Perhaps one of the most pressing issues of our days is the (lack of) control we have over our online presence. Being spied on became the default expectation, and the lengths that this has gone to is sometimes hard to believe. Even a few months ago, it was revealed that a novel tracking method had been discovered in Meta’s Android application (Facebook and Instagram), as well as Yandex’s, were exploiting the loopback interface to be able to track your habits - looks like there’s no boundaries, physical or moral, that these companies won’t overstep. I’m focusing on this particular incident not only because it’s relatively recent, but also because it goes to show that this is a veritable whack-a-mole game; we were supposed to have dealt with the correlation between web browsing and app activity, but the tech giants found yet another way to go around it.

In the aftermath of the AWS outage, there’s a lot of talk about how the Internet has been taken hostage by this specific provider, and how the internet is not decentralized anymore. While it doesn’t seem like this is necessarily wrong - after all, the recent outage, and all AWS outages for that matter, seem to take down a sizeable portion of the internet - it’s both misguided and ignores the deeper problems at play here.

There’s a feeling you have when you just uncover a fact so shocking, and yet so obvious, that’s hard to put into words. That’s what I felt when I saw this wonderful statistic: as far as I can tell, the only category of products that had a deflationary rate, averaging -7% a year for the past 20 years, was “Information Technology, Hardware And Services”. I had already read about this trend back in my days as an undergrad in Economics (15 years ago at this point), but to be confronted about the stark reality of these numbers ends up being a punch to the gut, and candy to my brain.

A sometimes overlooked aspect of infrastructure is how we can use different layers of the OSI model to implement features that are not typically associated with it. One example is to provide access control for applications through the network layer - while this is typically associated with and implemented at the application layer, there are simple ways to leverage level 3 solutions to very quickly and efficiently provide a similar effect. One such case is the usage of Wireguard in combination with either a firewall or a reverse proxy.

One of the things that I’ve always tried to implement on all the services I run is self-sufficiency. Now, this isn’t completely achievable, in the sense that I still depend on services and software that other people provide, but it’s still an ideal to strive for. In my particular case, all the services I run are self-hosted with no external dependencies, either from a raspberry pi I host at home, or a small VPS that I rent from a provider.