2mo ago

The AWS outage hit us during the day in Australia. I didn't notice because I run my own server, btw

And then I read about someone’s smart bed that got stuck in an upright position on heat mode because of the outage. Makes me feel like all that time sourcing devices that run locally was worth it.

Are we just digital preppers?

Edit: I get it, you aren't preppers, I'm sorry I said that.

From reading your comments I have gathered that you simply want to be ready (not prepared!) for when a free service becomes paid or they shut something down that you use or you simply don't like the idea of the gubbermint or the corporations being able to look though your data.

Many of you seem aware that your concerns are considered far fetched or like non issues by the average person.

well you are preppers, I'm sorry you had to find out this way.

51 comments

I hate the connotation that anyone who self hosts is a "prepper", because it implies the bad thing hasn't happened yet.
We are losing. Self hosting is just clawing back what little we can.
- I agree with this. I am not self hosting for some end of days apocalypse (except I do have a whole house generator and am looking into off grid electricity, though I really missed the boat on that one haha).
  It’s because literally all of these services are parasites run by scumbags. I don’t want anything to do with them. I use Jellyfin/komga because I don’t want my watch/read history sold.
  I seek out local only iot devices and isolate them to a physical switch that does not have internet access, only a physical link to the pfsense box where there is an isolated vlan on their own subnet with a hard rule in the firewall to block any outbound traffic. I can still view things like cameras and home assistant remotely via headscale or even homebridge (with some added risk) but not nearly as much risk as the plethora of security issues created by lazy iot firmware developers who rarely, if ever, update their shit. But further than the massive security risks created by 500 iot devices are the massive amounts of profiling data.
  I run my own apps like nextcloud and local llms because I don’t trust companies like openai and Google not to suddenly shutter products or drastically change the tos once I’ve integrated them into my workflow (plus tons of data harvesting).
  I refuse to use apps and run local proxies to view paywalled news articles because I either don’t trust websites that offer this service or they capitulate to everyone that sends a cease and desist (see: 12ft.io).
  Etc etc etc
  It’s inescapable in the modern age and I’m so goddamn sick of it. I was talking to a family member the other day and they were signing their literal fucking infant up for daycare. The daycare is owned by private equity, because of fucking course it is. Group homes for the disabled, emergency rooms, drug and alcohol rehabs, etc have been bought up by those scum in increasing numbers over the past decade with the anticipated results (people dying, worsening outcomes, etc) so why wouldn’t they sink their disgusting claws into child and infant care?
  The daycare (bright horizons, fuck them) will only send updates to parents via a proprietary app, of fucking course. Updates include pictures of their child, diaper changes, feedings, play, social time, developmental milestones, etc. both parents work so they’re sending the kid there 40 hours, it will be a lot of data - daily updates. The TOS is disgusting. Of course the company owns all the data, of course they can and will share it with third parties, of course they collect as much personal info as possible, and of course they do the bare minimum in terms of cybersecurity. Anything to drive up profits, even if it means exploiting the children you’re supposed to be serving and educating.
  The worst part is that when I point this out, when I point out that COPPA exists and they can insist that an account not be made because their child is under 13 and demand an alternative, I look like the pain the ass. they know that ultimately the daycare can be like “fuck you, the app is policy, do it or no pictures”. everyone just wants it to be easy and wants pictures of their kid. And we’re so indoctrinated by tech at this point to just click “agree” and not think about it. It just fucking sucks. No one wants to be the martyr and people like me that demand to be respected are seen as assholes. Meanwhile the company that’s charging them $1600/month for childcare that’s spitting in their face to earn extra on the side with their literal infants harvested data gets a pass because “that’s what companies do I guess”.
  They definitely just made an account on the app. In 10-20 years their child will probably have higher health insurance premiums because predictive modeling will have data starting from day 1 and it shows a higher risk of colorectal cancers or whatever.
  I cannot stress how badly I hope for a drastic change in the next 5-10 years. This is unsustainable. The villains are winning.
  
