Tag Archives: responsibilities

Why I’ll Never Do Anything in the Cloud

Posted on by
Reply

For as long as I can, nothing of my interactions on the Internet, nothing of my computer storage or backups, will be done in the cloud. The same stricture should, frankly, apply to businesses. Businesses should construct their own cloud—there’s no doubt clouds are deucedly convenient and, when working properly are highly efficient—and isolate that cloud from the Internet.

Here’s an example of why, brought to us by Amazon.

A glitch with an obscure Amazon database disrupted life for millions of people across the US as core internet services failed to function for an array of companies.
Alexa devices couldn’t hear. Corporate Slack messages wouldn’t post. Students couldn’t turn in assignments or access materials from courses. Financial trades were impossible on certain platforms. Users of Zoom, Venmo, Instacart, and a host of other services faced prolonged outages that rippled through homes and businesses.

Some of that is poor design. Alexa needs connectivity with the Internet? To execute an order to buy this, or to give the weather forecast, sure. But to set a timer for cooking? To set a reminder? An alarm clock? Really?

Back to the main subject. That minor database? It got a minor update that scotched the whole affair.

A minor update to what is called the Domain Name System, or DNS—the kind of software tweak that happens millions of times a day on the internet—sent the well-oiled machine that underpins the modern web careening toward a crash.
DNS acts as a kind of telephone directory for the internet, instructing machines on how to find each other. The faulty update gave the wrong information for DynamoDB, an Amazon Web Services, or AWS, product that has become one of the world’s most important databases.
Suddenly, machines on the East Coast that tried to process trillions of requests were getting the internet’s equivalent of a wrong number.

Think about the effects of time-sensitive moves being blocked from execution for hours and hours, often long enough to prevent the move from happening until it’s far too late and by delay, far more costly. That happens in the financial world—think in extremis overnight repos needing to be unwound….

That kind of foul-up could have been worse: computers not knowing how to contact each other could have prevented the computers hosting the DynamoDB database from being contactable by humans working from other computers in their attempts to correct the glitch in that database. That didn’t happen this time, but next time? Or it might have this time, but Amazon had backup systems it could switch into while they took the offender systems off line to correct.

Regardless, it took the better part of a day for Amazon to get their minor update of a minor database corrected and the effects of the repair to ripple across the Internet.

The article’s subheadline summarizes the situation and is why I avoid the cloud as much as possible:

Outage offers reminder of fragility of global internet connectivity

What He Said

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t often agree with Vivek Ramaswamy, and I don’t always disagree with him. This is one of those times when I agree. This, from The Wall Street Journal‘s excerpt of Ramaswamy’s speech at a recent Turning Point USA gathering:

Do we play the left’s game—silencing, canceling, punishing, authorizing the government to pick winners and losers in the private sector? Or do we stick to the principles of the American founding—freedom, merit, the rule of law, the pursuit of excellence? … I believe the answer is crystal clear. We don’t care about owning the libs, not anymore. We care about owning responsibility for saving our country…
…
So how do we respond? Do we turn around and fight the Pharaoh on the shores of the Red Sea, or do we cross? The answer, my friends, is that we keep going. Their brutal tactics should never cause us to change who we are. But when we lower ourselves to play according to their rules, when we concede the idea that might makes right, that we settle our disagreements with force rather than debate, then we lose the very thing we were fighting for, and that is our identity as Americans.

This is not too far afield from Sun Tzu’s injunction to leave the enemy a path off the battlefield. Just let the Left go, and the rest of us will move on, prosper, and those Leftist violence favorers will be left behind.

It Isn’t Only False Charges of Violence…

Posted on by
Reply

…that encourage further violence.

