ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD

FUCK THE CLOUD

This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this position. So here we go.

FUCK THE CLOUD.

By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, and a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand. These machines are connected via the internet, and if you have a company then these other machines are not machines run by your company, and if you’re a person they are giving it to you without you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that says “and I mean it“.

Can I be clearer than that? It’s a sucker’s game. It’s a game suckers play. If you are playing it, you are a sucker.

The term, like many of its sort, has deep, deep roots in the industry that it’s being foisted upon. I’m in no mood to find specific citations today but you can be assured that the idea of a “cloud” to represent the outside network was on whiteboards that I saw working as a temp in NYNEX research labs in the late 1980s. And even by that date, it was an understood context, one going back years before. Â (Terms I’ve seen retrofitted to give both the sense of timeliness and timelessness include zero-day, warez, and the war- prefix).

But this new round of it comes pre-packaged with marketer infestation. After all, it’s a great word: it insinuates soft fluffiness, a size and grandeur, and a fuzzy meaninglessness. So if you fail to deal with the underlying hard facts and cases, who can blame you? It’s a cloud. Soft, huggable cloud, I do love you and your rounded edges.

But what this all kind of hides is the situation of how you feel about stuff you generate.

Let me step aside and say that as a historian guy, I am big into collecting a lot of cast-offs. This is what I do. I’ve downloaded thousands of podcasts and millions of blog posts and a lot of other insane stupid stuff. We’ll get from that what we can, in the future. This is not about that.

This is about your data. This is about your work. This is about you using your time so that you make things and work on things and you trust a location to do “the rest” and guess what, here is what we have learned:

If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models. This is kind of like firemen sitting around giggling at you because you weren’t aware of the inherent lightning-strike danger of improperly bondedÂ CSST.
Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they, themselves are fired because the company is out of business.
You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

These questions that you have all work around that other overused word: value. To me, history guy, your old junk you used to do is of interest to me. But there’s a lot of people and a lot of stuff, so I wouldn’t want you to do it just for little ol’ me. But for yourself? What about yourself?

What of your work do you value? All of it? Likely not. The time you spend downloading a lot of porn, for example, is pretty cool, and if you lost all the porn, you’d probably be unhappy, but you could probably get the porn back or brand new porn that’s like porn 3.0 and new levels of porn. Probably the same for movies, for music – oh no, this data is gone, but why worry about it, you didn’t make the music or movies, so it’ll work itself out.

Less so the things you make: the writing, the linking of friends, the combined lists you collaborate on – maybe that has some value to you. When you die, of course, everyone else starts attaching arbitrary value to things you worked on or forgot about. A childhood photo of you has new meaning because the person the child became is gone. The essay you wrote in elementary school about being successful has more meaning because you turned out to be very successful. Again, this is value imposed from outside.

So what, then? What is really of meaning to you? Your twitters? Your weblog entries? Your list of bookmarks? Your photos? What?

Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service (or ad-supported service), quietly flinging you past an End User License Agreement that indicates that, at the end of the day, you might as well as dragged all this stuff to the trash. If it goes, it’s gone.

There was a time when we gave the Cloud (before it was a Cloud) a big pass because technology was kind of neat and watching it all actually function is cool. I mean, if someone gives you an amazing Moon Laser and the Moon Laser lets you put words on the side of the moon, the fact that the Moon Laser’s effects wear off after a day or so isn’t that big a deal, and really, whatever you probably put on the side of the Moon with your Moon Laser is probably pretty shallow stuff along the lines of “WOW THIS IS COOL” and “FUCK MARS”. (Again, to belabor, a historian or anthropologist might be into what people, given their Moon Laser, chose to write, but that’s not your problem). Similarly so, with those early BBS writings, or the first web forums, or the first photo album sites, or the sites from 1993 and 1994. Interesting, neat, but your “work” among these halting baby steps isn’t causing you despair if it goes away. (And you’re pleasantly surprised when it shows up again, sometimes.)

Contrast, though, when people are dumping hundreds of hours a year into the Cloud. Blowing out photos. Entering day after day of entries. Sharing memories, talking about subjects that matter to them. Linking friends or commenting on statuses or trading twitters or what have you. This is a big piece, a very big piece of what is probably important stuff.

Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please:

Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.
Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Don’t let them.
Recognize a Cloud when you see it. Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. You are giving people stuff for free. I pay for Vimeo and I pay for Flickr and a couple other things. This makes me a customer. Neither of these places get my only copy of anything.
If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties are cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow.

And that’s that.

