I remember experts saying 5 or 10 years ago that the increased standardization and centralization of the internet would lead to more frequent and widespread internet blackouts.
First AWS, and now this. It looks like they’re right.
Two things happen when we centralize. Doesn’t matter if it’s big business or infrastructure.
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Profits go up for the controlling few
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consumers get fucked.
We get fucked when things go wrong, the system fails, our data gets hacked, our power goes out, our rents go up, insurance rates go up… etc etc. MegaCorps all say sorry, give us 50¢ off our next purchase and a free credit check, and carry on while we eat the losses and increasing costs.
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Are we just forgetting the gigantic Crowdstrike outage a year ago by Microsoft that halted air traffic for a full day?
You know back in my day websites would protect themselves, as was the style at the time.
Now a days they just get cloudflare and put up a cookie notice.
Just one of those things lazy devs do.
Why reinvent the wheel.
It’s not lazy, they just spend that time on other features.
The Internet is way more secure today, partially because of centralised security efforts. Like if a site is behind Cloudflare you might aswell just not try.
Ya. Like popups and cookie notices.
Well the average website isn’t going to be able to protect itself from DDoS attacks or easily provide local cache copies of its content in multiple regions all over the world or create secured tunnels protected from general attacks. My company was affected by this and we are putting in contingency plans for this happening again but the whiteboard that we’ve created with all the features we need to reinvent is very full…
It even took down the very instance we’re posting this on.
Being a good CDN is an expensive exercise that requires the ability to run POPs in many countries around the world.
Cloudflare captured the market by basically being simultaneously much cheaper, better distributed and ultimately better performing than the incumbents at the time (Akamai and Limelight IIRC)
The rest of the story is capitalism doing capitalist things
Most corporate IT hires fucking morons as admins :(
Where do I get a fucking moron certificate?
It would be nice to be hired atm.More than likely it’s their management who are the morons.
One does not exclude the other :/
I’ve been a contractor most of my career and I can assure you, fair share of ID10Ts in my circles as well.
Those are the ones that get occasionally hired as admins for someone’s corporate IT ;)
So, and I’m gonna pull my shameless plug ofc, but what about a decentralised internet?
Check out tenfingers or the sub (I put the weblink, is it !lemmy.world/c/tenfingers on lemmy browser apps?).
What about we take the internet back?
This seems interesting but I struggle to see how it helps, seems more like its for file sharing. Or is the suggestion that it could form the host side of a web ecosystem, with files for websites hosted in this decentralised way?
Exactly.
File sharing, a chat, backup systems, are just the low hanging fruit IMO. You can make a takedown safe “web” presence, with whatever you want on it. Decentralised, accessible with your PC off. And FOSS.
You can try it out, the new “web” WIP, if you have a couple of minutes and access yo a PC (Linux works, would love to get feedback from other platforms).
Because one company offers a good service many people like, and no other company is doing it, od doing it as well as cloudflare. We are also talking about a security feature where not having it and getting hacked, may be well worse than a few hours of downtime.
Cloudflare is not necessary for the internet at all. People choose to use them.
it’s very concerning, but what are the alternatives?
Fastly?
I think it’s very concerning, but not exactly surprising. It makes sense that there ends up being market leaders for digital services, because they can provide economies of scale much more than traditional services. As another commentor pointed out, they’re are alternatives, even just for back-up service providers, but most sites don’t pay for them.
What was more personally distressing was I realised how much I rely on lemmy when my instance, and backup instance, both went down. I’m not sure where I’d go for immediate news, especially about something niche like “why is lemmy down?”. I don’t use other social media and I found myself checking r/redditalternatives just to see if there was some info about the shutdown. Obviously, it was useless because reddit…
Amazon the other week, then this. Really does show how vulnerable much of the net is
