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Was talking with colleagues about cloudbleed and S3 problems yesterday. I don't feel like many people are actually concerned of the implication of having an in

by geforce 10y ago

Was talking with colleagues about cloudbleed and S3 problems yesterday. I don't feel like many people are actually concerned of the implication of having an internet that isn't an internet anymore, but merely a handful of big companies hosting everyone. Or maybe it's me who don't understand.

Florin_Andrei 10y ago
It's almost as if self-reinforcing feedback loops are all over society these days. Being at the top makes it that much easier to stay at the top and crush everything else. Internet companies are just one small slice of this trend.
- 79d697i6fdif 10y ago
  antitrust is all bark with no bite these days. Most industries having 3-4 "competitors" that don't actually compete is the new norm. I wouldn't be amazed if a link is shown between this situation and the increasing wealth inequality
  - thehardsphere 10y ago
    That's because you're viewing this situation entirely from within your prior beliefs about large corporations, which somehow have convinced you that only 3 or 4 hosting companies exist and everyone must use them. Exactly how do you figure this? There are lots of alternatives to S3: 1. All the cloud stuff, which is the new fangled hotness (3 to 4 companies) 2. Non-cloud hosting providers (hundreds of them, from shared hosting to VPSs and above, and usually cheaper if you don't have high traffic) 3. Hosting your own stuff on your own hardware, which is the cheapest if you really need it, and can be done in a data center just about anywhere in the world with good internet. So, what planet is this that you live on where 3 to 4 companies handle all hosting and we have to use them?
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Beyond simple anti-trust, in many cases, we need to reform legal structures so that big players can't use them to block out startups. It's practically impossible to defend yourself well in a lawsuit against any respectably-sized company without a few million lying around, first of all. That affects everything, and big companies use that fact to bully upstarts and other small innovators into shutting down all the time. My own business was effectively shuttered (had to stop selling our primary product) by a C&D from a Fortune 100. It would've been 5-10 years and ~$5 million to see that case all the way through, and under current precedent, it's very likely I would have lost. Aside from that, industries frequently get laws and rules put in place with ostensibly-reasonable rationale, while the actual intent is to make it virtually impossible for disruptive competitors to enter the marketplace. The CFAA is the piece of legislation that primarily enshrines entrenched players in the online space. We also need to reform copyright law and clarify some matters regarding the applicability of EULAs, especially with regard to clickwrap and browsewrap. Once that's done, the flood of innovators that have been held back by big companies dispatching their law firms will finally be able to contribute, and the internet's competitve landscape will truly be back in the hands of the users. It will shift from "Who has my data? I have to go with them" to "I can use any interface I want to access that data", effectively resolving the chicken-and-egg effect that imperils any potential competing social network (not even Google could compete with Facebook on this!).
    - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
      > It's practically impossible to defend yourself well in a lawsuit against any respectably-sized company without a few million lying around Large corporations keeping a bunch of lawyers on their payroll are the equivalent of large nation states stockpiling nuclear weapons.
  - tjalfi 10y ago
    Antitrust laws were remarkably different in the recent past. Here is an excerpt from http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-.... "To get a flavor of how thoroughly the federal government managed competition throughout the economy in the 1960s, consider the case of Brown Shoe Co., Inc. v. United States, in which the Supreme Court blocked a merger that would have given a single distributor a mere 2 percent share of the national shoe market."
stickfigure 10y ago
What are you proposing? We should all serve off of our DSL lines?
- ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
  Collocation, dedicated servers, even VPS. There's plenty of a middle ground between serving off your home server and AWS, Cloudflare et al.
  - thehardsphere 10y ago
    And to be blunt, I'd even claim that the middle ground is superior for most people than AWS, Cloudfare et al. I have limited experience with AWS, but they always seem to be having problems that ruin everything that they don't acknowledge. That's what I get from people at the office who have to use it to support a particular customer. Nothing we do ever seems to run properly on it, even though our software is fine everywhere else. We're trying to push that customer off to using their own hardware, and they agreed with us that it's necessary but for different reasons. Cloudfare, I don't even understand why anyone would use it. I understand the benefits it claims to provide, but you can get those without having an external MITM proxy that can spew information all over the Internet with one bug.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  that would be cool
- quasse 10y ago
  I wish. Too bad there isn't any meaningful competition in the ISP space for most people.
- geforce 10y ago
  Ah! Maybe that would encourage people not to make 15mb pages doing dozens of requests!
- theseatoms 10y ago
  http://urbit.org/ http://urbit.org/
mseebach 10y ago
20 years ago, sites got "slashdotted" left, right and centre. Cloudflare and friends put an end to that, forever. Sites went offline for days if not weeks because of hardware failure -- some never came back because they didn't back up correctly. S3 went offline for five hours, but didn't lose a single bit of data. You're looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. We learn all the time, and we will probably also learn to build some resilience into our systems against these issues. But as someone who's been through a thing or two (see above) on the Internet of yesterday, I like the one we have today.
- romaniv 10y ago
  Some website being Slashdotted is not in the same class of issues as users' (possibly encrypted) page content being spread all over the web. Also, the notion that you either need to use some super-centralized platform or be susceptible to Slashdot effect or loosing backups is a false dichotomy.
- staunch 10y ago
  Cloudflare had nothing to do with ending slashdotting. This stopped being a problem years before they existed. Slashdotting was mostly a problem caused by Apache's incredibly inefficient design. It consumed huge amounts of memory per connection at a time when most of us had very slow connections. A link from Slashdot was, in effect, a Slowloris attack on your server. The big change was moving from a fork/thread-based webserver (Apache) to an event-based webserver (nginx), which was made even more efficient by kernel features like epoll.
  - scarmig 10y ago
    This sounds plausible, but is there any way to validate this with some kind of empirical evidence?
  - slig 10y ago
    > This stopped being a problem years before they existed. I still see this issue happening daily here on HN.
thehardsphere 10y ago
I'm sorry, but I disagree that we have an internet that isn't an internet. Even though two particular problems affected a great many sites, they didn't affect every site or even a majority of sites. That's because we don't actually have a "handful of companies hosting everyone." Maybe I'm not a typical user, but the only site that was affected by S3 that I use was HN. The only three sites affected by Cloudbleed that I use were HN, Discord, and another smaller site elsewhere. The rest of the internet worked perfectly fine for me. I'm pretty sure 90% of the sites typical users were unaffected also. I mean, facebook didn’t go down, did it? People could still search on The Google. I don't know of anyone whose job was affected by this aside from people who run websites. Neither of these were as bad as the Dyn outage, which wasn't the apocalypse either. I agree that over-centralization of the Internet to be concerned about actually creating, and it's definitely something you should consider before choosing services like Cloudfare and S3. But I don't think it's so bad today that the Internet isn't the Internet anymore.
olalonde 10y ago
> I don't feel like many people are actually concerned Judging by how frequently I read this sort of comment on HN, there are definitely many people who are concerned here.
cortesoft 10y ago
Man, back in my day the internet was even LESS of an internet than it is now. Very few companies had websites, and very few hobbyists could afford to run a website (there were few hosting companies, and it cost $100 to register a domain name with the only registrar around, Network Solutions). Running an internet presence was EXPENSIVE. Sure, there has been consolidation in the industry, but it is much easier to exist on the internet now than ever before.

