Out of the Clouds
If there is one thing that my husband and I are staunchly against in the world of t’Internet and computing, it’s cloud computing. We are rather wary of the idea of all of our data being elsewhere… and having to use/pay to use (?) a service to access it. My data is mine and should be under my control, not ‘conveniently located online’ under someone elses’ jurisdiction. Not that I have anything bad or illegal, mind (as some will argue that only those who are guilty would have issues with such a thing as a bullying tactic!), but y’know… mine. Not theirs.
So when we see stories like this, we smile:
Microsoft online services hit by major failure
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455
Now, I get the argument that it’s nice to be able to access your data from wherever in the world at all times. But if you’re really that fussed about reaching all your mp3s and pornography and cannot find a streaming service to scratch the itch, it’s not like you cannot set up your own cloud on your own machine under your own autonomy! Okay, I know that it sounds hard and confusing and all of that (I know I don’t want to do it), so it’s easier to default to seemingly safe options provided by other folks. Heck, we’ll eschew the concept, and still make use of products like Live Mesh, so it’s not like the concept is all bad… but you won’t see me moving to Chrome OS in the near future either. 😉 Maybe if I played nothing but web games… but looking at my precious (my preeecciooous) Sims, I think I’ll stick to where I am.
We do have a home cloud and server and that’s been useful whilst I have been out of the country – but I use the general cloud for documents that I actively want to share with others, like a public calendar, like my photograph albums, like collaborative projects with global parners, because I don’t want to have to insist that everyone logs to our home server for such things and actually, from a security point of view would prefer less access to our home server – the less people that access that, the less chance of malicious activity.
Excellent point! The husband and I do make use of Google Docs for things that we want to share with others that we deem low security. 🙂 And you two were actually point of discussion at home yesterday for this very reason – N remembered you had a home server. It’s more that I’m wary of being sold access to my music, books, pictures, programs, etc – that strikes me as shady.