Something is Broken in Cyberspace Today

[Macrobius]

Yesterday, Facebook and a half dozen GAFAM sites went down yesterday. (Probably in honour of our alleged Democracy's alleged _Super Tuesday_ is my guess)

This morning, I am seeing lots of authentication complaints from Fortune 500 companies are having problems with session authenticaton, OAUTH and the like.

Also, I notice my sites have 'changed behaviour' and / or are not working as expected.

Something clearly was 'rolled out' yesterday and for a reason.

I'm happy to say that my 'hastebin' server (http://purl.org/hastebin) is still capable of putting up 'pastes' which is pretty much our last ditch comms method if things go down (I used to use pastebin but they started censoring like any other centrally controlled site).

Oh well. Onwards. Look sharp.

For example, what I just said, in 'raw' format: http://45.79.58.143:7777/raw/jizenefaxi ... https://purl.org/hastebin/raw/jizenefaxi if you want it to look prettier.

 

[Charles Silvius Haddock]

I noticed. I tried to go to Whigdev yesterday and got a server error. By the by, I have used Hastebin already to good effect, and as an engineer I love plain text anyway. I always use Notepad and its equivalents instead of Office for my internal records and memos. Might host an instance of Hastebin myself if I get a server.

I didn't, however, notice that social media were down, and that shows you how little I use the GAFAM platforms anymore. I didn't notice any issues with the Gmail I use at work and that was the extent of my interaction with GAFAM yesterday. I guess network effects make them indispensible to normies, and it's worrisome that independently hosted websites were busted by this, but there's still the potential for decentralized and censorship-resilient Web 3.0 to be developed in the face of this aggression and corruption. Now's probably a good time to remind people that the big Web companies of the year 2000 mostly disappeared or declined, and I don't think the GAFAM complex will exist in the same form a couple of dozen years in the future either.

PS The topic of the abuse of power by the Stacks came up at a meeting yesterday, and there's a major change in direction at my firm caused directly by that coming soon.

 

[Macrobius]

I noticed. I tried to go to Whigdev yesterday and got a server error. By the by, I have used Hastebin already to good effect, and as an engineer I love plain text anyway. I always use Notepad and its equivalents instead of Office for my internal records and memos. Might host an instance of Hastebin myself if I get a server.

I didn't, however, notice that social media were down, and that shows you how little I use the GAFAM platforms anymore. I didn't notice any issues with the Gmail I use at work and that was the extent of my interaction with GAFAM yesterday. Moments like these make you realize how little they matter or how illusory their control of the Web really is. Now's probably a good time to remind people that the big Web companies of the year 2000 are mostly gone now, and I don't think the GAFAM complex will exist in the same form a couple of dozen years in the future either.

PS The topic of the abuse of power by the Stacks came up at a meeting yesterday, and there's a major change in direction at my firm caused directly by that coming soon.

whigdev went down hard -- I suspect a PHP upgrade of some kind (which would have effected Meta also, perhaps unintentionally.

I will work to bring whigdev forums back, perhaps using VMs and stop using toastgator as the hoast.

My approach here to social media is to take this as an occasion to use it even less (my reaction to TV moving from analog to digital signal in the Aughties or whenever that was).

The Tunis version of this thread has links to Hacker News for anyone who 'noticed' in real time.

Something is Broken in Cyberspace Today

Yesterday, Facebook and a half dozen GAFAM sites went down yesterday. (Probably in honour of our alleged Democracy's alleged _Super Tuesday_ is my guess) This morning, I am seeing lots of authentication complaints from Fortune 500 companies are having problems with session authenticaton...

tunisbayclub.com

Anyway, all the GAFAMs seem to have broken at once on Super Tuesday, along with hostgator. Ah, I love coincidence.

 

[Charles Silvius Haddock]

I edited the post since then because I can't say that their "control of the Web is illusory" if they're busting independently hosted sites.

PHP 8 update could have caused breaking changes though, and those kind of changes are more and more common even in big shops these days, so I would not be surprised. One client (a medium-sized corp you've heard of) busted their site for over a month with an Angular upgrade of several versions. Now these things aren't supposed to happen because you're taught in CSCI 101 to write things to be backward compatible, but no one does that anymore.

 

[Macrobius]

I edited the post since then because I can't say that their "control of the Web is illusory" if they're busting independently hosted sites.

PHP 8 update could have caused breaking changes though, and those kind of changes are more and more common even in big shops these days, so I would not be surprised.

I reserve judgment on whether it was just a badly timed PHP 8 upgrade or a deliberate strategy for Super Tuesday. I said my bit about that on Twitter:



I'll stand by my tagline ('It's all RAW HUMINT' which I see 2CB the auld phoron has adopted too) -- HUMINT is 'someone wants you to know something and SIGINT is 'you *think* you know something and that no one knows you know'. Epistemological Warfare is a thing.

I probably should have phrased that closer to the original observation (of Keynes): 'Your gut can remain rational longer than your brain can remain solvent, when exposed to propaganda.' Thanks, Jews. But to rationally control your gut, you need to be master of your gut and your hatreds ('animal spirits'):

And added some advice for Lent, because Prayer is the one thing necessasry:



Anyway https://purl.org/hastebin is a pURL I control and can point appropriately (the whole point about pURLs -- use a resolver and /etc/hosts if necessary)

https://linktr.ee/macrobius is the link of last resort for Crustaceans (or search Macrobius at github), and OW / Grus has a similar one there that I point to. The linktr.ee uses pURLs resolved by archive.org pURL resolver for now (deep XML shit) but that can change if need be. Writing a pURL resolver and standing up a server is trivial.

