Posts by Trevor_Pott

@heyrick

Hey now...I'm Canadian, not American.

@AC

Good intel there. I can't dispute any of it, except to sya that my experience nad my instincts tell me not to trust HP, Dell, IBM or really anyone else to host my stuff in the cloud. You talk about the sprint phone cloning, or exceptional items occurring because of the actions of a few employees that are outside the extant contract. I realise that /most/ actions that might endanger your data are perpetrated by individuals rather than the corporation itself.

…and? Bubba Joe Bob steals my corporate data and sells it to my biggest competitor for two squids and a goat. If this becomes public, or HP/IBM/Dell looses a lawsuit over it then their reputation is on the line. I can sue, but they will ERASE ME FROM EXISTANCE long before that ever gets to court, or anywhere else. David has a contract with Goliath, and Goliath sits at the back of an army of bloodthirsty lawyers carrying shoulder-mounted missile launchers and laughs at the primitive with a sling. David is dead, and has no more lives left. Game over.

You mention the difference between VLANs and firewalls inside the cloud. I won’t debate you for a second that this is an important enterprise distinction. From an SMB standpoint however, it’s really not. I am not exactly worried about other tenants on the cloud hacking my data, since paying off an insider to get at my data is far easier. No matter the technology, the HUMANS involved are the weak links. I have been called paranoid for talking about it before, but in any scenario where the human being involved are essentially untouchable, I get really nervous about dealing with them. In the case of cloud computing, as an SME or consumer…the folks on the other side of the wall are completely inaccessible from either a “run down and taser the bastards” or “send a lawyer at them” standpoint.

This is why my personal domains all go through my personal webserver. It is also why I run my own website, host my own storage and download the media I consume rather than stream it. I am a luddite. I didn’t grow up as part fo the new generation that was raised to “trust in the Google.” I wasn’t raised to believe that corporations like Apple “know what’s best” and “genuinely want what’s best for their customers.” I grew up watching corporations rape and pillage the society I loved until nearly all of the things I held dear about the world were whittled away to the barest shell of their former selves.

In my opinion, people today are willing to sell their privacy, right to choose their elected representatives, and right to hold their various elected representatives accountable for their actions for a pat on the head and a new “limited edition” colour of plastic case for their MP3 player. Given the sheep-like bleating that emerges from individuals and SMEs, the concept of things like class-action suits ever being a threat to a megacorporate is laughable. Depending on the information you propose to put into “the cloud” (and thus in the hands of these untouchable megacorporates,) you are quite literally betting your future (via your personal information) or that of your business on the benevolence of said megacorporate entity.

I just can’t find it within myself to trust any megacorporate. There are those however that I trust significantly less than others.

@Gamberoni

The key is "without a reasonable amount of warning beforehand." BY this I mean "A few months." They are not going to change the formats behind their cloud overnight such that you walk into work the next day and nothing works. They WILL change the formats to prevent competition, and extort money from you. They WON'T do that in such a way that prevents their customers from adapting in time to extort said money.

As I said; Microsoft is expensive, but I can reasonably trust that they won’t take my data and walk off. I will always be able to get said data, though I will likely have to pay much for the privilege.

@AC

The problem is that there is no middle ground. I don't doubt for a second that HP/Dell/IBM/whomever would provide the government, military or fortune 1000 companies with the best in anonymise, encrypted secure and reliable service.

As an individual and sysadmin for an SME, I also have zero double they would sell my soul out from under me. I am small, they are big. They don’t have any incentive to play fair with me: there are no laws to ensure it and in any case the regulators aren’t looking in their direction. If and when laws come about to protect the hoi polloi like myself, it is only AFTER a company has been brutally spanked in public for data loss/theft/selling that I will trust them. Only then will I know the leery eye of the regulator is watching, waiting for them to slip up again.

As for free services…screw ‘em. All of ‘em. I pay mu subscription to Ars Technica. I’d pay my subscription to El Reg as well…if they offered such a service. I would rather pay for the services I use and have my privacy than give Google my soul and have my literature for free. It’s a personal choice. I /like/ my privacy. I don’t think anyone needs to or should know where I am at any given time, what I am doing, thinking, clicking on, searching or what-have-you. Maybe that makes me a luddite, I don’t know.

