gagah.me

  • Self-Managed VPN as an Alternative to Paid VPN

    Ben Brooks wrote:

    The only way to now truly maintain internet privacy (once 45 signs this into law) — even at home — is to use a VPN…
    That said, there’s only two VPNs I recommend: Cloak, or Private Internet Access (PIA).

    If i’m to add something to his list of VPN to use, i’d recommend another approach entirely: self-managed VPN. The way it works is you buy a cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS), or a cloud instance like from Digital Ocean, Vultr or Linode, and install a VPN software like OpenVPN in it, yourself.

    There’s some script that makes this process super easy, such as Nyr‘s or Angristan‘s, and you’ll have a VPN up and ready in no time.

    There’s some advantage of doing this, and of course, some disadvantage. First advantage is you’ll have even more control of your data. You can make sure you secure your VPS properly, eliminate as much log activity as possible to ensure your data won’t get leaked and sold somehow, and you can get faster connection.

    Wait, faster? Yes, faster. Primarily because VPN provider usually buys bandwidth in bulk, but still if it’s popular enough, they might run out of it still in some region. If you use VPS or cloud instance, they typically have better fair-share bandwidth available. Plus you can utilized tools such as MTR or the providers own Looking Glass to make sure that you get the best routing and speed coming down and up from the provider.

    Main disadvantage of using a VPN this way is you lose obscurity. VPS gives you a dedicated IPv4 that associates any activity by that IP address to you, while a paid VPN usually shares the IP with a bunch of other users. But if you’re not doing anything criminal, this can actually be an advantage because your IP Address is cleaner.

    In my experience, for example, using PIA will ensure you have to fill so many captcha when you access a certain sites, because Cloudflare flagged their IP blocks somehow and for whatever reason. Same case with many sites that have overly aggresive admin, which blocks these known VPN IPs.

    Another disadvantage is you won’t be able to get the same user experience of just buying, installing and then get the VPN running in no time. But in my experience the hurdles will only be hard the first time you try to do it all yourself. After that, it’s a much, much better experience overall.

  • No-Nonsense Guide to SEO Optimization

    Tania Rascia wrote:

    If a website’s aim is to create as many pages as possible with click-bait titles in order to gain ad revenue, it may see some initial relative >success. However, people leaving the site right away (high bounce rate), a lack of people linking to the site (low referrals) and few people >directly visiting the site (low directs) will ultimately negatively factor into search ranking.

    Really well-written and sensible approach to SEO is hard to find, in my opinion, because the sector is rife with so called SEO-expert trying to one up each other with bad, outdated practice.

    If i see another person trying to get 20 dedicated IPv4 because “i need to build a private blog network and they need to be on their own IP”, i’d shoot myself. Tania has written a very clear and concise guide, and i can attest to the effectiveness of her SEO approach, because it works. I found her blog through a simple google for a very competitive keywords and she appears first.

  • CS:GO Is a Great E-Sport, But Youtube & Exclusive Right is Hurting It

    I’m never really a dedicated sports fan. I followed football (that’s soccer to you in North America) to some extent. Been a fan of Newcastle United since I was a little kid, mainly because my aunt bought me their jersey with Shearer’s name on the back. Newcastle this season is down in Championship after being relegated last season, and there’s no championship football airing on my local television, so no football this season for me, pretty much. But I do follow MotoGP and Formula 1 pretty religiously.

    But to be honest, most sports I watch, I watch because they are a great source of white noise while you’re working on your thing. The excitement generated from thousands of people cheering their favorite team is simply the best way to get you hyped up and start working, in my opinion. And so for years now I usually play some VODs of football games in the background while I’m doing anything productive.

    But since July last year, I’ve become pretty much addicted to a new form of sport. E-sports. Counter Strike: Global Offensive to be more specific.

    It all started by accident. I was trying to see if there’s a streamer playing Fallout 4 on Twitch, because I’ve just started picking it up again after leaving it due to being busy with other things. And I noticed in the top stream list there’s a stream with more than 500 thousand viewers. The game is Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and the title is ESL Cologne 2016.

