Category Archives: ‘Cloud’ computing

Stay Out of My Dropbox

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Hmmm… Thought-provoking post by Susan Orlean. As Dropbox becomes more ubiquitous this will become more of an issue for everyone.

Privacy became an issue the other day in the case of Dropbox, the popular online backup service. Apparently, in its original wording, Dropbox’s terms of service made it sound as if files stored there were encrypted, so employees couldn’t read them, even if they wanted to. But recently the wording was changed to something a little squishier: it now seems that employees are merely “prohibited” from reading files, rather than unable. I was dismayed when I heard this, because I use Dropbox constantly, but my dismay had more to do with seeing a good company handle an issue so clumsily than thinking my privacy was suddenly compromised. Millions of files are uploaded to Dropbox every day. Even the biggest nosey body in the world couldn’t go through that much stuff.

Don’t give your data to cloud providers. Just lend it to them.

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Interesting NYT column by Richard Thaler.

Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site. Think of it this way: you have lent the company your data, and you’d like a copy for your own use.

This month in Britain, the government announced an initiative along these lines called “mydata.” (I was an adviser on this project.) Although British law already requires companies to provide consumers with usage information, this program is aimed at providing the data in a computer-friendly way. The government is working with several leading banks, credit card issuers, mobile calling providers and retailers to get things started.

To see how such a policy might improve the way markets work, consider how you might shop for a new cellphone service plan. Two studies have found that consumers could save more than $300 a year by switching to the right plan. But to pick the best plan, you need to be able to estimate how much you use services like texting, social media, music streaming and sending photos.

You may not know how to answer or be able to express it in megabytes, but your service provider can. Although some of this information is available online, it’s generally not readily exportable — you can’t easily cut and paste it into a third-party Web site that compares prices — and it is not put together in a way that makes it easy to calculate which plan is best for you.

Under my proposed rule, your cellphone provider would give you access to a file that includes all the information it has collected on you since you owned the phone, as well as the current fees for each kind of service you use. The data would be in a format that is usable by app designers, so new services could be created to provide practical advice to consumers. (Think Expedia for calling plans.) And this virtuous cycle would create jobs for the people who dream up and run these new Web sites.

Freedom from the Cloud?

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This morning’s Observer column.

“The novelties of one generation,” said George Bernard Shaw, “are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.” An excellent illustration is provided by the computing industry, which – despite its high-tech exterior – is as prone to fashion swings as the next business. Witness the current excitement about the news that, on 2 March, Apple is due to announce details of the new iPad, the latest incarnation of what the Register disrespectfully calls an “uber-popular fondleslab”. Yves Saint Laurent would have killed for that kind of excitement about a forthcoming collection.

To put the hysteria into some kind of context, however, consider how we got into this mess…

Put not your faith in Cloud services — contd.

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Dave Winer again.

Twitter pressed a button tonight, and not just the one marked “Kill.”

They sent two wakeup calls to their users:

1. Hey it would be safer to use our client to access Twitter.

Subtext: We’re not going to kill our own app.

2. We will kill your use of Twitter if it suits us.

Just when people were starting to think that Twitter could be used for serious stuff, you know — like news, and revolutions.

When Amazon kicked WikiLeaks off, without adequate explanation, they did far more damage to their own rep than they did to WikiLeaks. Everyone knew WikiLeaks is a hot potato. What we didn't know is how little heat it would take Amazon to dump one of their customers. It would be one thing to stand up to repeated court orders and finally cave. But in this case, there wasn’t even a judgment against WikiLeaks. They kicked them off because it suited them. And that killed Amazon as an environment for journalism. RIght there. If they ever want to get that back they have a lot of explaining to do.

Now this one tweet from ABC’s Jake Tapper puts it all in perspective. “Twitter killed my ubertwitter.” He got the subject and object of that correct, and the verb.

What if, just saying — one of the revolutionaries in Cairo or Bahrain or Tripoli was using UberTwitter or Twidroid. Not impossible you know. What if they went to send a message, one that might save lives, and found out that Twitter had shut them off.

Yep.

Don’t build your business round Twitter. They may pull the plug on you.

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From Dave Winer.

today Twitter pulled the switch on two high volume Twitter clients, UberTwitter, the leading Blackberry Twitter client, and Twidroyd, which was the leading client on Android until Twitter shipped their own. Both are part of the newly formed conglomeration of Twitter client software in a $17.5 million tech/media company called UberMedia founded by Bill Gross.

I used to boast how Twitter was creating a coral reef which would support a thriving and diverse ecosystem. That was then, but now they’re running a stalag or gulag (a Russian variety of stalag). We don't know what Bill Gross and/or his team of developers did to piss off Twitter, which is itself a problem (the not knowing).

Keeping all your pictures in the Cloud? Are you sure about that?

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Instructive tale of how someone lost 4,000 photos as a result of an accidental deletion by Flickr.

When Mirco Wilhelm tried to log into his Flickr account yesterday, he was surprised to find that his 5-year-old Pro account with roughly 4,000 photographs had completely vanished. It then dawned on him that only a week earlier he had reported another account for posting stolen photographs.