Comments (121) left to “FUCK THE CLOUD”

Dezro wrote:

I have decided that “fucking the cloud” is what Porn 3.0 is all about.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 4:08 pm | Permalink
Be careful of what you blow into the Cloud « Crashed Pips wrote:

[...] (that is, the man with the personal motto of ‘we are going to rescue your shit’) has blogged, rather bluntly, about an important point. Donâ€™t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the [...]

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 4:42 pm | Permalink
l.m.orchard wrote:

Thank you. I’ve been tossing around the idea of writing a blog post just like this one, with the same title, for awhile now.

I’ve also been thinking that this is the year that I write self-hosted replacements or archiving proxies between me and all the cloud services I use.

I’ve not developed an archival habit with respect to other people’s shit, but I’m hoping that releasing tools that work for me can help others DIY. We’ll see how far I get.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 4:42 pm | Permalink
Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog » Blog Archive » The Cloud wrote:

[...] Jason Scott: “Donâ€™t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff.” [...]

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 5:56 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

Rob Sayre’s weblog posting is so inherently deluded I’m copying it here before he comes to his senses:

Jason Scott: â€œDonâ€™t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff.â€

Go ahead and put Stuff in the Cloud.

Using the Cloud doesnâ€™t mean you have to trust it. The catch is that you have to not care, which is not really a catch, since the alternative is that your Stuff ends up owning you.

Caring about Stuff means you will fret about the fate of your tweets, the archival qualities of your home movies, the posthumus hosting of your blog, and your home will have closets full of computers.

Egotism is expensive.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 6:34 pm | Permalink
Matt McKeon wrote:

Great article. People are completely ignorant of “cloud services”; they enjoy sharing their lives on Twitter for instance, but don’t realize there is no direct and easy way to save those moments.

But, the people who care about their data are doing something about it and that’s great.

We just need more people who actually care.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 7:00 pm | Permalink
Max wrote:

Amen.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 7:43 pm | Permalink
Michal Migurski wrote:

Thanks for writing this – between this and your previous article about AOL, I’d say it’s high time to code up some de-clouding software that regular people can use, code that takes all your tweets or bookmarks or photos or what-have-you, and outputs it to a regular old folder full of regular old HTML. I’m ready to do this for Del.icio.us and Twitter, the two services I use.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 8:20 pm | Permalink
Jim Leonard wrote:

I think using the term “cloud” is misleading, because you’re really damning free social networking sites, not cloud computing. Cloud computing proper is where you pay people money to hold your shit, and yes, they are responsible for not losing it.

This is the longest post I’ve ever seen that says “do not put your only copy of data on a site you do not pay for or trust.”

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 8:29 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

No, see, the problem, Jim, is that the term “cloud” is now being used everywhere, by everyone, and just like everything has good implementation and bad, the term is now too alluring for everyone not to use it constantly in ways that delight, amaze and sucker.

The term is dead before it hit the ground.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 8:37 pm | Permalink
Robert Sayre wrote:

“Rob Sayreâ€™s weblog posting is so inherently deluded Iâ€™m copying it here before he comes to his senses”

Thanks for writing my new blog subtitle!

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 9:37 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

I had an awesome review of me that used to be on the top of the page before my redesign/migration to Wordpress. It said, and I do quote:

“Jason Scott is an arrogant, self-impressed idiot who thinks he’s god’s gift to techies because he remembers “the golden days” of BBS’s. I met him at my first (and last) slashdot “meetup”; he dominated the conversation amongst a table of eight, spending hours talking about his favorite subject: himself.”
SuperBanana, August 28, 2006

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 9:52 pm | Permalink
Steve Webb wrote:

You put it very succinctly and eloquently. My feelings exactly. I’d prefer the client/server model with a bunch of apps running on my desktop where I can access them. It’s faster, it’s more reliable, and I have control over them. If I need some data on another machine, that’s what VPNs are for. Backups are not hard to set up, so the auto-backup argument of “the cloud” is bogus. I find that local apps are much faster anyway. I don’t even like using IMAP for email – I like my email stored locally, so I can manipulate it all faster. Sure, I give up on some convenience, but I love having control.

Posted on 19-Jan-09 at 9:58 pm | Permalink
Pacific Tides » Get Your Data Back wrote:

[...] Scott over at ASCII has a rather hearty rant about the Cloud we are supposed to put all our data in. And he is absolutely right. In fact, it [...]

