Once you have physical access, no need for the private key. Unless you're encrypting all of your data, they'll just snapshot your VM to go through it later (or your EBS volume, depending on where the data is stored).
And yes, you can write out whatever is in RAM just as easily.
Did everyone forget that "cloud" means "someone else fully controls the hardware"?
It's actually kind of hard to remember sometimes that cloud-compute providers don't employ some sort of homeomorphically-encrypted VM containers. Even though they are completely impractical and have never even seen a proof-of-concept, the idea is so intuitive that I bet if you asked a random non-IT manager if Amazon could read memory or CPU registers on the instances his employees have running on EC2, he'd say no. "Because obviously," he'd pontificate, "nobody would be using cloud-computation otherwise."
If I want my data to be very secure, its going to run on VMs that boot and run entirely in RAM, read the encrypted data in from persistent storage, and have their power controlled by an intrusion detection system. If you attempt to open the rack, power is removed, unencrypted data is lost, and everything is safely encrypted at rest.
You would only need this security for the most sensitive types of data though.
I was replying to this parent post: "I email myself my encryption passwords so that I - and any interested government agencies - can log in without me needing to remember them all the time."
Yes, you should protect your private key. No, protecting it isn't going to stop a government agency. A VM is not Schroeder's cat: you can peak without there being any evidence. That was my point. Apologies if I wasn't straightforward in my explanation.
If you keep one key per device, you can revoke it if/when that device is compromised, stolen, etc..
That key is for initial access to provision your machine, after which you should have a more sophisticated means of managing users, as certainly, if you are doing anything of much importance, you will eventually need at least 2.
By all means, have a separate, passphrase-protected key for each separate device (desktop, laptop, tablet) and push them to your machines using something like chef and the 'users' and 'sudo' community cookbooks, at a minimum, and destroy the .pem after you initially set up the host.
There is a reason that Amazon only configures one user with only one key, and it's not because that's how sane people access their machine.
The port shutdown was about the truckers, though there was some ILWU support - I have personally met ILWU leaders who were in support.
The truckers are not allowed to unionize, are employed as "independent contractors", sometimes have to sit with their engines running, idle, trying to get into the port for hours without being able to pee. They are treated as if they operate a small business while they are in actuality an employee with none of the rights of a typical employee.
The ILWU also doesn't oppose the city or state government interfering with a port shutdown because without the ability to shut down a port, they would not exist.
Wait, so people think "IT" means desktop support? Network architect is IT. Sysadmins, network admins, "devops" (remember when they were called sysadmins?) are all IT.
IT is about the technology. IS (information systems) is about the system as a whole, which includes the people. IT is focused on making technology work, IS is focused on using technology to improve a process.
IT is a part of IS, but IS is bigger than IT. If your job focuses on fixing technology (such as computer repair), you're working IT. If your job focuses on processes and people (such as software development, information security, business enablement, etc), you're working in IS.
For your website, the IT portion is the server it runs on. The IS portion is the IDE you use, your development environment, the server, your language/framework, the browser, your developers, and your customers. That's the information system as a whole that allows your website to work.
But yeah, when I hear "IT guy", I think desktop support. People in IS outside of support tends to refer to themselves as something more specific than general IT: I'm a programmer/developer/software engineer. I'm a network administrator. I'm a systems architect. I'm a security engineer. That's just my experience, and that's what I interpreted the comment "stay out of IT" to mean. Desktop support doesn't tend to have much room for growth compared to careers in IS.
Language is a reflection of the idea being presented. If your audience perceives IT to be desktop support, then using IT to mean desktop support is absolutely correct and does reflect reality. This is my interpretation of tptacek's comment, and from his posts afterwards it seems I am right. Other comments here are saying the same thing, that IT is a "computer janitor".
This might be different in other English-speaking markets, but at least in this thread, that is what is being expressed. It doesn't matter what term is being used, that is what the parent was trying to get across. Don't become "the IT guy". The definition of IT guy he was using is "computer janitor".
"IT" is now being used more often to mean "computer janitor" than all the jobs related to computer/system operations. It's a bit of a shift in the terminology.
The problem is not that Google, Facebook, and others are "solving a problem" by providing these bus fleets. They are offering jobs on the peninsula paying more than jobs tend to pay in SF [because SF companies have to pay more for rent and ACTUALLY PAY THEIR FUCKING PAYROLL TAXES TO PAY TO MAINTAIN THE BUS STOPS], with a greater likelihood of becoming filthy rich, to people largely moving from other parts of the country and/or world, with the promise that they can work in one community and live in another.
When such employees are not being recruited from other places, they are being recruited from SF. Google and Facebook have a problem that their offices are in FUCKING BORING monoculture suburbs which young, smart, energetic people do not typically want to live in. And their big, monolithic companies aren't a great match for the culture of SF, though companies like Twitter have been trying to make it work by insisting that SF is doomed without them.
One has to ask, why do people want to live in SF rather than Mountain View or Palo Alto? Is it because those places are FUCKING BORING?
