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

said by KitFox:

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?)

In this particular case, yes I was referring to binary code that I do make available for downloading from my web site(s), but under my own licensing terms, not AT&T's. And FYI, AT&T/Yahoo operate a major web and email hosting service used by many businesses (I am not in any way talking about some Yahoo social networking site).

The specific example I provided was from the "free" web hosting sites that they provide to their customers (and to which I still have access and continue to use for non-critical purposes). However, I did indeed used to pay for their commercial web hosting service for my web sites (until they started claiming the right to ignore my own licensing terms and invisibly replace it with their draconian TOS). And prior to their current TOS adaption, I did also use the "free" web sites for static storage and as temporary backups to my primary web sites (but no more).
KitFox
join:2002-10-09
Denver, CO

KitFox

Member

Oy. XD

Okay, first thing, try to avoid falling into trollish traps. :\ I only put them around on rare occasion when I don't think anybody will fall for them. That is, don't respond to "who is stupid enough to...?" with "I am!!" ...

Anyway, on to the more serious considerations of the situation.

First, it's obvious that in your case, for the utmost legal protection, yes, you would want to Not Post Binary Software under places that have those ToS. Do the same terms exist on their paid service?

If so, then don't use their paid service for that either.

If not, then those terms on a dissimilar service should not be cause to not use the paid service for logical reasons. Certainly, there may be other causes (cost, reliability, whatever), but to say "I won't use your paid service because people who use your free service get what they pay for" doesn't fully make sense. People who are protecting their IP should hopefully be smart enough to read legalese (that is what IP is all about after all) and use only services or portions that don't cause IP issues.

Of course you can have a moral or personal belief cause for not using it, however if that is the case, then that is your own moral or personal belief. It's kind of like religion or politics. Shoving it in other peoples' faces is generally not cool. Sure, go ahead and PSA the facts, "The ToS on this is worded in such a way that it allows bad stuff to happen". But then let other people make their own decision whether to not-use that specific service, or whether they intend to spread out their disuse further. Where does it stop, otherwise? Do you not accept phone calls from anybody who uses AT&T cell phone service, for example?

That being said, can you find one case at all where AT&T/Y! has actually made use of that section of the ToS in a way that you would consider inappropriate? Have there been situations where text or non-media content has been appropriated badly?

I guess the whole "Catch more flies with sugar than vinegar" thing comes into play. As a customer, I have a very hard time finding horrible service unless there is a direct break down in the individual providing it (such as the McD's dude who was stoned at work). I bet even you are happier to fix things, respond and give detailed explanations to people who ask kindly with a genuine cause, rather than people who scream that something is wrong and you need to fix it or explain it to them now.

So perhaps you should get info from AT&T about it in a productive and contributory way? After all, they know they can't make everybody happy all the time, and your dislike is a drop in the bucket for all the business. They are not stupid enough to steal something just because the ToS says they can, because when that hits the news, it would have a major fallout. So bring up the confusion and concern, and see what comes of it.

NetFixer
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NetFixer

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said by KitFox:

Oy. XD

Okay, first thing, try to avoid falling into trollish traps. :\ I only put them around on rare occasion when I don't think anybody will fall for them. That is, don't respond to "who is stupid enough to...?" with "I am!!" ...

Don't worry, you didn't have to admit that you are a troll, anyone who reads your posts in this thread is certainly aware of that.

OTOH, there are some (including some moderators on this site) who might be naive enough to believe the BS that you posted, and I was just setting the record straight for their benefit.

As for the rest of your "advice", I think you know where you can stuff it.
KitFox
join:2002-10-09
Denver, CO

KitFox

Member

And that's the kind of response I expected.

Plus it feeds into my counterpoint perfectly. I trolled at the start of my post and you fell into it hook line and sinker. Then, because you decide to focus on only that, you disregard and dismiss any other relevant portions of the posts. Kind of like you disregarded and dismissed the other relevant portions of the ToS.

From the ToS:
iii. With respect to Content other than photos, graphics, audio or video you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Site other than Yahoo! Groups...

"Site" is capitalized, so it's a defined term. What's its definition?
It is defined in:
This Terms of Service & Terms of Use ("Agreement") along with the AT&T Acceptable Use Policy and the AT&T and Yahoo privacy policies, set forth your obligations, AT&T's obligations, and the rules you must follow when using the att.net portal and/or e-mail ("Site") and/or AT&T High Speed Internet, AT&T High Speed Internet Direct, AT&T Dial and AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet, FastAccess DSL and FastAccess Business DSL, Wireless Broadband provided by BellSouth Entertainment, LLC, BellSouth® Dial Internet Service ("Service(s)").

