[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> With Heimdall, you completely own and manage your data and the service. No feature limitations or having to trust a third-party company with your data.

> Pre-requisites: You need to own a domain and have an AWS account. For reasonable use cases, you should not exceed AWS's free tier (which is very generous).

Erm ... wut?

[justusthane]

Unless you physically own a server you have to put your data somewhere, whether that somewhere is Digital Ocean, some shared hosting provider, AWS, or whatever else. You're still more in control of your data than you would be using a closed third-party product.

Sure it would be nice to have other options in addition to AWS, but I don't think those two statements are contradictory.

Also, I don't know if it is, but the data stored on AWS could be encrypted by the app, in which case you're really not trusting AWS.

[OJFord]

My charitable reading of GP's comment is as a reaction to the fact that the project's been designed in such a way (Serverless :tm:) that AWS is required; a pre-requisite, not an example.

From the first quote you might think that it was the deployer's choice where to put it, including on one's own hardware.

I don't know, however, what you'd do instead of SES.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> Unless you physically own a server you have to put your data somewhere, whether that somewhere is Digital Ocean, some shared hosting provider, AWS, or whatever else. You're still more in control of your data than you would be using a closed third-party product.

The claim was not "you are more in control than with a closed third-party product". The claim was "No [...] having to trust a third-party company with your data.". When you have to use AWS, then you evidently have to trust a third-party company with your data, unless you happen to be AWS. And not only do you have to trust a third party, you even have to trust one particular third party with no alternative if they misbehave somehow. That's pretty close to using a closed third-party product, if you ask me. I mean, really, you are using a closed third-party product--it just happens to be the infrastructure that you build on.

> Sure it would be nice to have other options in addition to AWS, but I don't think those two statements are contradictory.

So, AWS is either not a third party or could not access your data, no matter how much they wanted to? Or what other alternative do you see to make those statements not contradictory?

> Also, I don't know if it is, but the data stored on AWS could be encrypted by the app, in which case you're really not trusting AWS.

Wut? Am I just completely misunderstanding what this does? This uses SES, a service by AWS that handles your emails, right? As in: That speaks SMTP for you, and thus sees the plain text of the emails, right? And then, somewhere there is code that handles those emails that runs on machines that AWS has physical access to, right? As in: Code that AWS can trace and modify however they like, right? As in: Code where AWS trivially could extract any possible encryption keys from, right?

Unless I am completely misunderstanding this ... what would possibly stop AWS from reading all your emails if they wanted to?

[fterh]

No, you're not misunderstanding. I guess I made that statement with the implicit trust of AWS so I didn't think to qualify it.

You're absolutely right that if AWS is a bad actor it has access to all the information, but I'm working on the assumption that it's more profitable to AWS to be a good actor than bad.

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

> No, you're not misunderstanding. I guess I made that statement with the implicit trust of AWS so I didn't think to qualify it.

But that doesn't change that you are trusting a third party?! I mean, if that were to count as "you don't have to trust a third party", then anything does. Use gmail, so you don't have to trust a third party (except for the implicitly trusted Google)! Use Facebook, so you don't have to trust a third party (except for the implicitly trusted Facebook)!

There is nothing necessarily wrong with trusting any one of those. But then you don't get to claim "no trust in third parties required!"

> You're absolutely right that if AWS is a bad actor it has access to all the information, but I'm working on the assumption that it's more profitable to AWS to be a good actor than bad.

Well, for one, see above. But also: is it? Is it really more profitable to keep your data safe than to give the NSA access and in return get some of the good government contracts, say? Plus, trust isn't just about them not screwing you over intentionally, it's also about incompetence.

[ta999999171]

I'm working on the assumption that they have a contract with the CIA for hundreds of millions, and likely wouldn't get caught skirting the rules if it suits them - or can buy their way out if they did.