A Big Chunk of the Internet Goes Offline Because of a Faulty CDN Provider (techcrunch.com) 157
TechCrunch reports: Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, Twitch, Stack Overflow, GitHub, gov.uk, Hulu, HBO Max, Quora, PayPal, Vimeo, Shopify, Stripe, and news outlets CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times are currently facing an outage. A glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager at Financial Times. Fastly has confirmed it's facing an outage on its status website. Update: the issue has been resolved.
Stack Overflow down, but, but, ...... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Stack Overflow down, but, but, ...... (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't put all your internet eggs in one basket. Same goes for Cloudflare and other CDN's.
Honestly, it's really starting to seem like CDN's are a bad idea, because all it takes is one country to want to block twitter, and suddenly every site behind the CDN is blocked.
Your statement is false (Score:5, Informative)
Don't put all your internet eggs in one basket. Same goes for Cloudflare and other CDN's.
Honestly, it's really starting to seem like CDN's are a bad idea, because all it takes is one country to want to block twitter, and suddenly every site behind the CDN is blocked.
None of that is true. The whole point of CDNs is reliability. If they have an issue with one site, the CDNs ensure everyone else can get through.
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If they have an issue with one site, the CDNs ensure everyone else can get through.
Which is exactly the situation we had when everyone rented a slot in a data center rack and rolled their own web site.
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Honestly, it's really starting to seem like CDN's are a bad idea, because all it takes is one country to want to block twitter, and suddenly every site behind the CDN is blocked.
Firstly it doesn't work like that.
Secondly you can always put up your own "reliable" server, and then watch it melt into a puddle of plastic goo when Slashdot posts a story about you. Remember that? The pre CDN days, when a bunch of nerds reading news for nerds would knock whole sites offline?
Re:Stack Overflow down, but, but, ...... (Score:5, Funny)
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Wish I had some mod points for this one!!!! Thanks for the grin.
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It was nice to see such a fastly response to the Fastly situation.
Re:Stack Overflow down, but, but, ...... (Score:5, Funny)
Seen on Stackoverflow:
A: "Help, my company's web site is down and people keep phoning me to fix it, what do I do?"
B: "This sounds like you just want help with your homework."
C: "Have you tried Rust?"
D: "You should try turning your company off and back on again."
Another 24/7/365 service provider... (Score:3, Informative)
... which isn't.
Its about time one of these companies got sued into the ground after outages like this so they provide proper multiple failover and backup systems instead of whatever poundshop versions they tend to use instead.
Re:Another 24/7/365 service provider... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've had customers threaten to sue us as well.
Always cracks me up.
The SLA is right there in the contract you signed. It includes our reimbursement/credit policy for performance below our SLA.
The second you threaten though, I let you know the corporate lawyer will be conducting all further communications with you.
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Honestly, threating with lawyers only guarantees you the bare minimum of what is required and will actively prevent people from going "above and beyond" for you since any actions outside of lawyer approved SOPs are hard to defend.
It's best just to quietly document and try to work with and be friendly with the person helping you. It helps them "connect" with you and makes them feel invested in your outcome.
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This isn't because the court systems are slanted in our favor, it's because you are claiming a liability that we never agreed to, and we have a contract.
That's why 99.99% of all threats never actually enter court. It's just someone with a tiny dick posturing to make himself feel better about his inability to have his own uptime contingencies.
But ya, if it makes your dick feel bigger, go
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... which isn't.
Its about time one of these companies got sued into the ground after outages like this so they provide proper multiple failover and backup systems instead of whatever poundshop versions they tend to use instead.
Perhaps we are relying on CDNs as as whole a bit too much, IF this is to be believed:
"Today’s issue isn’t limited to a data center in particular. Fastly calls it a “global CDN disruption” and it sounds like it is affecting the company’s network globally."
CDNs were initially justified to provide considerable performance gains. They should not completely disable shit when they go offline, but it would appear they are now more critical than the web servers hosting content now.
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So they run for about 7 years and then what? Is the 7 years up this morning, is that the problem?
