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Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

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Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still let people use the old path system, even on new servers. This is an often-used trick to get around government censorship that will be destroyed with this change.

TBH, though, I'm not sure that would really help that much over time. It's clear there are real benefits for having bucket names in subdomains, such that the majority of new users would pick that format in any case. In that situation, governments may end up just blocking s3.amazon.com in any case because "only old bad guys" continue to use it.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually helps tremendously, since at the very least now there can be a "black market" for legacy (pre-Sept-2020) buckets, especially those on dedicated accounts that can be provided to organizations spreading facts like this.

I don't understand, why would restricting access to an anti-censorship service help fight censorship?

I mean that relative to the previous proposal, this is better. But other commenters make good points that legacy buckets could be blocked.

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#43
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still let people use the old path system, even on new servers. This is an often-used trick to get around government censorship that will be destroyed with this change.

Why S3 must carry the burden of getting around censorship? If you are talking about China, yeah, Google used to carry that burden. Now GAE, GCloud, Youtube, Gmail are all gone. The whole IP range was blacklisted. Now what? Just because something accidentally works does not mean it will last forever.

They don't "must", but it would be very nice of them.

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#44
This is interesting for a few reasons. IMHO, the original deprecation plan was reasonable. Not generous, but reasonable. Especially compared to what other cloud providers (eg. Google Cloud) have done. It did seem like a diversion from their normal practice of obsessively supporting old stuff for as long as possible, but it really wasn't too bad.

Responding to feedback, publicly, and explaining what they were trying to do and why they needed to do it, is incredibly refreshing.

This seems like a big PR win for AWS. I'm left trusting and liking them more, not less.

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#45
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It actually helps tremendously, since at the very least now there can be a "black market" for legacy (pre-Sept-2020) buckets Err, no, countries will just block the legacy bucket URL style and say that only the bad guys would still be using it.

That would mean they are blocking all S3 buckets indiscriminately.

Only old S3 buckets that are accessed the old way.

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#46
post #28

Still doesn't help with domain censorship. This was discussed in-depth in the other thread from yesterday, but TLDR, it's a lot harder to block https://s3.amazonaws.com/tiananmen-square-facts than https://tiananmen-square-facts.s3.amazonaws.com because DNS lookups are made before HTTPS kicks in.

It actually helps tremendously, since at the very least now there can be a "black market" for legacy (pre-Sept-2020) buckets, especially those on dedicated accounts that can be provided to organizations spreading facts like this.

Why is having a black market good? Is it that there's inherent value in making a market for something people find valuable (even if the seller is some tech person and the buyer is a dissident in a country that probably can't legally send money to San Francisco in the first place), or is it something else?

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#47

Thank you for listening! The original plan was insane. The new one is sane. As I pointed out here https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1125549694778691584 thousands of printed books had references to V1 S3 URLs. Breaking them would have been a huge loss. Thank you!

There's a book out there that points to my website. I wish they had just mirrored it. My website has been dead for a few months, and some O'Reilly book has a dead link.

I just now realised that if the web required two-way links there would be no way to put them into books!

Some context:

Back when the www was first released the most common criticism was the lack of back links. This is such a stupid and obvious deficiency that it really wasn't worth even looking into a system that was an obvious stillbirth. It wasn't just the "experts" saying this, but so many of them did because it was just so dumb. So you've probably never heard of this "world wide web" thing -- not only were there only one-way links, but it had its own homegrown markup language dialect and instead of using an ordinary protocol like FTP or even gopher it pointlessly used its own http protocol.

(Also back then there was this research protocol called TCP/IP, which was another waste of time given that the OSI protocol stack was poised to dominate the networks just as soon as a working one was written. I wonder what the modern equivalents are).

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#49
post #19

Still doesn't help with domain censorship. This was discussed in-depth in the other thread from yesterday, but TLDR, it's a lot harder to block https://s3.amazonaws.com/tiananmen-square-facts than https://tiananmen-square-facts.s3.amazonaws.com because DNS lookups are made before HTTPS kicks in.

And even if you use encrypted DNS, the domain is still in the clear via SNI. There's an RFC for encrypting SNI, but that's not here yet.

Aren’t TLS certificates also sent in plaintext?

Re: Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story

#50

Kind of tangential, but is Bezos a programmer type? I thought he came from banking or the big 4. I’m curious if the “malloc for the internet” bit is verbatim.

I don't think Jeff is a programmer, but I think he is very smart and his success shows that he can understand and create businesses around lots of different types of concepts and ideas. I imagine in reality there is some amount of collaboration that happens before Bezos spouts off something like "create a malloc for the internet", but in any case, it's very strong for his brand of leadership that the lore states it came straight from him.
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