Yes. And they are not FUCKING BORING because they lack craft cocktail places, they have a monoculture that is unattractive to people accustomed to diversity.
That is why these buses are gross, and that is why it is gross that people who just recently moved to SF after rents roughly doubled think that people should just get a better job if they want to live here, because who ever lived in SF except rich people?
How can someone who moved here as a student and began trying to build a life for themselves in the bay area ever fit without basically letting Larry, Sergei, and Zuck declare the sort of job that people who live in SF can have?
How can people ever own a home in this city if the only way is by being [un]lucky and boring enough to be at a behemoth company or a random startup that couldn't easily be predicted to hit, and take a bunch of stock away?
Also, if SF becomes a place where most people who can afford to live here have to work in another city, it will be largely devoid of employed people during the day. There will be jobs serving coffee in the morning, dinner in the evening, mostly stocked by people who live in the east bay, and we're likely to see some of the crime problems that Oakland has which I believe directly have to do with this, specifically that lots of people who pay rent and mortages in Oakland have to go to another city to do so, on woefully overloaded transit systems that are struggling for funding, leaving the city largely full of unemployed people and violent police officers during the day.
SF is an amazing place and I can't imagine why anyone would only want to work here during the first and last hours of the day, when I do my best to be here as many hours of the day as possible, though I can't afford to live here.
Plus a lot of these assholes don't even like SF. It's like a fancy fucking pair of shoes for them to brag about.
Think about some of the things you've said in the emotion of the moment:
"How can someone who moved here as a student and began trying to build a life for themselves in the bay area ever fit without basically letting Larry, Sergei, and Zuck declare the sort of job that people who live in SF can have?"
When I moved here, those guys were in Jr High probably telling poor taste jokes. So 10 - 15 years from now they may have no say at all in what job you want.
"How can people ever own a home in this city if the only way is by being [un]lucky and boring enough to be at a behemoth company or a random startup that couldn't easily be predicted to hit, and take a bunch of stock away?"
My wife and I bought a home in 1985. We were leveraged to the hilt (loans from the seller, the bank, her parents, and our savings). It wasn't "easy", I didn't see any current run movies, I rarely went out to lunch, but we were focused on getting into the housing market as soon as we could. Over the years I've watched all of my friends buy houses.
They were able to do that because they both saved when they needed too and they benefited from the success of the companies they worked for. Few were made 'rich' by startups, most by putting in their hours at HP or Sun or Oracle, saving money, buying their own company's stock with the employee stock program. Most were married or in committed relationships (it really correlates strongly with house ownership if you can split your living expenses with another person).
The theme in your comment is "I want what I want RIGHT NOW!" but life isn't like that. It plays out over weeks and months and years. Trust me when I tell you that if you did get what everything you wanted without effort, without time, without failure. You would hate it, worse you might despise yourself for having it.
If you evaluate your life based on the lives of others, you won't ever be happy.
There seems to be a lot of anger in your comment, but it all seems to boil down to "my reasons for living in San Francisco are more valid than others'".
The anger is that I'm ashamed to be associated with most people in the tech community lately, wherever I can live, and that so many people who just moved to the bay area think they know so much about how they are obviously not impacting it negatively.
People are becoming bigoted against tech folks and it's not a healthy change for this community, but I can't blame them, and frankly most of the time lately I don't want anything to do with people on either side of the polarized debate.
But the discussion is about how Google and whoever are "solving problems" that would be created by people driving private vehicles when in fact they are commonly recruiting people to work in Mountain View by dangling the ability to live in SF in front of them, which is damaging to the entire community as a whole, from Mountain View to SF to Oakland to Berkeley to wherever.
Also I do not live in SF, FYI, I used to, until my own fucking industry priced me out, simultaneously making it impossible to run a small business here providing tech services as I did for many years.
I came to SF to have it change me, but so many people are intent upon changing it, with complete disregard for how the tech industry left the city a husk after the dot-bomb.
I learned a lot of tough lessons about what makes SF SF and how to play harmoniously with that and most people are just spewing entitlement about how it doesn't matter that they are PERMANENTLY driving the cost of living up due to their TEMPORARY ability to make more money.
The truth is that real estate speculators are profiting off people on both sides of the debate.
People are paying twice the rent that would have been paid a few years ago and in many cases not getting better services.
I just don't feel sorry for a few people who got stuck on a bus. Protests are about showing that you can't change business as usual without interfering in it.
It's not fragility which leads to my offense. I embrace disagreement and figure we would all be better off if there was more of it… but I do not embrace vitriol. There's a toxin in modern culture that leads too many towards this type of emotional nonsense which drives people apart. 'FUCKING BORING' is not a phrase you use when you respect the parties you disagree with, and without that respect moving forward is damn near impossible.
It is a bad thing when such disrespect becomes acceptable in a community.
I thoroughly enjoy living in Mountain View, which is preposterously diverse compared to 99.9% of the country. Anyway, like many other things in life, it's all about what you do with it. Someone living in Antarctica might have some cause to blame their boredom on their surroundings, but generally if someone claims their life is boring because the city they live in is boring, the problem is with them and not the city.