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 12:27 am | Permalink
Adi R wrote:

I want to say that I disagree completely.
First, generalizing the “cloud” is wrong. We should, and will, make a cloud of everything soon, including your own home network, corporate networks, etc. So this generic thing you have against cloud, doesn’t hold water.
Second, obviously you should have a copy of everything you “share”, and see cloud as simply useful utility, no more. But how is this a “surprise” to anyone? Are there really people out there that Upload photos to Flickr and delete local copies?
Cloud is here to stay and we need to Embrace it, and learn to take full advantage of it, Porn 3.0 aside…

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 12:51 am | Permalink
JosefA wrote:

Coherent arguments are not made up of ad hominem, says this “sucker”.

I don’t see any connection at all between cloud as it is used in “cloud computing” and clouds on a network diagram. One is just a convenient name and the other is just, well, a way to annotate a network entity. Tracing cloud computing back to your 80s network diagram is reaching.

I think it’s mature to figure out how new technologies and architectures can be pragmatically employed. Blanket dismissal is to your own disadvantage.

Regardless of whether cloud computing is new or just a rehash of the old, the mere fact that it is becoming fashionable means that market momentum places it at a completely different price/performance point, and from that perspective it is “new” (even if the specifics of the architecture might not be) and a responsible IT professional won’t dismiss it just because it’s got a new name.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 2:30 am | Permalink
Mona wrote:

This is something that I have thought of often, though I don’t know enough about server-side-anything to have thought in these terms. But I share the sentiment. I realized that there are countless dead links out there, that used to be something. I wrote a paper in high school that I also submitted to an amateur creative writing site, and it was featured on the homepage at the time. I went back years later to retrieve the writing, and the website still existed, but was not functional anymore and I was unable to access any of the content from the past submissions. Luckily, I emailed the owner of the website, since his email address was still visible in the site’s footer, in plain text. He sent it to me, which was very cool. But that’s the only case where I’ve been lucky. I save hard copies, as well as upload files that are important to me on SEVERAL different free “services” since the probability of all of them disappearing at the same time is pretty slim, unless that is a misconception.

But I TOTALLY agree with discouraging the use of any site that doesn’t allow you to make other copies of your own work. That’s bull shit.

To be honest, and this is a little embarrassing…I wasn’t sure what the article was about, after just reading the title of the post. But my only guess was that perhaps you meant tag clouds…thanks for making me feel stupid.

And one more thing…are you single? After reading this article, and following it up by reading your quotation of a personal testimonial, I think you’re kind of hot. And no, I’m not joking.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 5:28 am | Permalink
ross wrote:

The Buddha would not have used Cloud.

“Do not Cloud your judgment”

He would have said.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 5:32 am | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

Good morning, giggling fireman. Yes, I am saying that some people don’t keep local copies of stuff. Also, if you have time in between giggles, note the part where I talk about using Vimeo and Flickr, sites that some people put into the “Cloud”, but which I utilize as a paying customer. I do a lot of things with The Cloud, except for inherently trust it, and not care whether it has an export function for data I care about that I generate.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 6:18 am | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

We’ll agree to disagree, mostly because you’re wrong and it’s no fun arguing with wrong people.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 6:18 am | Permalink
John Bender wrote:

Nice link bait.

The real promise of the cloud has nothing to do with the end user, but the more cost effective and efficient use of hardware as a service for scalability.

Maybe it should have been “Fuck People Who Put Personal Information on the Web with no Guarantee”.

Cheers

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 7:15 am | Permalink
Flack wrote:

There are two Google headlines today. One is the one you mentioned (“Google video going away”). The other is, Google Drive will soon replace your hard drive by allowing you to copy everything up to the cloud. They probably should have spaced those two announcements apart a little bit to sell me on the second one.

A friend of mine who works for a nameless Fortune 500 company offers “Cloud Web Hosting.” When I asked him what they meant, he said, “webhosting on virtual servers.” It’s official; “cloud” means anything you want.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 8:15 am | Permalink
Mona wrote:

I’m now stalking you, via twitter.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 8:36 am | Permalink
MrMan wrote:

Isn’t this crappy blog posted on Cloud? Buddha had his disciples blog Sutras for him, he did not blog. Mona I think you are hot, you should be part of the Cloud.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 9:26 am | Permalink
Paul O'Brian wrote:

I read this and thought: he is absolutely right, and I am a sucker.

I am off to archive my ljs RIGHT NOW.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 1:06 pm | Permalink
Frank wrote:

The first thing you have to do is understand what cloud computing is.

You aren’t even arguing against cloud computing, you are arguing against websites. Those websites may or may not be based on cloud computing. Cloud computing is about the infrastructure, not the application.

Twitter is NOT cloud computing.

