Google down and out for 45 minutes on Monday- the perils of centralization

[virasog]

That outage from google made everyone including me to worry about some files that we needed to access during that time. I thought that I'm having a problem with my internet connection but it seems good and it's only Google that's experiencing a problem at that time.

This is really a problem for those companies like google that can't be avoided. I wouldn't compare this issue to anything related to crypto/blockchain.

This was the first time when i experienced this. All of the google services like gmail , youtube were down. Being a company as big as google, they could not afford this downtime when almost all of the world are dependent on their services. They should have a backup disaster recovery plan so that the customers do not face any downtime.

[JohnBitCo]

This is really a problem for those companies like google that can't be avoided. I wouldn't compare this issue to anything related to crypto/blockchain.

The crypto was also indirectly effected by this outage of google services.  At that moment i try to login on an exchange and need my 2fa code which was sent on my gmail account. Since i was not able to open the gmail, i had to wait login in the crypto exchange until i have access to my 2fa in the email.

[PrimeNumber7]

That said, if taking bitcoin blockchain as an example, bitcoin blockchain has never been compromised before just because it is acceptable by people as miners protects it, web 3.0 will also be similar and will be protected by people just like in the case of bitcoin blockchain not by centralized body like google and the likes, and will never cease in operation like google just did for 45 minutes yesterday because it will be decentralized

It is not an uncommon occurrence for there to be over an hour between found blocks when the average is supposed to be 10 minutes.

If you are running a full node, there is a good chance that you are connecting to other nodes via google infrastructure. If you are running a full node, you are certainly relying on a centralized ISP to connect to the internet.

Decentralization has its purposes, but it is not the solution to everything. The overall performance of google products is likely greater than a hypothetical decentralized service that can help with similar tasks.

[Broly46]

I’m glad to move out from them as fast and as far I could, this backup isn’t as reliable as my backup hard disk too, when the disk corrupted you know the pain to get them back again, can you risk that again?

You have a chance of losing your data when stored in a hard disk when it faced physical damage or ageing factor but google drive is not an alternative because it's like you may lose your money to scammers when it gets stored into your own bank accounts so you are having so you wanted to put into someone's bank account so you will never lose.

Storing anything sensitive data into any online drive is highly risky.

Don’t underestimate how reliable you harddisk might be even under extreme catastrophe there is still slim chance of recovering the data inside the harddisk, it might take a lot of effort or money, but you can’t compare that reliability with the online counterpart, the only way you can loss everything data is keep it in custodian online harddisk where the google have all the say on “their data not your data anymore since you agree on the term” bullshit agreement,  your harddisk, given its aged and some hardware broken, it’s still recoverable by fixing it slapping some new chip board and run some expert data mining tool to recover all the binary under the metal.

SSD drives from good brands expected to have life over 10 years though and also there are some protective cases which can save it from minor physical damage but the most important factor is your data is at your own custody and nobody can access it while online drives can be hacked so easily. Whether choosing online drive or hard drive depends on what kind of data we are storing in it so sensitive ones should not be given more priority to convenience over privacy.

Every drive would eventually break just like any other electronic component, they don’t usually last a nice 10 years, and using it for online hosting would be even more challenging considering the I/O rate everyday, you might be lucky to have last a nice one year before some of the chips breakdown or the SMART check failed, and yup online hosting in a scale as large as google is out of question for individual who want to host their own video site with their own computer,  their own hardware and harddisk, our server can at best serve a dozen of users at a time before the server reached its limit. Can’t imagine the load when the server need to handle hacking attempt too.

There is no doubt google have provide the best video market place, YouTube is the only one of its kind where it’s the front runner of all the cutting edge, easy consumption of video content, you can’t compare it with all other sites, (amazon, Netflix etc) the video content categories cover nearly every thing of interests, and content creators upload so much videos that basically mean everybody would find one or two videos that they will like out of millions of the video on their platform.
That’s also indicate a lot of users depend on the platform to make a living, there is quite a few of them stream to get money some couple years ago, and I believe today there is even much more, the perils of the platform would have quite massive impact.

[Crptomagma]

I didn’t understand what was going on with google and couldn’t reach out to any reliable source for information. I was only able to know about the situation from my telegram group. When some of my colleagues complained of same inconvenience from google.

[semobo]

Every drive would eventually break just like any other electronic component, they don’t usually last a nice 10 years, and using it for online hosting would be even more challenging considering the I/O rate everyday, you might be lucky to have last a nice one year before some of the chips breakdown or the SMART check failed, and yup online hosting in a scale as large as google is out of question for individual who want to host their own video site with their own computer,  their own hardware and harddisk, our server can at best serve a dozen of users at a time before the server reached its limit. Can’t imagine the load when the server need to handle hacking attempt too.

There is no doubt google have provide the best video market place, YouTube is the only one of its kind where it’s the front runner of all the cutting edge, easy consumption of video content, you can’t compare it with all other sites, (amazon, Netflix etc) the video content categories cover nearly every thing of interests, and content creators upload so much videos that basically mean everybody would find one or two videos that they will like out of millions of the video on their platform.
That’s also indicate a lot of users depend on the platform to make a living, there is quite a few of them stream to get money some couple years ago, and I believe today there is even much more, the perils of the platform would have quite massive impact.

Sensitive details and content videos are not the same so why we need to compare the yotutbe platform's benefit and potential in this modern world when we want to save our private details in our hard drives. You agree that saving files on our own is not free and simple then do you every wondered why google offering it is for free?

You and we become the product when we get them for free so use it wisely, just don't get trapped into it.

