back to article Woz: Cloud computing trend is 'horrendous'

The risks of cloud computing will be "horrendous", Steve Wozniak said last night, in a statement that will set eyeballs rolling at Apple - the company he co-founded with Steve Jobs. The bearded designer of the Apple II is prone to off-message statements, but the latest one takes a dig at an area Apple has just invested a lot …

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  1. jake Silver badge

    Sing it, Woz! :-)

    I agree, 100% ... Trouble is that the kids in charge don't want to listen to us old farts who have already been there & done that. All they see is short-term dollars, not long-term vision.

    1. LarsG
      Meh

      A sane

      A sane voice in a sea of insanity.

      There have already been serious data crashes in the cloud.

      If you own it keep it close to you, I mean would you buy an Aston Martin garage it in a lock up shed on an estate 200 miles away in the Gorbals and leave the keys to it on the bar in a jam jar in the Dog and Fukket?

      The guy can see the future problems.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A sane

        You think?

        Gmail, Hotmail, Flickr, online VMs for testing the list goes on. People are already using online services for many things.

        Woz is old school, he's an electronics engineer and hardware hacker. Why does his opinion count in the world of software and online communications?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A sane @ AC 20:17

          You remind me of the story of the old bull and the young bull, both looking down from a hill at a herd of 20 cows.

          Young bull, 'let's run down the hill and sh*g a cow!'

          Old bull, 'let's walk and have them all!'

          There's a lot to be said about intelligence and experience, something that you appear to have none of.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A sane

          Cloud computing is just really starting out. Woz just sees that clouds are a tempting target for every hacker who

          wants to prove himself. Woz was the creator, Jobs was the accountant. If Woz lead Apple instead of Jobs, I would bet that Apple would be producing far more creative products than they do now. They would not have to rely upon courts to maintain their market share. Lastly, I would respect Apple instead despising it like I do now!

        3. K
          FAIL

          Re: A sane

          Fail - Did Mummy never teach you to respect your elders...

          Fact is Woz is only echoing was many IT professionals know, but don't have the channels to voice their concerns!

        4. Graham Wilson
          Flame

          @A.C. - - Re: A sane

          "Woz is old school, he's an electronics engineer and hardware hacker. Why does his opinion count in the world of software and online communications?"

          1. If it weren't for the electronics engineers, the Wozs of the world and hardware people, then you software types wouldn't even have an internet and comms systems to cream over. It's about time you dreamy service-orientated software types realised that The Cloud, at its core, isn't VIRTUAL: the world STILL consists of ATOMS, ELECTRONS etc. which make up things, that when configured by hardware engineers, go into making up the systems which we hardware types graciously let you program.

          2 There is a limit to how far APIs etc. go down in any system. Below that, it's the engineers' world; and below that again it's the world of the material scientist, and still further down again you'll find the world of the physicist and chemist. Down here, it's these people who 'program' and design--it's the world where nature is tamed and made to work for us. And it's a world that you'll never know or have any control over. You API-jerkers and high-level language programmers sit on top of a vast industrial infrastructure with a long history and damn well don't forget it! What's more, that infrastructure goes back some hundreds of years to the very beginnings of modern engineering and technology some 200 years ago--right back to Volta, Faraday etc.; even the long line of chemists stretching right back to Kekulé, Lavoisier and earlier contributed to the process, they ultimately laid down many of the underpinning technologies for the IC and microprocessor.

          3. To many of us, we've seen this model trotted out before, The Cloud is the latest incarnation of the software (service) rental model (remember Microsoft's first attempt?). Buy software as a once-off and there's only one fee, rent The Cloud and it's ongoing income. We old-timers know the ploy and we're already a wake-up.

          4. Presumably you're an A.C. because you wouldn't be silly enough to affix your own name to that comment.

          P.S.: I'm not an Apple user, never have been. It's just that here Woz's views make much sense (as they would to anyone who examines The Cloud objectively.)

          1. jake Silver badge

            @Graham Wilson (was: Re: @A.C. - - A sane)

            200 years ago? Try flint knapping, 70,000+ years ago or more ... We've been building on basics since we learned to think ...

            1. Graham Wilson

              @jake -- Re: @Graham Wilson (was: @A.C. - - A sane)

              Right, I don't disagree. I had to start somewhere and it's often, if not generally, agreed that chemistry was the first engineering discipline to fully become founded on scientific principles. This occurred around 1800; by then alchemy wasn't taken seriously by chemists of the day (as at this point the fundamentals of what was to become Dalton's Scientific Method were essentially understood and in place, thus the cornerstone of their work).

          2. Vanir
            Thumb Up

            Re: @A.C. - - A sane

            I'm a C++ programmer and I upvoted your comment.

            What you write is true.

            1. Graham Wilson
              Happy

              @Vanir -- Re: @A.C. - - A sane

              Thanks, sorry about my comment about programmers (I've done programming too). It's just that today so many lose sight of how very integrated all the different technologies are.

