You can abstract away the Pi and updates as easily as the cloud abstracts away everything. 90% of AWS users can't even figure or don't care about out how to distribute across multiple availability zones, much less data centers. Two Pis would be fine for 99% of this 90%.
Seems like the future to me, it's just not in any big tech company's best interest right now as they fight over data centers.
I don't know why we keep gravitating to Raspberry Pi's for this. IPFS works just fine on Windows clients. (By which I mean, it's no less stable than on Linux, neither of which runs particularly well at this early stage.)
What if publishing to your blog was as easy as installing a Chrome web extension that now travels with you? Suddenly every computer you have that runs the extension can pin a local copy of the site, and your visitors help out by virtue of the protocol. This doesn't exist of course, but thanks to ipfs-js, it could, very easily. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach of course, but my point is that the "Hello World" of this kind of app could easily be much lower bar than setting up a Raspberry Pi.
I haven't traveled abroad in a couple years, so I'm not sure exactly how this works, but I would be unable to contain my laughter if some CBP cop asked me to unlock my phone or laptop. Is this something that actually happens nowadays? Why on earth would anyone ever consent to this nonsense?
I, and almost anyone else, would consent to it for the sake of getting on the flight. Yeah, I don't like it either. It doesn't happen a lot, but when it does I imagine these outcomes:
1) Handover unlocked device, let CBP knuckle-dragger browse through it, in front of me, until they're bored and they hand it back. Get on flight. This is the best case scenario.
2) Handover unlocked device, CPB knucke-dragger takes it to back room where he may or may not download all contents and store it, enabling NSA to play seven-degrees-of-keven-bacon, Osama-edition, forever. That's the worst scenario, but very unlikely that anything comes of that.
3) Laugh at CBP knuckle-dragger, keep phone locked, miss flight, go to airport detention for an indeterminate amount of time until I give in and handover unlocked phone, be subject to scrutiny and "commentary" from CBP official, and maybe, get put on a list somewhere which will cause this to happen every time I fly.
If you are a US citizen entering the US (don't try this if you're a green card holder or a visitor), then in the case of (3), they can't hold you indefinitely, although they can hold your phone indefinitely.
This has never happened to me, and it probably never will, but if it does my plan is to refuse to unlock the phone and wait it out.
> Is this something that actually happens nowadays?
Yes, I personally know someone this has happened to. Also resulted in my own personal name/address/other info (amongst that of many others) also being demanded and hence provided to the government.
> Why on earth would anyone ever consent to this nonsense?
What would you do if you weren't a citizen and had a family to come back home to? Just be okay with being denied entry?
Great read, at first I thought it was just a puff piece but the ending is a great insight into the filter bubble that folks with that amount of money and power live in. He can't handle any criticism or line of questioning that dares to peek behind the curtain, it's something that just never happens in his world.
I'm not sure what level of power he's going to buy next, but everyone should be trying to peek behind the curtain. And deleting their Facebook.
Zuckerberg wants to fully combine his wealth and access to information about us into a presidency and then what? If you say the wrong thing about him on Facebook the IRS suddenly audits you? Criticism of Zuckerberg flags you in government databases as well?
Trump owns a chain of hotels and sells ties and hats, but doesn't operate what could largely be seen as the most expansive and intimate database about every American ever made.
The other angle which I haven't seen much written about yet (hint hint aspiring journalists) is I personally know a good number of the mid and high level employees at these companies, and they are becoming increasingly disillusioned by the day. They just don't want to be a part of this bullshit system anymore. Especially at Google and Facebook, they seem to be more authoritarian than some toppled dictatorships of the past century.
Fortunately it's a great time for radical career shifts, especially if you always wanted to be an artist.
Maybe they meant those mid/high-level employees have enough cash/stock that they can peace out of the work force or work less and pursue something artistic.
The piece doesn't really articulate a problem, if anything the reverse is true more often than not: management chases short term performance numbers to the detriment of the long term success of the company and long term shareholders.
It's more just like "woah we're hip smart tech bros we need to fix the stock market!" even though none of their claims really have any merit.
IPOs are still stupid for a lot of reasons, but stratifying shareholders (why is the answer to everything from the Valley always more stratification?) is neither here nor there.
