Posts by Nick Stallman 174 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Oct 2007
I actually look forward to a CloudFlare incident report as I don't know of another company who writes better public reports and fesses up to the Nitty gritty details.
If only everyone wrote about their issues like this.
Disclosure, I'm a Enterprise customer. These incident write ups were a factor in deciding to go Enterprise.
Is a bank an innocent victim if they leave their vault open and unguarded for the public to stroll through?
Or would that be criminal negligence?
I don't understand why governments, hospitals and so on are all the victims when this stuff happens when it was preventable.
In this case it's obvious that layers upon layers of negligence were involved - the bank vault was left open.
If we wind the clock back 23 years, wouldn't imagery of the planes hitting the twin towers meet all the same criteria while being a far better example of a terrorist attack?
Is anyone advocating for the removal of those videos from all online platforms?
Or is it's value as a record of a significant point in history by keeping it easily accessible?
If you are big enough to require static internal ips in such quantity that this might be a genuine headache, you know you can just get your own IPv6 block and own it entirely regardless of what ISP you have
I hear IPv6 blocks are quite plentiful and easy to get.
(Yes I am a ip block owner and have put time in to ensuring everything is dual stack)
Err have you actually used Copilot?
The whole thing about using ChatGPT to write code is clearly silly, however Copilot isn't that.
With a couple of weeks of Copilot under my belt, I find it not bad at doing boiler plate code.
E.g. if I bring a new variable in from user input, it will do a nice block of sanitization checks for you and throw a context aware error. About half the time I use that block as-is with no modifications.
It helps with comments and doctypes as well mostly intelligently.
All the time-consuming stuff. I'm still definately writing my code.
As a full time PHP developer, I challenge you to name that mythical language that fills the purposes that PHP fulfills.
Also since a lot of people want to dabble with websites and use PHP to do so, and often make bad code, there's nothing to stop them from making bad code in another language.
Wishing PHP to die off is like shooting the messenger - there's nothing inherently wrong with modern PHP as a language.
I'm not a fan of HP but I'll always get their printers. Clearly some devs over there are Linux guys because their Linux drivers are top notch even with fun features like network scanning.
The real kicker is I think the fully featured Linux driver download is about 8mb. The Windows driver was 350mb.
Does it actually matter? When the pricing is cheaper than most of S3 tiers?
Maybe not the best for long term archival but it's looking pretty good for virtually everything else.
Also the buckets I look after cost four figures a month, and the largest costs are not storage. Amazon hits you with a ton of other fees which Cloudflare are eliminating.
Trying to find a phone today that can't do NFC would be quite difficult. Not impossible but very difficult.
Remember this is to make captchas easier, not be the only option. As I already have a yubikey I look forward to using it instead of clicking on traffic lights.
And no bits can't fake it as per the original article. Cloudflare uses the fact that the original device manufacturer of the keys signs the keys in batches of 100,000 and Cloudflare has a whitelisf of vendors. A bit could emulate the security key in general but won't be signed by a reputable manufacturer of security keys and thus will be rejected.
I'm slightly disturbed by this article and comment section - do people seriously not know that hardware security tokens exist and how they work?
I've been using a yubikey for years for security reasons. It's fantastically convenient and virtually unbeatable security wise. Way better than sms or 6 digit nunbers for multi factor authentication.
Sure if you don't have a yubikey already you aren't going to rush out to buy one just to beat some captchas, but I would have assumed a lot of this audience would already have them. Or they should be seriously thinking about getting one at least.
Is it really Facebook re-using content, when the news organisations happily and freely post it themselves?
They are asking for a platform to share their news on, then are demanding cash for them doing it.
And now they are moaning about the platform they don't pay for being taken away from them.
Patching on Linux is at least simple - no reboots.
It's amazing that Microsoft hasn't figured out how to avoid regular reboots by now. Any Windows admin boasting of high uptime is admitting his servers are insecure. My production Linux servers all have over a year uptime generally (last reboot was datacentre maintenance related).
Good write up - first news site I've seen that didn't say it was a Cloudflare outage.
Cloudflare got blamed by everyone else since a lot of their error pages were visible to end users. The error pages were only there because the origin servers only had Level 3 transit of course so alternate routes weren't available.
