@frogzone@phnt@jae You can say what you want about nuclear weapons, but the technology is a remarkable achievement of science and engineering. I hate Cloudflare and its effects on the internet, but they are doing some cool engineering. gandhi_bezos.png
@jae@p@phnt its unremarkable. if i was backstopped with a bottomless pit of money by PRISM and banksters to commit atrocities, and benefit by building the tools of mass surveillance to handle those atrocities, u would not call me fascinating, but disgusting.
>intent
the media know about cloudflare, amazon and akamai, they are just too scared to do their actual job, or too corrupt
>don't need to build your own CDN
last i checked the internet had ISP and independent servers, if there were remarkable actors in this space they would be offering freedom-respecting software and hardware (FRSH) to handle the modern web, i understand that cf do provide tools but they are not FRS. if fedi wasn't so packed with big tech stockholm syndrome and sycophancy we would have worked out that CDNs are a bad idea, and something like (#)DCN (Decentralised Content Nodes) are needed.
I understand that only one person is working on something like this, and i am wishing them well on it.
@jae@p cloudflare is an extortion racket, no different from the mafia, but backed by wallstreet banksters. there is nothing special about it. it is so unremarkable that the legacy media are too scared to talk about it, lest they prompt people to ask questions about why it is so endemic.
> cloudflare is an extortion racket, no different from the mafia, but backed by wallstreet banksters.
no doubt.
> there is nothing special about it.
they do some interesting engineering things. the service in general, no it's nothing special it's a global proxy and edge cache setup. but the mechanics behind it are fascinating.
@frogzone@p the tragic part is, from a scientific and engineering point of view cloudflare is amazing. it just doesn't represent the internets i'm aligned with.
> Also it seems that IPFS could be used for that already, so why even bother making something new.
:objection1::objection2: Because IPFS completely botched the execution at every step and their software blows. Something like it has a shot at being good.
last i checked the internet had ISP and independent servers
Backbone ISPs just provide transit and "domestic"/"business" ISPs offer you that transit as a service along with DNS and whatnot. They are irrelevant to the discussion of CDNs. They are not prepared to provide you with CDNs or DDoS protection, nor is their infra.
Independent servers are another thing. Those can do both, but try convincing somebody that is truly independent to provide those services. Today's Internet is mostly no longer "independent" in almost any definition. Most of the backbone is handled by two or three companies that can anytime decide to just nullroute your ASN, if you own one, or drop your BGP announce and you are stuck talking to basically nobody. The network itself is no longer a few cables mostly used for universities.
if fedi wasn't so packed with big tech stockholm syndrome and sycophancy we would have worked out that CDNs are a bad idea
CDNs are currently the only way to divert unnecessary traffic from main servers that works. If you need some network resiliency and transfer speeds that are acceptable to your clients around the world, you just need them.
This server is hosted in NY, USA and across the pond I can at most pull 8MB/s of bandwidth. Now let's say that I have 30 users that are in Europe just sitting at their computer looking through the timelines. That is probably enough to completely saturate that available bandwidth. I've also recently switched ISPs and I magically gained ~7MB/s (previously max bandwidth was around 1.5MB/s), probably because this ISP is peered somewhere else and has a better connection.
In this case at least a cache server somewhere in Europe would be needed to off-load the media proxy traffic from the main server in NY. This is the ideal use case for CDNs.
(#)DCN (Decentralised Content Nodes) are needed.
First of all, that sounds like something from the crypto world, so I'm instantly 50% more like to think it's some non-sensical thing. Second of all, what even is this and who then owns the "content" on the nodes. As a company, I could understand that some of my cacheable data lives on some random CF server, but it might be unacceptable to store that on someone else's server. With CF/Akamai/... you are trusting one company, with your own CDN you trust only yourself and with a DCN, you are trusting every node? Privacy laws, especially EU ones, might make this a new technology that is completely DoA.
Also it seems that IPFS could be used for that already, so why even bother making something new.
But enough said, the post I replied to wasn't even about CDNs.
Also I can completely understand that anyone hates CF for making everyone click on the boats, when they go to visit random website.
