.
That doesn't mean that a detergents can't have other effects that are harmful to humans. It just means that I don't think a cell culture experiment proves anything in such a case. A study in animals would be something different.
That's not how I'd interpret this sentence: "We have skin and other barriers that protect the cells." It sounds to me like the author claims that humans have skin, which is true, and that skin forms a barrier that protects internal cells, which is extremely plausible.
That's a literal interpretation. A contextual interpretation implies that Roundup cannot cause harm through the observed means because it cannot clear the skin, the latter of which is patently false.
No. The contextual interpretation says that the above-mentioned study doesn't prove Roundup is harmful because the same results would be observed with any detergent, to which we are regularly exposed without suffering any harm.
Therefore, Roundup might or might not be harmful, but the study doesn't tell us much about it.
> to which we are regularly exposed without suffering any harm.
Right, because we're instructed not to consume detergents. Following this instruction keeps the detergents outside the body.
We are instructed to consume food grown with herbicides such as Roundup, and Roundup is often (if not always) delivered in a sprayed manner with significant aerosolization.
Have you read the case? It's not about the crops getting cancer from the herbicide, it's a human being. Also human being is not a GMO product. I don't understand your GMO angle.
I don't think you made an honest effort to understand the parent's point. They are saying that the jurors might have been biased against Monsanto due to the widespread fear of GMO, and glyphosate being a symbol of that fear.
I can't speak to what was in the jurors' minds, but in my opinion that's backwards: it is concern about glyphosate that is primarily driving fear of GMOs. If we got rid of glyphosate, I for one would not have any problem with the other GMOs I am currently aware of, though I would of course reserve the option of objecting to specific GMOs I might learn about in the future.
> it is concern about glyphosate that is primarily driving fear of GMOs.
In my experience the two most common anti-GMO arguments that I hear are: A) that GMOs can be patented, which creates IP problems when they spread, and B) that somehow human-designed species might be less safe than natural ones due to unintended health consequences of the modifications (not really sure the rationale for that one.)
It’s important to point out that this case is about Roundup as a whole product, of which less than half is glyphosate, not just glyphosate. Some other posts here go over this in more detail.
I vaguely remember watching an interview with an exec from Monsanto saying RoundUp was perfectly safe, safe enough to drink. Then immediately refusing to drink it when offered, because of course it's poison.
I remember that video as well but frankly it's a silly non-argument. There are plenty of things that are safe to eat and drink that will still be highly unpleasant, especially in concentrated form. I'm sure that drinking a glass of vinegar won't give me cancer but it doesn't mean that I will do it on cue. I also wonder how much table salt you need to eat before it starts having bad side effects but something tells me that it's less than a full glass.
Besides if the glyphosate truly is dangerous then the risk lies with microdosing it over a long period of time, I doubt farmers quaff bottles of Roundup when they're thirsty.
Salt is not safe to drink. Vinegar is to some extend (you can take several gulps)
Glyphosate is not. Claim was BS. Good journalists to challenge them on the spot. Bad Monsanto for making that claim. It is clearly not safe to drink. Not one gulp. Microdosing is not the point there, the claim was not made for microdosing, the claim was safe to drink.
The journalist was right to challenge him if the claim was BS but I disagree that asking him to drink a glass of roundup and him refusing is a good argument. I mean take the position of the Monsanto lobbyist, he most likely never attempted such a stunt before, he doesn't know how it tastes, he doesn't know if drinking a whole glass of it at once is going to cause digestive distress etc... Of course he's going to refuse even if he's honestly convinced that he's telling the truth.
Good journalism would've been to show how his claim is bullshit by citing sources disagreeing with the statement. But that doesn't make for good TV.
Also I disagree that the claim was that glyphosate was "safe to drink" like a soda or something, rather he said that it wasn't going to hurt you which is IMO not exactly the same thing, especially in the context which was that glyphosate was accused to cause cancer. I'm sure you could eat few spoonfuls of salt and it won't hurt you, I still don't advise doing it.