PWP (Personal web pages) are located on home.att.net, but that is not part of the portal. The above specifically says the att.net portal and/or email. So what is the att.net portal? A quick search on Google comes up with a simple answer at first glance:

ATT.NET - Email, News, Sports, Entertainment and Games
att.my.yahoo.com/
Welcome to the AT&T Portal! Stay informed with up to date news, weather, entertainment, sports, email, finance and more. At AT&T you have access to some of ...

Further investigation shows no connection between any of the user-controlled web services (PWP, Business Web Hosting, etc) and the att.net portal. Those portions are not the att.net portal, so the section that is being crowed about does not apply to them.

And before anybody goes pointing at "and/or e-mail" and jumping up and down, the whole "publicly accessible" requirement of item iii precludes that.

In summary, the whole panic and argument is based off a failure to follow relevant information and definitions.

Now. If you would like to dispute that with facts as opposed to trying to focus on the partial-trolling, feel free.

NetFixer
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The PWP sites (which I used as an example) are indeed covered by the same TOS as the one under discussion. Those PWP sites are indeed part of the "site" referred to in that same TOS. Here is the link to the PWP setup/signin page: »pwp.att.net/p/ and the TOS link on that page points to the same TOS that is being discussed (it is a different physical copy of the document, but the terms that are under discussion in this thread are the same). The reason that it might appear that the PWP sites are not part of the AT&T/Yahoo portal site (to someone who did not research it sufficiently) is probably because there is currently no direct link to the PWP setup page on the portal homepage. That is because the PWP sites are no longer being advertised to new users, and are now mostly a grandfathered feature for older customers. Since my quoting from the TOS on the PWP sites that I operate directly applies to those web sites, I have no reason to recant my editorial comments or remove the TOS quotes from those web sites.

One thing you are partly correct about is that the current TOS for AT&T's commercial web hosting service no longer contains the unlimited licensing crap (which is good, and I appreciate the prodding to look at the current TOS for that service). That change is probably because that particular service is no longer associated with Yahoo. When it was still associated with Yahoo, the TOS that I remember seeing was similar to the overall AT&T/Yahoo TOS that is under discussion in this thread. And that (along with a disagreement about running my »portscan.dcs-net.net service on their servers) is why I migrated from AT&T hosting.

Would I consider using the AT&T commercial hosting sites again now that the unlimited licensing claim is not present in that service's TOS?
FWIW the roflmao image above is currently being hosted on an AT&T PWP server.
celtictoad13
join:2009-02-25
Carlinville, IL

celtictoad13 to StuartMW

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With the utmost respect to all who post in this thread. Woz's comments seem to focus around a Individual consumer Cloud Computing and Not a Business Class Cloud computing. With that said, For those that do not take the time to read a Cloud providers TOS and not have an understanding of what you are agreeing to its your own damn fault.

As far as on a business side, it goes to the CTO to have an appropriate plan in place as to how they should manage their Cloud computing platform (IAAS, PAAS, SAAS). And what they put on the cloud and what they put on their own internal servers. How that appropriate data is managed ultimately falls to the policies and TOS agreements that a individual company and service providers agree to. And those companies, not the cloud providers, have appropriate working Back-Ups of what they are putting out on the cloud.

I am not saying that the Cloud is the" Be all end all" solution. But it is at this time a good platform to a business solution. And IMHO the Cloud is not right for the Individual user unless that user knows and understands the TOS.

Cloud Computing on a Business side has room to grow. And the folks over at »www.openstack.org/ have the right approach to organically understanding the need for standards within Cloud Computing. Something that Companies like Amazon Web Service, and AT&T do not have because they feel their closed cloud environments benefit their own legal pocket books and will whittle away with TOS that only benefit themselves and not their customers.
KitFox
join:2002-10-09
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As you observed, the ToS linked from the PWP is a copy of the other. A quick check in with AT&T verified that PWP are not legally considered part of the "att.net portal" as defined in the ToS and thus not defined as the "Site". Kind of like the ToS mention Fios (one of the "Services") yet is linked from places that don't involve Fios at all, such as my access to Yahoo through Comcast.

However, as observed by somebody else, this is probably not the best thread to be discussing it. *shrug*

wxboss
This is like Deja vu all over again.
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to goalieskates
said by goalieskates:

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.

Agree 100%. I was an early adopter of FB in its pioneer days. It was innocent enough then, but it now has so many security concerns that I quickly turned tail and ran the other direction.

I understand that the 'cloud' and FB are two different entities so to speak, but I reference it only because FB made me wary of jumping on new technology too soon.

The cloud makes sharing and storing data easy with promises of security intertwined in the package, but it really boils down to entrusting someone else with my stuff - a person (entity) which, by the way, I have never met personally.