People saw the Cloudflare logo and instantly assumed they were the source of the problem.
To be fair, the paid version which I've used for a couple of years now does not require participants to have a login and offers phone dial in mechanisms as well.
It's one of those actually quite well implemented products which no one really knows about.
Zero software to install unlike Microsoft Teams which repeatedly asks you if you wouldn't much prefer their app or Zoom who forces you to use an app.
I came here to mention this too.
The reason why BGP is involved is likely Cloudflare removing their contributing servers from the F root entirely.
This probably took time because they were hoping to just fix the code instead of disabling all their F root servers, but they couldn't do it fast enough so they pulled the plug.
Without Cloudflare F root servers in the pool, all the other F servers would pick up the slack which never had any issues.
We've got a decent sized Vmware cluster for our prodution workloads. 3 nodes, 96 cpus 576gig ram. Currently looking to expand this significant actually.
A lot of our stuff is Foss, and Vmware is running around 30 Ubuntu VMs. I have to pick and choose where we spend time tinkering however - I can tinker with our outbound mail server or a specific database but the entire platform the company runs on? I'm not prepared to (and don't have the time) to tinker there. Easier just to pay for it since its mission critical (and we have a provider who supports it too as needed).
Incidentally it still comes out way cheaper than AWS even with the Vmware licence fees.
$1b sounds a lot more FRAND than $0.
Since they got caught paying $0 that doesn't mean they get the FRAND rates for all their past infringement. Otherwise no one would bother paying at all until they got caught and sued.
No but putting tracking the movement of fellow workers and automating checks on their calendars is creepy as all hell and certainly not "do no evil". They can disagree with some of those projects without actively spying on individual people working on them.
Sounds like they got too cocky thinking they were untouchable and that no one would notice what they were doing.
Compared to other cloud outages,this one is very minor. Not only was it detected and acknowledged quickly, it was also resolved extremely quickly and the postmortem let's you know exactly what went wrong in great detail.
Outages happen. If only they were all this pleasant to experience.
Yes, but no. Its progressive jpeg but for multiple progressive jpegs at once.
Having 10 progressive jpegs on your site isn't much use if the first one has to load fully before the next one starts.
Cloudflare"s technique allows all 10 to progressively load at the same time.
And Telstra in Australia decided to route a good chunk of the domestic Internet to Melbourne and two very confused routers that sat there bouncing packets back and forward until their ttl ran out.
Halfed our servers traffic for an hour and Telstra doesn't handle any transit or peering for us at all!
Another happy Pebble user here too. Pebble Time, little scuffed and the battery isn't quite a week anymore but it's fantastic.
This is the first watch that makes me think about replacing it. Nothing short of a week battery will satisfy me - sleep tracking is occasionally useful no matter how much the Apple watch users say its not.
All that assumes that the underpaid staff at the stores with essentially root access follow that elaborate secure procedure.
How staff in stores can override a procedure like that I'll never know. It should be automated for them and if the user can't verify themselves then it should be escalated to a special department with tighter controls.
The argument about government CAs isn't a good one.
You can always verify who issued a particular certificate, so if you went to Google.com and you noticed their SSL certificate was issued by a Chinese CA it would be blatantly obvious.
For most potential targets various monitoring would pick it up so manually verifying it each certificates CA isn't needed - it'll be noticed by others.
Partial failures like that typically mean the connection can no longer reliably carry traffic, but it still thinks the link is online so it never enacts the fail over procedure.
So no prior failure is required, just the monitoring being told that something is up when it's actually down.
These extremely rare failures actually happen all the time. Earlier this year servers I manage were also knocked offline by a partial failure which prevented automatic fail over.
FTTP can (and does) still have congestion at many different points.
Firstly it's using GPON with a fibre running at 2.488gbps shared between up to 32 houses. If those 32 had 100mbit plans and decided to use them at the same time then you have a (small) problem.
Then you have POI congestion where the ISP doesn't buy enough bandwidth. This happens all the time and affects FTTP and FTTN equally.
And then you have ISP congestion from the cheap ISP's with garbage internal networks.
Fixed wireless has a fairly fixed max total speed per tower however and its shared with a lot more people so it's most susceptible after satellite.
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