Discussion on:

The cloud is getting more secure, except from the government

I am extremely uncomfortable with rules that allow the government to bypass longstanding rules regarding warrants and probable cause when investigating crimes. My personal data is one thing, I mean who is really going to sift through my spam in order to find out which cat pictures from icanhascheezburger.com I think my wife will think are cute.

Business data, however, needs to be safe from any prying eyes. There are reasons that government officials are required to follow onerous procedures to pry into our lives. There should be probable cause to get a warrant from an impartial judge before anyone should be able to go through data, even if it is in the cloud.

What do you think?

The government should need to follow onerous procedures whenever it wants to look at something that doesn't belong to it. Since it is already tapping the tubes, why should it have to be any easier for it to look through neatly stored files?

There are some things I don't like about The Cloud.

One, it needs to be operating at five nines or better to even be a consideration. There has been a respectable amount of failure to do this over the past year.

Two, I don't want to see The Cloud evolve to the point that it is the only way to do things. I like having a desktop box, with local storage, and the ability to do what I want with my hardware and software. I can see the return of the internet appliance, with no market to support the production of actual computers available for purchase by the average consumer. It may be a long way off, or it may not, but I won't like it one bit.

Three, privacy and security need to be pretty darn absolute, free from meddling busybodies, criminals, and governments.

Good article, by the way.

and I agree with you re: all three points.

The notion that my business/personal data is secure outside my personal purview is nonsensical. My responsibilities belong within my aegis.

Your number two is of particular interest, in that should the dumb terminal become the standard, yet another layer of dependency is added to the already cumbersome layers currently in place.

What happens when the road crew cuts a necessary cable? How many are cut off from that which sustains them?

While external communications failure occurs in either circumstance, where data is maintained onsite, it is at least still available allowing any number of internal functions to continue. Not so if it's all 'in the cloud'.

Nothing to add to number three. Concise, self-explanatory.

Clouds - here today, gone tomorrow.

Now I feel that I need to be convinced that it isn't. Dreading severe weather, hoping for sun.

Where do DNSSEC and IPv6 fit in here?

The Cloud and RIA are going to be depending on better and expanding network. ISPs can be mysteriously cranky. Malware, ...ugh. Web 2.0 stuff depends on the tubes to run at five nines as well.

Keeping my fingers crossed.

...doesn't mean they're not out to get you!

The "Cloud" really is big-government's wet dream. Imagine, no more need to bother judges for warrants, or even travel to a site to find and collect hardware and then do digital forensics to pull hidden or encrypted data. Everything they might want on anyone is a few keystrokes away.

Paranoid, cynical, or just accustomed to disappointment, the reality is that there are so many ways for it to fail. Snoop Gov, being all the rage that it is, has the potential to make oh so many things fail for anyone concerned with their basic rights and privacy.
It's the trumped-up half of the Cold War all over again.

I'd love to be shocked and awed by seeing The Cloud become more useful, without over-reaching, and without invasion of privacy from any vector, including the governments.

For personal use, The Cloud is not an option. I prefer to keep some delusion of privacy and security.

For business use, in a business network hosted cloud not open to the outside network; absultely. It's there data in the first place and storing it along with business apps in an application server makes as much sense now as it has since the the start of shared systems. It's nothing new beyond rebranding but it's still a good consideration for a business.

not open to the outside network

Government and business network engineers, prick up your ears.

hehe..

It was sad when the 1st hacker forced law enforcement into the mix.

When the Bush administration started violating the Constitution and Bill of Rights it became intolorable.

It is trully a sad day though when we need protection from the law enforcement agencies themselves.

Think free-for-all and noble savage. Loosen your tie. You look uncomfortable.

All the comments so far seem to assume that all the cloud computing will be nationally based. I work in the UK, do I have to consider which government might have access to my data. Does Google store my data in the UK or USA or Australia or Taiwan? How can I tell. Neon Samurai perhaps had it right by considering business cloud computing for business, but isn't this just going back to the old Mainframe Computing approach? There is a case for some applications to be of that nature but many need to be at a personal or departmental control level.

That was one of the first thoughts I had about Cloud when it first started to be the hip term.

"but, are we not just returning to the mainframe and thin/dump terminal model again?"

But it's all branding and rebranding. Calling it mainframe/terminal or centralized computing isn't nearly as cool and new sounding as "The Cloud".

(now why does the imperial march play though my head every time I see that term..)