Wow, the cloud is the worst idea in tech history

[clydefrand]

The people who came up with the 'cloud' for storing your data file back-ups had to be really stupid. But then, look at all the stupid people who believed them! Hey guys and gals, if it is on the internet IT ISN'T SAFE FOR ANYTHING you don't want anyone else to see.(especially 'nude' photos of yourself)

[justiceischeap]

1. I agree the Internet should be thought of as a public space where there is no expectation of privacy

but the problem itself wasn't the cloud but the Find My iPhone app.

[el_bryanto]

2. 100 years from now our conception of privacy will be as amusing to the people of that time

as is our amusement with Victorian dress.

Bryant

[RKP5637]

4. Quite true IMO! n/t

[justiceischeap]

6. No doubt.

It's already different between generations now.

[KittyWampus]

41. Privacy when I was growing up- had 2 older brothers who shared a bedroom during school year

so they had little privacy between them.

During summer we lived in tiny cottage to work at my paternal Grandparents' business. I had no bedroom at all= zero privacy, my brothers also still shared a tiny space to sleep.

Our only phone was on the kitchen wall. Zero privacy.

Our only tv was in the living room, an old black and white a more well-to-do family member handed down to us- zero privacy.

Three kids, two parents, one grandmother in a small house with ONE bathroom- next to no privacy.

[justiceischeap]

50. Growing up I'm sure most of us had a lack

of privacy and kids have more now however I'd like to think as a child today I wouldn't plaster near the stuff kids post on the Internet. That's what I mean about privacy being different between generations.

[yeoman6987]

31. I have thought about using an ICloud program

But for using as a "saver" of files I want to keep, but not risk on my computer if stolen or destroyed. I would certainly not put nude pictures of myself on it....nobody would hack those....ewww. Lol. And I would not put personal info on it. However, I am not sure now.

[gollygee]

3. It isn't fair to call people stupid

who believed that it was a good backup system, as Apple said. And you can turn it off but my phone and ipad kept asking me to turn it on a few times. One groggy morning accidentally hitting the "ok" button and you're stupid and deserve to have your private photos taken and distributed all over the place against your wishes?

[tridim]

7. Nothing is ever Apple's fault. They are perfect.

I've been told that for over 30 years.

[gollygee]

10. I must assume

by people who have never called the Apple help line.

Not fun.

[justiceischeap]

16. I am an Apple user and have been for many years

This is Apple's fault and they've said as much. It wasn't an issue with the cloud but with a vulnerability in their Find My iPhone app.

As far as Apple being perfect, they aren't but their computers are less hassle-free than any Windows system I've ever used.

[jollyreaper2112]

28. I wood agree

Their products are less hassle-free.

[savalez]

47. Gotta love those freudian slips!

As far as Apple being perfect, they aren't but their computers are less hassle-free than any Windows system I've ever used.

[Hissyspit]

5. More victim-blaming rationalization?

[MohRokTah]

8. The "cloud" has existed longer than there has been an internet.

Seriously, have you no clue what "the cloud" is?

"The cloud" is just marketing bullshit rebranding for technologies that have existed as long as I've been into IT.

[HipChick]

9. I have been in the Cloud Industry for a while

It always amuses me that folks expect a service that is free to be 'safe'

[RKP5637]

17. Like "free" VPN and proxy servers being private/secure. LOL! n/t

[pipoman]

21. "free" is it? Last I knew people had to buy a piece of hardware

And subscribe to a not-free service to use the "free" cloud. It is like car makers saying a radio upgrade is "free"....only after paying $40k is it "free".

[RKP5637]

15. Quite true! It's marketing rebranding for the masses! n/t

[JVS]

11. But it's really good for them to allow you to use a file without actually having the file in the....

fullest sense.

Look at something like Amazon cloud for music. You can log in and listen to those files anywhere you go. But you cannot copy and redistribute them.

[Demit]

12. I think it's a riot that the original idea of a personal computer was so you could be

self-sufficient. Buy the hardware, buy the programs, work independently, store your files on your own device. Now you are dependent on an internet connection; now you "rent" the programs, at least in my old field of graphic design. Haha! This is all to the benefit of the rentier class. They sell you on "convenience" when all that's really happening is they've found a way to extract money out of you on a continuing basis.