          3. This post has been deleted by its author

          4. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: @A.C. - - A sane @ Graham Wilson

            You go on a bit don't you!

          5. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: @A.C. - - A sane

            Agree except you don't buy software, you're granted a licence to use it...

        5. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A sane

          Wanna hear what inexperience sounds like?

          "Re: A sane

          You think?

          Gmail, Hotmail, Flickr, online VMs for testing the list goes on. People are already using online services for many things.

          Woz is old school, he's an electronics engineer and hardware hacker. Why does his opinion count in the world of software and online communications?"

        6. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: A sane AC 6/8 20:17

          Hey, it's the summer holidays and the kids are online. Crass, naive and arrogant.

          Back to the article, how can the Woz be "off-message" as he is no longer associated with Apple? He has the strength of character to voice his opinions nonetheless unlike all the mindless corporate drones pandering to their own ill-conceived self-interests.

        7. Daniel B.
          Boffin

          Re: A sane

          "Gmail, Hotmail, Flickr, online VMs for testing the list goes on. People are already using online services for many things.

          Woz is old school, he's an electronics engineer and hardware hacker. Why does his opinion count in the world of software and online communications?"

          Wait till someone hacks into a bank email account outsourced into Gmail. Given the stuff stored in bank employee e-mails, it's bound to be a blast!

          Security in the cloud (or insecurity) is something that should be taken into account, but in a lot of cases, isn't. And it isn't like data loss or hacks haven't happened:

          - MobileMe wiping iDevices clean if you cancelled your MobileMe trial but failed to unconfigure MobileMe on the iDevice.

          - the Danger SideKick getting mass amnesia due to Oracle RAC replication corruption.

          - The Amazon/iDevice hack mentioned in the same article.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: A sane

        I don't think they even need the keys, to be fair. You know, ex-engineering region, lots of time on their hands ;)

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Sing it, Woz! :-)

      The iCloud is about free backup for your iDevices and not so much about where companies store important data.

      Wozniak is right however and surprisingly his name 'Wozniak' is also in the iPad spell checker when typing in Wozniak. No I said Woz, type in Woz and it gives Wozniak.

      1. Fibbles

        Re: Sing it, Woz! :-)

        "Wozniak is right however and surprisingly his name 'Wozniak' is also in the iPad spell checker when typing in Wozniak. No I said Woz, type in Woz and it gives Wozniak."

        This is offf topic a bit but you should see what comes up when you type Zuckerberg into Firefox or Thunderbird if you're using the EN-GB dictionary.

        Here's a hint, it begins with 'C' and ends in 'sucker'...

        1. LinkOfHyrule
          Happy

          it begins with 'C' and ends in 'sucker'...

          Hahahaha it's true I tell thee!

          These firefox boys think of everything! You'd never get that in MS word unless some programmer hid it in hex amongst a load of C code!

          1. Stewart McKenna
            Thumb Up

            Re: it begins with 'C' and ends in 'sucker'...

            Not true. Back when there was a Word 2.0, you got 'whores' if you mis-spelt 'whereas'...

            Also, I used to get 'God Damn' for Goodman....

        2. Wensleydale Cheese
          Happy

          Trivia

          "you should see what comes up when you type Zuckerberg into Firefox or Thunderbird if you're using the EN-GB dictionary."

          So it does. I always thought that was a Yank phrase.

    3. attoman

      Re: Sing it, Woz! :-)

      I'm older then you and I KNOW that the web is the safest place to put my data and funnel my special functions. You just need to use the right tools.

      DO you doubt that the probability of the internet being functional is higher then the probability that you can get to your data and/or special program stored and or running any way, any where in the world or off it?

      Our program (www.worlddatatrust.com) harnessed this more then a decade ago and we have been using it ever since.

      Unfortunately, like the Woz, we couldn't market a snowcone to an Arab. Perhaps some good marketeer/thief will come along and Innovate us (you need this done every five years once you hit fifty).

      1. jake Silver badge

        @attoman (was: Re: Sing it, Woz! :-))

        "I'm older then you"

        Assumes facts not in evidence.

        "and I KNOW that the web is the safest place to put my data and funnel my special functions."

        How do you figure? I honestly don't understand this mind-set.

        "You just need to use the right tools."

        I think you are one of the tools ... and are being used by marketards.

        "DO you doubt that the probability of the internet being functional is higher then the probability that you can get to your data and/or special program stored and or running any way, any where in the world or off it?"

        Yes. I can dial into my personal systems, even if local access to TehIntraWebTubes[tm] isn't available at the moment. POTS is still more available than TheWWW, regardless of what the marketards would have you believe.

        ::paragraph elided::

        Nice advert, spammer.

        "Unfortunately, like the Woz, we couldn't market a snowcone to an Arab.

        My brother sells refrigeration equipment in Fairbanks, Alaska. I think Woz & Steve did OK, over the long haul. You sound bitter. Probably because you are thinking short-term profits, and not long-term vision. See my original post. And please note that I don't actually use any Apple products ... although my Wife uses an aging original iMac for video processing.