Anyone who argues against cloud computing and then calls Twitter, gmail, hotmail, flickr, etc cloud computing doesn’t have a fucking clue.

so what i say is go fuck yourself and get a fucking clue and then you can waste people’s time with your ranting bullshit.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 3:09 pm | Permalink
Chucho wrote:

Frank, you have absolutley no fucking idea what cloud computing is. Cloud computing is a trap!! Web-based programs like Google’s Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time. According to Richard Stallman, the concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 3:29 pm | Permalink
Jim wrote:

I didn’t read the article or the comments but let me add my opinion anyway:

You are an idiot.

Data storage costs money one way or another. I for one *love* that Amazon leases me high-speed, high-availability storage for pennies in the cloud. And I’m now making a killing re-selling Amazon’s infrastructure to my clients. The raw costs are cheap and the support costs are zero.

And my and my clients data is available everywhere. Always.

I’ve done all the alternatives: built and maintain a raid array on my LAN, managed both my own T1 with my own servers, leased shared hosting and leased dedicated hosting.

All of these suck.

My raid array still needs to be backed up off-site. (Guess where I store it? Amazon S3). I can’t maintain 99.9% uptime on both a data link and a box on my own without losing sleep. Shared hosting is oversold, and dedicated hosting is expensive and wasteful.

So now I make sweet sweet love to the cloud, and in return it rains down pennies.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 4:54 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

I didnâ€™t read the article or the comments but let me add my opinion anyway: You are an idiot.

Evening, Jim. From Slashdot, I presume.

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 5:00 pm | Permalink
Ã¦on wrote:

The best definition of cloud I saw is rich unger’s “outsourcing your data”. When your primary resource is your data (whether you’re an enterprise, or an independent creator) you have to think extra hard before you outsource it. Most of the times the answer to outsourcing of the primary resource is “don’t”. Techies recognize that, when it comes to outsourcing developers to india in core IT enterprises (there’s an article on the subject in joel’s book) . But cloud is new and shiny and it’s almost all about the tool construction, so the bullshit detectors fail to go off. Considering that techies also tend to mostly ignore the significance of the result (e.g. “a book”), and fetishize the means (e.g. “emacs vs. Word”), there’s really no surprise that there’s so much unchallenged hype.

(i’ve not come up with that, i found the original thought here http://blogs.concedere.net:8080/blog/discipline/software+engineering/?permalink=All-In-to-the-Cloud.html)

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 5:40 pm | Permalink
George Glass wrote:

I’ve lost so much shit in the cloud it is not funny! I don’t think it’s fair either…maybe Barack can do something about this…I really don’t like the cloud. Thank you author!

Posted on 20-Jan-09 at 7:59 pm | Permalink
ross wrote:

i don’t give a fuck whether they call it cloud or mashed fucking potatoes it’s still not trustworthy.

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 4:42 am | Permalink
Michael wrote:

Funny, weren’t the same things said about eCommerce when it first hit? “I’d never trust a site taking my credit card.” Sure, there are still issues with security and privacy as related to eCommerce.” But wait now, could we live without our Amazon’s or other eCommerce-enabled sites? Hmmm.
Also, your “understanding” of Cloud Computing is very shallow. Sure, Gmail is the cloud but it’s much broader and deeper than that. Of course you can bash and bad mouth things you don’t fully understand…and raise the FUD factor. New isn’t bad, new is different and takes time to be fully vetted, then either adopted or discarded. It’s your call.
In the meantime, you can live in “history” but you might want to check out: http://www.nohardware.com as it sheds a different perspective on this…with a bang!

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 7:54 am | Permalink
Reuven Cohen, CTO Enomaly Inc wrote:

Although I don’t agree with your thesis, I love the way you describe it. Keep us thinking.

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 8:53 am | Permalink
Flack wrote:

Mmmmmm. Mashed fucking potatoes …

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 11:40 am | Permalink
Everything is a Freaking DNS problem wrote:

Oldskool, Fuck the Cloud …

This comment by Jim Leonard, Trixter/Hornet for those who still remember our previous lives , is right on the spot.

“This is the longest post Iâ€™ve ever seen that says â€œdo not put your only copy of data on a site you do not pay for or trust.â€
…

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 11:43 am | Permalink
Rohan Jayasekera wrote:

Your title and rant are certainly attention-getting, but in the end your post could be entitled “HARNESS THE CLOUD”. Your list of four points toward the end is an excellent guide to making good use of the cloud instead of being victimized by it. I too take my own backups, and only rely on services that I pay for — and I’m a big fan of the cloud.

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 12:27 pm | Permalink
John wrote:

There is a third way.

