I hate how Signal went down because of this… Wish it wasn’t so centralised.
My friend messaged me on Signal asking if Instructure (runs on AWS) was down. I got the message. That being said, it’s scary that Signal’s backbone depends on AWS
Why is this scary? That’s what e2ee is for, so that no one besides your recipient can view the contents of a message. It does not matter which server is used. If anything for a service like Signal, you want a server with high availability like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare.
Scared because it’s centralized. If Amazon decides that it wants to shut Signal down, they can. Nobody can spin up a Signal instance and help out.
I would be surprised if Signal didn’t have a contract with another cloud provider as well, incase of this sort of thing.
I hope they consider other ways of doing things after this incident.
Willing to bet a lot of companies will be considering that now lol. Will it actually happen though? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I have been able to use Signal like any other day. I haven’t seen any disruption in sending or receiving.
For me it was not possible to send or receive messages for a couple of hours.
Started moving to Element/Matrix this weekend when I attended a protest and wanted to have some kind of communication, but also wanted to leave my primary phone at home. I was using a de-googled android fork and an e-sim, but being a data-only e-sim, I couldn’t use Signal due to the phone number requirement.
Annoying to have try to get contacts to get another app, but at least it’s decentralized and comes with the option of being self-hosted once I’m ready to tackle that.
@MrMcGasion @Sunny Come to the dark side (xmpp, and jmp.chat) and get decentralized messaging and SMS support with that data-only sim!
@Sunny@slrpnk.net already has an XMPP account, as that is included in every slrpnk.net account automatically. It is very easy to set that up for most Fediverse software, and the user id is identical between Fediverse and XMPP.
Oh damn i did not even know about this! I will defo have a play around with this tomorrow, how very neat!
However, it isnt me im really worried about in the grand picture, its family and friends. It was already difficult enough to convert them to using Signal.
Hey, note that you can use mautrix-signal to access your Signal account within Element on this phone.
It’s wild that these cloud providers were seen as a one-way stop to ensure reliability, only to make them a universal single point of failure.
But if everyone else is down too, you don’t look so bad 🧠
No one ever got fired for buying IBM.
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The state government of Queensland, Australia just lifted a 12 year ban on IBM getting government contracts after a colossal fuck up.
It’s an old joke from back when IBM was the dominant player in IT infrastructure. The idea was that IBM was such a known quantity that even non-technical executives knew what it was and knew that other companies also used IBM equipment. If you decide to buy from a lesser known vendor and something breaks, you might be blamed for going off the beaten track and fired (regardless of where the fault actually lay), whereas if you bought IBM gear and it broke, it was simply considered the cost of doing business, so buying IBM became a CYA tactic for sysadmins even if it went against their better technical judgement. AWS is the modern IBM.
AWS is the modern IBM.
That’s basically why we use it at work. I hate it, but that’s how things are.
It’s mostly a skill issue for services that go down when USE-1 has issues in AWS - if you actually know your shit, then you don’t get these kinds of issues.
Case in point: Netflix runs on AWS and experienced no issues during this thing.
And yes, it’s scary that so many high-profile companies are this bad at the thing they spend all day doing
Yeah, if you’re a major business and don’t have geographic redundancy for your service, you need to rework your BCDR plan.
It is still a logical argument, especially for smaller shops. I mean, you can (as self-hosters know) set up automatic backups, failover systems, and all that, but it takes significant time & resources. Redundant internet connectivity? Redundant power delivery? Spare capacity to handle a 10x demand spike? Those are big expenses for small, even mid-sized business. No one really cares if your dentist’s office is offline for a day, even if they have to cancel appointments because they can’t process payments or records.
Meanwhile, theoretically, reliability is such a core function of cloud providers that they should pay for experts’ experts and platinum standard infrastructure. It makes any problem they do have newsworthy.
I mean,it seems silly for orgs as big and internet-centric as Fortnite, Zoom, or forturne-500 bank to outsource their internet, and maybe this will be a lesson for them.
It’s also silly for the orgs to not have geographic redundancy.
Well companies use not for relibibut to outsource responsibility. Even a medium sized company treated Windows like a subscription for many many years. People have been emailing files to themself since the start of email.
For companies moving everything to msa or aws just was the next step and didn’t change day to operations
People also tend to forget all the compliance issues that can come around hosting content, and using someone with expertise in that can reduce a very large burden. It’s not something that would hit every industry, but it does hit many.
Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance. It should be seized by the government.
It should be seized by the
governmentpeople and mercilessly decentralized.Agree
God no, not the government!
They couldn’t organise a paper bag party
That’s largely because one half of the elected officials are dedicated to defunding and deconstructing government organizations, so they can then point at those same organizations and go “look, the government doesn’t work! We should stop funding it!” The government is actually great at organizing a lot of things. But they’re all so engrained in society that you don’t even think about them as being organized by the government. Systems that just work, reliably, all the time.
The government’s job is stability and reliability, not being as efficient as possible. Where a corporation may only have one person doing a job, the government will have four or five. Those people aren’t bloat; They’re on the payroll because the government is expected to keep functioning during emergencies. People would lose their minds if the streets department (responsible for clearing downed trees out of public roads) shut down after a bad storm rolled through, just because a few government employees had a tree branch fall on their house. What if firefighters stopped working because a local wildfire burnt a few firefighters’ houses? What if the city water department shut down because three or four city employees’ water supply was affected? What if the health department shut down during a pandemic?
