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The Internet Of Poverty Or Why Residential Internet Is Cheap

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019

For more than a year now I have had the priviledge of living in Uruguay while working on an Internet venture. Unpacked this means:

Living In Uruguay: I've gone from being the longest staying guest in my initial tourist accomodation/residence to renting a residence, signing associated contracts, and generally being embedded amongst the Uruguayos. I drink the tap water, I have favored kioskos, and I know which Pichis and Planchas belong in my barrio¹ and which don't. Terraforming though slow is happening. My social contacts have shifted from largely being weighted towards various types of nomads to locals and fellow immigrants.
Internet Venture: By this I mean physical machines, actual cables, some tangible keys in addition to cryptographic ones, and a number of contacts with the upstreamprovider that I have talked to more face to face than any other communications channel. I get the priviledge of looking at the machines, checking seals, and more when the act up. In the search for a datacenter I got to appreciate how rare an independent non-Equinix datacenter is that doesn't make cloud automation software for industrial laundries their primary business.²

Problemata

Uruguay is similar to Canada in some ways with an economy supported mostly by agriculture, tourism, and some mining. While the popular analogy is proposes Uruguay as Argentina's Canada, during my time here Brasil has appeared to be the bigger influence in everything except the langauge. Manufactered goods of any sophistication come from Brasil, China, or Europe. Some consumable consumer goods of Argentine manufacture appear on store shelves, but Argentina largely doesn't have the prowess to be competitive. The 20th and 21st century history of Uruguayo and Argentino economic relations is Argentina falling from emergent world power to a regional abcess that won't heal and Uruguay catching toxic shock and other nastiness through physical proximity and cultural channels. A more accurate attempt to analogize relations in the region to Anglophone countries that Uruguay is the United Kingdom if Agentina takes the place of the US and Canada if Brazil is the US. If you try analogically mapping South American countries to US states, Argentina is Illinois and nothing else maps cleanly.

Mind that as the dollar printing press loses strength due to Bitcoin and other reasons³ that US position appears as though it will approach Argentina's more rapidly than Argentina itself did.

For all of this, a residential internet connection runs ~42 USD monthly paid in local currency. The connection is carried over an optical fiber that terminates inside the home and by most appearances functions like a home connection does in the US. Streaming video works, IRC works, torrents work, and so on. Streaming multiple high definition videos from multiple platforms just works. How does this happen at this price point in Uruguay? The answer appears to be the same as in the US or any other part of the world.

My God The Caching

It has been roughly a decade now since Netflix killed Blockbuster and then pivoted from offering a large catalog of movies distributed through the mail to a tiny catalog⁴ streamed over the Internet. During the first few years there was a lot of drama over the internet transit this required. The amount streamed has grown while the complaints have all but disappeared. This is not because internet transit capacity grew faster than the streaming. It is not because Internet transit got cheaper. It's because Neflix places boxes with local residential ISPs.

Google places racks boxes with residential ISPs that'll hold big chunk of Youtube and other Google mystery meat, Akamai enthusiastically racks boxes with residential ISPs that'll hold the porn flicks, and your resdential ISP will pay a pretty penny for a general caching solution under the guise of serving the web but mostly serving popular torrents... by they time your residential ISP is done they'll have a couple racks filled. They'll also have recreated something like an old school BBS system to serve most of what their customers want.

For all the press about a "high speed" and "global" internet, it is in a residential ISP's financial interest to locally cache everything it can. The only reason "high speed" connections to a "global" internet works at residential price points is because they don't have to.

Any Everything Else?

Everything else is relatively small and unavoidably expensive. This includes any realtime two way communications. The expectation of routinely carrying two way real time communications is why generally entry level "business" internet plans involve doubling the price and decimating the advertised bandwidth. It isn't simply that sticking the word "business" in front is a license to mark up. It's that a couple hours of video calls to another provider costs them more than streaming Friends beginning to end on repeat.

This means everyone smart is serving lean content. It also means that when Conde Nast presents Ars/Wired/Cosmo/BarryDillerIAC tell you to funnel all your shit through https or a VPN while wrapping 1KB of text in 2 MB of shit that they bleed. And how do they bleed.