        "Perhaps some good marketeer/thief will come along and Innovate us (you need this done every five years once you hit fifty)."

        OK, if you say so. Gut feeling is you have a crap product. Like the rest of the cloud shit. No, based on your commentardary, I'm not going to investigate your product ... so I could be wrong. But I doubt it.

      2. K
        WTF?

        Re: Sing it, Woz! :-)

        Gonna party... umm download software likes its 1999...

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Sing it, Woz! @attoman

        Let's take you apart than, shall we?

        worlddatatrust.com:

        WHOIS says you're in the US, California

        dig mx says your email providers infinology.net lives in the US, but in Texas

        So that means data crosses federal lines - the FBI can play

        You're a US company, so the CIA can play as soon as you deal with anything foreign

        There is no way whatsoever that your setup can handle any information with a degree of security and integrity if you're US based. So if you "KNOW" ol' Woz to be wrong it suggests you may need to resume taking your meds..

        1. Vic

          Re: Sing it, Woz! @attoman

          > spamatatrust.com

          Please don't keep repeating his domain. He's a spammer.

          Vic.

        2. attoman

          Re: Sing it, Woz! @attoman

          Ah! Someone is alive in the underworld.

          Now what is it you would most desire sir? Good old triple DES encoding? With a User private key known only to your Klan? Or perhaps you are truly crazy like our friend Woz and want something so humongous that even the NSA won't touch it without an Executive Order and a Drone targeting their ass.

          No problem! Everything leaves and moves encrypted.

          Let us now examine the alternative mentioned fantabulous hard storage and multiprocessor service with underground bomb proof power generation and protection. If the CIA, or NSA wants in they go in and get the data and as an added bonus you, your dog and your grand kid are all very dead.

          Oh that's right you are down under where the bogieman never comes, the CIA or NSA or killer drones never operate. Right...

  2. NoneSuch Silver badge
    Happy

    I hate Apple, but love the Woz.

    He looks at tech objectively and exclaims the good and bad regardless of vendor.

    Shine on you crazy diamond.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The key is...

      ... in the last sentence of the report:

      "the beardy engineer". Not a marketing man.

  3. M Gale

    And yet...

    ...all I have to do is say something negative about Steam, and it brings out massive downvoting.

    Same shit, different stink.

    1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

      Re: And yet...

      Steam isn't quite the same thing. It has cloudy features now but it's not in the cloud. Your data resides on your computer, not in some fluffy abstraction out on the edge of the internet.

      Of course it has a fairly comprehensive DRM scheme, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

      1. M Gale

        Re: And yet...

        Same net result: A crapload of stuff you paid for being unavailable should someone else's machine decide to throw a wobbler. Or should you forget the password you used six years ago with an email address that's no longer valid, or any other number of problems that wouldn't happen if only you didn't depend on some third party for everything to work.

    2. Fred Flintstone Gold badge

      Re: And yet...

      ..all I have to do is say something negative about Steam, and it brings out massive downvoting.

      That's easy.

      Steam = vapour <> Cloud

      Anything else I can help you with? :)

      1. LinkOfHyrule
        Joke

        Says something negative about Steam...

        Why the hell did they name the thing after an East 17 song? What the heck is that all about? I assume the Gabe dude is a fan of theirs!

  4. Chris 171

    Data ownership..

    I agree with Woz.

    A vinyl record means more to me than an mp3 on my HDD, yet I can still see its container.

    True vapourware with added water & and we know how apple treat water damage..

    Said it before but I think this is their Achilles heel in development.

  5. M Gale

    There are some uses for the "cloud"...

    ...if you define "cloud" as virtualised elastic computing. Very useful for people running online services who need to be able to dial things up to meet a burst in demand, or dial everything back down again to stay economical.

    Unfortunately, today's "cloud" marketing is all about stuffing everything back inside a glass house and having everyone on a fat terminal rather than a personal computer. Thanks, but no thanks. This is why.

    1. Arctic fox
      Thumb Up

      Re: "There are some uses for the "cloud"..." Within the type of limits you have........

      .........referred to I agree. Within the private/domestic sphere I use it for syncing and (under certain circumstance) file transfers between locations. Actual main storage? Not a bleeding chance. They'll have to wrest my external hd/disc burner from my cold dead hands etc. etc.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    but but

    With Apple you sign away your rights to everything anyway. You're not permitted to use the phone any way you want. You can't root your phone and use the hardware with any software you choose.

    What's happened to Woz?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: but but

      'Not permitted to use the phone in any way you want?'

      I don't know what you want to do with yours, I shudder to think, but I use mine to make phone calls.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: but but

      "With Apple you sign away your rights to everything anyway. You're not permitted to use the phone any way you want. You can't root your phone and use the hardware with any software you choose."

      It never ceases to amaze me just how many people don't know or care. Let them be burned.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I don't particularly like clouds, but short of all of us becoming admins of our own servers how else can we get our data across all the devices we use today? USB sticks? How do we share it? E-mail attachments and their versioning nightmares?