Same thing with their WAF and other CF control panel settings that like to completely mess with traffic.
I also can understand if someone hates them, if they are used as a gateway/tunnel to the real server (CF IP in DNS->filtering, WAF, boats,... -> real server).
Or just their scummy behavior.
I hate them for all of the above. But I cannot understand when somebody doesn't like them for the technology they've built, because they don't share it with everyone.
Thank you for reading my blog post and I'm sorry for my Pete long post syndrome.
p: "here you go, here's a pdf of plan9 doc from years ago" jae: "nice, i can't wait" p: "it's good, you'll like it" jae: "hey, happy birthday, i'm still waiting on that document"
@p@phnt@frogzone ipfs in theory is something special. but I l don't understand their design decisions. the current implementation feels like driving a yugo
I've got 4 posts (excluding this thread) in total about DCN/Glutplug from hashtags and 3 of those were from you and one of the author's(?) accounts (dsfgs?) has nothing related and the instance hosting the account died a year ago. Kagi returns nothing useful. So that's the extent I know about this thing. No website, source repo, no mention on how it works, nada.
>Privacy? is uses i2p
From this thread, I assume, that the purpose of it is to store data that can be retrieved later and use it as way to serve files in a decentralized way. That part is fine. But... I2P is an anonymization layer on top of clearnet; using an anonymization network for storing and retrieving data with heavy traffic that does not need to exist is something I would call highly unethical. Same as torrenting over Tor. That kind of traffic usually isn't welcome. Yes, I know that some torrent clients support I2P, but I still think that using I2P for torrents that aren't highly sensitive (leaks) in nature just shouldn't be done.
I just want to cache some data on the edge, throw that data away after a set period of time and that's it. Ideally this wouldn't be built on top of I2P and it would just be another protocol where the website just references a hash of that data and you fetch that data from multiple nodes. There's no need to go through multiple hops to receive that data. From the side of the company using this, it achieves literally nothing other than putting their data on nodes from other people, which I guess saves cost. Also how do you reward people for hosting your shit. The advantage of speed isn't there, which usually is the main thing you build a CDN for. And for the customer, they are basically experiencing "Tor" speeds.
I think that this is a sound idea, but it is just executed poorly and doesn't make sense for the purpose you probably meant when you said that CDNs are a bad idea and DCNs are better. From this thread it literally seems to me that it is just an IPFS-like protocol running over I2P.
If you want to avoid censorship, make that content available anonymously and want your content to be hosted almost indefinitely, than it makes. It just doesn't make sense in the context you are arguing for.
@phnt@p@jae there are a host of really bad design choices in the technology that make cloudflare worse than cancer.
cancer isn't guided by "humans" or "humanoids" like cloudflare is.
(#)DCN is nothing to do with blockchain, is activity pub centric. Was (#)GlutPlug but that name is too suggestive and the person pumping it disappeared and so the name (#)DCN is the one i use. just look it up. i dont want to say to much but i understand someone is working on it.
Privacy? is uses i2p
control? the main server(s) send an integrity hash that the content must adhere to.
just search the hashtag for more info, i can tag u in a post if u need :)
THAT is how engineering works, bad architecture is BAD engineering, full stop. you can run a ring around saturn but if is bad architecture is bad design. and cloudflare is not just bad design is, book of revelations, is the antichrist that is trying to be bigger than god. if i die my spirit will not rest till cloudflare, cloudfront and akamai is destroyed and world knows its evil
some of the greatest jornalists and publishers use torrents for long term availability of content for the betterment of humanity.... p2p is the best chance we have; to swarm like starlings to the good.
@jae@dcc@phnt@p > Yeah, mostly frogzone suggests P2P as a replacement for datacenters and routers and they're unrelated. datacenters being replaced is correct and a good goal. i want the internet the way it was designed to be, with the endpoints smart and the transport layers dumb, sue me
the rest is apologisia for poking fun at an active genocide. fwict. you dont need to make a pictured meme for every post either, screams privilege and a person w too much time on their hands than they know what to do with
> i want the internet the way it was designed to be, with the endpoints smart and the transport layers dumb, sue me
Cars are smarter than roads, but a freeway is still a more efficient method of travel than a beeline.