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Downtimes happens for everyone, just accept it.
However these days web sites are often built up by cross-linking scripts from many sites and if one script serving site goes down you suddenly have many other sites that starts to behave strange. Even if the script serving site is just one of the hated and useless trackers.
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However these days web sites are often built up by cross-linking scripts from many sites and if one script serving site goes down you suddenly have many other sites that starts to behave strange.
Right vein of thinking, but it's even messier than that.
I find that anyone who acts like perfect uptime is easy has never tried it.
In particular, the more scalable (wide) your service needs to be, the easier it is to run into situations where failovers don't happen correctly.
We do our best, and we offer SLAs for a reason. If we fail to meet them, you don't pay us.
But threatening to sue will only put you in my email trashbin, because at that point, I don't give a fuck about your money, and frankly, any
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They had uptimes over five 9's with analog tech and copper.
You aren't honestly comparing those, are you?
If you are, then I'd *really* like some analog geeks to understand that their technology had a fraction of the complexity and service requirements of ours.
A tiny fucking fraction.
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Another moronic comment by Viol8. No provider offers 27/7/365. Stop drunk-posting on Slashdot and actually read an SLA for a change.
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Hey, they're FIVE NINES. They just happened to use up all their nines for the next 300 years.
Eggs and Basket - The Oldest New Concept (Score:2)
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Variations of that statement date back to the 17th Century.
How about a big golf clap for the cheap-ass humans who still haven't fucking learned.
Re:Eggs and Basket - The Oldest New Concept (Score:5, Interesting)
You could try to contract with multiple CDN's and set up automatic fallback, devise scenarios where you can actually test your fallback, etc. But that will be money and engineering efforts spent on an error scenario that might not be happening this year or next year, and pose an opportunity cost for you that you could spend on improving your site in better ways.
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The user based CDNs like arc.io seem pretty interesting as alternatives.
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Note that the commentary could be considered leveled at an individual site operator (in which case, your response is valid, it's impractical for an individual site owner to cover all the contingencies) or at the industry at large, in which case I think it's a pretty valid concern.
There's a handful of companies that each represent single points of failure for massive portions of the internet, because hundreds of companies all pick the exact same providers for key services. The emphasis on consolidation in th
Re:Eggs and Basket - The Oldest New Concept (Score:5, Informative)
(Of course, impact is a delusional number in this case, since it happened at O'Dark thirty. Any suggestions of improving infrastructure will be dismissed until this happens at 10AM on a critical business day.)
Hailing from the Amsterdam timezone here. This DID happen, at noon, on a critical business day.
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Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Here speaks someone who doesn't understand how the internet functions. They're not in one basket which is why they use CDN servers. They use multiple CDNs in multiple countries in order to deliver content more locally so it gets to that area faster than say the BBC only being delivered direct from the UK. Therefore a CDN going down in one area is only going to mean that area is affected, not the rest of the world. Certainly here in the UK I noticed no issue with any of those sites.
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Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Here speaks someone who doesn't understand how the internet functions. They're not in one basket which is why they use CDN servers. They use multiple CDNs in multiple countries in order to deliver content more locally so it gets to that area faster than say the BBC only being delivered direct from the UK. Therefore a CDN going down in one area is only going to mean that area is affected, not the rest of the world. Certainly here in the UK I noticed no issue with any of those sites.
Also:
"Today’s issue isn’t limited to a data center in particular. Fastly calls it a “global CDN disruption” and it sounds like it is affecting the company’s network globally."
Perhaps the "egg" we're relying far too heavily on these days, is the CDN network itself. Removing the turbocharger, should not disable your whole damn engine.
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I'm not sure which world you've been living in, but if you take the turbocharger out of most any modern car, it will in fact the disable the engine.
Yeah, it will. If you're a fucking moron turning a wrench who doesn't know what they're doing.
Re:Eggs and Basket - The Oldest New Concept (Score:5, Informative)
Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
These companies all do a basic cost/benefit analysis: do the CDN outages cost us less than other alternatives (including self-hosting)? Do the benefits of the CDN when it is operating outweigh the costs when the CDN goes down? Apparently they do, or the CDN's wouldn't still be used.
