Proof that software as service/cloud based, will never work for long term ...

[Karel]

I'm very uncomfortable with entities wielding massive amounts of power and influence deciding what is to be discussed and what not and what is acceptable or not. We developed all kinds of checks and balances for governments as we realized such a lopsided balance of power tends to yield all kinds of nasty situations. The big tech companies arguably have more power than many nations around the world yet few if any of the same checks and balances exist. They can wipe you from the many things they're involved in and simply move on without consequence. They don't even have to tell you why. I don't like the continuous narrowing of what's considered normal and acceptable and I don't like the idea of causing what's potentially a fair amount of harm to people's lives or livelihoods without recourse. If companies are going to wield that kind of power they should be accountable. Them using that power to wipe a bunch of dicks off the web doesn't make it any better.

I couldn't agree more.

[SilverSolder]

It will be re-assuring to know that the USA supreme court Masterpiece Cakeshop case did not establish that it is ok for a company to refuse service to anyone. This wasn't even up for discussion / decision in the case. It was a very narrow case with an even more narrow ruling. It wasn't even a liberal vs conservative decision as Breyer and Kagan were with the majority.

I feel no pity for Parler but am concerned with the general precedent. We have very large and powerful companies with significant control over the Internet that are wielding that power. Ok so Parler was an easy target, but what next?

I'm very uncomfortable with entities wielding massive amounts of power and influence deciding what is to be discussed and what not and what is acceptable or not. We developed all kinds of checks and balances for governments as we realized such a lopsided balance of power tends to yield all kinds of nasty situations. The big tech companies arguably have more power than many nations around the world yet few if any of the same checks and balances exist. They can wipe you from the many things they're involved in and simply move on without consequence. They don't even have to tell you why. I don't like the continuous narrowing of what's considered normal and acceptable and I don't like the idea of causing what's potentially a fair amount of harm to people's lives or livelihoods without recourse. If companies are going to wield that kind of power they should be accountable. Them using that power to wipe a bunch of dicks off the web doesn't make it any better.

The American lawmakers are behind the curve in setting up ground rules for this.  All America had to fight back with, against the lies and conspiracy, was the T&Cs of the private companies involved...

[bd139]

If you look at both sides of the argument here it’s fairly obvious that the reason that the people were silenced was because the technology companies feared liability down the line. This is no different to the local church no longer wanting to host KKK meetings but on a larger scale.

We have to look at the technology companies rather than a single entity wielding power but a collective of people. The individuals who make the company up need to be held liable for any outcome not the organisation. When bad behaviour becomes untenable then the entire organisation will collapse if people are put on the spot. I’ve seen this in the defence sector: people buy into the ideology being promoted as employees not the reality. When reality is forced on them from the outside, people bring their own position into debate.

As for government checks and balances they clearly don’t exist or work because they are based on a system that is at least 100 years old. What evolves in such environments, and any bureaucracy, is an intimate knowledge of how to sidestep legislation and the ability to manipulate change in favour of deregulation.

[BradC]

Email. I am quite happy to run my own mail server if I'm honest. However that's not really feasible now due to how the Internet has turned into large corporate islands. Your email has to be spurged out of and delivered to one of them rather than self hosting it otherwise you end up in a mire of RBL systems and some upstream MTU's telling your impolitely to fuck off even if you have SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly. There is also no process to appeal to some provider so you can send mail to them either. To do business via email you need to play in the cloud still.

Found via necropost....

This is about a year late, I have excuses but let’s say I’ve been “long time lurker first time poster” for a few years.

We run and have run our own mailserver(s) since 2005. We are a *huge* organisation (sarc) with 5 people and an IT department of “me” who do business globally, and we’ve never had an issue getting mail delivered. All outbound are running exim4 on a VPS. We do have SPF and DKIM because that made life “easier” with google, but it wasn’t strictly necessary. We run our own DNS and rely on nothing external sans a co-lo in the uk, a vps in the uk (DNS2) and a VPS in Sydney (DNS3, inbound SMTP secondary and DNS3). Maintenance is the odd patch, an OS upgrade every 4 years and paying bills.

We do have a fairly significant inbound greylist exception list, but only because a lot of email admins are dumb fucks.