If you want any kind of internet, there will be a backbone. Someone has to know how to route the packets and to where. You don't need to believe me: ask anyone that knows BGP to tell you how routing works.
> the rest is apologisia for poking fun at an active genocide.
No, I poked fun at people that are still bought into the Cold War myth that this is the most important genocide and the partisan version that says it's one-sided.
I don't need to make an apologia for jokes about genocide: show me your sacred cow and I will eat steak.
> screams privilege
Privilege is picking a side in a war that has nothing to do with you while ignoring all of the other wars. People affected by a war don't get to pick a side or pick which war matters: they're born on one side of an active conflict. Privilege is arguing about why other people on the internet have to pick a side or complaining that they picked the wrong one. Privilege is being able to close the tab because you didn't want to finish watching the beheading video instead of bowing and scraping to the guys that do the beheading because it's your goddamn town. You have a goddamn internet connection and enough food to eat and your monocle pops out because someone made a joke.
> you dont need to make a pictured meme for every post either
:tedk: None of this is *necessary*. None of us will die if we log off forever. ivegotamemeforthis.mp4
> P2P is great but it's not a substitute for the internet having a backbone. The packets have to get there somehow.
i am the choir, you are the preacher. the plumbing is a given. unless we're doing p2p lan-party style, which by that time means we're resurfacing sneakernet but calling it velcronet
@p@dcc@phnt@cereal@jae i dont know what else i can say, im going by my learned experience. a sober assessment is we need to be revived, because we have been made comatose. You can't fix this imv, by appealing to the lieks of CAGeMAFIA and the govt they will squash the alternatives. u say that there are indy datacenters, i dont see them, and honestly in today's world i wouldnt be able to trust them anyway. look at how many shell companies us, uk eu-backed israwl made to fool people they were getting a good device, when actually it was laced with explosives.
How bad is it? We can't outsource the production of our computers, we need computers that are made BY the civilisations that will use them, this is how bad it has gotten. in the same way i dont see an alternative to having our computers under our control the whole time and not outsourcing to a third party, and especially not one poisoning people and planet.
if you dont trust with your life, every person that walks into that datacenter u have a problem. this likely means there will NOT BE mega killer global apps in the future.... and good, those things have been fascist in every sense of the word 'fascist'.
the architecture of how we compute things is going to dictate whether we can be revived.
@p@dcc@phnt@cereal@jae i'll look at the top 500 "amazon-served" site at some point, i could disagree with the arguments raised but is not worth it. the people of the 1960s had valid concerns tho.
>Well, that's gloomy, but I'd rather improve the situation we are on life support is what im saying, comatose, dead, the life we see is borrowed, i want to resuscitate. gloomy, no. just accurate. we cant get to where we need to be if we delude ourselves.
The list predates the existence of Amazon. It is a benchmark of the top 500 supercomputers, carried out twice a year since 1993.
> the people of the 1960s had valid concerns tho.
And they pointed those concerns at a tool that cannot be un-invented instead of at the perpetrators of the problems. If you're worried about nuclear energy, the same computing resources require less power to put the computers fewer hops from the backbone in a climate-controlled environment. The backbone itself exists for the sake of efficiency.
> gloomy, no. just accurate.
That's funny, if you talk to someone with depression and they do one of their "$x is completely worthless" speeches, they will say "Actually, it's just accurate."
I don't eat the blackpills no matter who is handing them out: my options are to lay down and die or do something to justify my continued existence, and I pick the second option every time. If you are dead-set on demoralizing people, though, at least demoralize the people that should be demoralized.
Nuclear energy is excellent, and plenty of datacenters already do use nuclear energy. In California, we even get a breakdown of how much comes from what source on our bills. (It is still mostly oil and coal.)
> is a form of assymetric warfare
No, controlling all datacenters is. You should be supporting independent datacenters instead of decrying all datacenters unless you want the big tech companies to be the *only* ones that own datacenters, because they are the ones that are guaranteed not to care what you say. Here's #4 on the Top500 list as of last month: https://top500.org/system/180236/ .
