Showing posts with label the cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the cloud. Show all posts

Monday, January 30, 2012

US Attorney General's strong arming of MegaUpload: Another reason the cloud is a bad idea

An attorney for MegaUpload -- which was shut down by the US government earlier this month, and whose assets have been frozen, following copyright complaints from the entertainment industry -- says that the US Attorney General is planning to destroy all its user data within a week. With its assets frozen, MegaUpload can no longer pay to host its data with its service provider, and so the AG will cooperate with the erasure of tens of millions of users' personal files -- backups, family photos, personal videos, financial records, and even movies and music in production by independent artists who used MegaUpload as a file-locker while their produced their work. TorrentFreak characterizes this as the destruction of evidence, and I think that's right.

Read more here.

Monday, October 31, 2011

Why the cloud is a really bad idea..cont

On the net, trust no one, not even the cloud.

ON APRIL 13 of this year, a Wednesday, my wife got up later than usual and didn’t check her e‑mail until around 8:30 a.m. The previous night, she had put her computer to “sleep,” rather than shutting it down. When she opened it that morning to the Gmail account that had been her main communications center for more than six years, it seemed to be responding very slowly and jerkily. She hadn’t fully restarted the computer in several days, and thought that was the problem. So she closed all programs, rebooted the machine, and went off to make coffee and have some breakfast.

When she came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all.


Her gmail account had been hacked...

a message from Google’s help system arrived in my account, with instructions on how Deb could at last reset her password and regain control of her information.

She did so, and logged into her Gmail account with enormous relief, which lasted perhaps five seconds. When she looked at her Inbox, and her Archives, and even the Trash and Spam folders in her account, she found—absolutely nothing. Of her allocated 7 gigabytes of storage, 0.0 gigabytes were in use, versus the 4+ gigabytes shown the day before. Six years’ worth of correspondence and everything that went with it were gone. All the notes, interviews, recollections, and attached photos from our years of traveling through China. All the correspondence with and about her father in the last years of his life. The planning for our sons’ weddings; the exchanges she’d had with subjects, editors, and readers of her recent book; the accounting information for her projects; the travel arrangements and appointments she had for tomorrow and next week and next month; much of the incidental-expense data for the income-tax return I was about to file—all of this had been erased. It had not just been put in the “Trash” folder but permanently deleted.


Read more here.

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Amazon vs. the music industry

Hell hath no fury like a middleman scorned.

Amazon launched two new services, Cloud Drive and Cloud Player, earlier this week. U.S. Amazon customers can get free online storage from Amazon to use for whatever they please, but users are heavily encouraged to upload their local music libraries. All Amazon MP3 purchases are automatically synced to the user’s Cloud Drive without counting against the quota, too.

Once the music is copied to the remote drive, users can then use the Cloud Player Android or Web app to stream the music to any compatible device or browser, even if the files themselves had not been synced there.


Read more here.