Step 1: throw some words from your keyboard into a comment box and claim it was humor. Step 2: downvote people that don't laugh. Step 3: someday realize that humor and metaphor are not mutually exclusive.
> Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway (via Wikipedia)
> The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a product to function, the authors and designers of its component parts must communicate with each other in order to ensure compatibility between the components. Therefore, the technical structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organizations that produced it, across which communication is more difficult. In colloquial terms, it means complex products end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. The law is applied primarily in the field of software architecture, though Conway directed it more broadly and its assumptions and conclusions apply to most technical fields.
Conway's Law does not apply (doesn't say one thing or another) regarding the connection source code and layoffs.
It's hard to believe that people working in one of the most seek-ed/desired jobs in the Valley / tech world, are unaware of how things might be elsewhere.
> However, we've made it a tradition every April 1 to launch a new consumer product that leverages our network to bring more speed, reliability, and security to every Internet user.
On a side not, it's super annoying when you want to log in into your router, and google chrome auto completes / suggests it with 192.168.l.l, or ends up doing a google search for 192.168.0.1.
Why? Where I live, even with DST, in the summers the sun still comes up at about 5am. Without DST, it would come up at 4am. that is surely wasted daylight for >95% of the population
Does this mean that all DDoS mitigation techniques need to exist before the exit node of this traffic? Which in turn mean, that everyone needs to outsource their DDoS mitigation to Apple.
Also the corollary would be, that anyone who is able to bypass the protection mechanisms Apple has in place to control DDoS, can use it to DDoS a service like Google, Microsoft and get the entire service banned for all iCloud+ users. Right?
Apple has sort of addressed this with only having it work with Safari and other apps that implement the API, rather than system-wide as something you can connect to. It’s probably going to take a lot of reverse engineering before hackers figure out the API and how to get third party devices to connect and authenticate, if at all. If you can’t get third party devices to connect, you are missing the first D in DDOS.
There is also almost certainly an authentication mechanism in place, even if you were to reverse engineer the API. You'd need a bunch of paid iCloud accounts to have a DDoS be at all feasible with this service.
Additionally, Cloudflare themselves, one of Apple's third party partners, offer DDoS protection services. Because they see all the exit traffic, they'd be able to detect the DDoS and block it.
My guess is one of the major reasons for having the exit nodes in the same geo location as entry nodes is to have continuous operations in China. Without this constraint, they would have allowed chinese consumers to access the free web, which would ban them instantaneously.
I don't think Apple cares as much about video content providers, though.
That’s not the reason. In China, Myanmar, Egypt, and several other countries this service will not be available at all. Those customers will just have regular old iCloud.
A more likely reason is that video streaming services with georestrictions like Netflix, Amazon, or BBC would have lost their minds.
It wouldn't have been too hard to just implement this feature for chinese customers if that was the only driver.
But I agree that making the exit node in the same country probably goes beyond video content providers, it avoids all sorts of potential legal, diplomatic and practical issues.
Apple has always given in to China's demands. A few years ago they even moved their entire Asian iCloud datacenter to the China mainland after the government issued some vague complaints about "nationalism" and "security".