During the 60s, hippies in Cambridge were protesting computers on the grounds that these were a mechanism for government control, and this sounds quaint to us because computers can be used by anyone, and in fact they are a force-multiplier for creative thought, so they have been as useful in fighting government control as they have been to the government that wanted to use them. Of course, people that understood computers were genuinely baffled by the protests.
Datacenters are fine.
> a fascist coming together of govt and megacorporation
You can say it is totalitarian, you can say that it is autocratic, you can say that it is repressive, despotic, whatever. It is not fascist. There are plenty of correct words for it, and correct words tend to be less contentious than incorrect words, aside from the broader effect of diluting the term.
> in many ways we are already dead, so this just makes us more dead, i guess
Well, that's gloomy, but I'd rather improve the situation than argue about the situation with you ever again. I've said what I said, I'm done discussing it. Thank you.
and i'm saying a govt sanctioned 'datacenter' and soon to be powered by nuke-leer energy owned by big tech supremacists, is a form of assymetric warfare, a fascist coming together of govt and megacorporation that will rule with extreme and brutal silent and assymetric hybrid warfare. we can agree to disagree forever til we are blue. or move on. but when govt and mega corporations meld like this WeThePlebs are dead.
in many ways we are already dead, so this just makes us more dead, i guess
@p@dcc@phnt@cereal@jae >The solution? Host it on a hidden service on Tor/I2P/whatever floats your boat. But now you alienated 98% of your possible site visitors/users of the service
im an onion maxi and garlic maxi, the only clearnet traffic there should be is the transport garlic and onion routed stuff, imho. the internet is broken because corporates want to keep us tied to their 'clearnet'. do i think domain registries and CAs have no sustainable future, yes.
>No, it's a place where people put their computers
all u've described is a form of assymetric warfare on the people, govt (or large corporation that is govt contracted) maybe partnering with other corporates to house their stuff, ie govt sanctioning of who is allowed to have a voice. in its most extreme sense, and we are effectively at that extreme case already. u can reference "independent datacenters" til u are blu in face, i just see oxymoron. they can't exist, they are a phantom, an oasis, i don't believe any claims that independent, govt-sanctioned datacenters exist. the only ppl at a routercenter ought be telcos, and govt, doing the very most driest things of keeping the routing smooth and efficient, but it would be fine for them to communicate with ppl in the area about things that may impact connectivity from one month to the next. they can have a server in the routercenter for that but they cant host other entities stuff there that would be antitrust imv.
@cereal@dcc@phnt@p@jae >that means "no Datacenters". agree.... i think the term #datacenters gaslights us into accepting an oppressive version of the internet, where we have to basically offer our machine to the govt or corporation that owns the "datacenter", to host a thing.... we should call them #datatransits or #routerCenters or something, no servers their
and then we have #servers at the end points, at the nearby businesses and homes and such, call me a dreamer, but i think "datacenters" are inherently problematic.
@frogzone@dcc@phnt@cereal@jae If you put your server next to the router, fewer hops. If you put your server where there is stable power, you don't need to put a UPS in every house in the country. If you put your server where there is a clean room with climate control then you don't have to keep your house at 10% humidity to avoid corroding sensitive parts.
I think you don't understand why these places exist. There are people in this thread that have been in the game so long they bleed molasses, people committed to individual liberty independent of corporate and government control, all of that, and zero of those people think that datacenters should be abolished.
> i think the term #datacenters gaslights us into accepting an oppressive version of the internet
No, it's a place where people put their computers.
@p@dcc@phnt@jae >Where do you think the routers are going to go? in a variety of strategic and convenient locations, and not (basically) all (70%) in DataCenterAlley Virginia, CIA
>we should have more (diversity of communications providers) hail MARY, we have arrived
we do need someone that can move a petabyte in real-time? i dont know bout "someone" and "petabytes" but we do need a resilient network of pipes, to shove i2p and tor traffic into, imo