The people who work in government also live in the same areas they serve. Which means that they are affected by the same emergencies. The government needs enough redundancy to be able to continue functioning, even after those employees are affected by the same emergencies as the general public. If some emergency affects 75% of the public in a given area, then 75% of the local government employees are likely going to be affected. So if the government doesn’t have enough redundancy to be able to redistribute the work, people will see their government shutting down in the wake of the emergency. And to make matters even worse, during (and in the wake of) those emergencies, people look to the government for help. Which means that’s the most critical time for the government to continue functioning.
I say all of this because the same is true for the infrastructure that runs critical government systems. The government expands and implements things slowly by design, because everything critical has to go through multiple levels of design approval, and have multiple redundancies built in. If the government has updated a critical system, I can guarantee that new system has been in the works for the past two years at least. That process is designed to ensure everything works as intended. I wouldn’t want my city traffic lights managed by a private company, because they’d try to cut costs and avoid building in redundant systems.
Large corporations and oligarchs are better? I’ll take the government. At least we can vote on them.
I think co-ops are the way to go, but I can understand that someone “just” wanting to purchase the good/service might not see the difference between a co-op and corporation like Amazon.
I don’t think it’s a size issue really, but co-ops generally stay smaller in part due to how they are internally organized compared to a “median” corporation.
I also think that the government actually does a pretty good job at managing things; it’s just their failures are public. Private boondoggles might drive many people into bankruptcy, but they aren’t publicized any more than absolutely necessary.
It would be a more meaningful discussion if the government wasn’t controlled so much by large corporations and oligarchs.
Sorry but this is a ridiculous argument. What entity has dropped nukes on an entire population? Who is the current president of the US? Insane take.
Do you literally hear yourself? You think large corporate and oligarchs run insurance, tech, etc., is a better route than a public option? 💀 Jeff Bezos, Musk, Thiel, and Ellison for everything?
What are you actually arguing with the president thing? I literally don’t understand how that’s supposed to support your point.
When was the last time you heard about a large government computer outage? (I don’t count the VA because that’s broken on purpose.)
Launch of ACA markets? But that seemed more like the company paid to make it under sized it or just did shit code.
Which goes back to somethings shouldn’t be done for profit
CrowdStrike, but that hit private companies too.
AWS aggressively pursues high priced and years-long spending commitments with large customers, and they incentivize it with huge discounts for doing so.
And when AWS does this they intentionally incentivize these large customers to migrate existing workloads away from other cloud service providers as well, going so far as to offer assistance in doing so.
And when they hit their end inevitable enshittification, what then?
At that point you’re completely invested in their ecosystem and it’ll cost you triple to get out.
That’s next quarter, after I’ve got my bonus for all these savings.
IbM has entered the chat
Why do we place so much reliance on one mega company? This level of importance.
Because it’s cheaper and (in broad terms) more reliable than everybody having a data centre.
It should be seized by the government.
Oh yeah, what could possibly go wrong if the US government owned Amazon!
according to that page the issue stemmed from an underlying system responsible for health checks in load balancing servers.
how the hell do you fuck up a health check config that bad? that’s like messing up smartd.conf and taking your system offline somehow
Well, you see, the mistake you are making is believing a single thing the stupid AWS status board says. It is always fucking lying, sometimes in new and creative ways.
It makes me wish I was selfhosting more services, music & chat in particular. It wasn’t important enough to set up yet
important enough to set up yet
FWIW for music LMS is 1 container command including it in the location in real-only of you music directory with all your files, that’s it. So… if you are used to self-hosting (e.g. already have a reverse proxy and container setup) that’s maybe 1h top.
Can recommend Jellyfin, I use it for both music and tv/movies. Not sure on the chat bit, there are so many option it could get a long list
I have Jellyfin, but I haven’t tried it with music. How does it compare to Navidrome?
For chat, I was thinking something super simple for the weird situations like this. Alternatively, Briar if you’re near the person you want to contact
I’d provide a plug for LMS! If you don’t give much of a damn for music video type stuff, it’s pretty solid and exposes more metadata through the Subsonic API than Navidrome does. My use case required Composer tags in addition to the usual smorgasbord. Bonus is that it combines SUPER well with Symfonium and is compatible with Audiomuse AI.
All that said, I would switch over to Jellyfin for music if they upped their music metadata game and made genre exploration a bit easier (assuming you have hundreds of distinct genre tags like I do).
Is this the LMS you’re talking about?
yes, also recommending it
Yeah, was reading about it here too
Ring doorbells, Alexa, ahh… the joys of selfhosting.
Is there no way to check the doorbell video locally?
An Amazon employee misconfigures something and now your doorbell doesn’t work
Obligatory
Oh wow their front page doesn’t mention at all that their products run locally and don’t require subscriptions.
It mentions push notifications and emails, so I guess they must require an account, or can you configure them to use SMTP directly, as with the Amcrest Pro cameras?
TBH, I’ve never used any of those features. I just used it locally and plugged it into home assistant.
But I just reinstalled their app and can confirm I can watch the feed and get push notifications without a cloud account. Haven’t tried email tho
That sounds worth investigating, thanks! Amcrest needs an account for notifications afaik, but the Pro cameras can work just on a local network.
The app for them is awful. Then they made a new version that is awful in slightly different ways, so I’m interested in new options.