You don’t *need* the “cloud”. Having said that, if you don’t want to use someone else’s infrastructure you do have to be prepared to put the effort in.

[bd139]

That all works fine until one day one of your VPS ranges ends up on an RBL. I’ve worked for various companies doing high volume outbound email. Not spam but things like large SaaS vendors sending out notifications and workflow via email etc. Absolutely all it takes is one bad day and you’ve got a serious problem on your hands. And that day always comes. Also some address ranges have poor reputation. A wonderful recent problem I’ve seen is Amazon SES which has outbound delivery problems occasionally because someone on SORBS keeps listing their address ranges.

I’d argue that it’s a wasted effort running that for a 5 person org. You could be generating more revenue doing something else. Outsource it to someone.

On our current set up we have two actual real nodes running postfix at disparate colocation providers under our ASN and range. SPF, DMARC, DKIM configured. Pushing 20k emails a day out. Reject rate is 0.1%. But we don’t run corp email on that domain - it’s ok O365. 

As for not needing the cloud, yep I agree. But leveraging it is important to be competitive where it makes sense.

[BradC]

I’d argue that it’s a wasted effort running that for a 5 person org. You could be generating more revenue doing something else. Outsource it to someone.

I apologise, I read your post as "I can't make self-hosted E-mail work so I've outsourced it to fastmail". I was simply pointing out that you *can* make it work, but you appear to have that sorted. I'm a bit behind.

[madires]

A wonderful recent problem I’ve seen is Amazon SES which has outbound delivery problems occasionally because someone on SORBS keeps listing their address ranges.

And MS' Azure has a problem with SPAMmers too for the last two or three months. They seem to just play whack-a-mole and not being able to deal with the SPAMmers. So I had to block *.cloudapp.azure.com.

[bd139]

I’d argue that it’s a wasted effort running that for a 5 person org. You could be generating more revenue doing something else. Outsource it to someone.

I apologise, I read your post as "I can't make self-hosted E-mail work so I've outsourced it to fastmail". I was simply pointing out that you *can* make it work, but you appear to have that sorted. I'm a bit behind.

My personal email is on Fastmail. Business is on O365. Our outbound SaaS is self hosted because that's a trade-off that was reasonable. I also changed jobs half way through the thread which may have confused things 

My initial problem was stated as "I'm tired of running my own mail server and the problems it causes thus I use Fastmail who make all those problems go away so I can regain that bit of my life". The thing is fastmail costs me ~10 minutes of salary a month. 

A wonderful recent problem I’ve seen is Amazon SES which has outbound delivery problems occasionally because someone on SORBS keeps listing their address ranges.

And MS' Azure has a problem with SPAMmers too for the last two or three months. They seem to just play whack-a-mole and not being able to deal with the SPAMmers. So I had to block *.cloudapp.azure.com.

Exactly. This is why we had to run our own servers in the end for commercial outbound. SES has some sender reputation stuff but it only takes one mail server admin on the receiving end to report SPAM and then you're up shit creek.

[AlexJackson]

I totally hate this modern web experience.

!!!RANT INCOMING!!! 

Just recently I was looking at a wiki style page and wanted to see how they did their div layouts (so I can move from using tables - which work wonderfully without tons of css for laying out data). My intention was duplicating it. I knew it was bad, but I didn't just grasp how bad it actually was until I looked at the referenced assets.

836KB for 1 CSS, 160K for another other CSS, plus 9 other CSS files I didn't bother with, 600K for a javascript library, another 150K for some other ad tracking javascript library (thank god I have scripting turned off!). I was nearly at a 2MB download before I even got to the html, and images.

When your bloat far exceeds the content on your page (including images), you have really gone wrong. Also you've done something wrong when nothing loads with scripts off (93% of sites I have attempted to visit - Yes, at one point I did count).