The problem with the whole cloud thing is the imbalance of power. Even if you had a contract with a cloud service provider (because you pay them,) that contract is A) not going to be weighted in your favour and b) irrelevant anyways because the cloud provider has more lawyers than you have total staff members. The rights of the individual? HA!

Don’t get Government/Large Enterprise service provision mixed up with consumer/SME service provision, sir. They are different worlds. In the consumer/SME segment, corporations like DELL, IBM, HP and more cut every corner they can…and then a few corners they legally can’t.

So give me one good reason I would trust them? I don’t particularly trust Microsoft either, but I certainly trust them more than the alternatives available. The only reason for that is because they have been spanked a few times for anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices. When everyone is watching you…you behave.

@Peter 39

You don't trust Microsoft? Why, may I ask? Microsoft like to extort money from people, but I can't actually think of any real privacy breaches or personal information landgrabs by them. They’re greedy and lazy, not stupid.

Who would you trust more? Google? The idea is so laughable my sides are hurting. Amazon? Maybe…in all honesty I don’t know much about their track record, but they seem good so far. Who else….Oracle/Sun? They would seem trustworthyish, but just as greedy and lazy as Microsoft.

IBM? HP? Dell? Apple? Sony? Not on my life, methinks. They are greedy AND lack any semblance of anything approaching ethics. If you don’t have ethics, you have a hard time understanding why others might want to keep their data safe.

Microsoft is an evil empire. It’s also the devil we know. Microsoft may try to take all my money…but I can not imagine them selling my data to someone else, nor can I imagine them changing the fundamental structure or formats of their cloud without giving a reasonable amount of warning beforehand. After all, they need to give warning so that their customers can cough up the money to pay for the format change.

With Microsoft I know I will always be able to get my data OFF of their cloud if I need it, and they are the least likely of the bunch to sell my data without telling me. I also suspect they won’t try to “own” my data either.

…but they’ll be bloody expensive.

NOW, will they be RELIABLE to use a cloud service…that’s a whole other ballgame. Personally, I’m not sold on the reliability of ANY cloud service. From a data security standpoint though…I’d trust MS before any of the other contenders.

@Rishi

The point of being able to deploy SSL-based Outlook connectivity in my environment was to allow users who were NOT using domain connected systems the ability to cache a copy of their e-mail locally.

Your solution, while valid in a completely domain-joined world, is invalid in this scenario.

For masses of the masses...

...all of whom are known as self loading cargo.

@GeorgeTuk

"It will only be short hops to Europe then, what with the death penalty in US.

Actually aren't France banning the burqa (spelling...sorry!), scrap that.

And Italy turning back the Libyans.

So we will only be able to go to Germany (whose constitution was part made by us and US) and Switzerland...hang on they allow euthanasia."

So what's Canada, chopped liver?

@Alan Firminger

Terrible idea. If a satellite designed to deorbit into the ocean gets hit by debris then you have one (or maybe a smallish number more than one) bits of uncontrollable junk in orbit. If a satellite designed to fragment into bits on contact with atmo gets hit by debris it will SHATTER, and you juve just created the orbital equivalent of a shotgun blast.

From a “how do we dispose of this satellite” standpoint, your idea is brilliant. From a “what happens if the unexpected occurs” standpoint, it’s a hazard.

Re: women at the controls of a space ship.

No cool, man. Even as a joke.

Special Treatment

@Sarah: Very nearly everyone seems to demand special treatment at some point. Individually or as part of various groups.

@Entire world: If you get uppity when one specific group (we'll say Women as is the topical case,) ask for special treatment but not others, then yes, you are a racist/sexist/other flavour of bigot. The measure of a society isn't or group isn't in how many or which groups ask for special treatment, but how we balance the instinctual desires that everyone has to be treated better than others against the needs of all people to be treated as equally as circumstances allow.

To ask for special treatment is normal and human. To actually treat one group or individual as superior to others is unconscionable, regardless of which group or individual it is.

Also: Asking not to be treated like a disposable piece of meat is not asking for special treatment. It’s asking for a minimum standard of common courtesy and respect. So shoo and vamoose to all the haters and the griefers.

@Sarah

You guys get a nice day, and you send all the grey, miserable rain striaght here. *grumble grumble*

@John Dee

I seem to remember a really famous show a while back. Sex something something city...seemed pretty big on the objectification of men to me. I'd say such thigns go both ways.