Worrying and Amusing Stories of "Clown Computing" Gone Awry
We have just included some more cautionary tales about clown computing in relation to AWS (GAFAM). To replicate the latest 4 stories:
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Stanford University ☛ Head in the clown(s)
Thankfully, the disruption in proprietary trap AWS did not prevent Jenny Ballutay from making this wonderful cartoon.
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Futurism ☛ Oops! The proprietary trap AWS Outage Took Down Everybody’s Bored Apes
"Cannot load image."
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Stanford University ☛ AWS outage sparks campus-wide disruption
On Monday, Amazon Web Services Inc. experienced latencies and outages to its nationwide services, including Canvas and Bswift (Open Enrollment).
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PC World ☛ These smart beds began roasting their owners during AWS outage
Owners of Eight Sleep smart beds got anything but a good night’s sleep Monday, as the beds began heating up uncontrollably while also getting frozen in position due to Amazon’s worldwide server outage.
Many of these disasters could be avoided. First, wrong assumptions were made about "cloud" availability. In case of failure, why would beds start "heating up uncontrollably"?
Who designed this?
Why was it assumed that AWS just always works? What if some catastrophe hit the planet and many of our devices would stop functioning due to dependence on 1) a network; 2) some particular server/s?
"There are several articles about the AWS failure," an associate noted, "some of which (IIRC) mention the problem created by the centralization. The topic of re-decentralization needs to be raised, again. The video by David Bombal ("AWS Outage WARNING: Centralized Web") is on target there."
Back in 2020-2022 we wrote many articles about re-decentralization, occasionally in relation to code forges and video (or multimedia in general). The world's computing sadly relies on far too few companies, many of which are based in a foreign country. They are, in essence, remotely controlling many people and institutions.
We're going to revisit this theme some more in the coming days. █