Anyway this is why I always keep old versions an use old versions over the newest stuff. Remember in the early 2000s when Adobe first moved all their programs to the 'cloud' such as authentication for photoshop? Remember when Adobe had that masssssssssive licensing server outage that resulted in so many people not being able to use Photoshop? Yea, I do. I made a lot of money off that "fiasco" because I still had Photoshop 5 LE, Gimp, & MS paint and I was able to get people results if they didn't require extremely complex things. A lot of times not the exact results they wanted, but results they could compromise on, and could use to deliver. I was insanely busy for 2 weeks, even after the whole "fiasco" was corrected. Why? My software just worked when everyone else was crippled by someone else's computer. Why is it in the mobile world where we are expected to be mobile, are now extremely locked down? Lets not forget programs where you need to "deactivate" it before uninstalling or you lose that ""unrecoverable"" "seat". Oh god I hope my computer doesn't die from a massive hardware failure such as getting dropped, or a battery shorting out and starting a fire. BlueIris... Melodyne... You're not cheap, and I'm looking at you.

How long until Windows home turns to subscription? How long until all your work is done in an extremely bloated browser that eats memory because "its there to use". The browser will become your OS. Also, don't forget newer browser versions are using their own DNS servers ignoring the system's DNS servers and throwing constant  if you turn that "feature" off - if you can turn that off. Welcome to your new sandbox. Its 1" deep with coarse sand that doesn't work well with playing in the sand. Here's your crappy sand toys. You will like it and pay for it because its your only option. Welcome to the modern internet.



*sigh*

[SilverSolder]

I totally hate this modern web experience.
[...] newer browser versions are using their own DNS servers ignoring the system's DNS servers and throwing constant  if you turn that "feature" off [...]

Ah, I didn't know that.  I had been wondering at some of the behaviour I observed in my browser after setting up a local ad blocking DNS... 

[SilverSolder]

Should WhatsApp be added to the list of cloud based services that failed?

The whole "bait and switch" business model of some services is becoming only too apparent:

• Offer a new service for free, cross financing from other sources to keep competitors out
• Keep doing that until the service becomes an established monopoly
• Start monetizing the service from your captive "customers"

It is a business model favoured by drug dealers everywhere!

[Karel]

It is a business model favoured by drug dealers everywhere!

There are only two industries that call their customers "users": illegal drugs and software.

[bd139]

I totally hate this modern web experience.

!!!RANT INCOMING!!! 

Just recently I was looking at a wiki style page and wanted to see how they did their div layouts (so I can move from using tables - which work wonderfully without tons of css for laying out data). My intention was duplicating it. I knew it was bad, but I didn't just grasp how bad it actually was until I looked at the referenced assets.

836KB for 1 CSS, 160K for another other CSS, plus 9 other CSS files I didn't bother with, 600K for a javascript library, another 150K for some other ad tracking javascript library (thank god I have scripting turned off!). I was nearly at a 2MB download before I even got to the html, and images.

When your bloat far exceeds the content on your page (including images), you have really gone wrong. Also you've done something wrong when nothing loads with scripts off (93% of sites I have attempted to visit - Yes, at one point I did count).

Anyway this is why I always keep old versions an use old versions over the newest stuff. Remember in the early 2000s when Adobe first moved all their programs to the 'cloud' such as authentication for photoshop? Remember when Adobe had that masssssssssive licensing server outage that resulted in so many people not being able to use Photoshop? Yea, I do. I made a lot of money off that "fiasco" because I still had Photoshop 5 LE, Gimp, & MS paint and I was able to get people results if they didn't require extremely complex things. A lot of times not the exact results they wanted, but results they could compromise on, and could use to deliver. I was insanely busy for 2 weeks, even after the whole "fiasco" was corrected. Why? My software just worked when everyone else was crippled by someone else's computer. Why is it in the mobile world where we are expected to be mobile, are now extremely locked down? Lets not forget programs where you need to "deactivate" it before uninstalling or you lose that ""unrecoverable"" "seat". Oh god I hope my computer doesn't die from a massive hardware failure such as getting dropped, or a battery shorting out and starting a fire. BlueIris... Melodyne... You're not cheap, and I'm looking at you.

How long until Windows home turns to subscription? How long until all your work is done in an extremely bloated browser that eats memory because "its there to use". The browser will become your OS. Also, don't forget newer browser versions are using their own DNS servers ignoring the system's DNS servers and throwing constant  if you turn that "feature" off - if you can turn that off. Welcome to your new sandbox. Its 1" deep with coarse sand that doesn't work well with playing in the sand. Here's your crappy sand toys. You will like it and pay for it because its your only option. Welcome to the modern internet.