I have never been excited about “the cloud” (about as substantive a label as “web 2.0″) mainly because the protocols and methodology are not truly open and there is a very, very high level of complexity underlying products that should be as simple as possible.

For instance, what is more “open” ? Accessing blocks of data stored as tables in a database cluster using a very high level scripting language ? Or just get/put over SFTP ? I know that on paper these methods are extremely efficient and suitable for back end serving, etc. I am sure someone out there absolutely requires the feature-set that these services provide. But most people do not – and certainly not end users.

The logical option is self-providing these services, which is also not viable for many people. Self-providing an extremely fault-tolerant, highly available infrastructure is prohibitive in many ways for most.

The third way are the small number of providers, like rsync.net, that present highly available, enterprise level services that are NOT in “the cloud”. Real files stored on real filesystems accessible with standard unix tools that you already have installed (if you are using Mac OSX or any flavor of unix).

If there is any doubt as to the net result of unnecessary complexity, note the number of _significant_ service outages at Amazon s3 over the last two years. It’s awfully hard, on the other hand, to knock over a FreeBSD file server running on hardware raid6 arrays.

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 3:20 pm | Permalink
mroblivious1bmf wrote:

fuck. i resized+uploaded the bbs doc to google video and now it’s gonna get wiped!

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 4:50 pm | Permalink
Danno wrote:

Eh, it’s just Multics 2.0

Not like most of the worthwhile ones are hard to make local backups of either.

I do take your advice in consideration with regards to cloud computing platforms. Those assholes need to develop some standards or you’re just going to end up with fucking vendor lock-in again. Oh yeah, it’s great that your cycles are a utility, but if you can’t switch utility providers, you’re f’d up the a.

I dunno, do people really just put *all* their data into Amazon S3 and not have copies peeled off weekly or something?

Posted on 21-Jan-09 at 5:41 pm | Permalink
ross wrote:

danno: if it’s the easiest option, then of course people do it

Posted on 22-Jan-09 at 3:41 am | Permalink
People Over Process » Links for January 21st through January 22nd wrote:

[...] ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUDScuzzy dreams, bro. [...]

Posted on 22-Jan-09 at 2:02 pm | Permalink
F*ck the Cloud wrote:

[...] ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD If you like it, share it…: [...]

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 7:30 am | Permalink
Grover wrote:

Overall I agree completely about throwing away your data and not keeping local local backups, but a few nitpicks…

“Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. ”

Why? What makes paying for something different? If you pay Vimeo $25 a year and it goes out of business or gets bought by another company that closes them down, how is that any different than if I pay $0 to Viddler and the same thing happens to them? Who’s the sucker at that point?

“If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models.”

You realize this is exactly what you’re doing by calling everyone who trusts the cloud stupid, right?

“this is kind of like firemen…”

Not really. It’s the firemen’s job to stop your house from burning and if you paid a computer consultant for advice, they surely wouldn’t laugh either. The scenario is more like going into a bar where you know fireman hang out and saying “Oh hey, my house just burned down because I had 20 hotplates plugged in under my curtains.” I imagine votes of sympathy would be pretty hard to come by.

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 9:59 am | Permalink
O'Reilly Radar wrote:

Four short links: 23 Jan 2009…

Potty mouth, piracy, pointers to the future of the web, and Presidential technology woes, all in today’s link roundup. F*ck the Cloud – Jason Scott’s brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without…

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 11:00 am | Permalink
Binary Code » Build a Business on Twitter? Really? wrote:

[...] better understand the ramifications of this sort of odd behaviour I highly recommend reading Fuck The Cloud by Jason [...]

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 12:35 pm | Permalink
Fred wrote:

It’s all about choice my friend. Common sense would tell you to back up your data. If you are dumb enough not to do so, well, you get what you deserve. No one has a gun to anyone’s head saying YOU MUST USE THE CLOUD! I’m a fan of the “cloud” and I don’t think it’s for everyone. I just like being able to have the choice to use the cloud if I want. Use it if you want or don’t, it’s your choice and I feel that is what the core of the matter is.

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 1:59 pm | Permalink
Huy wrote:

I agree. Cloud Services, used incorrectly could be the next Subprime crisis:

http://www.huyng.com/?p=80

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 5:25 pm | Permalink
J’s Notes » F**k The Cloud? wrote:

[...] Scott says F**K THE CLOUD: By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, [...]

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 5:31 pm | Permalink
Agile Cyborg wrote:

Fuck the nebula! Yes. I love this bitch. No wanky pencil headedness or newbish callow-yearning-suck-KawasakiCalcanis-dick.