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These companies all do a basic cost/benefit analysis: do the CDN outages cost us less than other alternatives (including self-hosting)? Do the benefits of the CDN when it is operating outweigh the costs when the CDN goes down? Apparently they do, or the CDN's wouldn't still be used.
This is correct, but I think that some companies actually want to have another party to blame when crap breaks, which is part of why they outsource it. In the recent past I worked for a Fortune 500 company that was technically an "international" company, but in reality North America was the only market that they really cared about. I'm not going to name them because I don't want to give them free publicity because they are kind of dicks. Anyway, I did internal support on a SASS type product we sold to
Re:Eggs and Basket - The Oldest New Concept (Score:5, Insightful)
The law of diminishing returns goes back almost as far. How about a big golf clap for people living in some fantasy world who still haven't fucking learned.
Perfection can not be achieved. At some point you must say 'enough resource has been spent on this, I accept the remaining risk'.
When you are driving your car you probably wear a seat belt and have an airbag. Do you also use s 5-point belt and a HANS device like racers do? Do you have a motorcade surrounding you like the president does? Why not? Are you just a cheap ass human who still hasn't fucking learned'?
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How about a big golf clap for the cheap-ass humans who still haven't fucking learned.
I'm more amused by the implication that we all AREN'T "cheap-ass" humans. Ah the lies we tell ourselves to feel superior. Now put those items back on the shelf and wait for the sales to be over so one can pay MSRP like a good little consumer.
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The eggs aren't all in one basket. That's why only a portion of websites went down.
I'm talking directly to those who are or were affected. They can either learn from this outage and do something about it to mitigate the risk, or enjoy the next outage that could be far worse.
is it over? (Score:3)
https://downdetector.com/statu... [downdetector.com] has a nice graph showing the spike in reported problems, it looks like it's resolved though?
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https://status.fastly.com/ [fastly.com]
Yep, all green now.
Switcheroo (Score:3)
I wonder if any of the affected companies will now look to be able to run with multiple CDNs and then be able to switch out Fastly to Akamai or Cloudflare or someone?
When I last worked in this area, the CDNs made it tricky - first of all, they work very hard to sell you into their (proprietary) edge products. Secondly, their commercials mean that you pay X per month for Y amount of traffic (or less). You obviously set Y to be higher than your average because going over it costs you more. Thus, the amount you pay (X) is pretty high - and you couldn't afford to pay it twice. They won't let you pay a sensible amount per byte, so you always end up having to "over provision" by some amount. Even the likes of Amazon haven't been able to knock that craziness out of the market, although they do offer a pay-as-you-go CDN option, which I guess you could use as your backup. How on earth you pay the AWS bill though is another question entirely - I'll bet you couldn't sue it out of Fastly.
CDN sharing is technically not too hard (so long as you didn't get into bed with one provider). Getting the commercials in place to actually do such a thing is much harder - but I suspect big sites like SO and Github can probably do it. Lesser mortals no so much.
One wonders if the bigger sites would start to run their own CDNs - perhaps not as comprehensive as (say) Fastly, but "good enough" to run their site if their chosen CDN provider was having a bad day?
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[...] How on earth you pay the AWS bill though is another question entirely - I'll bet you couldn't sue it out of Fastly.
Am I right to take the meaning to be that AWS' CDN (CloudFront) is expensive, at least their pay-as-you-go option? We use CloudFront, and find it to be price-competitive with the competition, but would be open to other options if their was a significant savings.
Most big names run multiple CDNs (Score:2)
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But Amazon's shop website was down, because apparently they use Fastly as their CDN
It has been linked already in the comments, but https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
Overuse is the problem... and overscripting (Score:5, Insightful)
Using CDNs to deliver high-bandwidth resources is reasonable.
Using them to deliver critical parts of your site is stupid.