David
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join:2002-05-30
Granite City, IL

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said by Link Logger:

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

I agree, I have my own cloud. I have a machine that is on 24/7/365 and a droboFS on my network. Granted if a fire happened tomorrow I might be in trouble but I stand a better chance of the wife burning down the house than I do. We had a gas leak last week in the house and the situation has been rectified, that was as close to danger as we got.

in the next years or so, I plan on moving my email to a imap type of system and on a paid email platform (probably fastmail.fm)

EGeezer
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join:2002-08-04
Midwest

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That's pretty bad - try this one on for size;

By submitting or otherwise making available any Member Content to IslandPacket.com, you automatically grant The Island Packet and IslandPacket.com a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable (through multiple tiers), license to use, modify, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, publish, adapt, create derivative works of, distribute, transfer or sell any such content, for any purpose, including commercial purposes and in connection with advertising for the sole benefit of IslandPacket.com (collectively, "use"), in any type of media or in any form now known or later developed, without any payment to you.

In addition, you automatically waive and give up any claim that any use of such content violates any of your rights, including privacy rights, publicity rights, moral rights or any other right, including the right to approve the way IslandPacket.com uses such content. You also grant The Island Packet and IslandPacket.com the right to use any material, information, ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques contained in any communication you provide, submit, or otherwise make available to IslandPacket.com or to The Island Packet for any purpose whatsoever, including, without limitation, commercial purposes.

I may be wrong, but I seem to recall that this paper's TOS had read as follows;

... automatically grant The Island Packet and IslandPacket.com an exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable (through multiple tiers), license ...

I'd linked to a photo in my Flickr account in a post on a local historical site. Instead of displaying the link, the DISQUS coding retrieved the image and stored it on their server.

When I sent a note explaining that I didn't want the photo uploaded to their site, and was not granting all those rights, they removed everything.

NetFixer
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NetFixer

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said by EGeezer:

...I'd linked to a photo in my Flickr account in a post on a local historical site. Instead of displaying the link, the DISQUS coding retrieved the image and stored it on their server...

Within the past year or so, this site also began converting external image links into local images. But I think that Justin's motive is more to prevent future dead links in posts than an attempt to hijack the image (and I suspect that there may have been complaints from other sites about the hotlinked images). But there is no advance warning that your image link is going to be converted into an image stored on a dslreports.com server, and there really should be such a warning displayed.

I know that as recently as perhaps two years ago, the image below would have been hotlinked to a server under my control using this code:


[img]http://www.nature-pics.com/photos/fallcreekfalls/fallcreekfalls-082802-008.jpg[/img]
 


But now (as you can see by clicking on the image), it is stored on this site's image server:




Here is a link to an older post in this site where a hotlinked image was still hotlinked rather than being converted into a locally stored image: »Re: Post your network diagrams here.. (which is what I intended so that the displayed image would be dynamically upgraded to match my current network picture)

EGeezer
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EGeezer

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The link still shows as a link here.

»www.flickr.com/photos/eg ··· ightbox/

But when I posted at the IP, the link was converted to a stored image. I haven't posted any more image links there since that one, so don't know if they still have it set up to retrieve the image.

BTW, nice photos!
Kearnstd
Space Elf
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Another big issue with the cloud is that pushing more and more to the cloud will only widen the technology gap. We still have huge areas of the US land wise that lack proper broadband and only have options with pitiful caps and huge overages. And now our hard wire options are heading down the cap and overage route too.

So the connections are not becoming cloud friendly.

Name Game
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Name Game to StuartMW

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I think when the Cloud gets as common as the Microwave..that is when the whole thing will go up in smoke.

»hosted.ap.org/dynamic/st ··· 16-02-48

Snowy
Lock him up!!!
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Snowy

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said by Name Game:

I think when the Cloud gets as common as the Microwave..that is when the whole thing will go up in smoke.

»hosted.ap.org/dynamic/st ··· 16-02-48

I don't know whether to laugh or cry...
Man sets fire to home by microwaving socks, undies
LONDON (AP) -- Note to self: A microwave is for leftovers, not your boxers.
British firefighters say they saved an apartment from destruction after its domestically challenged resident tried to dry his wet socks and underwear in a microwave oven.

»hosted.ap.org/dynamic/st ··· 16-02-48

It's seemed to me that the thread title/linked article could well have been
"Steve Wozniak predicts 'horrible problems' with internet...
Afterall, the 'cloud' is just a re-branded form of net usage.

Name Game
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join:2002-07-07
Grand Rapids, MI

Name Game

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I think he gave that speech a few other places now..and is promoting his book too. Decision..decisions. It is a rough place out there on the Internet.

Thaler
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join:2004-02-02
Los Angeles, CA

Thaler to Snowy

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Great. Now I want to try and microwave the cloud.