What Does This Mean

Back in the old days 10 and 20 years ago the force driving down consumer connection prices was over subscription, that while a plan was advertised "up to" a certain speed "demand" could drive delivered speed down. Now the force driving down price is the fact that delivering 90+ percent of what the customers demand can be done from their own premises. The advertised maximum has also become unimportant so long as they can support enough simultaneous video streams on their local network as demanded.

It also means home machines are uninteresting for DDoS attacks, servers don't deal great returns, and anyone who knows what is targets the routers either intentionally or unintentionally. It means the actual deep dark web is only going to grow. It means the cost of offering anything to all comers is only going up.

Solution?

There isn't a stable one. Thankfully there can't be a stable one. Whether you hit them or not, walls are going up and location matters.

Unlike in other Latino locales, every neighborhood is a barrio. From historical Barrio de los Judios near the not especially commercial La Commercial to the present Barrio de los Judios more commonly know as Punta Carretas. [↩]
Asia is weird and Pacific coastline correlates with poor international internet connectivity. [↩]
Such as form continuing to be substituted for substance. [↩]
Featuring classics such as Fireplace For Your Home: Birchwood Edition [↩]

Posted in Computing | No Comments »

More Lessons Learned - Pizarro Entering 2019

Friday, January 11th, 2019

Spending 2018 in Uruguay has not been the easiest thing, but it beats the US. Aloe flowers here. Qntra lives having avoided final disposal during the 2017 to 2018 transition, but life goes on. I failed early in the year to carry what would become Pizarro into a going concern. A river of blood was avoided when the Republic came forth to invest coin and time into bringing Pizarro out of what was left.

One year later:

mircea_popescu: so : as far as i know, bingoBoingo is working on qntra and on pizarro. he's doing a very fine job with the former ; i'm nonplussed with recently discovering just how broken the latter's mp-wp offering actually was ; moreover it seems to me from a distance pizarro's still financially and customer-wise entirely dependent, ie as close to failure as you can possibly get without spelling it out.

Pizarro is still dependent. The conversion engine escapes me, and the difficulties this presents are compounded by Pizarro's lack of available hardware in the rack to be selling. As it stands there's one currently vacant Rockchip, a machine hosting DNS and Qntra which could be made available by moving the services to another machine, and an S.NSA cold spare ready to be put into use supporting Phuctor when it gets big spinning rust disks. Barring an infusion of hardware, we have shared hosting.¹

Combing through alt-alt and anti-Pantsuit heathens there is a curious and oddly persistent belief that Trump is going to put forth some sort of "Internet Freedom" initiative which will apparently break the Silicon Valley Pantsuits and let the various aspiring National Socialists return to the platforms those other socialists get to use. The man talks about a wall, he talks about bringing the USG's aspirations back down towards what it might do, but this very specific idea a number of these strings and forums advance is not something I have found in Trump. Still much as the Pantsuits will comb Trump for dogwhistles for their strawman... Anglin, Heartiste, and poorly identified forum strings have developed this idea to insulate themselves from the need to break with Pantsuit.

It is hard for me to tell if this is a savior complex or something else, but these odd ideas about Trump are an obstacle. That people who hate Obama and the Deep State and hate that the Deep State is constraining Trump are willing to bet it all on the elderly and mortal Trump fixing their problems as an alt-mammy instead of turning towards The Republic baffles me. Even when I manage a piece of evangelical Republican writing well received by the targeted community as measured by 'likes'... the reception warm reception is fuctionally empty. The other common response is curiosity about Uruguay, and the meat passes by. If there was meat to begin with.

The observation that I am becoming a gruff, curmudgeonly old male rings true. Living, surrounded by all of these alien cultures, I am becoming better at navitating Latinos and their formalities. Yet it still grates that the standard response to "Are you Xstring" is "Soy yo", completely absent an affirmative or negative. As ungrammatical as "a mi mismo" may be gven the rest of the language, at least it specifies a target. "Soy yo" grates as an empty tautology. Then there's the peculiar manner in which trust functions among Latinos in that while all strangers are untrusted by default simply starting a conversation overcomes the barrier in most cases.