Your fucking site is ripping my eyes out of their resting places. Even so, thanks to the O’Reilly blogger for this hammerhead resource.

I shall return to haunt.

Posted on 23-Jan-09 at 7:21 pm | Permalink
BlogBites. Like sound bites. But without the sound. » Blog Archive » I mean, if someone gives you an amazing Moon Laser and the Moon Laser lets you put words on the side of the moon, the fact that the Moon Laserâ€™s effects wear off after wrote:

[...] is probably pretty shallow stuff along the lines of â€œWOW THIS IS COOLâ€ and â€œFUCK MARSâ€. ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD « There’s an old saying about budgeting; truthful budgeting starts with being [...]

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 3:28 am | Permalink
John Cowan wrote:

I must agree with Grover that trust is independent of price. Being a customer is not enough: unless you have a written contract with the company for long-term data preservation *and are in a position to sue to enforce it*, you effectively have nothing. Even then, if they turn out to be chimpanzees with deep pockets, you still can’t get your data back, all you can get is money — hardly the same thing. (Full disclosure: I use S3 for backup and I’m happy with it, because I’ve interacted enough with Amazon in a variety of circumstance, including dealing with defective products, to basically trust the company.)

But then, when you have local backup, you have nothing either: heads *will* crash, houses *do* burn down, and CDs *will* eventually become unreadable. There is no single solution to data preservation, except for eternal vigilance. (Maybe you could find a dozen good friends, preferably in other cities, that you could mail DVDs to on a regular basis? Of course, that means trusting your friends, not to mention the Post Office.)

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 10:21 am | Permalink
islami video wrote:

better understand the ramifications of this sort of odd behaviour I highly recommend reading Fuck The Cloud by Jason

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 1:51 pm | Permalink
Alan wrote:

The cloud computing concept was called “computer utility” back in 1961 by the people at M.I.T. who invented time sharing. The presumed difference is that it would be reliable, regulated, and you would pay for it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 3:33 pm | Permalink
Falafulu Fisi wrote:

Amen to that excellent post. I haven’t subscribed to any social networking sites, simply because I don’t want to be a sucker. Also I don’t want to look at myself and say, huh! , I am not one of those exaggerated self-important people to give away personal information to the world as easily to the the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blah, blah, blah,…

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 5:01 pm | Permalink
FUCK THE CLOUD | www.pwnage.ro wrote:

[...] http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717 VN:F [1.0.9_379]please wait…Rating: 0.0/10 (0 votes cast) Tags: cloud computing [...]

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 5:10 pm | Permalink
anonymous wrote:

Grover, are you aware of the amount of disconnect with reality and logic of which your last paragraph comprises?

Posted on 24-Jan-09 at 11:03 pm | Permalink
Cuidado con la nube » Gum Valencia wrote:

[...] Cuidado con la nube Actualidad y Variedad, Redes sociales y demÃ¡s Add comments Mi punto lo pone “negro sobre blanco” (es un decir) Jason Scott en su entrada “Que le den a la nube”. [...]

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 2:34 am | Permalink
Jeremy Zawodny wrote:

Preach on, brother!

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 7:33 am | Permalink
Charles John wrote:

Great article. Thanks for writing it. I definitely agree completely. Here’s the thing:

I nearly went BLIND reading it!

I get the whole ASCII theme thing, but man… if you want to really get this message out – make thing thing something people can read all the way through without having to look away every ten seconds or so. Sheesh…

I’m STILL seeing green and black artifacts everywhere I look!

Again, nice article.

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 12:59 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

I love my green on black. But I’m considering some way to set a switch.

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 1:12 pm | Permalink
carlos wrote:

Why don’t you start growing your own wheat.
Don’t underestimate the importance that bread has in our lifes!
Lets not allow those mega-wheat traders in Chicago control our most basic food supply!

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 1:22 pm | Permalink
Drew wrote:

I agree completely.

There used to be a time when companies wouldn’t do business with people that charged too little or were free, because they recognized the person they were relying on wouldn’t be around when they needed them. The rise of the internet has changed all that, now companies want everything for free and don’t care if the people that support them are starving. It’s another bubble of greed and selfishness that will burst and leave the cloud believers in the shit.

The financial crises should have demonstrated that NOBODY is immune, and you cannot rely on the Amazons of the world to be around or provide free services forever. One day it will dissappear or they’ll jerk your around massively. Always keep your critical data local.

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 2:32 pm | Permalink
Michael Clark wrote:

Yes, please give a way to reset the text and background colors. At least you’re not using Courier everywhere. Aah, the days of the Wildcat! BBS and DOS.