[Atman]

13. I refuse to upgrade to Adobe's cloud bullshit

I've been using Illustrator and Photoshop since their very first versions, and switched to InDesign from Xpress when it became available. I've been a loyal customer, but I don't like this rental/cloud b.s. at all. If my clients need me to be using the latest and greatest, I find a way, but I think the whole notion of uploading everything you do to some mysterious "cloud" that exists god-knows-where is just ludicrous. I have one 1tb portable external drive, and a 2tb mirrored RAID. I don't need anything I do getting beamed into the clouds for someone else to hold on to. F that shit.

[greyl]

27. CC does not require you to upload your project files, fyi.

Lots of people seem to have this misunderstanding because of the Creative Cloud name.

[randome]

23. Good point.

The 'personal' has also been taken out of personal computers. Trying to personalize anything has gotten harder and harder over the years. By design.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]There is nothing you can't do if you put your mind to it.
Nothing.[/center][/font][hr]

[tridim]

32. I have access to the entire Adobe software catalog.

Adobe Creative Cloud is dreamy IMO, and MUCH cheaper than buying the software outright (and having to upgrade every year). People seem to have forgotten how expensive professional software became in the 2000's.

BTW, the "original idea of the personal computer" is well over 30 years old. I am very glad my current system has more than 640k.

[Demit]

64. I wan't referring to hard drive memory size. I think you missed my point.

Besides, you didn't have to upgrade software every year, that's an exaggeration. Programs were backwards-compatible through many versions; it was years before you really had to upgrade, then the upgrade was discounted b/c you were a registered owner & weren't buying a full version.

Yes, renting is cheaper than buying, at first. But you never ever stop renting. And you are at the mercy of whatever the rentier says the rent is.

And you can't work offline. So you're at the mercy of your ISP. That's the scariest part, to me: if a project is due tomorrow & your connection goes down.

[Puzzledtraveller]

14. I try not rely on it

I look at it as extra back up. Only recently did I have reason to care much less use it as all my images and video taken of my baby girl is stored in Onedrive automatically. I thought at first that it was a great feature and didn't see any need to bother having any hard data files but after thinking about every possible situation that could go wrong I decided to keep hard data files and only view the cloud as a quick access back up.

[trumad]

18. UHHH---me thinks you don't really understand the errr cloud.

[RKP5637]

26. +1, n/t

[HipChick]

49. 2nd that

[Recursion]

19. EBCDIC was probably the very worst

But the cloud is close.

[hootinholler]

24. EBCDIC was an elegant solution to the problem it solved

You could do all kinds of fun things like case swapping and making a number from a string? Simple subtraction and addition did the trick.

It became a pain when ASCII became the standard, but that's ok because in 10 years, you will read someone making the same claim about ASCII whilst alluding to DBCS.

[Xithras]

36. Nah. The invention of the Null Reference was probably the worst idea ever.

The programmer who first came up with the idea of allowing languages to pass a null entry to any location that will accept an object was even panned by its own creator much later (IIRC, it was originally written into ALGOL, and propagated on from there). By some estimates, that one stupid decision has opened more security holes and caused more crashes than any other idea in computing history, and has cost the world BILLIONS of dollars in debugging and downtime.

[BadgerKid]

20. Don't confuse poor implementation with a poor idea. n/t

[RKP5637]

29. Exactly! n/t

[eShirl]

22. works great for storing and accessing my digital purchases though

n/t

[Dreamer Tatum]

25. Our resident Apple shill is oddly quiet about this. nt

[savalez]

42. He can't "handle" it.

[JaneyVee]

30. Saved my friends thousands of dollars...

After her hard drive crashed permanently, she didn't need data extraction which could cost thousands, all her sentimental photos/videos were saved including the births of her children, and hundreds of dollars of purchased music.

[yeoman6987]

33. That is 100 percent why I am torn by the Cloud

If done correctly, it can be a great tool. I actually think this might even make cloud security better. Rules and regulations always occur after some event. I am sure they are diagnosing problems as we type.

[Orrex]

34. Was that an Apple hard drive?

[Dr Hobbitstein]

52. Apple doesn't make hard drives...

The drives in your PC are the same as the drives in a Mac. Seagate, WD, Fujitsu, et al...

[Orrex]

54. I know

[Atman]

35. That's why I bought a 2tb backup drive...

that copies everything I've done for a couple of years. With Apple's TimeMachine, I can select any date and go back to what was on my computer on that day. It works great, was very affordable, and I know exactly where my data is, not out in the clouds someplace, in someone else's possession.

[shanti]

61. I have one of those too

It's a great relief to have in case my macbook crashes. It's 5 years old now, still running strong tho. That reminds me, I need to do another backup!

