Web Excursions 2021-09-29

Amazon’s race to create the disappearing computer - The Verge

• Here’s the bind Amazon has made for itself:

  • it’s building an ambient computing platform

  • that is diffuse and difficult to pin down,

  • but the things we justifiably demand from our computing platforms — things like privacy, security, and accountability — require answers that are specific and clear.

• Amazon’s platform is, at its core, about convenience and consumption.

• A platform should create an economy of success around it,

  • where other companies are able to build businesses.

  • Given the proliferation of smart home gadgets, Amazon has certainly done that.

• Underlying all of this is the fact that Amazon is making this platform happen via the most Amazonian of mediums: retail.

• Amazon’s ambient intelligence platform is succeeding because it is less constrained by the computing paradigms of the past.

  • It has, without a doubt, made our homes smarter and our lives more convenient.

• The disappearing computer can do a lot for us;

  • now, the next question is what we are going to be able to do with it.

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Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Rapid and Reliable Object Storage, minus the egress fees

• R2 means “Really Requestable”

  • R2 builds on Cloudflare’s commitment to the Bandwidth Alliance, providing zero-cost egress for stored objects — no matter your request rate.

  • Cloudflare R2 will be priced at $0.015 per GB of data stored per month

  • R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold —

    • currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range.

  • Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers.

• R2 means “Repositioning Records”

  • Cloudflare R2 will include automatic migration from other S3-compatible cloud storage services.

• R2 means “Ridiculously Reliable”

  • R2 will provide 99.999999999% (eleven 9’s) of annual durability, which describes the likelihood of data loss.

  • the same level of durability as other major providers.

• R2 means “Radically Reprogrammable”

  • You can bind a Worker to a specific bucket, dynamically transforming objects as they are written to or read from storage buckets.

  • Cloudflare R2 is designed to easily integrate with the rest of Cloudflare's products.

loxias:

• B2 charges for egress, $0.01/GB.

• Wasabi charges ~$0.006/GB*month and no egress fees at all.

anderspitman:

Wasabi egress is free, but they "reserve the right to limit or suspend your service" if it doesn't fit the usage patterns they've designed for.

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Masked Email from Fastmail and 1Password

Fastmail and 1Password have teamed up to make it easy for you to create and manage unique email addresses while signing up for services online. Masked Email addresses are private, secure and deliver conveniently to your Fastmail Inbox.

Masked email from Fastmail and 1Password

davzie:

But in reality you're completely locking yourself into that provider. What if I want to change provider or the provider decides to sunset this feature.

mkenyon [1Password employee]:

• you can create Masked Emails for your own domain.

• there are a few upper limits for how many masked email addresses that one account can create.

  • We tried to set them unreasonably high to allow for all manner of legitimate use while still preventing bad actors.

  • They're also monitoring usage and tuning that limit.