This is ultimately what we did in my house for every Samsung TV.
Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.
As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.
Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.
With self hosting tools I have found the key to success is simplicity. When I stopped conflating my home lab, home production, and what I thought I wanted, things just became so much simpler and more reliable.
YMMV of course. I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of self hosters are unintentionally confused about the differences between those things, and it makes an easy recipe for problems.
We still have to pretend SSNs are private until both law and common practice change. I expect that to be “functionally never”. Maybe within our lifetimes. Maybe.
My SSN is out there several times over at this point, thanks to breaches at phone companies, insurance companies, CRAs, ISPs, and the rest. I stopped tracking breaches that included the kind of info you’d need to impersonate me, about six years ago. The list was long and it seemed to be a pointless exercise by then.
I also have a mixed credit file with all major CRAs because of more than one person with the same name I have, one of whom lived in the same area.
Even if I didn’t have freezes everywhere, over the phone KBAs stopped working years ago even with my SSN.
The most American approach would be for SSNs to become a de facto universal ID number that you have to give everywhere, while still continuing to function as an unchangeable password to all your most important things.
If my memory serves, this is the same wolf in sheep’s clothing that the attestation based Web Environment API was, from the same kinds of very interested parties. (Edit: I may be misremembering the name of that proposed API.)
It’s not about efficient, effective solutions. It’s about control. Something you have to look at with WICG and W3C is the source of proposals and drafts.
The last re:Invent presentation I saw from one of the principals working on IAM quoted 500 million requests per second. I expect that’s because IAM also underpins everything inside AWS, too.
IAM, hands down, is one of the most amazing pieces of technology there is.
The sheer volume is one thing, but... IAM's policy engine, that's another thing. Up to 5000 different roles per account, dozens of policies that can have an effect on any given user entity and on top of that you can also create IAM policies that blanket affect all entities (or only a filtered subset) in an account, and each policy definition can be what, 10 kB or so, in size. Filters can include multiple wildcards everywhere so you can't go for a fast-path in an in-memory index, and they can run variables with on-demand evaluation as well.
And all of that is reachable not on an account-specific endpoint that could get sharded from a shared instance should the load of one account become too expensive, no, it's a global (and region-shared) endpoint. And if that weren't enough, all calls are shipped off to CloudTrail's event log, always, with full context cues to have an audit and debug trail.
To achieve all that in a service quality that allows for less than 10 seconds worth of time before a change in an IAM policy becomes effective and milliseconds of call time is nothing short of amazing.
It's not simple, that's the point! The filter rules and ways to combine rules and their effects are highly complex. The achievement is how fast it is _despite_ network being involved on at least two hops - first service to IAM and then IAM to database.
I think it's simple. It's just a stemming pattern matching tree, right?
The admin UX is ... awkward and incomplete at best. I think the admin UI makes the service appear more complex than it is.
The JSON representation makes it look complicated, but with the data compiled down into a proper processable format, IAM is just a KVS and a simple rules engine.
Not much more complicated than nginx serving static files, honestly.
(Caveat: none of the above is literally simple, but it's what we do every day and -- unless I'm still missing it -- not especially amazing, comparatively).
IAM policies can have some pretty complex conditions that require it to sync to other systems often. Like when a tag value is used to allow devs access to all servers with the role:DEV tag.
In my (imagined) architecture, the auth requester sends the asset attributes (including tags in this example) with the auth request, so the auth service doesn't have to do any lookup to other systems. Updates are pushed in a message queue style manner, policy tables are cached and eventually consistent.
> 1. If it could be made to work in such a way that isn't invasive, it could be a boon, particularly to the most disadvantaged[0].
> 2. If all of the places that regulate it well kick it out, then they lose political capital that could constructively be used to encourage their neighbors to also regulate it[1].
I keep seeing that kind of thinking permeating tech. It is used often to hand-wave away any objections on the thesis that “well, we just have to get it right.”
Dr. Ian Malcolm is instructive here: “you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you never thought whether or not you should.” (Paraphrased from memory.)
Aside from data sovereignty concerns, I think the best rebuttal to that would be to point out that every major provider contractually disclaims liability for maintaining backups.
Now, sure, there is AWS Backup and Microsoft 365 Backup. Nevertheless, those are backups in the same logical environment.
If you’re a central government, you still need to be maintaining an independent and basically functional backup that you control.
I own a small business of three people and we still run Veeam for 365 and keep backups in multiple clouds, multiple regions, and on disparate hardware.
Their smart TV stuff used to be marginally interesting. When Samsung TV Plus launched it was fantastic. They weren’t yet sure of how to handle ads so even the ad space was still nice, and marginally useful.
As they figured out the ad strategy, apps started disappearing and new ones appeared that couldn’t be uninstalled.
Then the OS updates started cratering performance. I have a Samsung smart TV from after 2020 that takes about 4 seconds to register a single remote control command in the smart TV GUI.