Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

While S3 might be "extremely durable" from a technology standpoint, its unceremonious dumping of Wikileaks as a customer shows it to be politically fragile.

You might think of Wikileaks as "extreme," but this is an organization that was neither convicted nor even charged with breaking any laws, which Amazon dumped as a customer on very vague TOS grounds following pressure from Sen Joe Lieberman.

This could be an issue for reasons like...

-You make a Web app that Hollywood deems to somehow encourage or abet piracy

-You provide a service used by a customer deemed to be politically controversial

-You facilitate financial transactions deemed to be potential helpful to "terrorists" or the wrong sort of activists (e.g. Wikileaks).

Werner, since you submitted this entry from your personal blog, maybe you could clarify what safeguards Amazon has put in place to prevent a repeat of the Wikileaks situation. Many companies will stand behind a customer barring a court order, but for Amazon this clearly is not the case. How do you decide when to abandon a customer?

I think you nailed the TINY niche of things that amazon could take issue with and pull your site down. So now back to 99.9999999% of content producers on the internet: S3 is "extremely durable"

I've heard of other (large) providers pulling sites that contained "objectionable" content down. Wikileaks just had the media's attention at the time.

At least one customer had issues removing data without court order. So in order to satisfy your 99.9999999% estimation amazon should have at least 1B S3 customers which is way to optimistic.

I think your point is worth making.

The technology is good, but sometimes it's not about the technology.

Are those really issues for a static site? (Heck, would any of your examples be a static site in the first place?) And if a static site is dumped by Amazon S3, is that really so bad? You're a rsync and a DNS edit away from the site being back up - that's the beauty of a static site, it's just files in directories.

Are those really issues for a static site?

For most people, Wikileaks is a static site. They are unable to interact with it at all, ergo it could just be a static site.

Static vs Dynamic is orthogonal. You can still run afoul of the rules with a static site

I think the point is that a static site is trivial to move.

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