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Google has quietly started offering Google Cloud CDN service, a new content-delivery network (CDN) that should appeal to independent developers who want their applications to load quickly.
For its "alpha" release, Google is now accepting applications from people who want to try the new service, which is limited in geographical availability. More locations will be added when the service becomes generally available.
"Google Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) uses Google's globally distributed edge caches to cache HTTP(S) Load Balanced content close to your users," the product description states. "Caching content at the edges of Google's network provides faster delivery of content to your users while reducing the load on your servers."
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Google Has Quietly Launched an Akamai Competitor
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:20PM
This is bad... this worries me greatly and is really bad... Eventually there will be no way to NOT touch any of Google's servers when you interact with the internet. They will track everything and anything you do. Sure, you can block the domains but then 90% of your websites won't work (currently, most websites already use JQuery from some google server).
This isn't so much about privacy as it is about being hunted. Hunted for your eyeballs and the profile they can build up from your behavior, because this gives them yet another tool that allows Google to track you from page to page, request to request on the net.
I don't like this one bit...
What would be a defense against this? Use Tor only so that at least you do some anonymisation? But even then, they will detect you are using tor and maybe even 'degrade' your access in order to 'convince' you to use the regular internet...
(Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Tuesday December 15 2015, @04:57PM
Using Tor on a CDN backed website *will* degrade you access. The whole point of a CDN is to put content close to your eyeballs, but the whole point of Tor is to bounce around and come out somewhere unexpected, meaning that instead of the CDN serving content from nearby, it serves it from...somewhere else. It may not be a big difference depending on what you're doing, but it will definitely be degraded.
The rest of your comment is valid though, Google does big data mining quite well, and this is an excellent way for them to collect more data on everyone. You can't even use SSL to avoid this, because if you're accelerating SSL traffic then the CDN already has the cert to do the encryption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:11PM
I know tor 'degrades' your throughput, that is understood and expected; but I was thinking more along the lines of "now let us call your phone to do verification" or "do work for us by 'recognizing' the house numbers that our google earth car snapped a picture of" or "we don't allow access to this service from tor because 'you're not using this cdn the way it is supposed to be used' " or just plainly "we don't allow access from tor to our services anymore, go fuck yourselves, plebs!"
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:32PM
Any website will be slower through tor than without tor. A CDN, if it's not being perverse, ought to serve from a point of presence near the tor exit node. That's better than without the CDN. Since users of tor experience much greater latencies than do regular folks, the improvement will be less dramatic.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:16PM
Eventually there will be no way to NOT touch any of Google's servers when you interact with the internet. They will track everything and anything you do.
Clearly, the only solution is a decentralized internet. Don your tinfoil hat and go visit the people of Urbit [urbit.org]. I hear they're lonely.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:35PM
Don your tinfoil hat and go visit the people of Urbit. I hear they're lonely.
Only as lonely as they want to be - the website you linked to says they're in "semi-closed alpha", and you can sign up for a place in line to get an invitation. That could mean anything from them being antisocial and excluding everyone outside the inner circle to hordes of prospective testers clamoring at their gates, hard to tell for sure by looking at the website.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:30PM
That could mean anything from them being antisocial and excluding everyone outside the inner circle to hordes of prospective testers clamoring at their gates, hard to tell for sure by looking at the website.
More likely the the former than the latter.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:10PM
Urbit is doomed. Their approach is a 100% reimplementation from the ground up. That's the hardest possible way to change the status quo and requires an overwhelmingly superior value. Decentralization is simply not of sufficient value to enough people to get widescale adoption.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:59PM
Have some points for that link... *hands you some internet points*
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:12PM
That site doesn't seem to work without JavaScript. Which is quite ironic for a web site that (if I understand you correctly — after all I can't see that web site) has security-minded people as target group.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @05:42PM
+1 insightful
It is very hard to resist and I am not even tempted by their products. I simply can't not use them. Refusing is harder than refusing facebook, because so many things I do online are touched/infected/redirected to and through google in some way.
There should be some sort of anti-trust related law about a company being too big to fail, as well as too big for their britches.
Spinning off into bunch of subsidiaries does not resolve the problem of not being able to avoid all of those letters if I want to.
I can't even step outside without the chance of them taking a picture of me.
Those guys that vandalized facebook in germany have it right -- they wore hoods and face masks. They did no real damage. They only sent a message. I look forward to seeing what happens as a result, and what sort of crackdown there is.
That is the sort of thing Anonymous should be doing more of (or any of) -- sending messages like that.
All these large tech companies seem to have reached a size where they can comfortably ignore their products and the complaints their products have, just like the farms that abuse animals because they're going to be consumed anyway. I feel like cattle, being penned or roped in, branded, identified, and available to manipulated however works the most profitably for my handlers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:19PM
Indeed! "faster delivery, reducing the load" ... WHILE SPYING EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING YOU DO
And the dark lord said to the advert monster spymaster Go! Ogle!
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Tuesday December 15 2015, @06:30PM
Sure, you can block the domains but then 90% of your websites won't work (currently, most websites already use JQuery from some google server).
Maybe you could change your hosts file or local DNS to point to a machine that locally hosts JQuery.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:52PM
You don't really know how hosts files work, do you?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:07PM
I think he meant that you have a local JQuery host you trust, then point your dns/host files to that for jquery.com, not that he change the hosts file on the server. This would work something like surrogates in NoScript.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:05PM
I don't like this one bit...
Then don't be a sheep and follow everyone to the same currently in-vogue website. The only people that use, (and can afford) content delivery services are hopelessly over subscribed services, or sites that are under DOS attack - but which also have deep pockets. If you see deep pockets chances are they are already mining your data and already using google analytics.
Maybe when SoylentNews comes under such an attack you visit some other site for a few days, or hop on IRC and find out the new double plus secret IP address.
There is no reason to assume Akamai was pure as the driven snow either, as far as I can tell.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @07:17PM
What would be a defense against this?
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday December 15 2015, @09:28PM
Don't forget about browser fingerprinting. It generates a startlingly unique value and effectively works around any of the other measures you take.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @10:05PM
Disable javascript.
Randomize user agent among most popular browsers.
Block cookies and super-cookies.
Those 3 will obfuscate fingerprinting pretty good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @10:21PM
Tracking has gone well beyond the point where randomizing the User Agent helps. In fact, it can hurt you in many cases. Sophisticated trackers look at all headers you send, examples are the language and encoding, and what order you send them in. Changing your user agent but not the other headers to match actually makes you MORE UNIQUE.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @10:39PM
Its not just changing, it is randomizing. So it isn't just "firefox 42 pretending to be firefox 41" it is "firefox 42 pretending to be X,Y,Z,A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H at different points in time." That injects enough noise that while each individual spoof is more unique, cross-referencing between them is harder.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:25PM
There was a browser plugin I saw mentioned recently that used locally cached copies of jQuery and other popular libraries to sidestep CDN-based tracking like you describe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15 2015, @08:38PM
I wonder if this is an end-run around Privacy Badger [eff.org].
Privacy badger wor4ks by watching for, then silently blocking "tracking domains". However, if Google is providing Content distribution services, they can suddenly track you without specific tracking domains. Much like how facebook and Google Analytics track you on most websites unless you take precautions.
And HTTPS won't help, because like cloudflare, they will have a copy of the certificate.
I think moving to CJDNS [wikipedia.org] may be the best way out. As a bonus, you get IPv6. CJDNS is not ready for wide deployment though. You are encouraged to set up links by actually talking to people. (weird, I know.)