At this point I might sound a bit like a Monsanto lobbyist myself and I assure you I'm not, I'm just a bit annoyed that these types of stunts seem somehow more important than rational discussion and scientific studies. This guy is not even a Monsanto exec like claimed by the parent. I guess they revised their scripts after that.
I mean, the LD50 is something like a cup of the pure stuff. A bottle of concentrate is probably a lethal dose. Diluted 1 tbsp to a few gallons (like when spraying) a cup of it is probably fine. Granted, I personally wouldn’t drink it even if I prepared it myself, but I’m also not drinking a cup of bleach diluted well below a meaningful dose.
According to an op-ed [0] in The Guardian there was evidence that Monsanto was behind many false reports that RoundUp was safe:
> Testimony and evidence presented at trial showed that the warning signs seen in scientific research dated back to the early 1980s and have only increased over the decades. But with each new study showing harm, Monsanto worked not to warn users or redesign its products, but to create its own science to show they were safe. The company often pushed its version of science into the public realm through ghostwritten work that was designed to appear independent and thus more credible. Evidence was also presented to jurors showing how closely the company had worked with Environmental Protection Agency officials to promote the safety message and suppress evidence of harm.
The presecution claims it's not the active ingredient but the whole herbicide that's cancer causing. I think the studies are only on one of the ingredients, not on the whole herbicide?
Also, questions of exposure are not addressed here. This person was drenched in it couple of times by accident. If I use rat poison for my job vs have it rubbed or consumed in different doses, results can be quite different. Monsanto claims it's safe in any form and quantity but I don't think that's ever been verified. Level of exposure matters a great deal. There is a reason so many cleaning products have warnings on them about keeping them away from the body (though not for cancer)
> The presecution claims it's not the active ingredient but the whole herbicide that's cancer causing. I think the studies are only on one of the ingredients, not on the whole herbicide?
Yes, the claim neatly was crafted to render all the systematically gathered evidence only tangentially relevant, so what you are left is a lay jury deciding what they feel is more probable (the civil standard being a mere preponderance of the evidence, not the beyond a reasonable doubt standard of criminal law) on a complex scientific topic without strong scientific evidence and with plenty of opportunity for factors which roster to the likeability of the parties to influence the decision.
Whatever the arguments are that this is a necessary thing to accept in the legal system (and maybe even desirable, in that it disincentives certain antisocial corporate conduct), it doesn't really say much about the underlying facts.
I'm confused. Are you also saying that any amount of exposure to this thing is completely fine? How is that fact? That's a claim. It is a mild poison after all.
They are punishing that level of arrogance. If they had a warning around it, they would be in way less trouble.
Along with all the other explanations on this thread of why that's a silly argument, there is the fact that glyphosate isn't the only thing in commercial RoundUp weed killer solutions.
Arguably the main problem here is that he got defensive/hostile rather than refining or articulating his argument. Instead of saying "no, I'm not stupid", he maybe could have said "no, it would taste terrible and I'd probably throw up and and it may make me feel sick for a while, but the studies show that it wouldn't cause lasting damage to my body". (At least, I think that's his claim.) But then, he probably could have been more honest/clear in his original phrasing "you can drink a whole quart and it won't hurt you".
It's so rare that a journalist actually holds people to account for what they say nowadays, it's like an unexpected delicious lemonade stand on a hot day when you actually stumble upon those examples.
Our government, and moreso, our society through cultural and government apathy has devalued anything academic that does not produce material gains - capital, wealth, patents, etc.
I fear that the total commercialisation of academia means that we are unlikely to see meaningful material gains for society in terms of new cures to disease or technology advances outside of those that can be monetised for recurring revenue in the next decade.
It's really an unfortunate but self inflicted American problem.
It's a problem, sure... but the problem is that we're not funding schools. If we spent some tax dollars on our education system, academia would be more independent from business, and could focus more on the sorts of long-term and difficult-to-monitize research that business is not so great at.