If your scripts have grown so large that you have to transfer them by CDN in order to make your page load in acceptable time, then you are relying too heavily on scripting and your page is going to run like a turd on many people's computers. Learn how HTML and CSS work so that you don't need so much client side scripting.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Your reasoning doesn't really make sense anyway. The megabytes of scripting you're talking about are generally the bits delivered by CDNs regardless of whether the main page is regenerated per page view or not. And "Learning how CSS and HTML work" isn't really the #1 issue generating a page, it's usually the code on the server side that's looking up articles in databases and trying to stitch everything together.
I just don't understand it... you go to any random website do view source or push f12 and its one massive cesspool of libraries and frameworks and piecemeal loading of elements via separate requests. There are orders of magnitude more crap to support systems within systems than actual content with majority of time wasted on avoidable round trip delay.
Indeed, half of the Javascript-heavy websites I see are JS heavy because they're trying to reduce load on their (non-cached or limited cached) servers.
Isn't this what middleware is for?
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I just don't understand it... you go to any random website do view source or push f12 and its one massive cesspool of libraries and frameworks and piecemeal loading of elements via separate requests. There are orders of magnitude more crap to support systems within systems than actual content with majority of time wasted on avoidable round trip delay.
Yep, this shit-show is what the GP is defending. That's what CDNs help them with. "We need CDNs so our webpage can be shit!" That's all I can see in their comment.
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Then you have no use for a CDN. They're not just for distributing big files because Bittorrent is a bad word. Most CDNs are used to host static files like images.
A lot of websites are "not working" because the images are not being retrieved in a timely fashion. And images make up a good chunk of most websites and is a critical part of the website.
The alternative is self hosting the big fi
Lessons Learned (Score:2)
Over the last few
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Patience young padawans (Score:5, Informative)
There was a time when this sort of thing was a common occurrence, Slashdot its self could bring it about by linking to site, it was so common not only did it have a name, but a Wikipedia page, the Slashdot effect [wikipedia.org].
As time passed it became less common, lessons were learnt, bug were fixed, fail overs put in place and CDNs were part of that. This will continue, they sky is not falling in, this is an opportunity.
Oblig. XKCD (Score:2)
Looks like someone has tripped in the wire.
https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
Why? (Score:2)
The Internet was designed to get around single points of failure. Things have become far too centralized, and it needs to be fixed.
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1) This wasn't the failure of a single device, it was a failure of a whole set of devices run by one company.
2) Your understanding of the Internet is simply wrong. The "route around damage" applies to network traffic, not failures of endpoints.
Terrible SLA (Score:2)
A downtime of 4.32min gives a 1% credit on the monthly bill. Up to 43.2minutes gives a 5% credit, up to 7.2 hours 10%, up to 14.4 hours 25% and a downtime over 14.4 hours only gives a 50% credit.
https://docs.fastly.com/produc... [fastly.com]
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The best part? Customers must request within 30 days of the affected billing period; Fastly will apply credits 2 months after the credit concerns have been settled.
In other words, no big deal.
"Countless" (Score:2)
I'm not sure how many guys named "Fred" go by the name "Steve-O", live in Siberia, and are into moroccan cooking using only ingredients found in Peru. Might be zero, might not be. Therefore the number is "countless", correct? Either "countless" merely means "uncounted", or it effectively means a number so large that there appears to be no way to count it.
The number of websites impacted could be determined. They aren't "countless" just because the author chose not to count them.
Suggested alternatives include
Budget CDN, budget availability (Score:5, Informative)
One of our architects wanted to be part of the cool club and found out Fastly was cheaper than Akamai. We rolled out a pilot and spent almost a year working with Fastly services to figure out why our services were performing inadequately in Asia and Latin America...like dial-up speeds. We put the service back on Akamai and everything was golden...reliable, no-drama, cost a bit more, but the downtime cost us WAAAY more than the difference in service costs...not to mention the cost of a good chunk of our staff trying to troubleshoot Fastly's many issues.
It goes without saying, everytime we reported an incident, they'd blame us and we'd spend a week sending info proving that it was actually their fault...so to them, it was always our fault, until they actually looked at it and it wasn't....pretty unprofessional.
