Here’s a complexifier for you: the parent company of the National Enquirer, under fire from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos after it mounted an extortion campaign against him linked to nude photos, uses Amazon Web Services for at least part of its technology infrastructure.
In the wake of Bezos’ jaw-dropping Medium post Thursday about his correspondence with American Media, Ryan Huber, a security architect at Slack, pointed out on Twitter that the National Enquirer appears to be hosted on Amazon Web Services. A simple WHOIS lookup confirms that “nationalenquirer.com” is registered with “Amazon Technologies Inc.” located at 410 Terry Avenue North amidst Amazon’s sprawling South Lake Union complex in Seattle.
AWS representatives, presumably still dazed by this whole thing like the rest of us, did not respond to a request for comment on the breadth and depth of American Media’s spending on the cloud computing giant’s services.
It’s not that surprising that AMI would be using the services of AWS, which courts a lot of video publishers through its Portland-based AWS Elemental division and leads the market for public cloud computing services by a wide margin. It certainly would be the least surprising development in this saga, in which Bezos published email correspondence between his lawyers and AMI detailing how AMI threatened to publish nude or semi-nude pictures of Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, unless investigators hired by Bezos stopped looking into connections between AMI and Saudi Arabia.
People will tell you there have been many times to be alive, but folks, this is a time to be alive.
