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The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

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Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#31

Post by turtletontine »

adrianN wrote: post #19
chasing0entropy wrote: post #3

Spot on article, but without a call to action. What can we do to combat the migration of society to a centralized corpro-government intertwined entity with no regard for unprofitable privacy or individualism?

Individuals are unlikely to be able to do something about the centralization problem except vote for politicians that want to implement countermeasures. I don’t know of any politicians (with a chance to win anything) that have that on their agenda.

That’s called antitrust, and is absolutely a cause you can vote for. Some of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements were in antitrust, and the head of the FTC for Biden has joined Mamdani’s transition team.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#32

Post by MikeNotThePope »

chii wrote: post #26
captainkrtek wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. I agree wholeheartedly. The only change is internal to these organizations (eg: CloudFlare, AWS) Improvements will be made to the relevant systems, and some teams internally will also audit for similar behavior, add tests, and fix some bugs. However, nothing external will change. The cycle of pretending like you are going to impleme…

the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime. Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable. So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.

Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#36

Post by stroebs »

Fnoord wrote: post #22
stroebs wrote: post #21

The problem is far more nuanced than the internet simply becoming too centralised. I want to host my gas station network’s air machine infrastructure, and I only want people in the US to be able to access it. That simple task is literally impossible with what we have allowed the internet to become. FWIW I love Cloudflare’s products and make use of a large amount of them, but I can’t advocate for using them in my prof…

Literally impossible? On the contrary; Geofencing is easy. I block all kind of nefarious countries on my firewall, and I don't miss them (no loss not being able to connect to/from a mafia state like Russia). Now, if I were to block FAMAG... or Cloudflare...

Yes, literally impossible. The barrier to entry for anyone on the internet to create a proxy or VPN to bypass your geofencing is significantly lower than your cost to prevent them.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#37

Post by sjamaan »

krick wrote: post #10

It would be a good thing, if it would cause anything to change. It obviously won't. As if a single person reading this post wasn't aware that the Internet is centralized, and couldn't name specifically a few sources of centralization (Cloudflare, AWS, Gmail, Github). As if it's the first time this happens. As if after the last time AWS failed (or the one before that, or one before…) anybody stopped using AWS. As if a…

Same with the big Crowdstrike fail of 2024. Especially when everyone kept repeating the laughable statement that these guys have their shit in order, so it couldn't possibly be a simple fuckup on their end. Guess what, they don't, and it was. And nobody has realized the importance of diversity for resilience, so all the major stuff is still running on Windows and using Crowdstrike.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#39

Post by aaron_m04 »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #32
chii wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the root cause is customers refusing to punish these downtime. Checkout how hard customers punish blackouts from the grid - both via wallet, but also via voting/gov't. It's why they are now more reliable. So unless the backbone infrastructure gets the same flak, nothing is going to change. After all, any change is expensive, and the cost of that change needs to be worth it.

Is a little downtime such a bad thing? Trying to avoid some bumps and bruises in your business has diminishing returns.

Depends on the business.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#40

Post by aw1621107 »

Surac wrote: post #38

The thing I learned from the incident is that rust offer a unpack function. It puzzles me why the hell they build such a function in the first place.

> It puzzles me why the hell they build such a function in the first place.

One reason is similar to why most programming languages don't return an Option when indexing into an array/vector/list/etc. There are always tradeoffs to make, especially when your strangeness budget is going to other things.

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