Dreamwidth system problems
Feb. 8th, 2025 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
Yes, I'm aware that Dreamwidth has been down for long stretches today -- one of many sites affected by some kind of outage nobody seems to want to talk about. (My suspicion is that something or other was being covertly funded by cash from USAID, doubtless filtered through a couple of NGOs for the sake of plausible deniability, and the sudden loss of funding is causing problems to cascade through various corners of the internet. As the moment, though, that's just a suspicion.) It's quite possible that this will turn out to be a temporary glitch and Dreamwidth will return to its usual relatively stable functioning from here on. If that's not the case, I've already got a backup plan in the works, and will switch all activities to that if it becomes necessary. I'll post something to my blog at https://www.ecosophia.net/ if that happens; check there if Dreamwidth is down for a prolonged period.
In the meantime, if you're worried about losing access to anything that's been posted here, copyright law gives you the right to download one copy of anything for personal use. Might be worth considering...
Update 2/13/25: Interruptions in service have continued -- none of them lasting more than a relatively short time, but worrying. I'm going to begin the process of launching an alternative, which will use the same private hosting firm that hosts my blog. I'll post details as things start up; my plan is to run the two sites in parallel for a while, and then stick a placeholder announcement here to direct remaining traffic to the new site. Stay tuned!
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 03:15 am (UTC)What really raises my eyebrows though is that this has been less than a week. I would not have expected the internet to start showing disruption this quickly unless USAID makes up a huge percentage of the operating costs for something very important; which actually provides an answer for the mystery of where the money to maintain the physical infrastructure comes from. If this is the case, then especially as it's likely that USAID has also been quietly funding a lot of the services as well (the ubiquity of free pornography, for example, has never made a lot of sense to me), at this point I think there's a decent chance that the internet is going to very suddenly change in the weeks and months ahead as everyone scrambles to figure out how to keep the lights on.
I was expecting the collapse of the internet to unfold gradually at first as more and more people walk away before there would be a major change, but right now I wonder if the first major wave of collapse hasn't already started with the end of USAID, and if it might be a lot more dramatic than I was expecting until now.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 05:56 pm (UTC)As far as physical infrastructure, I had escaped the telecom industry and after over a decade and a half, had a front row seat of watching is slide into sanity crushing dysfunction. Some of the trouble was outsourcing critical work and systems from in house to the lowest bit.
This could just be a consequence of the corporate rot in a declining economy, or something bigger. We may just have to wait and see if this in an isolated incident or a pattern forming. A plan B seems in order either way.
I haven't been keeping tabs on the space weather lately, but there is typically an uptick in internet/server outages during geomagnetic storms. Kind of helps debunk the myth that the internet as we know it today was meant to survive a nuclear war.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-11 08:02 pm (UTC)– Donald Hargraves
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-12 02:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-15 08:01 pm (UTC)All this startups have "something" in common:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200212011055/https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-started-as-a-cia-project-1636592238
Time to print stuff again
Date: 2025-02-09 11:53 pm (UTC)The alternative press of the old counterculture was quite robust until the FBI shut down their distribution network, as described by the late Christopher Hitchens.
Marx approached things from the wrong end when he extolled the importance of controlling the means of production. He thought like someone who never actually ran a business. It’s relatively easy & cheap to knock off a bunch of silkscreen posters or xeroxed zines. Anyone who’s ever tried to publish anything knows that the real bottleneck of control is distribution.
The Ayatollah Khomeini is a bad role model to follow philosophically, but tactically his approach was interesting. His message was spread through Iran and diaspora partly by hand-to-hand distribution of cheap cassette tapes featuring his speeches, and this I gather helped pave his way to power.
Re: Time to print stuff again
Date: 2025-02-15 09:31 am (UTC)Using media that is suppose to be fun for politics, people are instinctively doing this with YT, Facebook and Tik tok, the problem is that they are controlled that is why P2P was heavily sabotaged, Kademlia was an interesting network until it got flooded by a lot of porn viruses and SPAM, it is obvious that was an Op since at some point everything stopped suddenly...
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 01:20 am (UTC)https://peterhalligan.substack.com/p/trudeau-orders-all-the-data-on-the
Looks as though Canada saw the huge, embarrassing, incriminating public audit of USAID and decided... they couldn't afford to have that happen to their own foreign aid slush fund, and have ordered all data on it deleted?
Borrowing a term from the kids: that's sus.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 05:45 am (UTC)Caching servers are one of the only ways to maintain the internet without requiring a mind-boggling amount of bandwidth available for every major server: if every time anyone makes a request for data from a server it has to be sent from the main server, wherever that is, to wherever the end user is, that would require a lot more bandwidth at the main server than merely sending information to cachin servers, storing a copy, and then sending updates between the caching server and the main server as necessary. This also allows people to access sites from closer: which reduces the distance the packets need to travel, dramatically reducing the total bandwidth the internet requires, because it takes less total bandwidth to send a page to Toronto once, and then out to people in Southern Ontario from there than to send it from California across the continent every time someone access the page. As a result, as long as the system works well, these servers allow for much quicker connections, for any given main server to handle far more connections, and for the entire internet to function with far less total bandwidth.
There are a lot of these (the operating system Ubuntu, for instance, uses over 600 merely for distributing updates: see https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors for a list); and like any server, these are expensive to maintain, with energy costs, equipment, and human capital. Despite the high costs for maintaining this extremely elaborate system, they are also usually quite reliable, but they have long been near the top of my list of things related to the internet which do not seem to make any kind of financial sense. For at least one, and likely more, to have abruptly failed so quickly after USAID abruptly shutdown seems like more than a coincidence. I think it's more than one since Dreamwidth appears to have gone down in Australia as well, and they would have to use different caching servers; and I also doubt that I connect to the same caching server that supports Providence. I also think it's likely that some of the other internet disruptions are on other caching servers.
