

The Cloud  - cwan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/05/the-cloud.html

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JoachimSchipper
Security in the cloud really is an issue, consider e.g.
<http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~hovav/dist/cloudsec.pdf> \- cross-VM attacks are
real, and extremely scary.

(It _is_ possible to get around this; e.g. Tarsnap doesn't trust the server
much, and thus gets around the fact that it uses EC2. But that takes careful
design and is probably impossible for many applications.)

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johngalt
80s Get rid of all your office mainframes! We can put the power in each client
with a PC! Decentralize everything! No more sharing a computer with everyone.

90s Fast ethernet lets us centralize everything. It's way easier to manage a
server with a network of clients!

2000s All the clients are cheap and idle. P2P is the wave of the future. Who
needs servers?!

2010s Cloud is here! Better to centralize everything in Amazon, Rackspace,
<Generic_Cloudservice>. Leave nothing on the client!

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motters
My suspicion is that, just like Gmail, all of these cloud systems are
backdoored. The only secure solution, which applies especially to businesses
with any confidential information, is to encrypt and decrypt on the local
client machine.

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neworbit
Sony loses control of tens of millions of cloud accounts and their gaming
infrastructure disappears for weeks, and people still think cloud = reliable
and safe, huh?

Even giant botnet infections have nothing on that.

There's a place for everything, yes. Definitely convenience to cloud services.
I am not of the opinion it should be the default answer.

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joshu
So anything on a server is now cloud?

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dstein
Like "e-business" and "social network" before it, "cloud" is simply a
pseudonym for the Internet.

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zdw
re: backup, if people are savvy enough to use a DVCS, then making it policy
that all business documents are installed in that is a fairly good step for
the "files" portion of things. This can be secured in a variety of ways that
are community validated (ie, not a security sham like Dropbox turned out to
be) and can be hosted in a provider independent manner.