    Even running a simple mail server these days means keeping up to date with spam, security, service downtime, etc. Even after that most times the server is not under your direct control - nor is it on your Internet connection - so it that still can be monitored, blocked, physically accessed...

    I guess it's the cost of de-centralizing our information into multiple machines and something we'll have to learn to live with.

    I think Woz would do a better job focusing his energy and creativity on how we do this better, rather than trying to combat it.

    1. JP19

      "how else can we get our data across all the devices we use today"

      If you want your data to remain secure with great difficulty, the clouds I see don't fix that, they just say hey don't worry about it (rather like we are not supposed to care about the privacy of social media).

      If only that was all the 'cloud' is about. I see it being used to lock in, extract more money from, and control customers under a pretence of it offering something useful. The cloud doesn't belong to you and if you come to depend on it (and you will when it is the only option offered) they have you by the short and curlies.

    2. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Linux

      Short of becoming admins on our own servers?

      Become an admin on your own server. :)

      It isn't as hard as it used to be. And if companies like Apple were spending their energies on software to run your own server, then it'd be easier than wiping your arse.

      But companies like Apple don't want to give YOU control of your own data. There's no profit in it.

      THEY want to control the data, so they can mine it, analyse it and decide what you want for breakfast next week.

      That's the trouble with the cloud - all the advantages seem to be on the service provider's end.

      If you're an end user, then your cloudy services can just evaporate with no recourse.

      Not so bad if it's just a personal webpage you put on geocities in 1999, but if it was an email service that disappeared you'd be fairly pissed off. Especially if you're a business.

      1. LinkOfHyrule
        Coffee/keyboard

        it'd be easier than wiping your arse.

        That made me lol as I can just imagine a new marketing slogan - "Linux Servers - Easier than wiping your arse" and a little picture of that penguin dude holding a bog-roll!

      2. Chemist

        Re: Short of becoming admins on our own servers?

        "Become an admin on your own server. "

        Low-powered, dual core atom at home,big drives, always on - SSH/fish from anywhere, used for various other functions and transcoding 1080p video when not otherwise needed - Linux of course.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I don't particularly like clouds, but short of all of us becoming admins of our own servers how else can we get our data across all the devices we use today?

      By calling them SERVERs and SERVICES we may actually return to a degree of sanity and people who actually have a clue getting involved in the debate (like Woz). The whole "cloud" crap irritates me to an enormous degree because it's one of those words that's so vague anyone can pretend to be an expert and say things that would get laughed at if the term was more precisely defined. You get Veeps and even politicians deciding they want to go "Cloud" because it's the latest buzzword, not because there is any rationale behind it. Classic marketing waffle.

      I'm with Woz here, but from another angle - cloud services are the tail end of a relentless war on privacy rights waged by US companies like Google and Facebook whose entire business model is tied to breaking into people's lives. Given the ridiculously weak fines they get handed in Europe for quite simply ignoring privacy laws actually exist (as far as I can see in Europe v Facebook with active collaboration from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner) I cannot see this change soon - until it goes very badly wrong.

      I'll get off my soapbox now, but the Apple fail was only a tiny example in this context.

    4. Vic

      > how else can we get our data across all the devices we use today? USB sticks?

      rsync.

      Vic.

      1. Britt Johnston
        Pirate

        @vic - how else can we get our data across ...?

        Remember those programs that share a small amount of your CPU capacity?

        Perhaps clouds will hook into spare MBs on one of your drives.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      If your asking such fundamental questions, maybe you should pack away all of your kit and get your pad/pen/envelopes out.

      Then you have the nerve to slate an experienced engineer.

      Does anyone listen to your opinions?

  8. Mr Young
    Pint

    I'm not past the stage...

    of copying backups around the working hard drives. The Cloud is like VPN is it not - ultimately a matter of trust? VPN article please

    1. RonWheeler

      Re: I'm not past the stage...

      Most VPNs I've seen aren't really used for storing all your stuff - though it is possible assuming the right storage/permssions etc at the other end. They're just a secure communication channel, not a definition of what the content going through is.

  9. Gordan

    Risks? Not to mention performance.

    "The risks of cloud computing will be "horrendous""

    Performance is pretty poor, too:

    http://www.altechnative.net/2012/08/04/virtual-performance-part-1-vmware/

  10. PT

    No Cloud for me

    Problems with the "cloud" -

    1. "Free" - maybe today, but if (or should I say when) they decide to charge a subscription, if you don't pay it you lose everything.

    2. "Private data" - don't make me laugh. Everything you upload will eventually be searched by governments and commercial entities alike. Aside from your personal privacy, it's a rare piece of data that can be closely scrutinized and not reveal a potential copyright or patent violation to a motivated lawyer.

    3. "Secure" - only until someone on the same service does something that offends the US DOJ, then you've lost it, probably forever. Plus see (2) above.

