{"id":31245,"date":"2025-10-22T17:38:42","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T17:38:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=31245"},"modified":"2025-10-22T17:40:46","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T17:40:46","slug":"ring-paused-their-doorbell-cameras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/?p=31245","title":{"rendered":"Ring paused their doorbell cameras…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Court Painter prefers to spend his time painting in his studio, absorbed in the gritty matters that define his life and work\u2014firmly grounded in the physical, somatic materiality of his artistic practice. More often than not, he remains blissfully oblivious to the digital disasters that plague the hustle and bustle of the 21st century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This issue of the cloud<\/em>, however, cannot be ignored!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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When a technical issue disrupted operations at servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses in Northern Virginia facilities on October 20\/25, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world<\/strong>.The incident marked at least the third time<\/a> in the past five years that Amazon Web Services\u2019 Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector<\/a>, costing companies an estimated<\/a> hundreds of billions of dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Throughout most of yesterday, the connective tissue of modern life seemed to be under threat\u2014a reminder that the internet is physical, fallible, and heavily reliant on just a few massive companies.The modern web owes that fragility in part to the <\/strong>cloud<\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From The Atlantic Daily<\/em>,October 21\/25<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Domino Effect<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
Everything is in \u201cthe cloud\u201d now, except the cloud is a real place, and it\u2019s in Northern Virginia. Rows and rows of servers stacked in Amazon-owned warehouses across Ashburn, Haymarket, McNair, Manassas, and Sterling make up a chunk of the infrastructure for the modern internet\u2014equipment as crucial as railway tracks and the electric grid. When a technical issue disrupted operations at those facilities yesterday, it was enough to temporarily crash the internet for users around the world.The incident marked at least the third time<\/a> in the past five years that Amazon Web Services\u2019 Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread internet outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector<\/a>, costing companies an estimated<\/a> hundreds of billions of dollars. Venmo users were locked out of their payments, and international banks experienced major blips in their service. People struggled to book urgent doctor appointments and couldn\u2019t access their Medicare benefits. Snapchat and Reddit were down, as were Instagram and Hulu. Ring paused their doorbell cameras;<\/em><\/strong> ChatGPT stopped answering. (Some unfortunate customers of Eight Sleep, which sells AI-powered, temperature-changing mattresses, woke to bright strobe lights or an \u201cabsolutely freezing\u201d<\/a> bed, per testimony on X.) Throughout most of yesterday, the connective tissue of modern life seemed to be under threat\u2014a reminder that the internet is physical, fallible, and heavily reliant on just a few massive companies.The modern web owes that fragility in part to the cloud<\/strong>. In the pre-cloud age, setting up a website meant buying physical servers, procuring software licenses, and writing foundational code from scratch. This DIY process was both extremely expensive and time-consuming. The basic proposition of the cloud is What if you didn\u2019t have to do any of that?<\/em>Amazon and its competitors own the servers and prewrite the code so customers don\u2019t have to. When developers lease infrastructure from cloud providers, they get to leave the cumbersome work of maintenance to someone else.The trade-off is ownership for accessibility, up-front costs for monthly fees\u2014and it has proved extremely attractive. Adoption in the corporate world has been nearly universal. Amazon spearheaded the rush to the cloud in the late 2000s, when it began building the warehouses that now house much of the modern internet. Thanks to that first-mover advantage, it still dominates today: Amazon controls an estimated 30 percent<\/a> of the global market for cloud computing, while its competitors Microsoft and Google have captured 20 and 13 percent, respectively. Because the actual servers are consolidated under a handful of companies, so are the potential points of failure\u2014not to mention the profits.Unlike the highways that crisscross the United States, which are built and maintained by government programs, physical data conduits are built and maintained by corporations. The internet is often understood as a free and open resource, but it is controlled by a small group of digital landowners. Last July, a single cybersecurity firm<\/a> caused an internet-wide meltdown that grounded planes and interrupted financial services around the world. Jonathan Kanter, a former top antitrust regulator in the Biden administration, told me such disruptions help \u201csociety understand the magnitude of the power, the magnitude of the reach\u201d that certain companies have. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t just affect one commercial interest\u2014it affects the entire country.\u201dAmazon\u2019s dominance is compounded by the nested structure of the internet: One hyperlink leads to another, which leads to another, which at some point probably leads back to Amazon<\/a>. An issue with Amazon\u2019s Virginia servers might affect Amazon products globally and any websites that interact with Amazon-backed services; a business that doesn\u2019t rely on Amazon for its services might still be entwined with another business that does<\/a>.There are ways out of the centralization trap, but they come with their own problems. Rumble, the streaming service that has become a home for those deplatformed elsewhere, has an AWS alternative of its own. The issue is that Rumble is also linked to inflammatory right-wing causes<\/a> that could potentially pose reputational risk for major companies looking to use its cloud services. Urbit, another attempt at decentralizing the internet that has generated buzz over the past few years, was founded<\/a> by the software developer and far-right provocateur Curtis Yarvin<\/a>, who has openly advocated for an American monarchy. No truly decentralized alternative has so far come close to the scale of AWS, which has dramatically outspent and outperformed its competition. And at this point, new challengers may find it too hard to catch up.True decentralization is also incredibly difficult to achieve, in cloud computing and beyond. Consider crypto, a form of digital currency originally designed to deliver freedom from the centralized authority of banks and governments. That was the idea, anyway\u2014in practice, this roughly $4 trillion industry is very much beholden to the centralized internet, as well as to Wall Street and Congress. Coinbase, which also went down yesterday amid the AWS outage, is in some ways the antithesis of what crypto\u2019s libertarian thought leaders imagined<\/a>: Like many other crypto companies, it discovered that centralization is the price of doing business.Amazon doesn\u2019t publicize the existence of its Virginia data centers, and most customers may not even know they exist. But as the steward of the internet, the company has accrued an enormous amount of influence over our lives: how we access our money, how we seek medical help, even how some people get a good night\u2019s sleep. Tech outages happen\u2014but under our current system, a bad day for Amazon can be a bad day for everyone.Related :<\/strong>The CrowdStrike failure was a warning.<\/a> (From 2024<\/em>) Crypto\u2019s core values are running headfirst into reality.<\/a> (From 2022<\/em>)<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This has nothing to do with the story however Court Painter wants eveyone to know Tina Fey touched his painting arm during their cloud painting session!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Court Painter prefers to spend his time painting in his studio, absorbed in the gritty matters that define his life and work\u2014firmly grounded in the physical, somatic materiality of his artistic practice. More often than not, he remains blissfully oblivious to the digital disasters that plague the hustle and bustle of the 21st century. This … Continue reading “Ring paused their doorbell cameras…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-images","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31245"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31263,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31245\/revisions\/31263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/allanhardingmackay.ca\/courtpainter\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}