Cloud Based Storage Will Be A Great Tool For Evil.
54 2013-01-02 by WarHymn
It just occurred to me that with the internet and the addition of cloud based storage oppressive governments and organizations will no longer need to burn books and will even be able to censor in real time. So if they don't like a particular book or article, ZAP, its gone.
Even worse if they desire to rewrite something they can do this real time as well. So when you the concerned citizen want to reference something you read in the past you will never be certain that it wasn't edited since you read it last.
It will be like 1984 but easier. Instead of burning something in the memory hole they just press a button. Instead of reprinting lies they will just amend to what ever they want it to read as many times as needed.
Thoughts?
31 comments
9 [deleted] 2013-01-02
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2 possessed_flea 2013-01-02
back in the good old days everything was kept on the server and then simply displayed on 'terminals' .
Remote operating systems are never going to come back for the average user since they are essentially useless for all but high-end technical applications (and the microsoft remote desktop methods are simply too slow for anything serious. )
What you will see however is storage moving to the cloud for 'backup' purposes, (like what we see with the apple cloud and dropbox at the moment. ), I doubt that bandwidth will become cheap enough in my or your lifetime for this to be economically feasable to 'stream as you need'.
processing will remain local due to the cost, we will continue to have 'heavy clients' to remote data. as will editing, (who really prefers google docs to microsoft office.).
From a buisiness standpoint its cheaper to follow the iTunes model (allow download of content multiple times, but keep a local store of it) rather than the youtube model (download each time the media is accessed.)
If some scary badguy is going to try to 'remove' knowlidge they may be able to remove personal backups of a few versions of a file from cloud services, but they will never be able to get to people's local copies.
1 sean1705 2013-01-02
Google "VDI"
1 TRoS_LD 2013-01-02
Oh wow Virtual infrastructure. How scary. Does anyone understand how old this technology is? We're looking at jails on crack (that can actually handle processor and memory sharing ;P) and nothing more. This is as insecure as having a website.
1 sean1705 2013-01-02
Actually one of the most common reasons for a VDI deployment is situations that have very strict data security standards.
The technology is similar in principal to a mainframe but the implementations is miles ahead.
1 possessed_flea 2013-01-02
thats what I was talking about in regards to microsoft style remote desktops, (I guess X11 falls under this also.) On a local(ish) network with a set range of applications its fine. it does not scale well though, bandwidth, cpu power and ram are too expensive and software is taking more and more resources every day. Hell firefox, word and a OS together can eat up that whole 4 gig.
The cost of running something like this for 1000 users is astronomical compared to purchasing 1000 desktop machines. And with everything moving to mobile the cost of the bandwidth is even greater (and will remain that way for a long time to come. ) Latency on such things is also through the roof.
1 [deleted] 2013-01-02
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1 haveyouconsideredthe 2013-01-02
"matter of time" This is at least the 3rd attempt I can remember at dumb terminals to replace PCs all of the previous ones failed for the same reason the current ones will fail. People outside of corporations don't want them.
1 TRoS_LD 2013-01-02
Exactly! As I sit here, in front of my terminal, accessing a network I don't own, full of content that isn't mine...nah, it will never happen, we'll never be so connected we ... oh wait...
TD;IDAF We already love this "cloud" model as the internet, silly.
1 [deleted] 2013-01-02
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1 TRoS_LD 2013-01-02
Mandatory remote computing would require storage, and would require some client side interface, be it a thinclient /dumb terminal. Even if we somehow forgot how to store data, (hell write it down if you have to) we would still have a need for transferring the works of others. They would move from one Storage network to another. These networks can't consist of just wire and expect to store all their data among that latency. They will need a storage medium, and because of this limitation, your fears are unjustified.
However, it is still possible that such a day may come, and it is important for us to keep our minds working on solutions to the possible potential problems.
1 [deleted] 2013-01-02
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1 TRoS_LD 2013-01-02
Now that's an idea. That would be preferable. We could probably still extract usable data from the nodes without being noticed.
4 [deleted] 2013-01-02
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2 frostek 2013-01-02
You do realise that's almost any large company ever, don't you?
I mean forget your CoD save games, any company that uses a datacentre is basically using cloud computing. Do you really think they should have all their data locally in the actual office / factory where they all work?
3 Billistic 2013-01-02
I predict personal clouds will be the future norm. You'll run a machine off your router that will run something like http://owncloud.org/
1 eM_aRe 2013-01-02
I just got a Raspberry Pi and this was the first thing i set up.
