Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 209 posts

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#51

Post by dmoy »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
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…

> 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. Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN? I don’t even understand what this comment wants: Banning VPNs? Walling off the rest of the world from US internet? Strict government identity and citizenship…

> Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN?

In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from one of their gas stations?

If we're being charitable to GP, that's my read at least.

If it was a digital services company, sure. Meatspace in only one region though, is a different thing?

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#52

Post by mcny »

almosthere wrote: post #46

how many people are still on us-east-1

My old employer used azure. It irritated me to no end when they said we must rename all our resources to match the convention of naming everything US East as "eu-" because (Eastern United States I guess)

A total clown show

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#53

Post by digestives »

Aurornis wrote: post #45
zie1ony wrote: post #35

My friend wasn't able to do RTG during the outage. They had to use ultrasound machine on his broken arm to see inside.

> My friend wasn't able to do RTG during the outage. What is RTG?

X-ray, in some languages (like Polish) the abbreviation comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roentgen_(unit)

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#54

Post by dmoy »

IgorPartola wrote: post #24
randallsquared wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried that? I gave up on hosting my own email server seven or eight years ago, after it became clear that there would be an endless fight with various entities to accept my mail. Hosting a webserver without the expectation that you'll need some high powered DDOS defense seems naive, in the current day, and good luck doing that with a server or two.

I have never hosted my own email. It took me roughly a day to set it up on a vanilla FreeBSD install running on Vultr’s free tier plan and it has been running flawlessly for nearly a year. I did not use AI at all, just the FreeBSD, Postfix, and Dovecot’s handbooks. I do have a fair bit of Linux admin and development experience but all in all this has been a weirdly painless experience. If you don’t love this approach…

It's not insurmountable to set up initially. And when you get email denied from whatever org (your lawyer, your mom, some random business, whatever), each individual one isn't insurmountable to fix. It does get old after awhile.

It also depends on how much you are emailing, and who. If it's always the same set of known entities, you might be totally fine with self hosting. Someone else who's regularly emailing a lot of new people or businesses might incur a lot of overhead. At least worth more than their time than a fastmail or protonmail subscription or whatever.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#55

Post by Joel_Mckay »

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…

Client side SSL certificates with embedded user account identification are trivial, and work well for publicly exposed systems where IPsec or Dynamic frame sizes are problematic (corporate networks often mangle traffic.)

Accordingly, connections from unauthorized users is effectively restricted, but is also not necessarily pigeonholed to a single point of failure.

https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/ssl

Best of luck =3

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#56

Post by Dylan16807 »

stroebs wrote: post #36
Fnoord wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand why you want to allow any random guy anywhere in the US but not people country hopping on VPNs. For your air machine infrastructure.

It's a bit weird that you can't do this simple thing, but what's the motivation for this simple thing?

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#57

Post by vpribish »

dmoy wrote: post #51
Aurornis wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN? I don’t even understand what this comment wants: Banning VPNs? Walling off the rest of the world from US internet? Strict government identity and citizenship…

> Is anyone else as confused as I am about how common anti-openness and anti-freedom comments are becoming on HN? In this specific case I don't think it's about being anti-open? It's that a business with only physical presence in one country selling a service that is only accessible physically inside the country.... doesn't.... have any need for selling compressed air to someone who isn't like 15 minutes away from on…

you're being obtuse, GP clearly wants a locked down internet

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#58

Post by testdelacc1 »

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…

If anything, centralisation shields companies using a hyperscaler from criticism. You’ll see downtime no matter where you host. If you self host and go down for a few hours, customers blame you. If you host on AWS and “the internet goes down”, then customers treat it akin to an act of God, like a natural disaster that affects everyone.

It’s not great being down for hours, but that will happen regardless. Most companies prefer the option that helps them avoid the ire of their customers.

Where it’s a bigger problem is when a critical industry like retail banking in a country all choose AWS. When AWS goes down all citizens lose access to their money. They can’t pay for groceries or transport. They’re stranded and starving, life grinds to a halt. But even then, this is not the bank’s problem because they’re not doing worse than their competitors. It’s something for the banking regulator and government to worry about. I’m not saying the bank shouldn’t worry about it, I’m saying in practice they don’t worry about it unless the regulator makes them worry.

I completely empathise with people frustrated with this status quo. It’s not great that we’ve normalised a few large outages a year. But for most companies, this is the rational thing to do. And barring a few critical industries like banking, it’s also rational for governments to not intervene.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#59

Post by DeathArrow »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #47

Centralization has nothing to do with the problems of society and technology. And if you think the internet is all controlled by just a couple companies, you don't actually understand how it works. The internet is wildly decentralized. Even Cloudflare is. It offers tons of services, all of which are completely optional and can be used individually. You can also stop using them at any time, and use any of their compet…

Centralization means having a single point of failure for everything. If your government, mobile phone or car stops working, it doesn't mean all governments, all cars and all mobile phones stop working.

Centralization makes mass surveillance easier, makes selectively denying of service easier. Centralization also means that once someone hacks into the system, he gains access to all data, not just a part of it.

Re: The Cloudflare outage might be a good thing

#60

Post by DeathArrow »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #33

Now just wait til every country on earth really does replace most of its employees with ChatGPT... and then OpenAI's data center goes offline with a fiber cut or something. All work everywhere stops. Cloudflare outage is nothing compared to that.

That's why it's better to have redundancy. Hire Claude and Deepseek, too.
Post reply on HN