Broadband Tech > Security > Security > Steve Wozniak predicts 'horrible problems' with cloud...

Steve Wozniak predicts 'horrible problems' with cloud...

quote:

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"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

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"With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away" through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.

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That is precisely why I run my own web and email servers. The problem of on-line hosting providers claiming either outright ownership or automatic unlimited licensing rights to anything you store on their servers has been with us for quite a while. The "cloud" approach just greatly magnifies the problem, because many "ordinary" users as well as many SMB (and probably even enterprise class) users won't even think about where their data is actually stored (or bother to read the TOS).

Here is a sample of why I no longer use AT&T/Yahoo owned servers to publish web content:

reply to StuartMW
I agree with his concerns.

Tech has always seemed to follow the same progression: We see the dazzling new stuff and adopt it, and only later do we consider the security or the cost - usually after we get burnt.

You'd think we'd learn but we don't because the virtual world is somehow perceived to be different. Like it can't really happen - and "friends" are really our friends. So we lather, rinse, repeat.

Never mind false advertising, whatever happened to once bitten, twice shy? Risk assessment? Contingency plans? If you did this in the real world, you'd be beat up and bruised and have the sense to stop.

I'm not sure the world is really ready for "computers for the rest of us." Not when so many of us (individuals and companies) have the common sense God gave a grape.

reply to StuartMW
And this is why the cloud is a great place to store non-private, non-critical data. Should Amazon go crazy and burn my MP3 storage, I'm out...what, a small online music collection? Nobody's dead, nor is there any more damage caused than the loss of my music. Meanwhile, Amazon would have hosed themselves for all future commerce I would have carried on through them.

I think the most "personal" thing I throw up on the cloud are notes on the lectures I attend. Then again, these aren't state secrets...unless it's SOP to dictate them to 100+ people at a time.

reply to goalieskates

reply to NetFixer

reply to StuartMW
For the stuff that matters I have my own cloud thanks, for everything else that ultimately I don't care about (which means if you start charging me for the service I'll just quit using it) I'm happy to use someone else's cloud.

Blake
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Vendor: Author of Link Logger which is a traffic analysis and firewall logging tool

reply to StuartMW
So, which is riskier: triple-redundant Amazon S3 storage, or a crappy WD disk on a dusty home PC owned by someone who's never made a backup in his life?

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I'm not seeing a whole lot of difference between using cloud-based storage and infrastructure, and using remote web hosting. Except unless more clueless people start using it and get a nasty surprise.

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I'd appreciate pointers to anything saying that Amazon owns anything you store in its S3 service. I just don't think that's likely to be true - Amazon seems to be aimed at supplying business-class services.

It seems as though they are saying specifically that they DO NOT own any of your content on their servers. It seems as though what they are saying is that they have the right to use it and duplicate it and post it anywhere they want. You still own it but they can do what they want with it. What's the difference? Ask a lawyer.

I don't like cloud computing because then I don't own anything. If I lose access to the company I lose access to my stuff. I have the original theatrical release of Star Wars. If all I had was Netflix I could not watch that (I don't think) I would have to watch the "updated" version that "they" think is better. I really like having my own stuff.

As for the internet hosting companies ... they have lost tons of my files over the years. But fortunately after the first one I started keeping my own multiple back-ups, so now I just laugh it off when they have a catastrophic failure. Bottom line - no cares about you or your stuff more than you. Best is to have both. Personal preference.

reply to NetFixer

reply to Sentinel

reply to Sentinel
I'm not seeing that claim.

»aws.amazon.com/agreement/

quote:

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8.1 Your Content. As between you and us, you or your licensors own all right, title, and interest in and to Your Content. Except as provided in this Section 8, we obtain no rights under this Agreement from you or your licensors to Your Content, including any related intellectual property rights. You consent to our use of Your Content to provide the Service Offerings to you and any End Users. We may disclose Your Content to provide the Service Offerings to you or any End Users or to comply with any request of a governmental or regulatory body (including subpoenas or court orders).

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reply to mysec

reply to StuartMW

reply to NetFixer

Re: Steve Wozniak predicts 'horrible problems' with cloud...

reply to StuartMW
If you're going to put in the cloud, at least encrypt it and have other copies locally offline and other places.

reply to NetFixer
I love it when sheeple panic because they can't understand words. That's what the US education system is getting us these days.

IANAL, but that stuff is so plain English it's not even funny. That AT&T Legalese means:
If you give it to us specifically to display it for you from our servers to people, you are giving us the right to display it to people until you tell us to stop by removing the content.

That is, "You can't put this stuff on our servers for people around the world to see it, then sue us for using it without your permission when somebody views it at the server address you placed it at."

There is no implied permission. They can't say "Well, you knew that you uploaded it to a place where it would be seen by anybody who went to »www.server.com/data, so you should expect that when people go there, they will see it." That was tried, people put up a picture on a web server, then sued for it being displayed by the web server, and won. So the ISPs have to explicitly get that permission via the ToS rather than getting a copy of written permission for each file.

So they have to say "When you put it there, you are explicitly granting permission for our servers to display it to people. When you take it down, or we take it down, that permission goes away."

They VERY explicitly also say "solely for the purpose for which such content was submitted or made available", which expressly means that if you post pictures of a volcano exploding on a your web site run by them, the purpose it was submitted was to make it visible on the web site, so this does NOT grant them permission to sell it to a magazine, post it on their home page saying "Look, a volcano exploded" or anything else, since that is not the purpose it was submitted or made available for.

But hey, like I said, I blame this on the English language making legalese a pain and on the lack of educational standards making people fully incapable of not failing to understand. Kind of like too many people wouldn't understand the twisted negations in the sentence preceding this one. That and too many others won't know the word "preceding".

Well, besides the fact that the paragraph refers to text primarily, though it also technically applies to binaries (and who is stupid enough to post their own compiled code on a Yahoo site?) that you make publicly accessible, that covers the fact that when you post it, it will be translated by Google translate if somebody requests such, potentially by the site itself, and it will invariably be mirrored on so many servers, consolidation systems, etc, that any attempt to remove it would be futile. Then include data retention policies for text and it opens another huge can of worms. Since removing text from so many systems, including ones not under AT&T/Y!'s control is prohibitive, they cover it by saying "If you submit text, you can't take away our right to use it somehow."

If you are posting the whole of your novel there for public consumption, then yes, you grant them the right to use it for anything.

So don't post your novel.

What text or other non-media content have you posted for public access that you may, in the future, want to try to remove from the AT&T/Y! completely? And if you were permitted to, at a whim, force them to scrub every single system (indexes, RSS, everything else too) of your content, how do you propose to remove it from everywhere else?