This is definitely the future. It would be so easy to set up a social media network on a device like the Pi and you wouldn't have to worry who has your data or who is snooping on you communications (if you are encrypting).
2 pork2001 2013-01-02
Would you store all your vital data in one place (like a flash drive or phone) and then lose it, break it, or have it stolen? No. Then why trust the cloud without a local backup. And the people touting cloud backup are luring people to be complacent. One natural disaster or one corrupt government official, and your data is vapor. Plus, it's obvious the NSA's monster facility in Utah is going to get cloud data access.
As for news, the push to eliminate paper, end newspaper and magazines just makes it all the easier for history to get changed.
2 wongtong666 2013-01-02
Fahrenheit fucking 451
2 SoundSalad 2013-01-02
Good thing I prefer real books and will never store my only copy of files on a could!
2 timbricker13 2013-01-02
Anyone read Ready Player One? Fantastic book, and frighteningly plausible as more and more real money is used to pay for digital "possessions"
2 SHAGGSTaRR 2013-01-02
I think everyone in IT sensed "cloud" was contrived marketing language layered onto a process that had been happening ever since Google started offering their cache of web documents up to the public, and since they took the pop3/imap over http concept and really made it competitive with desktop applications.
Everyone I've worked with senses this "cloud" horseshit is getting to them from a corporate-media echo chamber from vendors who can bring business to themselves by telling you it's what's next and that you need it. Hosting companies and software houses like vmware who cater to hosting companies. Everyone in the IT ecosystem who serves services up from computers running a hypervisor of some sort as their main operating system.
A clever marketeer would then say that it's a natural recapitulation as current processing power brings an old idea like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_utility into reality..
Don't sign up for hosted services etc if you don't like them.
2 WarHymn 2013-01-02
I actually use google drive every day and its a cloud type free service. Its for work not personal. I do like the ease of document management but the ability for abuse seems huge to me.
2 SHAGGSTaRR 2013-01-02
That's right. I would be extra-wary, with it being Google, because they have everything necessary for drilling into that data and the connections between it to really plot you out and graph you as a consumer of their adverts.
I know how tinfoil-hat that may sound but to me that's just business sense, and the tinfoil bit is where I say: Then that data becomes shadow-government property for use in contingency planning and selecting domestic targets for testing whatever.
2 WarHymn 2013-01-02
I already know you are correct by the fact that the banner adverts on my gmail account reference things in my emails that I have not searched for. If I mention that I might like to go to Las Vegas for say, its not long after that I see lots of adverts for Las Vegas. I wrote an email referencing a bunch of topics about steel welding to a friend and then the adverts for welding units seemed to be extra heavy.
They are good at what they do.
2 SHAGGSTaRR 2013-01-02
Aye. One place I know "cloud" isn't just 2010s ad copy on 1999s VPS deal is with Amazon Elastic Compute. Amazon commit all inclusive multicultural slavery in those warehouses of theirs and keep their developers fatigued and fearing for their jobs but that scalable system (which this site relies on) was built from the ground up by their engineers for their engineers, then opened up to the public. Its ability to scale to demand at such scale (rather than something an enthusiast put together at home) for such low pricing, is genuinely new and worth talking about for developers/statisticians/enthusiasts, but it's still an extra rather than a necessity.
One thing I was thinking of regarding google drive is also Googles ability to mine imagery.
I can't remember which but iirc one of the founders wrote their thesis on image processing, and of course, they have plenty of practice with mining videos too courtesy of us giving them a few hours worth of video every minute via youtube.
If you were a datamining and advertising giant wouldn't you be mining the holiday photos and videos people are keeping safe with you, and seeing which brands they can be sold more of/converted to?
1 Afro-Ninja 2013-01-02
| if they desire to rewrite something they can do this real time as well. So when you the concerned citizen want to reference something you read in the past you will never be certain that it wasn't edited since you read it last.
this can/could already happen with wikipedia so I'm not sure what the big deal is
1 WarHymn 2013-01-02
If in the future we are all using the cloud it will matter. Wiki at least lets you track changes but that of course could be manipulated.
1 kryschtnob 2013-01-02
Fucking patriots!
On a serious note, this is a real problem that has already begun. There are several ways to bypass it though, like making your own "cloud" (in other words, buy a NAS and start hacking away).
1 funkarama 2013-01-02
Yep, this is the reason you should try to get your workplace to own servers of their own.