The SPLC labeled my organization [Kristen Waggoner’s Alliance Defending Freedoma hate group in 2016, around the time we asked the Supreme Court to hear our case on behalf of Colorado cake artist Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop. These designations encourage violence: My car window was shot out shortly after I argued Masterpiece Cakeshop before the justices, and we see a spike in death threats whenever we receive fresh mention in the media.
The threats reached a fever pitch after Kirk’s assassination…. On Tuesday, we deliver oral arguments in Chiles v Salazar.… For the first time in our history, there won’t be an accompanying rally outside the court. Security professionals warned us that the threats of violence at an outdoor event were too great.

It’s a grave mistake to not hold the rally because of these threats and the overt murderous actions of others on the Left. Surrendering to threats of violence and actual violence only encourages more violence, not just threats of it, by those of the Left who are bent on destroying—physically, if possible—those of whom they disapprove.

Better to meet the threats head on, have the conspirators, attempted murderers, and the few who succeed tried, convicted, and jailed or executed as the case may be in the first instance. That would mitigate greatly, if not obviate the second and subsequent instances. That’s the only way to obviate the second and subsequent instances.

This is a better answer:

But we won’t be cowed. When our cases in defense of women’s sports are argued at the Supreme Court in January, we expect to be back with the biggest rally yet—this time with the security apparatus needed to defend our speakers.

Hopefully the DC police will be up to the task and—finally—allowed to do their job and arrest the violence inflictors, followed by—hopefully—a vigorous prosecution and conviction, concluded by—hopefully—serious jail sentences.

This Isn’t Just Political Mischief

Posted on by
Reply

Nor is it merely divisiveness.

Jay Jones, Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Attorney General, has threatened a political opponent, Todd Gilbert, at the time the Republican Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, with murder, with implied threats against his wife and children, as well. This was as recently as August 2022. What he texted another delegate, a Republican:

Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.

Here’s Jones’ full sequence:

From inflicting metaphorical violence on us average Americans with their government shutdown to threatening physical violence in the form of murder threats by a candidate for State Attorney General(!)—this is, mind you, against years of assaults like Bernie Sanders smearing Republicans as Nazis, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice; Chuck Schumer threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by a murder attempt against one of them; Party politicians in drumbeat cadence calling Donald Trump Nazi, Hitlerian, a threat to democracy, followed shortly by two murder attempts—this is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s view of how to deal with their political opponents. If they don’t get their way, they will attack American citizens as a whole and seek to murder their political opponents.

And just to drive home Party’s point, Jones is refusing to withdraw his candidacy for State AG, and no one in Party is pushing him to withdraw. To a man and woman, Party politicians are downplaying Jones’ threats, pretending he was joking.

This is the Party that wants to seize control of our Congress in 2026 and seize the White House in 2028.

Hardly Overreach

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) has offered nine universities preferential access to Federal funds if they sign on to an agreement that, among other things, bans race or sex in admissions, freezes tuition, and caps international enrollment. Whether or not that’s a good idea, or unsavory, or… can be debated.

However, the tenor of the hue and cry over the offer is badly overwrought and illustrative of the outright timidity of far too many.

[T]he proposal provoked strong reactions across higher education, with some decrying it as federal overreach….

There is no Federal overreach in the offer. No one is forcing these schools to sign up. They can do—they have been doing all along—with “ordinary” access to Federal funds. Moves to reduce or deny access to Federal funds by schools that are openly antisemitic or supportive of terrorist-supporting entities on their campuses is an entirely separate thing.

Many States and localities offer enormous financial incentives in return for making movies in those locales. Offering Federal financial incentives to companies, foreign and domestic, to produce goods and services in the United States or to increase current domestic production is a widespread and long-standing practice, and it is a far cry from withholding Federal funds from businesses who do not so produce or increase production.

This offer to nine schools is no different from those other financial incentives.

It’s sad, it’s a mark of how far fallen is an education system that produces such timid ones, and it’s an indication of how far we are—four generations–from our last struggle for our national sovereignty. Too many who should know better have gone soft and weak in the knees.

Hard times make strong men; strong men make easy times, easy times make weak men, weak men make hard times. We’re in a dangerous phase of that cycle. Western Civilization’s last weak time interregnum lasted 800 years.