I also agree, too many rely on the Cloud. Then again, these are the same people that use their home ISP as their permanent (and only) email address.

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 5:25 pm | Permalink
Jason wrote:

You might as well write that about every hosted services on the Internet. Hotmail, GMail, YahooMail, Shared Hosting, file storage … anything. None of those places take responsibility for lost data- none of them. It’s simply a 3rd place to keep shit backed up to that wont be lost if your house burns down. I think of the “Cloud” as a utility. A place to use and abuse and then dump when I am done with it. Hmmmmm … there are compassion to be made there.

I guess you know people that rely on it as their only source of storage and they got screwed. Since you were working in Tech in the 80’s I assume you’re an older fellow. You don’t like change and don’t like the idea of someone else controlling your data. Even if those people have better tools to do so. We know a few of those ….

Fuck the cloud, but keep it’s number for later use

Posted on 25-Jan-09 at 5:48 pm | Permalink
» Traue keinem Web-Dienst « Macs in Media Deutsch Archiv wrote:

[...] Jason beschreibt in seinem Artikel das grobe Marketing der letzten Jahre um das “Cloud”-Phänomen. Alle Daten schweben in einem süßen Wölkchen, das niemandem etwas anhaben kann. Uneingeschränkt trauen sollte man diesen Anbietern allerdings nicht, denn sie haben kein wahres Gesicht. Ich bin nicht paranoid, aber trotzdem ist es nicht verkehrt das Original lokal auf seinem Computer zu haben und lediglich Kopien ins Web zu schicken. Ich habe nichts gegen Dienste, wie Twitter, Delicious oder Flickr, die ich selber gerne und oft benutze. [...]

Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 12:41 am | Permalink
robot jones wrote:

It’s amusing that you think paying Flickr and YouTube for the privilege of giving them your stuff for free makes you not a sucker.

Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 7:38 am | Permalink
John wrote:

I have to ask then what you consider save for data storage.

Seagate’s enterprise drives are having firmware failure. If you put a label on your DVD you shorten its lifespan. Try finding a tape drive for home use.

Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 3:00 pm | Permalink
Jason Scott wrote:

I know what I do, but what I do is not what everyone else does.

I split stuff into “generated” and “acquired”, and I split acquired into “rare” and “not rare”.

So then it goes not-rare, rare, generated.

Not-rare ends up on two hard drives.

Rare ends up on 6 hard drives, and is shared with friends (as is not-rare)

Generated ends up on anywhere from 3-6 hard drives, archive.org, flickr, DVD-ROMs, and in very rare cases, 30 year tape.

I use the cloud, assuming cloud means “storage not under my control”, but in the same way I “use” a coffee shop or a gas station. I don’t leave a dufflebag of my stuff there and hope it’ll be there tomorrow.

Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 3:08 pm | Permalink
Shii wrote:

Google Video is not “going off the air”. In fact, Google is one of the better clouds you can upload to; they have a revenue stream that practically ensures they will be able to keep information around. But putting valuable information on a revenue-free startup like, say, Rapidshare.de or Vimeo is a waste of time and possibly a loss for others when those websites inevitably blip off. Your essay is a great read for fools who think they can upload an extremely valuable work somewhere and forget about it.

Posted on 26-Jan-09 at 5:26 pm | Permalink
CrossedBearings wrote:

The cloud does have one usage pattern I like. A data sync hub.

Its a great way to sync data between apps and between machines. It doesn’t ‘let go’ of your data mind. Its still in the synced apps.

And if the cloud goes ‘poof’ then oh well – its just your sync conduit thats gone. Find another.

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 1:07 am | Permalink
Elvis Montero » Blog Archive » Life on the GDrive: Cloud me up, Scotty! wrote:

[...] extemporaneous, you can check Mr Jason Scott’s verbose, albeit entirely factual, “F*** The Cloud“: Contrast, though, when people are dumping hundreds of hours a year into the Cloud. Blowing [...]

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 4:45 am | Permalink
A nuvem que se lixe wrote:

[...] Encontrei ontem na net um artigo provocador que merece uma leitura atenta e alguma reflexÃ£o. O nome diz tudo: “Fuck the cloud“. [...]

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 6:20 am | Permalink
Max wrote:

Re green on black:

Just point people to a style zapper:

https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_style_sheets

Useful anywhere.

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 7:02 am | Permalink
Denis Boudreau wrote:

A-fucking-men. Speaking from a painful experience as well.