I guess it's good enough if you only do business in the US or you just don't care about reliability or availability...but we do and that architect was almost fired for the Fastly fiasco.
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if debian mirrors use it as well. I got multiple 503 errors from apt-get while trying to finish installing a new system.
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Informative)
if you go to https://deb.debian.org/ [debian.org] you will not only see that it is, but that Fastly is kind enough to sponsor this service
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory XKCD [xkcd.com]
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Non-obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Related XKCD [xkcd.com]
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Informative)
CDNs are one place where "the cloud" really makes sense, because it's not viable for each and every organization out there to build out 200+ endpoint locations inside of ISPs to make content available closer to the consumer.
Argue all you want about shifting things from a corporate datacenter to AWS / Azure / GCP, but CDN providers have been here since before we were calling things "the cloud" (Akamai in the late 1990s), and are part of any serious scaling effort on the web if you're in any way doing it right.
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CDNs are one place where "the cloud" really makes sense, because it's not viable for each and every organization out there to build out 200+ endpoint locations inside of ISPs to make content available closer to the consumer.
Argue all you want about shifting things from a corporate datacenter to AWS / Azure / GCP, but CDN providers have been here since before we were calling things "the cloud" (Akamai in the late 1990s), and are part of any serious scaling effort on the web if you're in any way doing it right.
Personally I would like to see ISP (or third party) caching hierarchies offloading static content to improve access across ALL sites not just ones that pay CDN companies.
Should have tweaked the way proxy caching works a bit so that cache servers only proxy what is mutually deemed to be cache worthy /w standard means for clients to check signatures and get keys to check/decrypt cached data.
If that were done caching would have continued to thrive rather than being killed off by encryption and cheap bandwidth.
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Personally I would like to see ISP (or third party) caching hierarchies offloading static content
What is this static content you speak of? Last time I saw that was in a learn to HTML class at school.
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What is this static content you speak of? Last time I saw that was in a learn to HTML class at school.
Most data by volume transmitted over the Internet is static video.
Other static content include Imagery, JavaScript, audio, software, fonts, system / software updates, binary packages, documents, style sheets.
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I was hoping by teasing the word video out of you that you would see how braindead the idea was. So to be clear you want ISPs to take over the entire job of a CDN? How much do you want to pay for your internet? $2500/month, $3500/month?
Yeah I know, storage is free because something something cloud something, and nothing costs anything.
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I was hoping by teasing the word video out of you that you would see how braindead the idea was. So to be clear you want ISPs to take over the entire job of a CDN? How much do you want to pay for your internet? $2500/month, $3500/month?
Yeah I know, storage is free because something something cloud something, and nothing costs anything.
Just the opposite is true. Video is ideal. The bigger the content the better ROI for ISPs as it maximally reduces overhead associated with reducing bandwidth vs caching of smaller content. The nice thing about data caching its trivially horizontally scalable and caches are able to coordinate with upstream peers for scaling and load distribution.
The problem with current proxy systems is that they are all or nothing which only adds latency for dynamic content, reduces security and privacy and increases con
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Then you haven't been paying attention to modern web app design.
For example, if using ReactJS or the like (and that would be a very large chunk of web apps for frontend rendering) that javascript is static, as well as any images or video being rendered. All of that can be accelerated through a CDN.
Modern trends have a frontend being rendered using Javascript, and a backend API that the Javascript engine interacts with using dynamic code such as Java or Python/Django or the like.
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In particular, people booking coronavirus tests. Fortunately it seems to be back now.
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Or filing tax returns. None of the main ones were due today, but there are some that have to be filed a certain number of days after a particular event, like the taxes on buying and selling properties.
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, nobody will miss GitHub or PayPal. People who code don't need to to access their repos. People who use PayPal for their day-to-day payments will just write checks. Damn comment on ./ are getting more retarded every day.
This should be at +5 there AC. I dunno if people who were kicked from facebook and Twitter have found /., or what, but the quality of postings has gone downhill.
