Collateral Damage
‘Cloud Computing’ may become a victim of the War on Internet Piracy™.
Over at Naked Capitalism ‘George Washington’ asks Did the Feds just kill the cloud storage model?
It explores the viability of cloud storage and the entire ‘everything on the ‘Net model, when the PATRIOT Act, and the media moguls piracy obsession means that the US government can rummage through your stuff almost at will, and seize it without notifying you or justifying their actions.
Imagine what you would think if you had put all of your furniture in a mini-storage unit until you found a new apartment, and when it came time to pick it up, there was nothing there but a fence and a sign saying that the entire location had been taken by the DoJ as part of an investigation involving what someone put in another of the hundred units at the business.
If you want it back you’ll have to wait until the case is over, and then sue the government in Federal court – something in the 5 to 10 year range. There is no insurance coverage for this sort of occurrence, so you need to start over from scratch.
Megaupload was an on-line storage location. There is no way of knowing how much of the stuff stored there was illegal, so everything was seized and the site shut down. Customers have no way of accessing their stuff. For all intents and purposes it is gone.
The Internet can give you the ability to access your stuff from anywhere … well, as long as you can connect to the ‘Net, and the site where it is stored hasn’t crashed, and the Feds haven’t seized it, but a lot of the time you can get to it. So, welcome to ‘Cloud Computing’ where all of your stuff can go up in smoke… 😈
3 comments
But of course this isn’t the first time cloud computing has been tried. You’re old enough to remember the attempts in the mid 70’s to create “computing utilities” where you could have access to mainframe power without actually having a mainframe on site with all its maintenance issues. Things foundered then on the same three issues they founder upon today — privacy, data retention, and I/O bandwidth.
I swear, it’s deja vu all over again. Nobody ever seems to invent new ideas anymore, they just take old ones, dust them off, and rename them.
– Badtux the Grumpy Penguin
It seems this is my day to rename things. (See downstream post.) Should we call this practice “mushroom cloud computing”?
Actually, that failure was the opening for my first sys admin job working with first a Data General mini, and then a DEC PDP 11, because the IBM 360 never seemed available when it was needed for instructional tasks. The DEC was added to run Unix [not Ultrix], while the DG ran it’s native RDOS. [The DG minis were very popular for PBX systems, and other process control use.]
This was part of the transition from business oriented ‘data processing’ to computer science at the college, as there were a lot of science oriented programming jobs opening up in the area.
Oh, yes, I remember the time-sharing using Bell 103s and Teletype 33s. It was similar to what we used in military when I started programming, They charged for everything.
Centralized systems require a level of trust I have never had in computers. I have back-ups in California and New York if a hurricane hits, as well as the local copies.
Steve, given the environment, a total devastation caused by the Feds is very possible.