The recent outage in the Google Cloud infrastructure has certainly revealed a fair amount of vulnerability in their cloud offerings. So many services were affected, and I heard some tales of Nest owners who couldn’t unlock their homes or control their HVAC systems because the system couldn’t function without the other side being up and running.
This has always worried me about cloud infrastructure and beyond that, into IoT designs. We have come to depend on much of this kind of technology recently, and it can be tough for those that understand how all this works to let things like HVAC controls and door lock security go off to be managed by a company without any sort of manual override.
Google Chrome and Ads
It isn’t the first time that Google has turned on us, they used to have as a company motto, “Don’t be Evil,” but then when they ran into a profit wall, they realized that they had to accept evil into their company to make more money. So now, Google is Evil. Recently, the details came to light in regards to how Google will be changing Google Chrome. They are going to disable a programming API that enables some ad-blocking software to function correctly. Honestly, I was expecting this sort of thing long ago. It was the perfect reason to look into moving ad-blocking away from the computer level and further into the network itself. At work, I use Cisco Umbrella, and that places a filter on DNS services. When I was playing around with Raspberry Pi computers a long while back, there was another GitHub project that caught my attention, and that was Pi-Hole.
Pi-Hole
The GitHub project, Pi-Hole is a very straightforward installation that provides DNS filtering for malware and adware based on community-developed blocklists. I originally used it on my Raspberry Pi until I discovered that the Pi wasn’t really all that reliable a platform. Since then I have installed Debian Linux on my original Mac Mini, and that machine, which also serves as a central entertainment hub for my household also provides Pi-Hole services. I have set my home router to refer to the Pi-Hole for it’s upstream DNS requests, so every device attached to my home network funnels all the DNS traffic through the Pi-Hole. In that installation, with all the DNS requests sent to the Pi-Hole, it has liberated my Google Chrome, and any other browser, on my computer, iPhone, iPad, or whatever without any settings to change or fuss around with. To that end, thank you, Google, for giving me the push to help eliminate ads throughout my home.
Sirius/XM Outages
In line with what happened when the Google Cloud malfunctioned, there was another event earlier today that posed a challenge for me, IT wise. I was driving into work and I often times listen to XM’s Channel 33, which is First Wave. I was enjoying all of that music, and the announcer mentioned the channel schedule. That reminded me that I have the XM app on my iPhone and I could stream the XM signal into my workplace just as easily as I can stream Spotify music. So then I tried to use the app and ran into Error 1025. What the hell is that? I eventually got into a chat with a Sirius/XM representative, and they told me that there were system level issues at Sirius/XM that was giving everyone challenges. I have to remind myself frequently that my first stop should be DownDetector.com! I browsed to that site while I was on the chat with the XM representative and there it was, Sirius/XM, with a huge complaint spike. I should have started there! Lesson learned!
The way of things, for cloud infrastructure and all these interconnected devices, will not go away anytime soon. While the settings that you have on your phone and computer might also be causing issues with connectivity, it’s important to always keep in mind that sometimes the biggest systems can also be more fragile. It’s important to keep sites like DownDetector in mind because if you are having a problem with a website, chances are so are a whole lot of other people.