Amazon sought to hide the water use of its data centers from the public, for fear of looking bad: "Instead, Amazon officials opted to use only the relatively smaller figure of primary use, 7.7 billion gallons, when calculating progress towards its target because of “reputational risk”, fearing bad publicity if the full scale of Amazon’s consumption was revealed, the document shows."

SourceMaterial

Leak reveals Amazon plan to keep water use of data centres secret

Amazon strategised about ways to keep the public in the dark over the true extent of its data centres’ water use, a leaked internal document reve...

I've been studying the chat app SimpleX (I have to keep abreast of these things for work) & was so over focused on the tool I did not see the hand that made it. Thanks to a prompt from @Liaizon Wakest, I looked into the political leanings of the developer. The author indeed appears to be hardline, highly vocal, conspiratorial extreme right, even so far as drumrolling racist party ReformUK.

X (formerly Twitter)

Evgeny (@epoberezkin) on X

Founder of @SimpleXChat. Expert in Operational Security. Certified Ethical Hacker. DM: https://t.co/xwZrg5sWzf

(trigger warning) So it follows I will not be using or further supporting SimpleX Chat

For a really long time I have wanted a world with this in it: - Self-host Signal server under my desk or in a network-near dc (

GitHub

GitHub - signalapp/Signal-Server: Server supporting the Signal Private Messenger applications on Android, Desktop, and iOS

Server supporting the Signal Private Messenger applications on Android, Desktop, and iOS - signalapp/Signal-Server

) - Install Signal app from whatever store - Open up app and select my alternative server - Ask friends/family/colleagues to open up their apps and do the same

Reading paragraphs like these in front page mainstream media gives me hope tickles: "Dr Corinne Cath-Speth, the head of digital at human rights organisation Article 19, said: “We urgently need diversification in cloud computing. The infrastructure underpinning democratic discourse, independent journalism and secure communications cannot be dependent on a handful of companies.”

the Guardian

Amazon Web Services outage shows internet users ‘at mercy’ of too few providers, experts say

Crash that hit apps and websites around world demonstrates ‘urgent need for diversification in cloud computing’

#datasovereignty #selfhosted #decentralisation

Way too many bytes in one basket makes for one very big single point of failure. This is the cost of an absurdly hyper-centralised fast-food-like data center culture. Signal++ down, sucks, but it's seeing fundamentals like banks & public sector services break that stings most. But hey, maybe this is what it tales to push more govs to actual #datasovereignty, investing in locally owned data centers or building out their team & hosting on-prem #decentralisation #amazon #aws