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Showing posts with label Digital Ocean. Show all posts
social media platforms
Critical Infrastructure Cyber Security Data server Decentralised Platform Decentralization Digital Ocean Personal Data social media platforms

Bluesky’s Growth Spurs Scaling Challenges Amid Decentralization Goals

 

The new social media platform, Bluesky, received a huge number of new users over the past few weeks. This mass influx represents an alternative social networking experience, which is in demand. However, it also introduced notable technical challenges to the growth of the platforms, testing the current infrastructure and the vision for decentralization. Bluesky recently hit the servers hard, making most parts of the platform slow or unavailable. Users were affected by slow notifications, delayed updates in the timeline, and "Invalid Handle" errors. The platform was put into read-only mode as its stabilization was left to the technical team to take care of. This was worse when connectivity went down because of a severed fiber cable from one of the main bandwidth providers. 

Although it restored connectivity after an hour, the platform continued to experience increased traffic and record-breaking signups. Over 1.2 million new users had registered within the first day-an indication that the program held a great deal of promise and needed better infrastructure. Issues at Bluesky are reflected from the early times of Twitter, when server overloads were categorized by the "fabled Fail Whale." In a playful nod to history, users on Bluesky revived the Fail Whale images, taking the humor out of frustration. These instances of levity, again, prove the resilience of the community but indicate and highlight the urgency needed for adequate technical solutions. D ecentralized design is at the heart of Bluesky's identity, cutting reliance on a single server. In theory, users should be hosting their data on Personal Data Servers (PDS), thereby distributing the load across networks of independent, self-sufficient servers. That in its way is in line with creating a resilient and user-owned type of space. 

As things stand today, though, most of the users remain connected to the primary infrastructure, causing bottlenecks as the user base expands. The fully decentralized approach would be rather difficult to implement. Yes, building a PDS is relatively simple using current tools from providers like DigitalOcean; however, replicating the whole Bluesky infrastructure will be much more complex. The relay component alone needs nearly 5TB of storage, in addition to good computing power and bandwidth. Such demands make decentralization inaccessible to smaller organizations and individuals. To address these challenges, Bluesky may require resources from hyperscale cloud providers like AWS or Google Cloud. Such companies might host PDS instances along with support infrastructure. This will make it easy to scale Bluesky. It will also eliminate the current single points of failures in place and make sure that the growth of the platform is ensured. 

The path that Bluesky takes appears to represent two challenges: meeting short-term demand and building a decentralized future. With the right investment and infrastructure, the platform may well redefine the social media scenario it so plans, with a scalable and resilient network faithful to its vision of user ownership.
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User Security
Billing data Cloud Computing Data Breach Digital Ocean User Data User Security

Data Breach at Digital Oceans Leaves Customer Billing Data Exposed

 

Digital Ocean, a cloud solutions provider, informs certain clients that the billing information they receive may indeed be breached as someone has exploited a flaw inside the central database of the company. 

US - Based Digital Ocean, Inc. is a supplier of cloud computing with global data centers located in New York City. Digital Ocean offers cloud services for developers which help build and scale applications distributed across multiple computers concurrently. 

Digital Ocean stated in an email to clients that the unauthorized access took place between 9th and 22nd April 2021 but was only "confirmed" seemingly on 26 April. 

“An unauthorized user gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed,” the company told customers. Digital Ocean affirms that only a "small percentage" of its users have been affected and therefore no intervention is necessary. 

The billing information leaked includes the name, address, expiry date of the payment card, last four digits of the payment card, and the name of the bank issuing the card. The organization pointed out that the entire credit card details were not stored as this kind of information was not revealed. 

“According to our logs approximately 1% of billing profiles were impacted,” Tyler Healy, VP of security at Digital Ocean, told Security Week in an emailed statement. “This issue has been fixed and we have informed the impacted users and notified the relevant data protection authorities.”

Over one million programmers from each country in the world use its resources on its web portal added, Digital Ocean. 

Last year the company announced to its customers that some of their information had been disclosed after a document file had been published accidentally, though at that point it was sure that the documentation was not malicious. 

Furthermore, the email reads as “yesterday we learned that a digital ocean owned document from 2018 was unintentionally made available via a public link. This document contained your email addresses and/or account name (the name you gave your account at sign-up) as well as some data about your account that may have included Droplet count, bandwidth usage, some support or sales communications notes, and the amount you paid during 2018. After a detailed review by our security team, we identified it was accessed at least 5 times before the document was taken down.” 

They also affirmed that they will be teaching their employees how to protect customer data, establish new protocols to warn everyone timelier about possible exposures, and make adjustments in specification to avoid future exposure of data.
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