  I appreciate your rant and think your username is very apt.
  meanwhile I have mates telling me that googles SSO is the best thing since sliced bread.
- depends what the bad thing is in your opinion, i guess.
  If you mean "losing any semblance of control over the things we need survive (digitally)" then I'd say its the same a prepping.
  You can quite comfortably exist in the digital space and access everything you need via others if you want.
  Just like you can exist in the real world, using fuel, food, power and other goods and services, supplied by others.
  Both scenarios work well right up until they don't.
  
  The bad thing I mentioned is the loss of our individual control on our lives, things that most countries have enshrined in their constitutions: self-determination, the right to relatively good health, the right to control our lives. These things have eroded away in a terrible and malignant way.
  You can quite comfortably exist in the digital space and access everything you need via others if you want.
  I can, you can, and several others here can... But it is hard fucking work, and it's a conscious choice we make against the current. Most ppl don't care.
  When you don't participate in normal activities like Instagram, LinkedIn, etc, you can see the eyerolls.
  It galls me very bitterly that I, who once championed Google and other online services, who lived online and used internet services and was at the forefront of technology use, am now forced to actually retreat from these parts of what is now called daily life just so I can live with myself.
  The bad thing has happened.
  We should not be the ones made to feel out of place for assuming that our data should be ours. We should be more outraged that companies can create apps to control our bed temps and just shut the service down without notice, or go bankrupt and sell the data to someone we don't know or consent to, or create a new subscription model to heat our fucking car seats.
  If there is some ambiguity to you about whether the bad thing has happened, start asking yourself why Signal, the "beacon of privacy" had some services fail during the aws outage.
  
  It's more like installing filters because sometimes they put malaria in the gasoline IMO.
  Preppers believe some conspiracy doomsday shit, which is why nobody wants to be labeled a "prepper" I guess.
- I'm sad that Opera Unite failed. It was the closest thing to self-hosting for regular non-technical people.
  
  Never heard of that. What did it make easier for regular people?

weirdest use of that meme format to date
also the irony of 145 IQ man tripping over his own grammar

I fail to see how the low IQ guy makes sense here. Maybe if it was "all smart devices are bad" which would be dumb.
- could go like "smart-things not working if there is no internet"

w-why is this a bell curve??
- I never said i was on the right

We do it for the fun/hobby. But also for the freedom and own control. And most likely also to make the internet more decentralized and robust. So a movement against big tech.

Bad meme usage

My homelab made of scrap electronics from the previous decade has officially had less downtime ratio than AWS this year

Homesteading is a much more apt analog then prepper. We are digital homesteaders.
- I fertilize and water my dockers daily. Hate it when the servers need weeding

Not necessary preppers as that is someone who's motivation is to mitigate some hypothetical future bad thing happening
I think most self-hosters are doing it out of a combination of technical exploration and mitigating real issues that exist today, e.g. cloud service outages or market exits causing something previously bought to be useful to become a temporary brick or permanent e-waste. Well, and cost in some cases, no one particularly enjoys having an extra bill for hosting.
- Either you are splitting hairs or do not understand how precarious our way of life is.
  Running out of food, water or fuel is not some hypothetical future bad thing. It happens all around the world, sometimes even in western countries.
  In Australia we had a fire at one of the gas processing plants in the 90's and the whole state was without gas (actual Liquid natural gas, for cooking and heating) for almost a month, back then literally everything was run on gas. hot water, ducted heating, ovens, many cars because it was so cheap and plentiful). It seems ridiculous considering we are one of the biggest producers in the world.
  You think you are tacking 'real' issues with your servers, but to the average user you seem just as crazy as a guy with a basement full of beans and piss jugs, screaming about the government is watching us constantly.
  But now we know that they are watching, and pushing people towards specific ideas using social media and many other things we though were just crazy talk.
  I'd have a bit more sympathy for the preppers if I was you.
  