    I didn’t know it at that time but it turns out I’ve stumbled upon a pretty special thing. Throughout the year, there’s a bunch of professional CS:GO tournaments with lots of prize money involved, but Cologne is one of the major tournament in CS:GO. It’s Major because it’s an officially sanctioned competition sponsored by the creator of the game itself, Valve, and that, of course, carries a special sense of importance to the competition, and more than one million dollar prize money.

    Before you ask, yes I’ve stumbled upon some streams with a similar amount of viewers in the past, but they’re mostly DOTA2 or LOL competitions. I’m not really a fan of watching MOBAs, because they require a deeper sense of understanding than watching a first person shooter game like Counter Strike.

    And counter strike is a game I’m pretty familiar with. I played some 1.6 in the past, when I was still in Junior High School, and have great memories of playing it. CS:GO is two versions younger than 1.6, and I’ve never played it before, so I want to find out how the current game plays.

    Well anyway, let’s just say that I got hooked. I stayed up all night watching the stream, and even better, there’s a pretty good underdog storyline developing in the competition. Team Liquid, a North American team not expected to go deep in the tournament, got out of the group stage, and the quarter, and the semi, and to the final.

    You see, North America is apparently not considered as good as the European Union scene in CS:GO. And there’s quite a bit of rivalry developed by fans from both regions, especially North American fans who became ecstatic seeing Liquid going deep in the major. And as you can expect, the crowd noise when Liquid plays are tremendous. Constant scream of “Let’s Go Liquid” can be heard non-stop when they play.

    Unfortunately, Liquid lost in the final to arguably the best CS:GO team in the world at that time, SK Gaming. Although that’s a rather underwhelming end to a pretty amazing underdog story, the whole thing has turned me into a pretty big fan of CS:GO as an E-sport and E-sports in general.

    To me, E-sports is a really interesting and an undeniable force that’s just gonna grow in the future, especially because the number of viewers involved is very young, and increasing very fast. Just in January, for example, another CS:GO Major, this time in Atlanta, broke Twitch records for having more than one million concurrent viewers at a single time. And that’s not even counting a bunch of other streams showing the same game but casted in a different language. And, even better, the final of that major is also aired on national television, in North America. Although to me the participation of conventional media in E-sports is neither relevant nor important. If it’s gonna grow, it’s gonna grow from new media like online streaming, not television. But the affirmation of E-sports as an entertainment worthy of being aired on national television is certainly interesting.

    And recently, Youtube has forged a partnership with two very big event organizers in Faceit and ESL, by having an exclusive rights to air their two main streams on Youtube instead of Twitch.

    And here is where I see the one problem coming in E-sports.

    As the viewership comes in, the investment money comes in, and the conflict of interest started to become a real big factor. Having exclusive rights deal with any streaming platform this early in the game is hurting E-sports, in my opinion. It should be as open as possible, available to as many viewers as possible. Youtube as a live streaming platform itself is not terrible, but personally, it’s not as good as of yet compared to Twitch.

    The problem is in the culture. People come to Youtube to watch someone’s recorded video for 3-5 minutes or follow a let’s play of something for more than 10 minutes due to the personality involved. Twitch already has live streaming culture build up to the point where the chat, to someone new, might look like an endless spam, but to someone who spends even 3 days watching a live stream of a major like me when ESL Cologne 2016 is on, helps build up hype for the game.

    And the viewership for ESL Pro League is hurting because of this deal with Youtube. Last year, I see at least 50 thousand concurrent viewers watching the stream on Twitch, but this year, they’d be lucky if they see 20 thousand. And Youtube’s rate of improvement is very slow compared to Twitch, which will hurt them even more.

    I don’t know if this Youtube thing will hurt or help in the long run, but I hope that any controlling interest in CS:GO or e-sports competition can be wise and quickly adapt to this conflicting interest and see exclusive rights as they actually are: a short-term gain for a long term loss. To me, developing more viewership is more important than revenue at this point, and if the problem is in investment, I’m not sure if attracting investors is really a problem, especially with Faceit & ESL being first in the game. But if they maintain this policy of having exclusive rights with one party that results in decreasing viewership, then attracting investors will definitely be in issue.