He immediately wrote to Flickr and received an apologetic reply. But…

Unfortunately, I have mixed up the accounts and accidentally deleted yours. I am terribly sorry for this grave error and hope that this mistake can be reconciled. Here is what I can do from here:

I can restore your account, although we will not be able to retrieve your photos. I know that there is a lot of history on your account–again, please accept my apology for my negligence. Once I restore your account, I will add four years of free Pro to make up for my error.

Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Again, I am deeply sorry for this mistake.

So… back to my question: do you keep your pics in the Cloud?

UPDATE:Happy endings Department. Flickr eventually succeeded in restoring his photographs. And they gave him a 25-year free Pro account to make up for the fright. Thanks to all the readers who told me about it.

The real reason why Amazon cut off WikiLeaks

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Dave Winer thinks he knows. And my guess is that he’s right.

Here’s how he tells it.

Today I got a promotional email from Kay Kinton, Senior Public Relations Manager for Amazon Web Services, entitled “Amazon Web Services Year in Review.” It contained a paragraph, quoted below, that explains how their government business grew in 2010.

“Government adoption of AWS [Amazon Wb Services] grew significantly in 2010. The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board became the first government-wide agency to migrate to a cloud-based environment when it moved Recovery.gov to AWS in March 2010. Today we have nearly 20 government agencies leveraging AWS, and the U.S. federal government continues to be one of our fastest growing customer segments. The U.S. General Services Administration awarded AWS the ability to provide government agencies with cloud services through the government's cloud storefront, Apps.gov. Additional AWS customers include Treasury.gov, the Federal Register 2.0 at the National Archives, the openEI.org project at DoE’s National Renewable Energy Lab, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at USDA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. The current AWS compliance framework covers FISMA, PCI DSS Level 1, ISO 27001, SAS70 type II, and HIPAA, and we continue to seek certifications and accreditations that make it easier for government agencies to benefit from AWS. To learn more about how AWS works with the federal government, visit: http://aws.amazon.com/federal/.”

Dave writes that “It makes perfect sense that the US government is a big customer of Amazon’s web services. It also makes perfect sense that Amazon wouldn’t want to do anything to jeopardize that business. There might not have even been a phone call, it might not have been necessary.”

This strikes me as being spot on. Amazon’s original reasons for dropping WikiLeaks always seemed feeble — and indeed unlikely to stand up in court. But the company’s decision has been useful in drawing attention to the underlying issue. Political discourse is increasingly conducted via cloud services like Amazon’s. That means that it’s moved into a space that is essentially private. As someone observed at the beginning of the WikiLeaks affair, it’s as if our political discourse had moved from the parks and streets and into shopping malls. And that means that important aspects of free speech will henceforth exist at the mercy of corporate whim. This is bad news for democracy.

“Net neutrality” — now that would be a good idea.

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Dave Winer’s post about Net Neutrality reminded me of the story about Mahatma Gandhi arriving at Tilbury Docks in London and being asked by a reporter what he thought of Western Civilisation. “Ah”, said the Mahatma, thoughtfully. “Western civilisation — now that would be a good idea.”

The idea is that the transport layer, operated by telephone companies and cable companies, must transport all bits across their lines at the same rate and cost. Nice idea, but it’s hypocritical to demand that of their vendors when they don’t provide it to their users. For some reason they are never called on this hypocrisy by the tech press.

At the PDFleaks conference in NYC last Saturday I said that after Amazon booted WikiLeaks from EC2 that signaled very clearly that there is no such thing as net neutrality. Here’s a service provider, very analogous to Comcast and Verizon, that decided it wasn’t in its economic interest to carry a user’s bits. It wasn’t just about the level or cost of the service, they cut them off totally. Without adequate explanation of why. Saying they were doing something illegal is no explanation at all. That’s not for Amazon to decide, that’s for the courts. Due process is required to prove that something illegal is happening. And many legal experts believe that there’s nothing illegal about WikiLeaks.

Yep. That’s why one of the long-term implications of the WikiLeaks row will be a re-evaluation of the value and risks of cloud computing.

The WikiLeaks bunker?

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From Christopher Mims:

If Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is trying to turn himself into a Bond villain, he’s succeeded: the ongoing distributed denial of service attack against Wikileaks has forced his minions to move the site to a fortified data center encased in a cold war-era, nuke-proof bunker encased in bedrock. Really.

The host is called Bahnhof, and considering that the attacks against Wikileaks already forced its original host, PRG, to boot the site, and its second host, Amazon.com, to bow to political pressure to do the same, one wonders why Swedish Bahnhof would take on the challenge of hosting a site that will probably be under permanent attack for the foreseeable future.

Unless it’s for the PR value: Bahnhof has hosted Wikileaks before.

The chap who made the movie seems inordinately amused by it.

Where the computer went

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This Google video provides a company-approved tour of one of its data centres (aka server farms). I’m writing about the environmental impact of cloud computing at the moment, and rediscovered it when going through the research files for my book. It provides an interesting glimpse of the heavy engineering that lies behind cloud computing.