Re: Cloud proof of failure - was:: wikileaks unreachable

[Jack Bates <jbates () brightok net>]

On 12/6/2010 9:29 AM, Nathan Eisenberg wrote:
> How is it more or less unattractive than having one's own servers in
> one's own office?  Lieberman and Co would simply have leaned on Mom's
> Best BGP (r) and Pop's Fastest Packets (r) instead of on Amazon, and
> the result would have been the same.

That is a possibility, though it also depends on the business mentality 
and AUP. The problem is, it didn't necessarily require any *leaning* and 
the AUP may have been enforced anyways.

> That's the catch with this here series of tubes - you don't control
> all of the tubes, even if you're Amazon, or Giant National ISP Co, or
> Massive National Fiber Plant Co.  The server infrastructure is the
> least interesting part of what happened to WikiLeaks.

Anytime you are dealing with something highly controversial, you open 
yourself up for technical and social attack. Your business dependencies 
may be inclined to disassociate themselves with you on any grounds 
possible; not that they disagree with you, but perhaps they don't want 
to be that closely associated.

It does not require any leaning, notification, or even noticeable 
service effect for me to decide to shutdown a site/location which is 
controversial in nature and causing a DOS. If I sold a 'bulletproof' 
service, I'd have a different through process, but that's because I'd be 
selling such a service. I don't sell 'bulletproof', and so I'm quickly 
inclined to request/takedown anything which causes technical/social 
issues for the network per the AUP.

What the Senators did was wrong, but what Amazon did may have not been 
due to the pressure, but strictly based on "oh, we didn't notice that, 
and it's violating our AUP." I'm not saying it's the case, but it does 
happen. I've had to have others tell me of AUP violations from time to time.


Jack