    My cloudiness is limited to using a free DropBox account to synchronize my several computers, the appeal being that the data physically exists on all of them.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Everything old is new again

    I suspect that the Woz feels that after 40 years of development, we are coming full circle. Hackers like him and the 70s valley scene wanted to build _personal_ computers in opposition to the computing services of IBM and Amdahl. They wanted to get compute power and data storage on their own terms, not the terms of the glasshouse priesthood.

    The (main) problem with the cloud is ownership. If you can get access to compute power, or to charged-per-byte-storage models, that's all fine and dandy. What's not fine and dandy is when your compute provider or your data provider starts to claim ownership of the data that you put there. That is a serious, market-warping, privacy destroying issue that no-one has yet got to grips with.

    1. attoman

      Re: Everything old is new again

      Actually if its always encrypted and the storage provider has no access, he has little or no incentive.

      That is it leaves your system encrypted and returns encrypted and only is in the clear for you or someone you authorize directly. This is how our system has worked since 1997. The ISP has no idea what is going in or coming out.

  12. Snark
    Thumb Up

    Sanity

    Someone just shouted out at the emperors new clothes. If we all shout out enough maybe someone will listen. Nah, there is money involved so they won't.

    I see the clouds as something like buying from ebay or a market. I take a risk because of the cost, if I lose out because I buy a lemon then fair enough. I wouldn't invest my business or my future on it. if it's online backup, compute power I couldn't afford otherwise, or other stuff then fine. If it goes bang I am inconvenienced or can carryon. If Amazon goes titsup so I lose netflix and grumble, but it won't do more than inconvenience me. I wouldn't want to use the cloud for things I couldn't live with out.

  13. Mike Flugennock

    Stop me if I'm wrong, but...

    Isn't "the cloud" just a different trendy name for "networked computing" (from back in the late '90s), which was, in turn, a different trendy name for "mainframe"? You know... like back when everybody just had terminals which couldn't store any data locally and could only use and handle data stored on centralized "big iron", and when the mainframe fell over, everybody's data was lost and/or entombed?

    And that's the big new thing, huh? Turn over all your work to the control of one company, who stores it all in one centralized location? Oh, yeah, it's new, it's cool. What could possibly go wrong?

    Wasn't the whole personal computer "revolution" at least partially about having control over your work, and breaking loose from the whole centralized control thing?

    Like I said, stop me if I'm wrong...

    1. attoman

      Re: Stop me if I'm wrong, but...

      Your wrong and you are right. There is not just one Cloud Computing. It just means getting functions and services from the net rather then locally. That's all.

      It can be done stupidly as you describe or it can be done so that the probability of you ever not being able to get your function/data is the same as the probability that the net itself will crash. That's better then reliability of your hard drive or Google's server farms period.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Cloud is forever

    Not in the 'your data is always available sense' (Amazon + MS have demonstrated that it isn't) but in the unnerving 'once its out there its out for good'. It happens often enough now; company A is bought by Company B who have a very different idea of what 'privacy' means with regard to your personal information - and who knows when/if governments will change their minds on what business is allowed to do with data it holds. Or one of company C's cut price offshore employees decides to make a few quid on the side. Anyone recall Hotmail's change of T+Cs of 10 odd years ago that effectively gave MS ownership of anything passing through the system?

    I don't fancy extending that Russian roulette to data that means a great deal more to me than a name + address, and instinctively feel far more comfortable if it remains where I can control access. It can be a pain accessing documents across devices, but if you're prepared to put a little effort in, there's no good reason to be beholden to money grabbing snake oil merchants with little product and no track record. Services like Dropbox are fine for distributing generic documents + reference material, but for the stuff that matters storage you can see is the only thing I'd trust for the foreseeable future.

    The only shame is that there's not more 'faces' like Woz questioning the grand claims made for unproven services with security potentially riddled with weak links.

  15. Thorfkin
    Thumb Up

    Woz has the right idea

    The buz on the internet and in most office meeting rooms is "Cloud". It seems to have caught on as "The next big thing". But I agree it's nothing more than the "leet speak" of the business world. Reality though is the black to the cloud's white. The simple undeniable fact is that if you move your critical data into the "cloud' all you're doing is adding one more fail point. Now not only do you have to worry about the functional reliability of your service provider's storage hardware but now you've just added your, and same said service provider's Internet connection to the list of things that can go wrong. Moving your data to the cloud Increases your down time rather than increasing it.

    The cloud is fine for non-essential things like personal e-mail or for social sharing but for anything more important than that it's just snake oil.

  16. Charles Manning

    Oh bollocks Woz

    Anti-cloud comments are to be expected from Woz. He after all pushed micros and personal computers in the age of Big Iron.

    His opinions will get lots of up-votes from BOFHs etc who have a vested interest every company having its own servers and thus lots of employment and gravy for sys admins etc.

    But is he right? Only sometimes.

    The Cloud is certainly not for everyone. Big organizations, and those with very high security requirements are probably better served by having their own systems.

    But for most small companies, The Cloud typically provides a better solution. Sure The Cloud can have data outages etc, but a small company without dedicated, capable, sys admin staff will lose their data and have system failures far more often.