by geforce 10y ago

Florin_Andrei 10y ago

It's almost as if self-reinforcing feedback loops are all over society these days. Being at the top makes it that much easier to stay at the top and crush everything else. Internet companies are just one small slice of this trend.

79d697i6fdif 10y ago
antitrust is all bark with no bite these days. Most industries having 3-4 "competitors" that don't actually compete is the new norm. I wouldn't be amazed if a link is shown between this situation and the increasing wealth inequality
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  That's because you're viewing this situation entirely from within your prior beliefs about large corporations, which somehow have convinced you that only 3 or 4 hosting companies exist and everyone must use them. Exactly how do you figure this? There are lots of alternatives to S3: 1. All the cloud stuff, which is the new fangled hotness (3 to 4 companies) 2. Non-cloud hosting providers (hundreds of them, from shared hosting to VPSs and above, and usually cheaper if you don't have high traffic) 3. Hosting your own stuff on your own hardware, which is the cheapest if you really need it, and can be done in a data center just about anywhere in the world with good internet. So, what planet is this that you live on where 3 to 4 companies handle all hosting and we have to use them?
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Beyond simple anti-trust, in many cases, we need to reform legal structures so that big players can't use them to block out startups. It's practically impossible to defend yourself well in a lawsuit against any respectably-sized company without a few million lying around, first of all. That affects everything, and big companies use that fact to bully upstarts and other small innovators into shutting down all the time. My own business was effectively shuttered (had to stop selling our primary product) by a C&D from a Fortune 100. It would've been 5-10 years and ~$5 million to see that case all the way through, and under current precedent, it's very likely I would have lost. Aside from that, industries frequently get laws and rules put in place with ostensibly-reasonable rationale, while the actual intent is to make it virtually impossible for disruptive competitors to enter the marketplace. The CFAA is the piece of legislation that primarily enshrines entrenched players in the online space. We also need to reform copyright law and clarify some matters regarding the applicability of EULAs, especially with regard to clickwrap and browsewrap. Once that's done, the flood of innovators that have been held back by big companies dispatching their law firms will finally be able to contribute, and the internet's competitve landscape will truly be back in the hands of the users. It will shift from "Who has my data? I have to go with them" to "I can use any interface I want to access that data", effectively resolving the chicken-and-egg effect that imperils any potential competing social network (not even Google could compete with Facebook on this!).
  - Florin_Andrei 10y ago
    > It's practically impossible to defend yourself well in a lawsuit against any respectably-sized company without a few million lying around Large corporations keeping a bunch of lawyers on their payroll are the equivalent of large nation states stockpiling nuclear weapons.
- tjalfi 10y ago
  Antitrust laws were remarkably different in the recent past. Here is an excerpt from http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-.... "To get a flavor of how thoroughly the federal government managed competition throughout the economy in the 1960s, consider the case of Brown Shoe Co., Inc. v. United States, in which the Supreme Court blocked a merger that would have given a single distributor a mere 2 percent share of the national shoe market."