The pile of things the Republic has with which to attract continues growing. FFA, Eulora, Cuntoo, the list goes on and yet... Republican evangelism faces a less receptive ocean than it did in 2015 when TRB occupied center stage. It wasn't until the Pizarro Rockchip offering that the recipe for a clean gentoo started getting passed around. Before the Rockchip, Republican doctrine favored older distros, but was dominated by negative recommendations. Don't use X. Not here's how to get something cleaner. In 2018 the Republic made substantial steps towards positive as opposed to simply negative declarations, but the work continues.

Aside from the dependence issue, Pizarro rapidly accumulated a documentation debt exemplified by the massive running GPG textfile of everything from missile codes to the most mundane of notes intertwined into a mess. Progress has been made opening the book keeping to the point the December 2018 statement was hours rather than weeks late.² I am not happy that nearly a year into Pizarro that this is what progress looks like, but what is, is.

As it stands without further capital infusion it appears Pizarro will fail in March or April. With further capital infusion that date can be extended. I am inclined to crank the outreach measures up even more as I move to walkingless promising databases. I am unsure if the Republic can economically utililze enough dulap class machines and Rockchips to cover Pizarro's fixed costs in the near to mid term provided the machines are brought to Uruguay. This uncertainty creates the sort of destabilizing wobble which consumes far to many of my brain's clock cycles. As much as the Republic rightly frowns upon 'man alone' activity in other areas, when it comes to marketing/evangelism... I'm my self evaluations suggest I am too isolated³ in respect to the man alone index.

I can't rightfully expect the forum to offer easy answers quickly or quick answers easily, but I hope to get some discussions.

Shared hosting which entered December on shaky ground and left December refined thanks to intervention by Mircea Popescu supporting one of his girls. [↩]
For the December statement the major consumer of time was the customer equity calculation and rereading. With the November statement the major consumer of time was making sense of an unaccounted surplus carried over from July and August. [↩]
For what its worth perhaps to my peril, I have not yet engaged in more than a cursory survey of the secular employment landscape in Uruguay. I want Pizarro to work, and pray it does. for that I am not persuing secular employment here. The loss to worry I haven't found a manner to eliminate.

In spite of, or perhaps influenced by the worry the pull to plant roots in this country has been strong, as measured in tempation to get a dog. [↩]

Posted in Computing, Midwestern Rube | 1 Comment »

Collected Lessons About MP-WP After Rebuilding This Blog Again

Monday, November 19th, 2018

After rebuilding this blog following a small disaster I allowed to happen a number of lessons about MP-WP have been collected:

The Quality of MP-WP Documentation Has Improved Through Addition

There are now several guides to setting up MP-WP. The most recent addition by billymg offers the clearest instructions for getting MP-WP running on a Rockchip and alleviating certain persistent pains. The esthlos guide remains solid in the general case. Lobbes covers yet more interesting issues to consider.

One Simple MySQL Configuration Tweak Saves Lots Of RAM

By the default configuration MySQL will default to using the InnoDB engine to store everything. This come with substantial RAM usage spent on ACID compliance and caching. In the read often write infrequently environment of blog substrate InnoDB is overkill and on a machine with a hard RAM budget like the RockChip, MyISAM appears to be a safer choice. RAM allocated to MySQL has dropped from 1.3 GB in my last stack to ~100 MB in the present stack.

In my.conf simply add

default-storage-engine = MyISAM

In the

[mysqld]

section of my.conf wherever it happens to live on your system. Probably /etc/mysql though there may be others possibilities.

Substantial MP-WP Funnctionality Needs Apache2

In my last stack I used lighttpd. Pingbacks never got sent. In this stack built on apache2 pingbacks are being sent. Substantial reading would likely be necessary to unveil what other MP-WP functions are dysfunctional on alternate httpd software.

One still further bonus is that Apache2 with mod_php is sitting in less RAM than lighttpd and it's php-fpm instances.

Edit This One File To Get A Civilized Archive Page

To get an archives page that looks like this you can use this line in your archives.php file in the default theme:


		<?php wp_get_archives( array( 'type' => 'postbypost' ) ); ?>

Conclusions

The rebuilding sucks and is a reminder that discounting the need for frequent backups doesn't kill the need. On the plus side, after this rebuild there is a whole lot more breathing room on the RockChip.