    Google, or whatever, perform a far better sysadmin job than the average small business owner who would rather be doing things that profit the business than running around fixing servers, doing backups etc.

    1. Steven Roper
      Stop

      Re: Oh bollocks Woz

      Except that small business are more at risk from competitors. I part-own (and run the IT systems for) a small (< 20 staff) software development and publishing firm and there are dozens of other businesses in our region alone in the same field. They've poached customers from us (and we from them!) but the one thing in common between all of us is that we source most of our business from online searches and social networking - the same services that are now offering "cloud storage" as well.

      By storing all our information in the cloud, all of our competing businesses are effectively giving control of our data to a few big companies who may very well have a vested interest in seeing one of our firms succeed at the expense of the others. Maybe some high-flying Google executive's son owns one, and so dear old Dad can use Google's access to all that data stored in their cloud "service" to give said son an advantage. Or maybe Google want to move in on our turf and put all the competition out of business. There are many possible scenarios where the consolidation of masses of SME information could be abused, and at some point in the future, almost certainly will be.

      Not only that, but as others have wisely posted, when you store everything on the cloud, you effectively give up ownership of your data. If someone else misuses the cloud service you're using and the copyright mafia / homeland security / whatever decide to shut it down, an SME would be just as fucked, if not more so, as a big company that was stupid enough to rely on the same service. Megaupload anyone?

      Most of my contemporaries in competing SMEs are as skeptical about the cloud as I am, for these and other reasons. I know full well that managing a round dozen of desktops and an assortment of notebooks, tablets and smartphones clustered around a homegrown server is nothing like managing the massive IT infrastructure of a big company; in fact it's nothing that a halfway competent sysadmin can't handle between cups of coffee. So for SMEs, hiring one grease monkey to look after your small tin (as opposed to big iron!) is more than worth the cost, when you consider the risks and potential costs of exposing, and losing, all your data to the cloud.

    2. windowssucks

      Re: Oh bollocks Woz

      Apply fans don't own anything. They are living in nice and sweet Gulag proprietary ecosystem.

  17. Dana W
    Go

    YES!

    I'm an Apple fan, and I love the Woz. But there is not coolaid enough trust or use the cloud, no matter who's brand name is on it.

    My data, my business.

  18. Tom 79
    Mushroom

    The biggest issue for me is the circumvention of government search. Since the cloud provider technically owns the data, it's up to them, not me, to whether they want to comply to a search request. With the bendy ethics of today's execs, I'm surprised they are so willing to jump on that bandwagon.

  19. K

    They've got it all wrong..

    I use the cloud for email and photos.. but you'd have to be a moron to rely upon if for backup.

  20. Thurstanh
    Childcatcher

    iWoz, more like iHasbeen

    I think Wozniak's relevance has been dubious since the early 80s. I read quite a bit of his book 'iWoz' , but found it difficult to get past his self aggrandising nature, particularly since he hasn't done anything of note since the apple II in 1977. For this reason I generally see his media appearances through the lens of 'iHasbeen'.

    The cloud is what you make it. We have already been using cloud technologies for years, any web mail service is a 'cloud'. I used gmail online, but also use an offline client with it's own copy of files should something happen to gmail or my connection.

    On the contary Is not the risk of relying on local backup 'horrendous'? I have a copy of my files online with carbonite, secure in the knowledge that local fires, floods or theft will not result in loosing my digital photos. Along with other online services I'm able to have access to the files I need from anywhere without the need for a laptop or remembering to copy files onto a USB key.

    Furthermore cloud computing opens up a world of possibilities previously only available to institutions or large companies. I'm talking of the ability to access and manipulate large data sets or process complex calculations with no more than a basic computers or even a tablet. Examples already existing are rendering 3d models, which can take hours on a powerful workstation, but when farmed out to a cloud can be rendered in a matter of seconds. Soon (if not already) doctors will be able to compare and diagnose through access to terabytes of X-ray, cat scans and patient histories that would be inconceivable on a local computer and available to only the richest of hospitals if IT wasn't outsourced in the form of a cloud.

    Not saying we should charge ahead without thought. Cloud technologies provide too many opportunities to simply brand it 'risky' and run away. Privacy and data ownership amongst other concerns will need addressing, but these are just part of being a digital citizen with or without the cloud.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: iWoz, more like iHasbeen

      an "ihasbeen" has more standing than an iwannabe_but_never_achieved_it

    2. Grikath
      Stop

      Re: iWoz, more like iHasbeen

      "Soon (if not already) doctors will be able to compare and diagnose through access to terabytes of X-ray, cat scans and patient histories that would be inconceivable on a local computer and available to only the richest of hospitals if IT wasn't outsourced in the form of a cloud."

      Mileage may vary depending on locality and local laws, but in my little country medical data pertaining to me is *my* property, not some hospitals' or doctors' , which means *no-one* has access to it without my express permission, and rightly so.

