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RE: Cloud proof of failure - was:: wikileaks unreachable


From: Nathan Eisenberg <nathan () atlasnetworks us>
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 15:29:51 +0000

In a cloud hosting environment, you typically don't know where your
data and servers are, and thus you don't know what legal and political
pressures they may be subject to. If that means that in practice you
are subject to the combination of any pressure that can be applied to
any one of the hosting centers maintained by your hosting provider,
then "the cloud" indeed would seem pretty unattractive to anyone with
politically or socially controversial content.

How is it more or less unattractive than having one's own servers in one's own office?  Lieberman and Co would simply 
have leaned on Mom's Best BGP (r) and Pop's Fastest Packets (r) instead of on Amazon, and the result would have been 
the same.

That's the catch with this here series of tubes - you don't control all of the tubes, even if you're Amazon, or Giant 
National ISP Co, or Massive National Fiber Plant Co.  The server infrastructure is the least interesting part of what 
happened to WikiLeaks.

Nathan



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