Since this problem is occurring in one of the spots where I'd expect to see a breakdown occur first if the problem is that some outside funding was suddenly cut off, my assessment of the likelihood of a problem has just increased quite a bit.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 03:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 01:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-13 06:46 am (UTC)reporting from Australia: DW has remained operational for me. I have been able to read this week's posts.
However, I agree there is likely a cache issue as my searches do not bring up recent entries.
regards to all
iridescent scintillating elver
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 02:38 pm (UTC)Seems like everyone is there these days.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 03:55 pm (UTC)Substack
Date: 2025-02-09 08:18 pm (UTC)I've been wondering whether or not to stake out a claim on substack. I use their Notes, but haven't started writing there. I have a bunch of essays I've been drafting since Dec. and I took January off online mostly to generate new material. I still have my own website domain with a host... and though that doesn't seem to get much interaction, it also seems more searchable by people doing regular web searches. I may just stay off substack after and keep my writing on my site. I was thinking of doing both... I don't know. But several synchronicities have said "'zine, 'zine, 'zine" so I should maybe also just collapse now and avoid the rush.
I've resisted most social media except email, blogs, forums (including a few subreddits), and substack Notes.
What I dislike about substack is everyone asking for money. As a writer I want to get paid, and I don't mind paying other writers... but I like to read a lot of different writers, and its unsustainable for me to have subscriptions to all but my favorites. I don't want to do the same thing to other people, because I am sure I am not the only one who feels that way. I'd rather have my work up for free and people read and get to know my work, and buy what I have out that has been published, than not read an essay because everyone else is asking for payments too. Plus the content on substack is wildly variable. Some people ask for a fee and then don't publish anything for a month.
Just a few of my issues with substack. Your little note helps me think it might be good to just keep using my domain as main blog, put some zines out, and otherwise. I can at least still link to my essays using the Notes function without having to go through the trouble of posting in two places, etc.
Thanks for the opportunity to think some of this through here.
JPM
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 09:20 pm (UTC)substack
Date: 2025-02-10 03:04 am (UTC)I enjoy Substack as a platform, so I will use it.
My posts are much less controversial, as I mostly write about people who died a hundred years ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 04:45 pm (UTC)Plan B's are always in order....but I don't think substack is a very good choice at all.
When I get paranoid (which is not infrequent) I cross post on my ancient and wheezing Blogger account. But truthfully, how much do the powers that be pay attention to fringies like the folks here?
Pride in being a fringie is a mark of honor.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 08:50 pm (UTC)sites requiring emails
Date: 2025-02-10 02:58 am (UTC)agreed - stay off substack
Date: 2025-02-11 11:42 am (UTC)Even though I comment here from a DW account, for numerous reasons I concur; including simple intuition based on the character and number of the hoops already required to use -- even to read -- Substack.
Who needs just one more email or other account? I already despair of future access to most of my old ones, which now demand cross-checking with other accounts for "security" whether I want them to or not, and also want phone numbers. It is not as anonymous as one might like to believe. As a result I can't even use my 20-year-old ebay account any more. I have forwarded my old main hotmail to another web based email and it is all too baroque and messy and I cannot even rely on gmail receiving confirmation passcodes from yahoo when it wants them and ... no! no! no! Just don't voluntarily increase the complexity!
iridescent scintillating elver
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-11 08:14 am (UTC)KVD
where to go?
Date: 2025-02-13 06:38 am (UTC)Reasons not to use Dreamwidth? I far prefer its comment format to that of Substack. Then, I have really only the two to compare as I don't look at many other such platforms.
iridescent scintillating elver
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-09 06:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-10 02:56 am (UTC)i'm on substack but it's not a long-term plan and i agree everyone constantly passes the hat and the guilt trips get tiring.
i'm actually very excited about planning a zine i send through the mail because i love planning mail art, too. the entire process is exciting and when i hear how someone cried with joy at all the art, it's worth it.
erika lopez
(no subject)
Date: 2025-02-13 01:12 am (UTC)However, I'm not sure how common they usually are. Does anyone know if there's a good source of data on how many internet disruptions there usually are, so I can get a sense of what would be normal?
Error 503 Today
Date: 2025-02-13 03:56 am (UTC)Dreamwidth was out for a few moments for me just now, and the error message jibed strongly with Anonymoose Canadian's hypothesis of cache servers. It was an "Error 503 backend fetch failed" fwiw.
After a brief wait I tried again, and after much huffing and puffing and an Error 504, the interwebs served me up the site. I'm betting my browser went thrashing the bushes for a different cache server.
- Cicada Grove
Re: Error 503 Today
Date: 2025-02-15 09:33 am (UTC)I think this whole thing of "cache" looks like a hidden cache of some sort where things were redirected in order for stuff to be siphoned and monitored. That's why it seems to be just a US, Canada and Germany thing...
It might not even be a DW problem...
Take this example the Google cache finds this man in the middle thing in the article but if I go to the page nothing of the kind is mentioned.
https://bonsai.io/docs/http-504-gateway-timeout
"Network issues","Gateway issues", looks to me that this is not even a DW problem, maybe the man in the middle was sponsored by USAID and it failed, the silence about these issues on the technical forums is suspect to me. The 2 years continue layoff in US industry made all my colleagues into little obedient wussies.
Have you wondered why Google doesn't even index DW content?