We've always had trolls and smartasses, but the quality is suffering these days.
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We've always had trolls and smartasses, but the quality is suffering these days.
I wonder if it's just people getting stupider. The UID of the OP indicates that he isn't new here.
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We've always had trolls and smartasses, but the quality is suffering these days.
I wonder if it's just people getting stupider. The UID of the OP indicates that he isn't new here.
I can believe that - I've been having local trouble with people on the dumbest things, like showing people actual tax/legal document information directly relevant to their situation, and the reply - "no, that's wrong - that won't apply to me." We'll see what song they'll be singing around next April.
Maybe soundbite society has taken away their ability to think.
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The whole point of Git is everyone having their own copy of the repo and can control what goes in or out of it. If GitHub went down permanently, it should be very easy to switch to mailing lists.
As for Paypal, there's tons of alternatives, like Visa or ACH. And if those also fail too, there's always Dogecoin.
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I believe the proper reply to use here is "Woosh."
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Ok Mr. Smart Guy. Which Website or internet service that is popular enough for people to know of for a news article targeted towards people with an 8th grade education, would you pick that would be of value?
Please be aware any answer you give will point out how shallow of a person you really are, or how ignorant you are for not choosing some other competing site/service that does the same thing, but better for a particular set of reasons.
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You are quite welcome for the "personal attack" random guy on the internet, with some aliased user name.
Hey I am OK being shallow if I have to, I just wanted to point out what you said wasn't funny, just annoying because you are gaslighting a serious problem.
Being that our Internet Infrastructures are so full of single points of failure, is really the big problem we need to address. Saying such sites were useless doesn't help address the problem, nor is it really funny to discredit those who may find such
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gov.uk,, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC and Financial Times: News and information sites: Yes they are news sites, and we are having a problem currently with trusted journalism, however we still turn to many sites like this when we want to get an idea on what is happening.
Be nice to the poor guy - he was sweating bullets until he saw that Fox News wasn't on that list.
I suspect that in true post you know who fashion, he just got triggered when he saw the New Right's enemies list outlined in the summary.
And with that bright spot in his life, he didn't care who else was affected.
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None of those sites listed in the summary will be missed.
True, now if they were porn sites...
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We'll just have to get all the porn actors together and have them make new content.
It's not like a writer's strike would slow that down.
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Yeah, Stack Overflow, Github, Paypal, and Stripe absolutely won't be missed by anyone. Unless they are writing software, managing systems, or buying something online.
Put the crack pipe down.
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It is. And what do you think happens to the order you're trying to place if Stripe isn't available? Best case, a delay until the transaction can be retried, worst case is some nasty untrapped HTTP 503.
Stripe is also used for point-of-sale purchases through tablets and phones and such - unavailability can cause issues paying restaurant checks and buying meatspace retail goods at shops.
What happens if Stripe isn't available for SaaS billing if it's an overnight outage? Would that cause service interruption
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot & The Pirate Bay.
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Yet here you are.
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Interesting)
We cannot avoid gazing at an accident in progress.
When Slashdot was young, it was mostly filled with Pro Linux stuff, Anti-Microsoft Stuff, random interesting science news, and interesting but oddly useless technology such as the Potato Powered Web Server [slashdot.org]
The posters were young 20-30 somethings often getting 6 figure jobs in the up and coming Tech, Economy 2.0, .COM economy. With a seat with the C table employees. As these guys were to bring these companies into the 21st century...
Then around 2003 many of these companies got tired of paying big salaries to these "kids" and realized now that they got Internet Access, they don't necessarily need workers in the office to do the work. So they got enticed by Cheap Offshore labor, who took advantage of Free Open Source Software to allow them to practice up and get skilled enough to be competitive. For the US based IT market there was a lot of layoffs, and what was worse if you were to find a new job, the salary would be much lower than your previous job, and require more skills. People went from 100k a year jobs, to 50k a year. (which was still middle class, but getting a salary cut, is much harder on someone than one thinks).