  • More Cloud.net Locations Review & Deeper Look At Their Platform

    After i’ve posted my experience with Cloud.net two weeks ago, Terry Myers, a rep from Cloud.net contacted me to see if i’d be interested in trying out some more of their locations. I instantly said yes, of course, since who can reject such sweet, sweet chance of spinning up some free VMs from multiple providers in different locations for free.

    So this is a disclaimer. I’ve got $50 credits from Cloud.net to test out their products, and that’s it. Those credits can’t be converted into money, and all of the things that i’ll be writing in this review is purely my own experience and opinion, without anybody from Cloud.net having a pre-published approval.

    Here We Go, Then

    I got the credits. I decided to spin up some of their more exotic locations. As i’m located in Asia, i decided to deploy a server in Hongkong, since that’s the only asia location they have up on their marketplace.

    And this turned out to be a really bad experience. From the start, i knew there’s something wrong with the server. It’s very slow in responding to SSH command, and after struggling to do a basic OS update before i do any testing, i decided to just get a basic bench.sh benchmark and what do you know:

    System Info
-----------
Processor   : QEMU Virtual CPU version (cpu64-rhel6)
CPU Cores   : 1
Frequency   : 1999.999 MHz
Memory      : 486 MB
Swap        :  MB
Uptime      : 23 min,

Disk Speed
----------
I/O (1st run)   : 3 MB/s
I/O (2nd run)   : 6 MB/s
I/O (3rd run)   : 4 MB/s
Average I/O : 4.33333 MB/s

    That I/O might explain a few things. But then it got worse, about a few minutes later after i’ve finished updating the VM and reboot, it won’t come back up again.

    So i raised a ticket, and at first Terry replies to say that they’re looking into it, might just be a firewall issue. But after a few minutes and some interactions later, a staff replied to the tickets saying that it’s a network-wide issue, and as a result of this, the provider (they call them “zone”) will be hidden from Cloud.net. I haven’t seen them since.

    Okay. To be completely honest, although the support is great, that whole experience wasn’t exactly pleasant, and to me illustrates typical friction points when dealing with a “marketplace” (some people might call middleman), as opposed to a provider who manage their own equipment directly. Lack of control by the platform owners, and fragmentation. On fragmentation especially, i have a slight issue with how Cloud.net tries to reduce this friction point, mainly by using a measurement figures called Cloud Index.

    Cloud Index

    Like Google’s Android platform, Cloud.net, or their parent company Onapp, probably just sets up a specific rules & requirements for provider who wants to join. From there, the providers will get listed on  their marketplace, and Cloud.net will monitor their performance. The metrics that they use to monitor the provider, also known as “zones”, is called ‘Cloud Index’.

    Now, cloud index, as a term of measurement, is an invention of Cloud.net. And unfortunately, their marketplace doesn’t really explain in full details of what that term means. To find out, one have to click on their “FAQ“, and then you’ll find the explanation of what it means, in their own words:

    We have three individual parameters (index scores) for calculating the total Cloud Index score:

    CPU Performance via Unixbench
    Disk Performance via IOPS
    Average Bandwidth/Throughput Performance via CDN tests on various global edge servers.
    We take the raw numbers and put them in to our system. For each individual parameter (CPU/Disk/Bandwidth), we assign a score between 1 – 100. The following formula is used for each parameter:

    Providers are scored as follows: (Provider Raw Score / Max Raw Score) * 100

    In my own personal opinion, this is a recipe for user’s confusion. As an internal metrics used by Cloud.net to measure the performance of each providers in their platform, it’s completely fine. But as a public measurement units for users looking to find a quick way to compare providers, it’s very opaque.

    For example, here’s what it looks like in practice:

    Out of three locations, you have two that doesn’t have any cloud index. One doesn’t even have uptime average listed for some reason. For a completely new user to the platform, without looking at what “cloud index” means, you have to make a decision basically based on nothing, unless you want to do further research or test one by one. This arbitrary “cloud index” number, for these new users literally means nothing since it doesn’t translate to any typical real world measurements for servers, such as specifications, performance, price, or real testimonials from users in that zone.