You mean like desktops? That are unplugged? How many of those do you think are sitting around? How old is the version of Windows on them do you think?
If your recovery strategy is "drive as fast as you can to the thrift shop" then I don't know how effective "rebuilding" would be. This is fucking terrifying.
This is par for the course for the NYT, the noble corporations are painted as heroes keeping us safe from the dirty wildlings who are about to topple the wall any day now.
They do the same thing with many (large) companies, the State Department, all military/intelligence branches, etc. It's how you get access, and they seem more willing to play ball and churn out these puff pieces over doing real journalism than anyone. The Times is the most prominent example of this pattern, but it's becoming more and pervasive.
Washington Post all the way. I still read it, but NYT often disappoints me when I already know something about the subject. New Yorker is good, but not science sections. The NYT Cassini coverage was good.
Yeah I still think the NYT has the best science coverage out there, but business and tech has become such a joke over the past 20 years it's not even worth checking.
I worry a lot about how these megacorps will treat "collaborators" vs "non collaborators" in the coming years. Obviously you can't just outright buy everyone, but they seem to be increasingly abusive towards technologies and teams that aren't on board with their interests and ideology.
Actually I'm more worried about how Facebook and Amazon treat non compliance, but Google sure seems to be getting shadier every day.
This combined with the W3C evolving into a corrupt entity just makes me want to get out of tech completely. Maybe if I could get some awesome dev job at the EFF?
From what I can tell, this is all opensource using their publicly documented API. That is, you could implement the same support for GCP in your own auth backend product, and you could implement the same support for your own cloud platform in Vault.
So… I don't really get what you're talking about in this context.
"We're working to enhance the integration between HashiCorp Vault and GCP, including Vault authentication backends for IAM and signed VM metadata."
There's not much detail in that. But, you could certainly read it in a way that using Hashicorp products might be lower friction than using other products on GCP.
This is a genuine collaboration effort by two of the players whose services many people are already using together, and they are making that experience better for their users.
The kind of dismissiveness and hyperbole in your comment is why we can't have nice things.
> How does Snowden have anything to do with a collaboration between Google and Hashicorp?
I don't think they have anything to do with each other. My point is that we know some weird things are happening and it's a put-down and a conversation stopper to call someone a tinfoil hat wearer.
(The best you can say is that the person you're insulting might have a mental illness.)
This is a pet peeve of mine because I knew about some of the hijinks that have gone down (and are going down) since before Snowden flushed his life down the toilet to get people to pay attention and I've been dismissed with that exact term. It's naive in a post-Snowden world to not postulate conspiracies.
The Hashicorp stack is pretty widely used in part for its open source cross-platform capabilities. This seems more along the lines of "Hey! You already use Terraform/Vault for provider X. Now GCP works even better with the tools you already use!"
You concern is probably worthwhile, but I think this is not an example of it.
I work for Pivotal and we donate engineering for a product (CredHub) which is comparable to Vault, though with a slightly different set of motivating problems.
We, like HashiCorp, cooperate with Google on a lot of things.
They don't pick winners. What works best for Google is to get your workload into GCP. It matters little whether the bits you run are Pivotal bits, HashiCorp bits, Docker bits, Red Hat bits, IBM bits, Microsoft bits or your own bits.
What matters is that they're being processed on GCP atoms.
The analogy I have used before is that Shell, BP and ExxonMobil don't care whether you burn their fuel in a Ford or a Toyota. They mostly care that you burn their fuel.
I don't mean to paint a cynical picture here. As a partner Google is excellent, responsive and respectful, our engineering cultures have good compatibility and there are deep common interests. But Google's goal is to make GCP the most attractive place to run your workload. That means that they are going to be ecumenical. They want to help us to win, but they want to help everyone to win, because that helps them to win.
> Obviously you can't just outright buy everyone, but they seem to be increasingly abusive towards technologies and teams that aren't on board with their interests and ideology.
I 'm not sure where you're coming from or going with this. Do you have an example to illustrate? What are you considering collaborators and non-collaborators?
Any two corporations can work together to create partnerships and better integrations of their products and services. This is how most business is done.
Seems like the future to me, it's just not in any big tech company's best interest right now as they fight over data centers.