So Slashdot started to get filled with a lot more bitter and disillusioned people. A lot of them questioned being in IT, and were angry at a lot of people, Companies for laying them off, Government for allowing the companies to do this, The Offshore workers for taking their job... So Slashdot started to take a darker turn. Technology was not longer something interesting, but something to be mocked.
Over time the Offshore problem settled down, as companies realized they weren't as much as a bargain than they though. The Computer upgrade cycle normalized (the rush to fix Y2k, made a lot of businesses upgrade all their PC's and toss out a lot of their old tech by the end of 1999. Meaning 2000-2008 the bulk of the economy was using newer computers that didn't need to be upgraded). So the tech jobs came back, but not like in the late 1999's it became a normal middle class job, nothing too spectacular but a steady job.
By this time we were moving towards Mobile Technology, in which these now 20-30 somethings are now 30-40 somethings. Where such new technology is no longer appealing to them, and they are just focused on family life, and getting by. While a decade ago we were making fun of the Mainframe guys for dismissing the PC as just a toy for rich kids, while the mainframe does real work. We are now the ones making fun of the Kids with their smart phones.
Now today we are in our 40-50's, we are starting to become grumpy old men, other media sites had flooded our minds making everything seem like a big deal, where much of it isn't, and we are getting Angry and less tolerant now. We have been established in our careers so we are now making the 6 figure salary again, and now sitting in the C-Suite again. So Slashdot is not longer the fun site, but just a place for old men to complain about everything.
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So Slashdot is not longer the fun site, but just a place for old men to complain about everything.
I believe they call that a nursing home.
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For those in their 50+ it is mostly 24 Hour Cable "News" They are yelling at.
For those in 40-50's it is mostly Internet BLOG sites
For those in 20-30's it is the social media sites where information is much more condensed.
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For those in their 50-60s it is mostly 24 Hour Cable "News" They are yelling at.
For those in their 60s+ tuned out of the everyday senseless commotion (media, social media), tinkering, working and living life.
Re:And Nothing Of Value Was Lost (Score:5, Funny)
So Slashdot is not longer the fun site, but just a place for old men to complain about everything.
It has (literally in many cases) turned into "Old man yells at cloud".
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Mod parent funnier.
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When Slashdot was young, it was mostly filled with Pro Linux stuff...
Then around 2003....
Just a nit... there was no Pro Linux stuff when Slashdot was young. Though the Penguinistas were ravenous in the mid-2000s, mostly due to having absolutely no experience with mature operating systems, Linux was simply not ready for the data center and remained a mere hobbyist OS. Due to the apparent popularity of Linux, IBM even tried to replace AIX with Linux around then, but professional systems administrators balked at how terrible Linux was compared to the extremely stable AIX, which came back by 2005
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So Slashdot is not longer the fun site, but just a place for old men to complain about everything.
And it's run by click-driven Advertising Overlords who, let's face it, are almost certainly intentionally posting dupes and off-topic "not news for nerds, not stuff that matters" content because they know we'll boost their engagements by griping about it. I'm guilty of it, myself, but we do make it way too easy.
Too bad we can't just pool our pennies and buy the site, remove the Taboola clickspam links, put an editor who gives a damn about content back on the payroll, and make this place what it used to be.
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You completely misattribute the problem. Offshoring had nothing to do with an incredible glut of IT people. Shit I still remember 2000. Why the heck would you do a medical degree when you could get and IT degree in less than half the time and start making $100k a year first year out of uni. That was the promise of the industry. Better still IT had low entry requirements, and every university offered it.
Every moron and their dog did an IT degree. There were people who struggled all the way through highschool
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We've got a union. And they sent a Janitor in to sit in tech meetings to consult on how we should handle after hours incidents. Because he's a shop steward.
He suggested that nobody can work outside normal working hours. That was his official "union" opinion. They eventually replaced him with a secretary who understood we may need to work outside normal work hours. Of course, she can't understand why we need to make it so hard to logon to the network.
Perhaps the root problem is... (Score:2)
But I'm being redundant here.