[FLPanhandle]

37. It's a great idea IF you don't expect privacy.

Everything you put online or on your mobile device think of as in the public domain. Once you understand that risk and use it as such, then it's great.

[tabbycat31]

38. This is why I hoard flash drives

And have an external hard drive as a backup.

I do use some cloud based storage (Google docs for work things, but that's more so that more than 1 person can work from there at the same time) but don't load anything on it.

Call me paranoid (and my friends make fun of me when they see a string of flash drives) but I have everything backed up. And as for phone photos, non Apple phones have a card where you can remove and add a bigger one if necessary.

[Staph]

60. I'm with you.

My Android phone and digital camera are regularly backed up to my computer's hard drive, and that drive is backed up to one of two external hard drives on a similar schedule.

I've been warning family members for years about the dangers of the cloud. They have ignored me, until this week.

[dilby]

39. Yeah the cloud is as dumb as online banking or bill pay or ordering goods from Amazon.

Sorry but your poor excuse of a password does not negate how nice it is to be able to store data that you can access from anywhere or have extra processing power without having to buy $200,000 in servers.

[Xithras]

40. Cloud storage is a good concept. Current consumer grade clouds need more time to mature.

I regularly develop software for clients running on cloud platforms like Azure or AWS, and they all use multifactor authentication that is nearly unbreakable. You can't brute force multifactor, so the only way to infiltrate them is to find a direct exploit, which makes the cloud platforms no more or less dangerous than using a local datacenter.

The real problem is that consumer grade applications don't use multifactor because consumers generally don't know what it is, and instead rely on primitive username/password singlefactor authentication models that can be brute forced or cracked by anyone with a bit of time and resources. The username/password model is inherently and irreparably insecure, and yet nearly all consumer web and cloud applications still depend on them. Until we can move past the password, we'll never really make cloud storage safe.

[KamaAina]

43. Worse than the Zune?

[bemildred]

44. It definitely ranks high on the list.

But you have to consider putting bank and credit card account on the web too.

[Glassunion]

45. The worst idea in tech history? Really?

Apparently someone never used Windows Millennium Edition
or Ashton Tate dBase IV
or the IBM Deskstar 75GXP
or the Apple Pippin
I could go on...

[dilby]

46. I miss the days of the Deathstars. n/t

[Glassunion]

56. We recently had a batch of 60Gb SSDs drives.

They had this little quirk... You restart the machine and they would show as an attached 2Gb USB drive. Since they are SSD, there is no way to recover the OS or the data.

[ffr]

63. Or that other lump of sh*t, Windows Vista

But I don't use or trust anything I put out on the Internet. I just assume there are 100,000 hacking servers running at 16-core speed blasting away at our precious accounts 24/7, doing whatever they've been programmed to do by people smarter than the people who think their networks is safe from the ongoing assault.

[HipChick]

48. The US goverment are heavy into cloud storage

High level of security

When those start getting hacked, then I'd worry

[pnwmom]

51. Are you confident that the wireless transmission inside your home is any more secure?

Most people have wireless transmission in their homes that can be hacked.

[CentralMass]

53. I think Facebook has it beat <eom>

[ZombieHorde]

55. The Cloud is fine, but you shouldn't just put anything on it.

Lots of people put their game saves on cloud. If you don't care if everyone knows what game you're playing, then you're pretty safe as far as I can tell.

[JEFF9K]

57. Never on Internet.

I recommend having a laptop that is never connected to the Internet. You can load it with Open Office software from a disk and other software that is still available on disk and doesn't require online registration.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

58. It's not stupid, it's about money.

Now there is some utility in 'offsiting' or otherwise mirroring data if you're worried that something like a fire at your location could destroy everything you've got.

But the reality is that computers and media have generally gotten good enough that people don't upgrade nearly as easily as they used to. Windows XP, office, and a decent adobe photoshop or whatever several updates back would do pretty much most things people want, so they have no reason to update. So if you want to keep selling to people, the new way to keep money flowing in is with 'cloud-based apps' or 'services' for which you have to keep paying a monthly or yearly rental fee. Since you don't 'own' and can't 'buy' the cloud, you have to keep renting it. And that's just what companies want - for you to be perpetually handing over money.

[Atman]

62. ^^ THIS!

Totally.

[kimbutgar]

59. I never thought the cloud was a good idea

Any one with knowledge of hacking could take proprietary information from a company and use it to their advantage.

You're right another dumb idea.