*sigh*

LMAO agreed.

I hate to disappoint you further but Microsoft are working on Electron based apps to replace most of the desktop office apps at the moment, starting with Outlook. So basically you're going to end up with 20 separate browsers each with a 50 meg stack of shit on top of it. If that's not bad enough it's written in TypeScript so the stack sort of looks like:

idea -> piles of shitty libraries -> typescript -> web assembly -> v8 engine -> chromium -> OS API -> hardware API.

I am guilty of this myself if I'm honest as well going back about 10 years when I slid jQuery into something. By the time all the plugins had been installed that were required such as jQuery UI and all the ancillary shit it was landing at around 2 megs of JS. At this point I decided enough was enough and wrote a 9k library that did nearly everything required. But no one understood it because it was functional programming based so it was discarded in favour of something people could google rather than understand in about 30 minutes if they read the nice fucking manual I wrote.  . About then I decided to say fuck it, I don't want anything to do with the modern web and relegated myself back to the realm of systems programming where I reside today and have no intention of changing.

One reason I'm liking Apple at the moment is they actually value native applications.

On windows, everything is going subscription. Windows Home is just that first line of coke free to get you in. This is followed by Office family and possibly windows 10 pro when you realise you need one of those little features. If you're me you use an MSDN key for Office and scrape old win 10 pro serials off PCs on the way to the tip 

[madires]

I totally hate this modern web experience.
[...] newer browser versions are using their own DNS servers ignoring the system's DNS servers and throwing constant  if you turn that "feature" off [...]

Ah, I didn't know that.  I had been wondering at some of the behaviour I observed in my browser after setting up a local ad blocking DNS...

DoH, DoT and company. Those new protocols are meant to hide the content of your DNS requests, but they create several new problems - improvement for the worse (a topic for a new thread). However, they can help in some specific situations to keep your web browsing more private.

DoH in Firefox: network.trr.mode
  0 off by default
  2 DoH first, regular DNS as fallback
  3 DoH only
  5 explictly off

IIRC, Mozilla has changed the default value to "2" for US users last year.

[madires]

I am guilty of this myself if I'm honest as well going back about 10 years when I slid jQuery into something. By the time all the plugins had been installed that were required such as jQuery UI and all the ancillary shit it was landing at around 2 megs of JS. At this point I decided enough was enough and wrote a 9k library that did nearly everything required. But no one understood it because it was functional programming based so it was discarded in favour of something people could google rather than understand in about 30 minutes if they read the nice fucking manual I wrote.

You shall not over-deliver! That's the reason why we need high speed internet for watching ads with some scarce crumbs of information sprinkled in between.

[AlexJackson]

LMAO agreed.

I hate to disappoint you further but Microsoft are working on Electron based apps to replace most of the desktop office apps at the moment, starting with Outlook. So basically you're going to end up with 20 separate browsers each with a 50 meg stack of shit on top of it. If that's not bad enough it's written in TypeScript so the stack sort of looks like:

idea -> piles of shitty libraries -> typescript -> web assembly -> v8 engine -> chromium -> OS API -> hardware API.

I am guilty of this myself if I'm honest as well going back about 10 years when I slid jQuery into something. By the time all the plugins had been installed that were required such as jQuery UI and all the ancillary shit it was landing at around 2 megs of JS. At this point I decided enough was enough and wrote a 9k library that did nearly everything required. But no one understood it because it was functional programming based so it was discarded in favour of something people could google rather than understand in about 30 minutes if they read the nice fucking manual I wrote.  . About then I decided to say fuck it, I don't want anything to do with the modern web and relegated myself back to the realm of systems programming where I reside today and have no intention of changing.

One reason I'm liking Apple at the moment is they actually value native applications.