  pushing people towards specific ideas using social media
  I've been incredibly concerned about this for more than a decade. Watching r/the_donald in action was incredible and validated all of that fear.
  And it's still happening. On all social media, including here.
  Certain narratives are pushed hard, and it's effective. Some of it is fully genuine. Some of it is/was seeded artificially and picked up some genuine steam, and is still being reinforced. The stuff that's fully artificial seems to be dropped fairly quickly most of the time these days.
  After the artificial narrative picks up and gets genuine sentiment mixed with it, it becomes hard to tell the difference. If you can mix it in with existing emotions, like anger that we're in this situation, and add in some seeds of truth it works even better.
  Propaganda works. On all of us. And just by being here, we're being exposed. But I'm afraid to leave, too. The more real people leave the easier it is to manipulate the remainder.
  It's just all so easy and effective and actually happening. And the alarm bells about it aren't loud enough.
  
  You think you are tacking ‘real’ issues with your servers, but to the average user you seem just as crazy as a guy with a basement full of beans and piss jugs, screaming about the government is watching us constantly.
  The government is watching us constantly. There's no doubt about this and if you think it's not, you are the crazy one living in fantasy land.
  At the same time, how do you think a basement full of beans would help? The entire path from "the government is bad" to "therefore I'll have a hole full of food where I can live by myself for years" is dumb magical thinking that can be shown to not work by simply looking around or reflecting about oneself for a second.
  There are many valid reasons to be concerned about a disaster. And yet nobody doing your traditional prepping for anything larger than a tornado deserves respect.

Who hosts your DNS?
- Even if I didn't run my own DNS, the cache on the local devices would have been enough to let me access things like plex or nextcloud. Or just type the local ip in directly
- If I'm on my local network hosting my locally hosted services, I do.
- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? /j
  Yeah I'm onboard using raw IP adresses but I'm probably annoutlier here 😊
  Also, who didtributes the IP adresses 😖 why didn't they go with MAC adresses.
  
  One MAC might have multiple IP addresses.
  You're right that it's unfortunate that one American entity gets to decide ipv4/v6 address space though.
- Me myself and I.
  Also a third party for some family connections.

Lol, I was playing Minecraft on my own self-hosted server the entire time.

Signal went down. Setting up XMPP sounds tricky.
- setting up a multi platform, secure, free and well built messaging platform that can be adapted to use decentralised networks like LoRa? easy
  Getting your friends and family to use it? literally impossible
- Look into DeltaChat
- XMPP is actually super easy to setup with Prosody. Highly recommend giving it a try. The hardest part is getting all the SRV records right in your DNS.
  It's particularly awesome if you set it up to use the same user and domain as your email(s), and then your email and XMPP IDs are the same!

your in the right place, I also didnt notice the AWS crash. Where I work also got away light as we use AWS, but not got into all the managed services yet

We do it for an immediate benefit not for some hypothetical apocalyptic scenario result of a half baked conspiracy theory.
It's a bit like calling people who camp in the woods, fish, or rock climb "preppers" because these would be useful skills after the modern civilization.

I mean preppers try to be as self sufficient as they can. Hosting your own stuff is similar to that, so yeah, I guess.
My outage was when the internet to my house was intermittent, not when AWS went down

I had no idea there were that many IoT shit around! I actually wanted to make some stuff just have IoT as an exercise (using arduino) but the extent of what is an IoT is just... insane... beds? Showers? Why? Just fucking why?
- I once read a review of a sous vide machine that just would not work unless it was connected to a smartphone via an app. And then that app would not work properly without a connection to some backend. That backend died at some point, bricking the sous vide machine. What a wonderful world we live in.
- TIL about cloud connected beds.

Yeah my dad is a normie tech enthusiast who wants everything connected to the internet. I'm looking for a way to isolate the devices but I'm having some trouble
- VLAN setting are probably your best bet to prevent communication with your normal devices and lock the IOT devices off in their own section of the network where they cant snoop around. Same goes for Wi-Fi, make a new SSID for just IOT stuff and let them only see themselves and the default gateway.
  
  Yeah I've been tryna find a way to do that but last time I did it I fucked up the openwrt settings and screwed some dns things with my devices.

Billions must be out of service......

51 comments