[b1temy]

Is "clown GCP Host" a technical term I am unaware of, or is the author just voicing their discontent?

Seems to me that the problem is the NAS's web interface using sentry for logging/monitoring, and part of what was logged were internal hostnames (which might be named in a way that has sensitive info, e.g, the corp-and-other-corp-merger example they gave. So it wouldn't matter that it's inaccessible in a private network, the name itself is sensitive information.).

In that case, I would personally replace the operating system of the NAS with one that is free/open source that I trust and does not phone home. I suppose some form of adblocking ala PiHole or some other DNS configuration that blocks sentry calls would work too, but I would just go with using an operating system I trust.

[jraph]

> Is "clown GCP Host" a technical term I am unaware of, or is the author just voicing their discontent?

Clown is Rachel's word for (Big Tech's) cloud.

[dehrmann]

She was (or is) at Facebook, and "clowntown" and "clowny" are words you see there.

[jraph]

> She was (or is) at Facebook

was (and she worked at Google too)

> "clowntown" and "clowny" are words you see there.

Didn't know this, interesting!

[mintplant]

"Clownshoes" is common as an adjective at Mozilla.

[hk1337]

So, it's basically like Cloud2Butt but with a different word.

[baxtr]

Anyone know how she come up with the word or why she chose it?

[rwmj]

Maybe from JWZ? https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/clown-computing.png

[yborg]

Huh. How did you link to jwz without getting THAT image?

[jraph]

It's another domain, jwz probably didn't set up that redirection on this one.

[kadoban]

Probably just because it looks/sounds a little like cloud and has the connotations she wants.

It feels pretty hacker jargon-ish, it has some "hysterical raisins" type wordplay vibes.

[oniony]

Maybe she's a juggalo.

[senectus1]

amusingly its a term used by my co-workers to describe anyone thats not them.

[jraph]

Oh well... I suppose humility is your coworker's defining quality? :-)

[senectus1]

oh the answer to this is definitive. :-P

[jrflowers]

Your coworkers call you a clown?

[senectus1]

I didnt call them workmates.

[jrflowers]

Hire somebody to make balloon animals in the office for a couple hours, pay in cash, tell the balloonist that your name is [coworker’s name]

[JackFr]

"What clown wrote this ... [ runs git blame ] ...erm...never mind."

[NoGravitas]

“When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

I remember the term "clown computing" to describe "cloud computing" from IRC earlier than 2016

I use a localhost TLS forward proxy for all TCP and HTTP over the LAN

There is no access to remote DNS, only local DNS. I use stored DNS data periodically gathered in bulk from various sources. As such, HTTP and other traffic over TCP that use hostnames cannot reach hosts on the internet unless I allow it in local DNS or the proxy config

For me, "WebPKI" has proven useful for blocking attempts to phone home. Attempts to phone home that try to use TLS will fail

I also like adding CSP response header that effectively blocks certain Javascript

It sounds like the blog author gave the NAS direct access to the internet

Every user is different, not everyone has the same preferences

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Another habit I follow is to set the gateway of (a) computers I cannot trust, i.e., ones running corporate OS I cannot control, to (b) a computer that I believe I can control running UNIX-like OS that I compiled from source

I run tcpdump on (b)

(b) is the only computer with direct access to the internet

The only time I have seen a sentry.io DNS request is from (a)

[simoncion]

> It sounds like the blog author gave the NAS direct access to the internet

FTFA:

  Every time you load up the NAS [in your browser], you get some clown GCP host knocking on your door, presenting a SNI hostname of that thing you buried deep inside your infrastructure. Hope you didn't name it anything sensitive, like "mycorp-and-othercorp-planned-merger-storage", or something.
  
  Around this time, you realize that the web interface for this thing has some stuff that phones home, and part of what it does is to send stack traces back to sentry.io. Yep, your browser is calling back to them, and it's telling them the hostname you use for your internal storage box. Then for some reason, they're making a TLS connection back to it, but they don't ever request anything. Curious, right?
  
  This is when you fire up Little Snitch, block the whole domain for any app on the machine, and go on with life. 

I disagree with your conclusion. The post speaks specifically about interactions with the NAS through a browser being the source of the problem and the use of an OSX application firewall program called Little Snitch to resolve the problem. [0] The author's ~fifteen years of posts demonstrate that she is a significantly accomplished and knowledgeable system administrator who has configured and debugged much trickier things than what's described in the article.

It's not impossible that the source of the problem has been misidentified... but it's extremely unlikely. Having said that, one thing I do find likely is that the NAS in question is isolated from the Internet; that's just a smart thing that a savvy sysadmin would do.

[0] I find it... unlikely that the NAS in question is running OSX, so Little Snitch is almost certainly running on a client PC, rather than the NAS.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Or the author gave a browser direct access to the internet

For example, I have seen a freshly installed Firefox Nightly try to connect to sentry.io on startup

For me, these attempts never succeed

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"snowgoose"

[rausr]

> Is "clown GCP Host" a technical term I am unaware of, or is the author just voicing their discontent?

The term has been in use for quite some time; It is voicing sarcastic discontent with the hyperscaler platforms _and_ their users (the idea being that the platform is "someone else's computer" or - more up to date - "a landlord for your data"). I'm not sure if she coined it, but if she did then good on her!

Not everyone believes using "the cloud" is a good idea, and for those of us who have run their own infrastructure "on-premises" or co-located, the clown is considered suitably patronising. Just saying ;)

[b1temy]

> the idea being that the platform is "someone else's computer"

I have a vague memory of once having a userscript or browser extension that replaced every instance of the word "cloud" with "other peoples' computers". (iirc while funny, it was not practical, and I removed it).

fwiw I agree and I do not believe using "the cloud" for everything is a good idea either, I've just never heard of the word "clown" being used in this way before now.

[masto]

“Cloud to butt” was popular in the early cloud days. It went around Google internally, and caused some… interesting issues.

[ryandrake]

I remember ridiculing "cloud computing" by calling it "clown computing" decades ago. It's pretty old and well established snark-jargon, like spelling Micro$oft with a dollar sign.

[seethishat]

Also, sometimes, we use the term 'weenie' rather than 'clown'. They are interchangeable.

[user_of_the_wek]

The circus left town, but the clowns are still here.

[wlonkly]

But whose monkeys are these?

[m463]

with clown=cloud, GCP must mean google clown platform