      The idea of putting such sensitive data in "the Cloud" is, mildly put, distasteful, especially given the rather lax attitude the big players already have towards property and propriety when it comes to personal and personalised data.

      Starting with insurance companies, there's plenty of organisations who'd love to, and assuming more or less global cloud storage *will* get their hands on that data eventually for their own purposes.

      The technology in and of itself is useful, but there are plenty of applications and situations where handing out your private data to a service which' owning company treats privacy and property with a rather mercenary attitude is a REALLY bad idea.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yup

    Totally agree here. Damn “Cloud” has been the most over-used, over-hyped and over-promoted IT term of the past decade. I’ll stick to being in direct control of my content, thanks. Remember the news article from a couple days back how someone social-engineered his way through Apple support and managed to remote-wipe iWhatever devices he didn’t actually own? What a joke. It’s issues like this that time and time again highlight the perpetual problem of lack of foresight in the IT industry by major decision makers. Cut costs now to get your promotion then let your successors clean up the mess a few years down the road created by your incompetent self.

  22. windowssucks

    During the last 14 years i've lost hundreds of files on my computers (mostly because Windows sucks). That's why i'll wellcome cloud computing. And not even Windows have been the only reason for loosing data. Couple of weeks ago i made a mistake by trying OpenBSD and OMG i lost the all extended partitions with 3 Linux distros and hundreds of files (including some multimedia).

    As a demented person i'll wellcome cloud computing because at least i could save my files and stop loosing them year after year.

    1. jake Silver badge

      @windowssucks

      In the last 40 years, or thereabouts, I haven't lost anything that I have generated.

      It ain't the computer or network, it's the operator.

      1. Vic

        Re: @windowssucks

        > I haven't lost anything that I have generated

        I have.

        I'm currently having a bit of a mare with ext4 filesystems. They're not good on battery-powered computers.

        I'm going to have to revert everything to ext3...

        Vic.

      2. Graham Wilson

        @jake -- Re: @windowssucks

        Agreed, I've had some monumental stuff-ups, such as having a backup hard drive fail in the middle of recovering data from another drive that was already failing but which had not yet been backed up (as the data had only been created shortly beforehand), yet over a similar time frame to you, I've only lost trivial stuff, temporary files etc.

        Backup systems could be better by being more flexible and less intrusive, but in the end, it's up to the user to be both careful and methodical.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I hope for your employers sake your not a techie. Sounds like you don't know what your doing.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @windowssucks

      So you belive that the cloud will protect you from your own incompetence?

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Techies don't keep their data in the cloud. Non-tech people just follow the fad, how do you think the i devices have become so popular.

    I hope Woz's predictions come true.

  24. Ant Evans
    Alert

    Conflation

    Let's not confuse the retail and wholesale issues here. By analogy the FSA makes a useful distinction between private investors, who need some things spelled out and who get some guarantees, and institutionals, whose day job it is to know this stuff.

    The wholesale cloud thing will not go away. There are still a lot of idle assets in IT, and the consolidation of storage and computing power that has happened in the enterprise will continue beyond it, for exactly the same reasons. The buyers may not be informed, but then the Masters of the Universe get it wrong sometimes too. [The hole in this model is that network throughput can't be consolidated in the same way, but that is another debate.]

    Retail cloud users have no understanding of the consequences of what they are doing, and no 'Information Services Authority' to spell it out for them. Maybe they actually want Facebook to point out what their alleged friends supposedly bought, as they drive past the mall. It's their decison. It should be an informed descision. It isn't.

    Finally, anyone who has lived in a police state can see that this retail cloudwalking has the potential to get much uglier.

  25. Nev

    "Cloud"

    It's the future:

    Because finally content providers will be able to achieve the holy grail that they have craved for so long.

    Subscription based access to content instead of allowing punters to pay a one-off fee to purchase films/tv-shows/books/etc.

    Ker-ching!

    Cue the music; "There's no stoppin; us now...."

  26. Smitty

    We promise nothing!

    The problem with the cloud is the T&Cs.

    The cloud service provider clould claim they offer 100% uptime, fast processing times and unbreakable security. They might even go to great lengths to give weight to those claims and foster a good reputation.

    However, when a problem does occur (and it will) they will simply point to a clause hidden near the end of their service agreement that will say something along the lines of "If anything goes wrong, tough luck mate! We are responsible for nothing".

    Until cloud providers are willing to offer cast iron service availability and reliability guarantees the cloud will alway be a risky proposition.

  27. Beaufin

    Joni said it best

    i've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down and still somehow, it's cloud illusions i recall, ...

  28. James Gosling
    IT Angle

    Cloudy with occasional showers....

    It's entirely possible for two or more people to talk about Cloud technology, be well informed and know what you are talking about and yet.... both of you are talking about entirely different things. It's worse than poorly defined, it is as if confusion is an agenda!

    Woz has earned the right to express his views on any aspect of IT, and I will always listen carefully to what he says. His word is not the last word on the subject, but I value his input.

