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> Cloak also supports tunneling through an intermediary CDN server such as Amazon Cloudfront. Such services are so widely used, attempts to disrupt traffic to t

by vmoore 4y ago

> Cloak also supports tunneling through an intermediary CDN server such as Amazon Cloudfront. Such services are so widely used, attempts to disrupt traffic to them can lead to very high collateral damage for the censor. I once blacklisted a bunch of Amazon IPs that I found in some random Gist on Github, and surfed the web, and so much stuff was broken. It's staggering just how entangled AWS is with the web. The dream of the 'decentralized web' would be hard to implement. You would need to root out any dependence on AWS, Google, Cloudflare etc But if this means we can reliably hide traffic in these centralized networks, then maybe it's a good thing they exist. Sort of like steganography with cloud services.

THENATHE 4y ago
The problem with the “decentralized web” that everyone dreams of is that there is no way for it to truly work. Either everyone has a home/office server for everything and then a company makes routers that “automatically” set up a DMZ and firewall rules and whatever, OR Everything is just on a conglomeration of smaller hosts, which is still not ideal because that means each user pays higher prices and gets less performance, lower bandwidth, higher latency, etc because of the lack of hardware scalability with mom-and-pop server hosts. Some level of single player (or few large players) is necessary for the modern internet.
- nine_k 4y ago
  I don't think that decentralized web is about not depending on cloud providers. I think it's mostly about having many independently controlled web sites,, as opposed to most content living in a few corporate silos with their own rules of access control, like FB, IG, Youtube, Twitter. Physically a large chunk of decentralized web could live on one huge server, and still remain acceptably decentralized. OTOH if every home had a separate p2p-networked appliance from Google or Meta, but Google's lawyers and Meta's algorithms running on each node decided what you see on your newsfeed, and what is downplayed or taken down, it would still be centralized, as it is now.

by vmoore 4y ago

THENATHE 4y ago

The problem with the “decentralized web” that everyone dreams of is that there is no way for it to truly work. Either everyone has a home/office server for everything and then a company makes routers that “automatically” set up a DMZ and firewall rules and whatever, OR Everything is just on a conglomeration of smaller hosts, which is still not ideal because that means each user pays higher prices and gets less performance, lower bandwidth, higher latency, etc because of the lack of hardware scalability with mom-and-pop server hosts. Some level of single player (or few large players) is necessary for the modern internet.

nine_k 4y ago
I don't think that decentralized web is about not depending on cloud providers. I think it's mostly about having many independently controlled web sites,, as opposed to most content living in a few corporate silos with their own rules of access control, like FB, IG, Youtube, Twitter. Physically a large chunk of decentralized web could live on one huge server, and still remain acceptably decentralized. OTOH if every home had a separate p2p-networked appliance from Google or Meta, but Google's lawyers and Meta's algorithms running on each node decided what you see on your newsfeed, and what is downplayed or taken down, it would still be centralized, as it is now.