On windows, everything is going subscription. Windows Home is just that first line of coke free to get you in. This is followed by Office family and possibly windows 10 pro when you realise you need one of those little features. If you're me you use an MSDN key for Office and scrape old win 10 pro serials off PCs on the way to the tip 

Yup... I seen this coming a mile away, and had always setup my systems to function without an internet connection. Well frankly because back then, we were poor and the internet wasn't a "required" utility like it is now so it would get shut off periodically so I learned early on not to depend on it. Even now, I'm still rocking Office 2003 with the office 97 shortcut bar (removed in office 03). I'm also still on windows7 with no intention of going to 10. I hate win7 for its online feature creep (such as: games for windows will block your game from loading if it cant talk to the MS game servers to get info on that game. Running a game will also invoke gameux.dll, which itself will run the game after it gets metadata and it doesn't fail gracefully and wont load your desired game. After a number of attempts to run the game, the game will eventually start even if you invoke it from the run command. You will have to do this everytime unless you jump through hoops to ****actually**** disable it by replacing the file with a "null" dll of the same name and making it read-only). The only thing I'd get win10 for is for MS Flight Sim 2020 but even then its a long shot.

You don't still happen to have that "discarded" setup do you?

You shall not over-deliver! That's the reason why we need high speed internet for watching ads with some scarce crumbs of information sprinkled in between.

That's the purpose of modern media. Gotta sell that advertising slot. And Alphabet & Co being Alphabet (advertising agency) they're throwing funding at firefox, and developing chromium so they can for all intents and purposes push new "standards" onto everyone else. Guess this is what we get when everyone depends on an advertising agency for their software needs.

[olkipukki]

I hate to disappoint you further but Microsoft are working on Electron based apps...

That's more or less expected... after Teams success 

[bd139]

What success is this you speak of?  (I am currently having to deal with a consultancy that uses it so I’m basically getting my dick burned off by my horrible corp Dell XPS for 8 hours a day which runs Slack and Teams all day).

[Mr. Scram]

That's more or less expected... after Teams success 

You mean how they stuck a crappy version of everything in one app so nothing works as well as it could while hogging resources for basic functionality?

[olkipukki]

We can force you either pay a premium or allows to use just something for free because

does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-subscription-model/

Is it new trend about to start? 

Also, Atlassian has killed on-premises licenses...

New server license sales will end on February 2, 2021 and support will end on February 2, 2024. Choose cloud or Data Center instead.

[bd139]

Atlassian cloud is a complete rotten ball sack of a product as well. DC edition is expensive. I spy market gap 

If someone basically built JIRA open source then they’d be gone overnight.

[Mr. Scram]

We can force you either pay a premium or allows to use just something for free because

does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-subscription-model/

Is it new trend about to start? 

Also, Atlassian has killed on-premises licenses...

New server license sales will end on February 2, 2021 and support will end on February 2, 2024. Choose cloud or Data Center instead.

"Does not meet the hurdle rate" is a nice way of saying "pay up, motherfuckers!", especially to those already stuck in the ecosystem.

[Mr. Scram]

What I've always wondered is what happens when the market saturates. The whole point of making everything cloud is getting a steady revenue stream which ultimately means making more money. Neither companies nor people have endless amounts of money to spend, so there is a point the available funds get spread too thin and no one is making money. Do we enter an endless cycle of companies going bust and ecosystems popping from under people?

[SilverSolder]

What I've always wondered is what happens when the market saturates. The whole point of making everything cloud is getting a steady revenue stream which ultimately means making more money. Neither companies nor people have endless amounts of money to spend, so there is a point the available funds get spread too thin and no one is making money. Do we enter an endless cycle of companies going bust and ecosystems popping from under people?

Each individual eventually "saturates" with the number of services that they are able to subscribe to.  They will end up looking for ways to cut the monthly costs.   They will discover (or re-discover) the benefits of owning things outright rather than subscribing to them.  Manufacturers will make products to satisfy that market.

Eventually this should all balance out...

[bd139]

That’s starting to occur now. Also it gets to the point where “feature momentum” starts to cost your users time to relearn things. Typically most people are paying for something that works and stays consistent. But this conflicts with the feature laden pitches to attract new users from other competitors.

The canonical example of this is Google as they kept breaking Gsuite badly so people started moving to O365. Now Microsoft are losing users to Google so they’re doing the same and innovating quickly. This lead to broken Office desktop apps.

These two outcomes balance out to fairly large companies I know who are deploying libreoffice and no collaboration stuff other than email.

This is quite funny because I work and have worked for SaaS / cloud companies for years. It’s a fad and it’ll die again one day. But the cash is good.