    Saying that, I can see what they’re trying to achieve here. They predict the confusion that might arise from having so many providers listed in the same locations, and they try to simplify the decision making process to one single number. But in order for that number to be meaningful, it has to be explained comprehensively in a single page filled with measurement formulas. Unless the target market is CIOs who loves having to go through hoops to make a single decision, it’s not gonna work. Average users will most probably just go for the cheapest providers, since they don’t really know what they’re actually losing, especially if both the cheapest and more expensive options have similar uptime, of which the figures are the biggest UI element being displayed.

    Lack of control , and some other Weird Quirks

    The other odd fragmentation issue that i experience from trying out multiple providers on Cloud.net is big differences of OS templates offered by each providers. Some for example, only offers Debian 8 variety, some have Debian 7 too. One locations for some reason did not offer Ubuntu LTS, but regular release of Ubuntu. Some offer Cloudlinux, some don’t. If cloud.net, or Onapp have direct control of the providers, i’m pretty sure they’re gonna streamline all of this and make OS templates similar in every single locations. But they didn’t seem to have control over this issue.

    This further highlights the need for more explanations in their marketplace page, especially because templates being offered can actually be a meaningful differentiation and value proposition by each providers, and further incentivize their active participations in the platform by competing with one another.

    Another criticism and suggestions i have about their platform user experience is it’s not really that snappy. Rebooting, shutting down and starting up doesn’t feel instant. There’s also no snapshot capability yet. You have to take backup manually, and the backup can’t be easily migrated to another zone. But they’re working on this, according to Terry.

    Benchmarks

    All of that out of the way, it’s benchmark time. Since i’ve tried so many locations in a very short period of time, this benchmark doesn’t in any way try to illustrate the reliability of provider’s offerings. In total, this benchmark will cover 9 providers.:

    Provider Name Location RAM Disk Capacity Bandwidth Price/Month
    Quadranet Dallas, US 1GB 40GB 1TB $7.6
    Togglebox Dallas, US 512MB 20GB 500GB $3.80
    Clouvider London, UK 768MB 20GB 500GB $7.60
    Jolt Nottingham, UK 512MB 20GB 500GB $3.80
    Qweb Blasserdam, NL 512MB 20GB 500GB $3.80
    CL8 Limassol, CY 512MB 20GB 50GB $3.80
    Advantage Palmerston North, NZ 512MB 20GB 500GB $13.70
    Vultr Paris, FR 768MB 15GB 1TB $5
    BuyVM New York, US 1GB 20GB Unlimited $3.50

    BuyVM’s New York KVM Slice (1GB Ram) and Vultr Dallas (768MB Ram) will be used as comparison. Click on the provider’s name to get the full bench.sh result.

    I’ve selected some figures from the benchmark result of each of them to compare in a chart. Here they are:

    Overall, performance-wise, Cloud.net’s offerings are really good. But really, these providers are pretty known good quality, so it’s not really a worry in the first place. To me, at this point, the advantage of using Cloud.net instead of buying directly, is price. If you buy directly from Jolt, for example, their ‘Cloud VPS’ line starts at 9.95 pounds per month, while if you’re buying from Cloud.net, you can get them starting at $3.80, with more bandwidth allocation. Some of these providers, like Softlayer, for example, don’t even offer public cloud service directly. One special note i got though, is for provider in exotic location like CL8 in Cyprus. 50GB bandwidth, really?

    In short, there is a place for Cloud.net in the market. People might hate middlemen, but if the middlemen can act as a good buffer for average end users to get access to these big enterpris-level providers, they definitely have values. The issue that remains is will Cloud.net able to truly improve their user experience, level of support and integration between providers. Because Linode, DO and Vultr, already have a bunch of locations under their belt, and if Cloud.net is unable to control, monitor and support customers in each different zones, their value proposition will just gone out the window. I have good hopes, though, that they can improve.
    Thank you for Cloud.net for giving me the chance to try out their platform further.