 

[Macrobius]

I noticed. I tried to go to Whigdev yesterday and got a server error. By the by, I have used Hastebin already to good effect, and as an engineer I love plain text anyway. I always use Notepad and its equivalents instead of Office for my internal records and memos. Might host an instance of Hastebin myself if I get a server.

About hastebin, specifically, it's worth hosting -- I use it for hosting 'bootstrap scripts' (Azure is oddly bash centric these days. I wonder why. 'Cloud Shell' default) among other things (not necessarily the same instance ) and it can be backed by redis or Amazon S3. Be warned the fellow who maintains it is moving in a direction I don't find useful and I will probably continue to use the auld stuff.

I strongly recommend plain text markdown plus a variety of strategies for converting to PDF or mobile formats (.epub or .mobi) from that and will be providing very explicit instructions, along with windows useable installers for normies. 'IPFS and WebTorrent are the only servers you really need'

Bottom line: SICP taught us that data and functionality are duals. Data means distributed artifacts now, and distributed functionality means installers for distributed thin clients (or thick ones, whatever). Samizdat at Scale is a thing.

Mobile is a client.

The archival history of the Crust should be something you can pass on samizdat networks and install and have it 'just work'. That's the archival goal.

 

[Macrobius]

For those not getting the Shakespeare ref: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-v/read/4/3/

 

[Macrobius]

Anyway, my personal recommendations for 'the Crust' at this juncture, based on what I am seeing, are:

1/ install the webtorrent Desktop: https://webtorrent.io/desktop/

2/ if you are a bit of a technologist, consider adding IPFS Desktop, but only run it if you want -- it's a P2P file system (similar to Napster if you remember that era). It will consume a fair amount of bandwidth if you let it. But it's good to 'be ready' to turn it on.

3/ run a hastebin server if you are able, as discussed above.

4/ learn what a pURL is and how to use them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_uniform_resource_locator

5/ learn 'Markdown' too if you want the deep dive, but that's not critical at the moment.

A purl can point to a tor website, or a webtorrent, or via a gateway to the IPFS filesystem. These topics are all interrelated.

 

[Macrobius]

https://whigdev.com/white/index.php is now back -- it was a forced upgrade to PHP 8.2 which has been temporarily reverted while I investigate @Charles Silvius Haddock

For what it's worth I enabled 'SSL' (https) - from the Whitespace status thread:

- https is now enabled for Whitespace, and PHP 8.2 has been reverted, restoring access. This was a 'surprise' update courtesy of the host that broke the site

- Whitespace runs in Edge

- kitsap.whigdev.com and macrotube.whigdev.com appear to run in an old Chromium but not in Edge (there is some problem where they don't display in https and you need to manually revert to http -- i.e. they are unusable for ordinary users in Edge)

Namely:
Chromium Version 100.0.4896.88 (Official Build) (64-bit), tested on Win11.

- I haven't tested Chrome because I don't use it on this test platform. [see link at end of this post]

- I'll be testing Firefox and report on this thread later

- The old forum works again Previous Dissent • Index page (whigdev.com)

More updates here:

Site Damage Assessment 3/8/2024

- https is now enabled for Whitespace, and PHP 8.2 has been reverted, restoring access. This was a 'surprise' update courtesy of the host that broke the site - Whitespace runs in Edge - kitsap.whigdev.com and macrotube.whigdev.com appear to run in an old Chromium but not in Edge (there is...

whigdev.com

 

[Macrobius]

Commenting further on:

I edited the post since then because I can't say that their "control of the Web is illusory" if they're busting independently hosted sites.

They don't really have to do anything nefarious -- if they just do 'forced upgrades' and 'planned obsolescence' (with our without using that as an excuse to shut down commentary) it will garner no particular suspicion and yet be quite effective via the 'shut er down Clancy, she's-a pumpin' mud' effect.

Most people don't have the time, talent or treasure to keep things running when the corporations want to push the upgrade cycle.

We saw this with 'mom and pop telecoms' that were allegedly enabled by the 'Telecomm act of 1996'... the Baby Bells and long-haul/tier 1 companies just outcompeted them by pushing the regulatory button to upgrade their APIs every 6 months, and no small private company could compete. Eventually, DSL was captured by the Baby Bells and the FCC threw up its hands and decided 'bimodal competition' (wireline vs cable) was 'good enough'.

Devesting the copper in the ground and ending the wireline monopoly never happened -- it just decayed and will lie there until scrappers dig it up I guess.

Like Ben Franklin said: 'Open Comms... if you can keep it'

 

[Macrobius]

Facebook looks totally compromised to me as of this morning. A lot of 'normies', when they 'attempt to log in' are going to get a verbal message saying they are screen locked, that their computer has accessed IP addresses without their knowledge, and they should UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES attempt to shut down, log out, or stop the problem without calling 'Microsoft Suport' at some fake number which I'm sure will harm them further. Grandma, is that you?

Of course, you should do no such thing if that problem (involving OAUTH2 and using Google to sign into to FB btw) happens to you. *sigh*. Normies will fall for the bait and so

... the ATTAQ is on. OK, Boomers.

Anyway, if it happens to you in a throw away browser, just quit and log on normally in a good one. Nuke the throwaway. Or make sure you clear cache (if you know how). Also, change your FB password.

If you don't search the web using a throwaway VM, you just learned why you need to do that.

 

[Macrobius]

Here's a bit of personal advice -- if you don't use a VM, *at least* use Firefox to browse and download the 'multi-account container' extension. This lets you have disposable identities (no sharing cookies or cross-site vulns).

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/k...story is selected in your privacy... See More

EVEN if you do nothing else, you will thank me in the morning