stickfigure 10y ago

What are you proposing? We should all serve off of our DSL lines?

ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
Collocation, dedicated servers, even VPS. There's plenty of a middle ground between serving off your home server and AWS, Cloudflare et al.
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  And to be blunt, I'd even claim that the middle ground is superior for most people than AWS, Cloudfare et al. I have limited experience with AWS, but they always seem to be having problems that ruin everything that they don't acknowledge. That's what I get from people at the office who have to use it to support a particular customer. Nothing we do ever seems to run properly on it, even though our software is fine everywhere else. We're trying to push that customer off to using their own hardware, and they agreed with us that it's necessary but for different reasons. Cloudfare, I don't even understand why anyone would use it. I understand the benefits it claims to provide, but you can get those without having an external MITM proxy that can spew information all over the Internet with one bug.
RodericDay 10y ago
that would be cool
quasse 10y ago
I wish. Too bad there isn't any meaningful competition in the ISP space for most people.
geforce 10y ago
Ah! Maybe that would encourage people not to make 15mb pages doing dozens of requests!
theseatoms 10y ago
http://urbit.org/ http://urbit.org/

mseebach 10y ago

20 years ago, sites got "slashdotted" left, right and centre. Cloudflare and friends put an end to that, forever. Sites went offline for days if not weeks because of hardware failure -- some never came back because they didn't back up correctly. S3 went offline for five hours, but didn't lose a single bit of data. You're looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses. We learn all the time, and we will probably also learn to build some resilience into our systems against these issues. But as someone who's been through a thing or two (see above) on the Internet of yesterday, I like the one we have today.

romaniv 10y ago
Some website being Slashdotted is not in the same class of issues as users' (possibly encrypted) page content being spread all over the web. Also, the notion that you either need to use some super-centralized platform or be susceptible to Slashdot effect or loosing backups is a false dichotomy.
staunch 10y ago
Cloudflare had nothing to do with ending slashdotting. This stopped being a problem years before they existed. Slashdotting was mostly a problem caused by Apache's incredibly inefficient design. It consumed huge amounts of memory per connection at a time when most of us had very slow connections. A link from Slashdot was, in effect, a Slowloris attack on your server. The big change was moving from a fork/thread-based webserver (Apache) to an event-based webserver (nginx), which was made even more efficient by kernel features like epoll.
- scarmig 10y ago
  This sounds plausible, but is there any way to validate this with some kind of empirical evidence?
- slig 10y ago
  > This stopped being a problem years before they existed. I still see this issue happening daily here on HN.

thehardsphere 10y ago

I'm sorry, but I disagree that we have an internet that isn't an internet. Even though two particular problems affected a great many sites, they didn't affect every site or even a majority of sites. That's because we don't actually have a "handful of companies hosting everyone." Maybe I'm not a typical user, but the only site that was affected by S3 that I use was HN. The only three sites affected by Cloudbleed that I use were HN, Discord, and another smaller site elsewhere. The rest of the internet worked perfectly fine for me. I'm pretty sure 90% of the sites typical users were unaffected also. I mean, facebook didn’t go down, did it? People could still search on The Google. I don't know of anyone whose job was affected by this aside from people who run websites. Neither of these were as bad as the Dyn outage, which wasn't the apocalypse either. I agree that over-centralization of the Internet to be concerned about actually creating, and it's definitely something you should consider before choosing services like Cloudfare and S3. But I don't think it's so bad today that the Internet isn't the Internet anymore.

olalonde 10y ago

> I don't feel like many people are actually concerned Judging by how frequently I read this sort of comment on HN, there are definitely many people who are concerned here.

cortesoft 10y ago

Man, back in my day the internet was even LESS of an internet than it is now. Very few companies had websites, and very few hobbyists could afford to run a website (there were few hosting companies, and it cost $100 to register a domain name with the only registrar around, Network Solutions). Running an internet presence was EXPENSIVE. Sure, there has been consolidation in the industry, but it is much easier to exist on the internet now than ever before.