## 39 De-Centralize yourself !
During last week, Amazon Web Service (AWS) had issues and many services and websites were broken on the Internet...and on your smartphone. I had no problem with that or nothing urgent but I was very happy to see that. It's perhaps a good way to show how stupid internet users and companies are !
Amazon web service or Microsoft Azure etc... that's not only cloud services but also host for many sites and services, for data etc, in different places, often with less taxes than next to their clients. I don't know how many clients they have but many of the ads and pictures I can see are coming from AWS. Are they less expensive ? No, you can find better but they have certainly very good sellers. I can only see the result of that in the big automotive company I work for. Office 365 has many issues, lags and some of the files are not compatible between regular office and Office365 online. Many of the internal services were sent to Microsoft servers and it's worse than before (it was not very good in internal servers but with fewer operating downtimes). And I don't want to talk about crowdstrike...We have seen how dangerous it was in 2024 (1) ...but my company has signed a contract 2 months after. They are spending millions for lobbying everywhere. And you know that the choices are not made with technical peo
ple...Same problem with cloudflare. You can see that damned splash screen and check process more and more to avoid DDoS, and other security things but also to host data and pictures as a Content delivery network. Is it making a better internet ? I don't think so. But with a full security package, it's easier than to find the most skilled employees in cybersecurity.
The problem is that if someone finds a vulnerability or creates a bug in one of those major services, everything breaks and, as a client, you don't have the right people with the necessary skills to fix it. I don't have the skills for that, so I made the choice to create something simple that I can understand and move from one host to another, rather than hosting something like a WordPress website myself. I was a WordPress user for years, but now I avoid it like the plague. It's not a problem of centralisation like the others, but rather a problem of having an overly complex engine. It's not a tool for blogging anymore, but for creating websites and large content management systems that can be used for news magazines, shops, blogs, and so on, with tons of plugins and options... and therefore tons of vulnerabilities, updates, and an increasingly large site that is difficult to back up effectively. I see the problem every day in the logs of my French site, with hundreds of attempts to exploit a typical WordPre
ss vulnerability. It's exactly the same with Windows and all the tools you need to install to avoid viruses, Trojans and malicious scripts. I'm very happy to have simple tools that I can manage myself.
However, I don't centralize my data either. This blog is hosted with the help of SDF.org. The other one uses a different host in France and Canada, with some of the data stored in Switzerland and at least one backup for everything. Do you think that's excessive? Perhaps for a blog, but many companies are forgetting this with all those services bought from big tech companies. Nothing is perfect, and the more complex something is, the more issues you will have. Who said 'Keep it simple, stupid'…? Not who you think. The same applies to social networks. I'm not a big fan of BlueSky, which is doing much the same as Twitter, with the same result coming very quickly. I'm very happy with Mastodon and I don't need to use it every hour like I do with too many of those services. If I'm using Signal for political activities, I can switch to simpler services like XMPP. You always have to be flexible and ready to adapt to change. Keep control of your data and private information, and don't place too much trust in indust
ry benchmarks. Oh, I need to talk about passwords later... much later.
to read :
=>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdStrike#The_2024_incident 1-2024 crowdstrike incident
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