

Dangers of Cloud Computing Being Ignored? - sirfrancisbacon

I've noticed quite a bit of hype regarding cloud computing over the past few years or so. However, what I find slightly unsettling is how, well, the vast majority of intelligent people (in addition to corporations) seem to support the idea even though it seems to signal the end of privacy.<p>So let's just suppose hypothetically that accessing applications and services from the cloud becomes far more feasible, nicer, and overall an order of magnitude better than running traditional applications. Would people choose to compute over the cloud then?<p>If it were me having to make the choice, I think in the end I'd choose to completely avoid the entire scenario, even if it meant risking being labeled a technophobe for life.<p>I just find it interesting, and I'm starting this discussion in hopes of perhaps wondering whether the majority of people consider whether power or freedom is more valuable in the end.
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pj
Cloud computing is still a very confusing topic for many. If you think, like
techies do, that cloud computing is a technology that enables rapid
scalability of information systems, then it doesn't mean you have to leave
your privacy in the hands of the big three. You can run cloud computing within
your firewall and still reap the rewards.

Unfortunately, the marketing bandwagon has morphed cloud computing into a
technology that _must_ be outsourced. This isn't always true. I work for a
hybrid cloud company that enables systems that span the corporate data center
and the outsourced data centers.

Sometimes corporate, or even personal data, is private, and sometimes it is
public. You have to decide for yourself which info must be kept on your own
systems and which can be outsourced. Does it really matter if your product
catalog is running in the Rackspace Cloud or on a machine in at your office?
It's probably better to be at Rackspace. Customers are still accessing the
data from the internet. Why worry about your corporate network going down or
the server crashing? Leave it to the experts.

But maybe your R&D or your employee benefit database could be retained
locally. It's not a rip & replace sort of scenario. Sometimes it may be,
perhaps for the smaller IT shops, or SMBs that don't have infrastructure of
their own. For them, cloud computing is freedom _and_ power. SMBs want to
focus on running their business, not running a rack of servers.

There is still a lot of FUD to overcome. If you're a technology person and
you've implemented scalable systems the old way, with your own servers, or
colocation, or whatever and then done the same kinds of systems using cloud
computing, it's really unbelievable the difference between the two. Technology
people are so much more productive when they don't have to worry about
maintaining the physical guts and they can concentrate on the software.

Of course, this means that those people who maintain the guts at big companies
are really going to push back on Cloud Computing, because it threatens their
jobs. If IT shops don't have their own infrastructure, then they don't have
any job for infrastructure people. Work forces are going to shrink and those
individuals who feel powerful because they do little work with a lot of people
under them are going to be afraid.

Cloud computing is going to shift that equation where those who do more with
fewer people by more effectively leveraging scalable technologies are going to
thrive in this market. It's very difficult to fight faster, cheaper, and
better and cloud computing is all three.

The risk to privacy is overblown. If companies are afraid of losing control of
their data, they'll implement cloud computing like systems, "Fogs" or "Private
Clouds" or something of that sort and manage it themselves.

Really though, for the consumer, nothing is changing. If they use software as
a service or online email or something like that, it doesn't matter to them if
they are using "cloud computing" or their software is running on a single
machine out there at a colocation facility. They don't know the difference.
Most consumers will never know the diffference and they don't care, why should
they?

This is actually one of the risks to cloud computing. The marketing push to
call it "anything on the internet." To them, it's the same thing we've been
selling that for decades and now there really is something different going on
and we are losing the essence of that difference to the sales and marketers
who are trying to capitalize on the gold rush.

But this transition to cloud computing is inevitable. It might not be called
cloud computing after a couple years. Some even argue that Amazon EC2 actually
isn't cloud computing at all because it doesn't scale automatically, well,
they've added that functionality recently, but before that it was debatable.

Still lots of confusion. Everyone is trying to control the meme and adapt it
to their particular business model. It's a war going on right in front of our
eyes.

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dejan
I agree. There is also a bigger issue that concerns me. Clouding is not any
different than having a single server from the user perspective. The data
still is centralized, as one central entity owns your data, even though they
organized the back-end as a cloud.

Regarding the privacy issues- as long as one such entity hold/maintains your
data, they dictate you what you can and can't do, what you can say or not,
share or see, thus what is legal or illegal.

China and Iran - cut services, while the US (and Europe in somewhat) try to
protect conservative methods so that their backers (read companies) can earn
more money. Copyrights are coming to their dead end, while new business models
are emerging. What you do with your data is your own business, and laws need
to be rethought as gravity laws do not apply to electrical current - the
forces that pull are different.

We need democratization, decentralization and de-copyright of the Internet,
where we own a slice of the global cloud and data can be shared over it no
matter what its contents are.

I'll soon post an open source project I am working on to tackle these issues.
Hope to hear more comments.

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alexandros
There have been proposed alternatives, at least on the whiteboard level..

<http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv:0903.0694>

Disclaimer: I am an author

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dejan
Has there been any form of prototype implementation?

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alexandros
Just bits and pieces as parts of a current EU project, nothing coherent. We
are still working out the pieces in theory, particularly 'community currency'
and the programming paradigm. While it is our desire to focus our energy on
finding out how much 'cloud computing' can be had without compromising local
autonomy, the speed depends on how much support we can get, as we can only do
so much in our free time.

~~~
dejan
What kind of support have you applied for? FP7? I am a little bit disappointed
how little support is given for research by the EU.

~~~
alexandros
The project you mentioned in this thread sounds interesting. Maybe we can take
this offline? You can email me at a dot marinos at surrey dot ac dot uk.

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leecho0
I think this is an interesting topic. But before we can even get started, we
need to get a sense of what we are talking about when we're referring to cloud
computing. I have my own prediction for what cloud computing will look like in
the future at my blog <http://lchou1.blogspot.com/2008/12/future-of-
computing.html>

If you agree with that vision of computing on the cloud, you'll see that
software and the way we interact with it on a daily basis will be completely
different. Just like how television changed media, cloud computing will change
technology. For instance, moving things to the cloud means you can access the
information anywhere, so "your computer" won't be a physical entity, but an
account, and soon, you probably won't need a full computer to access these
services. So I don't think it's right to just say that cloud computing will
"just" be better, it's going to change the game.

As for privacy, I think it's a good trend that this is being brought out into
the open. If someone had the desire, people can find out a great deal about
you with what's available now. Knowing about it and actively trying to protect
privacy is the only way to prevent the big-brother scenario from happening.
There was an article on something related to this not too long ago on hn:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=685095>

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RK
People still don't encrypt their email (at least the overwhelming majority of
them). The convenience of ubiquitous mail access across multiple devices has
made encryption even less likely (i.e. do you carry your private key with you
everywhere?).

I doubt consumers will care much about the privacy of their data in "the
cloud".

I can only assume that companies with data that needs to be private will take
appropriate steps to protect it, but as we've seen with lost laptops, usb
drives, etc., they don't always take the best of precautions.

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drhowarddrfine
"However, what I find slightly unsettling is how, well, the vast majority of
intelligent people (in addition to corporations) seem to support the idea even
though it seems to signal the end of privacy."

In what way does this signal the end of privacy? Just because a company could
access and use your data does not mean they will. Once a company starts doing
that, it will be the end of that company.