  • Ryzen Is Here

    From GamersNexus:

    To get the immediate question out of the way: The processors will be made available on March 2 (shelf availability) at the following prices:

    AMD Ryzen R7 1700: $330
    AMD Ryzen R7 1700X: $400
    AMD Ryzen R7 1800X: $500

    Seeing as how rumoured benchmark suggests some of these processors are twice faster than the equivalent Intel model, it’s a holy crap moment for AMD. I’m not gonna hold my breath but it’s gonna be an exciting time if the Athlon 64 success period for AMD is repeated again. But please, this time AMD needs to make some great server processors too. I can’t wait for $10 VPS with Ryzen 8 cores CPU that outperforms Xeon E5. 🙂

    Also, everybody’s talking about disrupting the CPU industry but Jim Keller seem to be the only one that can and has actually done it.

  • It Doesn’t Look Too Good for Ahok, Unfortunately

    Gubernatorial election in Jakarta has finished. Well, the first round of it, at least. And the result doesn’t look too good for Ahok.

    The gap between candidate number 2 (Ahok-Djarot) and candidate number 3 (Anies-Sandi) is far too close for comfort, and although in their public statement the Ahok-Djarot team sounds ecstatic with the result, i don’t think they’re truly being honest about it. Not for a candidate that used to have almost 70% approval ratings and insanely active grassroot campaigning team (Teman Ahok). I’m not sure if Ahok now regrets the decision to go with political party instead of making a history and going independent.

    Now, following the rules of our election commission, a second round of gubernatorial election will be held with candidate number 2 and 3 trying to win over the rest of the votes from candidate number 1. One interesting thing to note here, candidate number 1 actually got a lot more votes than i personally predicted.

  • Lurk More, Fa**ots

    Building a community is hard. Online, even harder.

    This is what I’ve noticed from recently participating in some online community building. It’s not a big project, just a small online forums for a very specific niche.

    And one of the things that surprise me is how important ‘seeding’ the community is.

    For example, from talking to several other forum founders, we found that at the beginning, they use bots, to increase the community engagement rate.

    Yes, bots. Some fake accounts created for the sole purpose of creating and replying to some threads.

    See, the funny thing about human is, we all like to participate in a community but we rarely wants to be the first to do so. By using bots, forum founder can ensure that there’s a constant flow of new threads and discussion happening.

    Plus, people who just landed in the forum from Google or some other external source, will see a thriving community with active posters, sometimes very, very helpful, that it makes you wonder how did they have all this free time to spend on online forums.

    Little did they know, they are replying and discussing topics with robots, not real people.

    Another benefit of using bots to ‘seed’ the community, is that you can actually design the culture of the community.

    By culture, I mean people have the tendency to follow certain patterns of interaction based on the types of interaction that they’ve already seen. So if you see an old forum, usually they have this pattern of speaking, that characterized the community. The types of posts, the types of response, are uniquely theirs. And this ‘culture’ does not born overnight. It develops slowly over years of interactions between members.

    And this leads to the title of this post.

    I used to be quite active on 4Chan. I saw them as a unique community. In fact, all the chans are pretty unique, in that they’re constantly the source of new content, especially offbeat content like a meme, and yet, the creators of those content never got the attribution that they seemingly deserved. Why? Well, on 4Chan, everybody’s anonymous.

    So oddly enough, 4Chan in my eyes, with all its broken ways, can be said as a perfect community. It’s a community that’s always giving something without hoping for tangible rewards (they want some laughter, maybe). And the community has cultures that are so uniquely theirs, that an outsider will get spotted pretty quickly. This outsider then will get egged on and this term usually will come up:

    Lurk More, Faggots

    That is, in a way, a form of community-run-moderation. And it’s very effective. You can cull the bad from the good (well, the good according to 4chan), without having to resource to banning, because if you’re out of the 4chan line for even a bit, you’re gonna get policed. Unless you’re a pretty dedicated troll, you’re gonna hit the x button and get out. I wonder how many moderators 4chan actually has, and the ratio of moderators to users. Because from an outsider’s perspective, these unique characteristics of 4Chan should decrease the moderation cost quite a bit.

    So, how should a community enforce a lurk more policy? Unfortunately, you can’t. Not in this day & age, unless you want your forum to be branded hostile to new members. But still, that’s a pretty interesting way to look at community moderation.