oh and sla means (service level agreement) by the way, it's something most hosting companies offer for the availability of a hosted website or service.
I don’t expect steemit to have a mission critical enterprise class dns, server hosting and mitigation plan when routing, website or dns issues happen. I just don’t, the fact that it works at all and is so robust most of the time is incredible. The fact that the developers step through and continue to make things better each time often unpaid or at extremely long hours — all power to them, I understand when something becomes way bigger than the original idea and becomes almost a passion project in the process.
We do take a lot of this internet stuff for granted, we really do. You have to remember more than ever that more influence is everywhere, not just good but also bad, funds to hire bad people to do bad stuff, people with mental health disorders wanting to spread their collective angst, it’s just the nature of the beast when you look at society as a whole, someone somewhere is having a bad time, having a raw deal. Yet we assumed, often consider ourselves to be ‘put out’ when our access to things is reduced or diminished, instead of getting angry or causing myself stress or drama I try and look at things objectively and from a realistic mindset.
I am guilty of taking a lot of things for granted. We get used to things working a certain way, we get comfortable, that in turn creates a cosy almost apathy feeling that they just work, in fact, over the years of my computing life these things have gotten not only so wonderfully simple but actually have allowed us to spend more time creatively using these things, I remember when I had to load a game from tape and that took over fifteen minutes to load. I had to ‘go do something else’ for a short while until it loaded and even then if I nudged the table the thing might reset. Everything was so delicate, because it just about worked.
Sure, we have fibre optic cables that allow us to blast data from one side of the world to the other but also we have power wanting to do the opposite, to subvert that data transfer, suppress it, re-enginner it into fake news, have their 15ms of fame in the internet spotlight. It’s the nature of the beast of hyper connected society, the faster we go the more we are going to have to concentrate on cross referencing, multi point failover and lots and lots of redundancy and the rub is you won’t even notice it - I’m guessing that facebook goes down in different areas of the world multiple times a day, those instances crashing, ip ranges getting flooded.
It’s only the delegation of global engineers turning up, doing their jobs and mitigation and route/fault fixing that brings back the connectivity between us and the platforms. It’s a battle, it’s a war, it’s like having a 100 thousand zorros in 10 thousands parallel universes jumping from ledges and fighting the hoards of bad packets and vunerabilities, even some that they don’t even know exist yet, some of these engineers have to become Sherlock, they have to create sandboxes, internet exposed boxes that capture and see traffic pass by without any services exposed on the internet, looking for clues, like buoys in the ocean listening for seismic and wave activity, this is an always on, on demand job and it’s getting hard to keep up.
It’s not going to be about just working remotely on the web it’s going to be actually about staying on it long enough to do the work, paying for your fast lane to access the cloud data we put and share on the net, building in some level of local redudancy for the latest 0 day OS or efi hack, being adaptable to understanding the difference between a real or a faked website or email, it’s not going to be enough to have the latest machine or a replacement laptop or phone when it ‘stops’ working. You need to understand and adapt to actually navigating the internet and the services on it.
AI is here, it can both help and hinder, adapt and replace, mitigate or find more causes, the people that understand it the most and wield it’s power will either benefit or cause major parts of the internet and our sense of entitlement to be effected. i’m not one for creating more drama, just being a realist, things go wrong.
maybe it’s time to head outside into nature, share a conversation and a drink with a friend or a stranger, record an audio podcast and share some thoughts, take a photo, write an offline post — whatever it maybe do that offline for the moment, then while you are it consider the amount of time, effort and hours the devs and engineers put into this stuff and be thankful. Because without them, we wouldn’t have half of the cool things we get to play with on a daily basis.
’tralalah, tralalah, wooooooo'