Juggernaut
Irreverent or irrelevant?
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join:2006-09-05
Kelowna, BC

Juggernaut

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Forget it. Stick to popcorn, it's safer.
MaynardKrebs
We did it. We heaved Steve. Yipee.
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MaynardKrebs to David

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said by David:

I agree, I have my own cloud. I have a machine that is on 24/7/365 and a droboFS on my network. Granted if a fire happened tomorrow I might be in trouble but I stand a better chance of the wife burning down the house than I do. We had a gas leak last week in the house and the situation has been rectified, that was as close to danger as we got.

Illinois?
Ever seen a 'twista' nearby?
Is your Drobo is a bunker in the basement, or was your house not built with a basement? Or is the water table too high to have a basement? Or is your house built in a flood zone?

Do you have surge suppression on the electrical system of the house and a good ground?
Do you have backup power to protect against corruption on writes?
Do you have backups of your backups?

David
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join:2002-05-30
Granite City, IL

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David

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most twisters seem to hit either east to southeast of my location. Most times they seem to be touching down in pontoon beach, IL going down IL162 or IL203. Drobo sits in an older coal bin, in the basement. My house (according to the recently updated federal flood plane plans) is not in the flood affected zone. My brother's house ended up in the flood plane this time but mine did not. What was funny was the police department is considered in the flood plane LOL!

Yes, I have surge suppressors and battery backups. I have an alpha power unit that takes 110v wired going in. It was designed to keep a parking gate 3Amp motor working (up and down) for up to 72 hours. Last time power went out in STL it told me it had enough power for 4+ days. I don't buy cheap "consumer grade" supplies, I buy the older commercial stuff and refurbish it.

I only have backups of backups of critical stuff, everything else is backed up to the drobo, which is a redundant disk array.

KrK
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Did you get this notice?

Looks like they are phasing that webspace out.

NetFixer
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NetFixer

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said by KrK:

Did you get this notice?

Looks like they are phasing that webspace out.

No I have not seen that particular notice (probably because most of the email from AT&T gets tagged as spam by their own email servers), but I knew that new customers could not create PWP accounts for quite some time (probably since at least a year ago) and that the service was only available as a grandfathered service.

For the time being all of my PWP accounts are still active and I still use them for non critical off-site storage. If they go away, I am not losing anything and I do have other on-line storage available to take its place.

FWIW, some of my AT&T PWP accounts are associated with ancient BellSouth ISDN accounts that have been closed for over a decade, so when I say I won't be losing anything if those accounts get closed, I really mean that I won't be losing anything.

I also suspect that even if they do shutdown http access to those sites, that ftp access may still be active (and that is primarily how I use it). That happened a couple of years ago when AT&T decided to purge all content related to the former worldnet.att.net customers. Some AT&T IT manager got carried away and shutdown all http access to all of the PWP sites that used the att.net domain, but ftp access remained active. After a great outcry from effected customers, they reluctantly restored http access for all but the forbidden worldnet customers. But it was shortly after that incident that they started making it difficult (if not impossible) for most new customers to create a PWP site.

Rocky67
Pencil Neck Geek
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join:2005-01-13
Orange, CA

Rocky67

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A little over a year ago AT&T shut down my pacbell.net PWP that I had for over 12 years. I'm still ticked off about it.
MaynardKrebs
We did it. We heaved Steve. Yipee.
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MaynardKrebs to David

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to David
said by David:

Yes, I have surge suppressors and battery backups. I have an alpha power unit that takes 110v wired going in.

My Alpha has 8 deep-cycle marine batteries on two shelves. I could add another 8 batteries easily. Runs a loooong time. Mine used to backup a PBX.

David
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Granite City, IL

David to StuartMW

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yea mine was designed for a parking gate for a parking garage. According to the specifications it is to keep a parking gate, ticket dispenser and fee computer working for up to 72 hours.
Kearnstd
Space Elf
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Kearnstd to StuartMW

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considering clouds are shared services, I would say before hosting a business on one is to make sure they can keep you online in the event that a "neighboring" site on the cloud gets in trouble.

by in trouble I mean if you have an online business of some kind... and on the same hardware cluster is say some site that turns out to offer pirated music and movies that when the FBI busts into the data center and steals the servers because being a government agency they are not bright enough to just ask the network admin to image the virtual server of the offender and instead just steal all the hardware related taking you down too.
armed
join:2000-10-20

armed

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said by Kearnstd:

considering clouds are shared services, I would say before hosting a business on one is to make sure they can keep you online in the event that a "neighboring" site on the cloud gets in trouble.

by in trouble I mean if you have an online business of some kind... and on the same hardware cluster is say some site that turns out to offer pirated music and movies that when the FBI busts into the data center and steals the servers because being a government agency they are not bright enough to just ask the network admin to image the virtual server of the offender and instead just steal all the hardware related taking you down too.

Yea that happens every day or two.