  29. KroSha
    Mushroom

    "The Cloud" has got to be the most b*****it term of the decade. For some reason, The Bosses think it's some kind of drokkin' magic. Wake up, morons! It's a SAN, one with a VPN on the front. It's not a cloud, it's a bloody big box of HDDs. Everything is still recorded on platters, it's still just hardware, not some kind of magic smoke.

    If you're a SME, then maybe it's more cost effective to host stuff externally. Personally, I think they'd be better off hiring someone who knows what they're doing and run all storage in house.

    Nukes, cos that's how the Cloud will finish for too many businesses.

    1. the-it-slayer
      Facepalm

      No...

      Why does everyone who agrees with Woz want to tarnish the whole cloud concept with the same brush? Just take your old fashion floppy drives out your arses and think for a second. After reading what Woz has said, he's missed the whole point as well. Shoval out the rubbish and you'll find out why cloud services will exist for centuries.

      It's a buzz word for a lot companies wanting to jump on the bandwagon to make some extra dosh and these corp's will fail in the long run. However, properly run cloud services such as Amazon EC2 know what it is. Only obtaining the resources you need where running your own boxes inhouse, you'd be wasting 75% of resources you own to run applications that need to be scalable on-demand with some sort of failover with a clustered system. It's not always about data holding. You'd have to be ultimately stupid to trust a cloud service as your singular storage system (like iCloud). It's handy to store media that you can afford to lose (apart from personal photos). Sharing contacts, music, videos, secondary processed photos across multiple devices makes sense rather than non-sensical method of using USB cables and copy/pasting. However, dragging my whole life tech life with personal documents, photos etc onto dropbox for example. No.

      You all forget this is a very immature concept that needs some time and expansion to make sure standards are introduced to overcome the initial problems.

      Would you not prefer all your company's services (e-mail/file/sharepoint/printing/database) shared across a private cloud worth of machines that share the workload and reduce the cost of having dedicated hardware per service? That's cloud tech, clustered tech, shared tech whatever you want to call it. You take your risks by allowing a third-party to do anything, not just cloud. SMEs just need precautions and need to understand a backup is needed to move elsewhere quickly if it effects their business. Same with anything else.

      Sounds like Woz's time for innovation is up to be honest. Technologicalaries are not visionaries.

  30. Will 20

    The Cloud - or as I put it to my bosses - the new word for 'outsourcing'

    They passed.

  31. Adam T

    Cloud? Good metaphor

    The problem with clouds is that you never know where they're going to end up, nor when they're going to burst and rain their contents all over the shop. Cloud services are the same.

    Anybody remember Oddpost? A sweet little online email service, at the time it was years ahead of anything else around - better than GMail or Hotmail are today IMO, albiet lacking any pgp or other security.

    I sighned up, used them exclusively - nice handy POP3 options so i could even collect and send my work email. Then Yahoo! bought them. Sod that.

    Gmail? Google Docs? Now it's Google Drive, and a whole new EULA, and suddenly they *really* want you to share your documents. NO. I use it for my personal stuff, I want features aimed at ME working with ME.

    Goodbye to that then.

    There's only one cloud service that I find useful these days, and that's EC2. I don't have to leave anything on it, but it's there for when I want to do stuff - it's extra horsepower. Would I leave all my important personal stuff in an EBS or S3? Hell no. I don't want it there.

    That's not to say I don't want a solution that lets me access my data from anywhere, and scales with the amount of crap I collect over the years (too many HDDs sitting on shelves, I don't even know what's on them anymore). But iCloud? Google Drive? Dropbox?

    Sorry, these aren't the solutions to an all-your-shit-in-the-sky-forever pipe dream, because in five years time I'll have gathered enough stuff to fill their existing quotas several times over, and they'll either want to charge extra for extra storage, or they'll have been bought by Yahoo!.

    There's a better way, we just don't know what it is yet, but when I see it, I'm buying shares.

  32. attoman

    Permanent Independent Secret Storage vs Accessible and Relatively Secure Electronic data

    Acronym Alert !

    In any event I challenge most people to read that deck of punch cards you found moldering in the basement or the DC300A cassette tape with your best video games from 1977(yes I still have it and there were some).

    The 45,000 year old French cave paintings are the most persistent human communication we have. If we really want to worry about the future we should be talking about a universal storage medium whose properties transcend device limits. This in fact is basically what the stone tablet and the vinyl record almost have in common.

    It is possible now with nanotech to build structures that have multiple levels of data. Very soon we will be using spin to store information and data densities will make another enormous leap.

    We can at a level still perceptible to the human eye and in material obdurate and nearly diamond hard build both a simple vocabulary and language map along with instructions on how to read the information levels stored in the media. This approach should become a standard for all future high density media.

    Excuse me for opening a new line of discussion but really let's put cloud vs hardware to bed OK? Let's all tell the truth we all (including Woz) use both and are not likely to stop any time soon. Anyone who makes the extreme effort to be completely clear of cloud or hardware is already in serious trouble and needs very much to get a life.

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