[Broly46]

Every drive would eventually break just like any other electronic component, they don’t usually last a nice 10 years, and using it for online hosting would be even more challenging considering the I/O rate everyday, you might be lucky to have last a nice one year before some of the chips breakdown or the SMART check failed, and yup online hosting in a scale as large as google is out of question for individual who want to host their own video site with their own computer,  their own hardware and harddisk, our server can at best serve a dozen of users at a time before the server reached its limit. Can’t imagine the load when the server need to handle hacking attempt too.

There is no doubt google have provide the best video market place, YouTube is the only one of its kind where it’s the front runner of all the cutting edge, easy consumption of video content, you can’t compare it with all other sites, (amazon, Netflix etc) the video content categories cover nearly every thing of interests, and content creators upload so much videos that basically mean everybody would find one or two videos that they will like out of millions of the video on their platform.
That’s also indicate a lot of users depend on the platform to make a living, there is quite a few of them stream to get money some couple years ago, and I believe today there is even much more, the perils of the platform would have quite massive impact.

Sensitive details and content videos are not the same so why we need to compare the yotutbe platform's benefit and potential in this modern world when we want to save our private details in our hard drives. You agree that saving files on our own is not free and simple then do you every wondered why google offering it is for free?

You and we become the product when we get them for free so use it wisely, just don't get trapped into it.

Yeah data is not free, but on a bright note, it’s getting cheaper, although it won’t be getting to the point of cost absolutely no money, but I believe it’s as good as free but a little more costly, when google decide to remove data, you know it’s not even cheaper to use google anymore, it’s actaully taxing you more money than you kept it on your own custody, that’s very profitable to google to make money out of cheaper storage but making it pricier for the end user like you, which is better? Keeping on your own where storage are getting cheaper or kept it with them where they will keep the price high to rip you off?

[squatz1]

That said, if taking bitcoin blockchain as an example, bitcoin blockchain has never been compromised before just because it is acceptable by people as miners protects it, web 3.0 will also be similar and will be protected by people just like in the case of bitcoin blockchain not by centralized body like google and the likes, and will never cease in operation like google just did for 45 minutes yesterday because it will be decentralized

It is not an uncommon occurrence for there to be over an hour between found blocks when the average is supposed to be 10 minutes.

If you are running a full node, there is a good chance that you are connecting to other nodes via google infrastructure. If you are running a full node, you are certainly relying on a centralized ISP to connect to the internet.

Decentralization has its purposes, but it is not the solution to everything. The overall performance of google products is likely greater than a hypothetical decentralized service that can help with similar tasks.

+1 to this. A lot of people forget this.

Decentralization can only really exist because your ISP is letting you do so. Obviously all of this traffic is encrypted, so they're only able to see the type of traffic which is occurring though they could use this to block bitcoin nodes and cripple the network. Though that would probably cause issues with other types of software in addition to bitcoin.

There really isn't a lot you can do now to stop centralization. Supporting local networking infrastructure / hosting options could be something that people do to ensure that there is proper competition in the market. But they're only going to do that if the cost is in the same area.

[semobo]

Yeah data is not free, but on a bright note, it’s getting cheaper, although it won’t be getting to the point of cost absolutely no money, but I believe it’s as good as free but a little more costly, when google decide to remove data, you know it’s not even cheaper to use google anymore, it’s actaully taxing you more money than you kept it on your own custody, that’s very profitable to google to make money out of cheaper storage but making it pricier for the end user like you, which is better? Keeping on your own where storage are getting cheaper or kept it with them where they will keep the price high to rip you off?

Google offers service for free but at the end they are selling your data, are you okay with that?

I never wanted someone to keep track of all my activities and keep seperate database on it which is the most unacceptable thing for a common man to undergo. While saving our data into our own drives may get cheaper and more durable in the future with technology development but still going to be expensive if you compare it with free service and data cost.

[Broly46]

Yeah data is not free, but on a bright note, it’s getting cheaper, although it won’t be getting to the point of cost absolutely no money, but I believe it’s as good as free but a little more costly, when google decide to remove data, you know it’s not even cheaper to use google anymore, it’s actaully taxing you more money than you kept it on your own custody, that’s very profitable to google to make money out of cheaper storage but making it pricier for the end user like you, which is better? Keeping on your own where storage are getting cheaper or kept it with them where they will keep the price high to rip you off?

Google offers service for free but at the end they are selling your data, are you okay with that?

I never wanted someone to keep track of all my activities and keep seperate database on it which is the most unacceptable thing for a common man to undergo. While saving our data into our own drives may get cheaper and more durable in the future with technology development but still going to be expensive if you compare it with free service and data cost.

The cost of producing solid state drive is very low, it can get down to the point of 0.1x of current price eventually, the licensing fee is keeping the price high, you do compare chip between x86 and ARM, you quickly discover the two cpu have a vast price diff despite they did the exact task, when the licensing is expired or somebody invent an open source ssd design (ARMV ssd??), you would likely stunned by how much data you can get for the equal buck, until then we would likely consume a higher price tag.

[PrimeNumber7]

Decentralization can only really exist because your ISP is letting you do so. Obviously all of this traffic is encrypted, so they're only able to see the type of traffic which is occurring though they could use this to block bitcoin nodes and cripple the network. Though that would probably cause issues with other types of software in addition to bitcoin.

There are some ISPs that do block traffic traveling through port 8333 (the port that bitcoin software uses by default). This is mostly schools, libraries, and employers wanting bitcoin traffic not to take up their limited resources.

ISPs can also see where your internet traffic is going unless you are using tor or a VPN, in which case, your ISP would be able to see the VPN or tor server your traffic is going.