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 7:21 am | Permalink
Beware of cloud freebies | openedweb.com wrote:

[...] these free cloud services offered so widely today. Before you click, I want to warn you that this post uses strong language. Jason Scott is an archiver of old BBS data and producer of a five hour [...]

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 8:47 am | Permalink
swag wrote:

Damn. And I thought this was going to be about Fucking the CLOWN.

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 10:08 am | Permalink
Doug Schepers wrote:

Amen. Trusting the Cloud is like trusting the stock market. You’d be a fool not to invest your money in the stock market, right?

Right?

Posted on 27-Jan-09 at 10:32 am | Permalink
BigKev wrote:

What the hell does it matter, in a hundred years we’ll all be dust anyway. What the hell will all our puny thoughts and lives matter then? Better that we leave no trace of out poluted thinking behind anyway as an influence to future custodians of the earth. Maybe then, the ants or the cockroaches will make a better job of it!

Posted on 28-Jan-09 at 5:08 am | Permalink
ASCII by Jason Scott / Conversation With a Dead Guy wrote:

[...] Comments BigKev on FUCK THE CLOUDJason Scott on On Comments and CommentaryVersa Dave on On Comments and CommentaryDoug Schepers on [...]

Posted on 28-Jan-09 at 10:28 am | Permalink
Merauderweb wrote:

Fuck the cloud!…

Fuck the cloud!…

Posted on 28-Jan-09 at 11:30 pm | Permalink
Bench Marks » Blog Archive » Link Roundup 01-29-2009 wrote:

[...] A sea of digital cameras This photo made me feel old, and at the same time reminded me of hiring a wedding photographer, because if you don’t have pictures of an event, did it really happen? Online Lab Notebooks Good post by Cameron Neylon looking at the requirements for keeping your lab notebook online. As you can tell from the comment I left, I worry about either the IT overhead this is going to cause, or that we’d be placing our data in the very shaky hands of “the cloud”. Great article on how much you should trust cloud computing here. [...]

Posted on 29-Jan-09 at 11:46 am | Permalink
rgbFilter » ArchiveTeam.org steps up as your Public Data Watchdog wrote:

[...] Documentary, and writer of recent counter-technocultural foul-mouthed gems like Datapocalypso and FUCK THE CLOUD — is striking up a kind of internet viligante, do-gooders league called Archive Team, which [...]

Posted on 30-Jan-09 at 7:55 am | Permalink
bitsenbloc » Blog Archive » ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD wrote:

[...] So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe youâ€™ll make out, maybe you wonâ€™t. But he ainâ€™t necessarily going to be there tomorrow. via ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD. [...]

Posted on 30-Jan-09 at 8:19 am | Permalink
RJ Ryan wrote:

Can’t agree more, Jason.

Another example: ma.gnolia.com just crashed hard:
http://ma.gnolia.com/

Posted on 30-Jan-09 at 7:14 pm | Permalink
The ENTCHEV GIS Blog wrote:

F*** THE CLOUD…

[UPDATE 01/31/2009] Ma.gnolia Suffers Major Data Loss, Site Taken Offline, says a Wired blog post. Also:”The failure appears to be catastrophic. The company can’t say to what extent it will be able to restore any of its users’ data. It also says the…

Posted on 31-Jan-09 at 7:15 am | Permalink
Mike wrote:

it’s a trade off you self-obsessed turd.

Enterprises in the cloud? no.

SMB’s in the cloud? Hm.. not really – private clouds.

Open social networking apps in the cloud? Absolutely

you’ve totally missed the point, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Posted on 02-Feb-09 at 7:29 am | Permalink
å°ä¸å¿è€Œä¹±å¤§è°‹ Â» Blog Archive » Porterhouse Blue wrote:

[...] religious fanatics alike. If life is sacred, so is the right to make up one’s own mind and fuck the Cloud at the same time. { Editorial : The story behind the discovering and making the contraceptive pill [...]

Posted on 02-Feb-09 at 4:10 pm | Permalink
Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:

Hey guys, Mike from the Internet cleared all this up for us on post 86! Thank God he found this comment feed!

Posted on 04-Feb-09 at 2:02 pm | Permalink
Bob the Build wrote:

Mike,

I appreciate you taking the time to clear that up! We’re not from the internets so we don’t know these things. For a moment there I thought clouds just pissed rain on us all day, but provide internet too?! Wow, I thought that was so cool.

I thought I’d run outside and plug my internet into the next raincloud that passes but I’m really glad you took the time out of your day to clear up the confusion. We must not know what we’re talking about. Sounds like someone I know..

Posted on 08-Feb-09 at 2:55 am | Permalink
Bob the Build wrote:

Oh crud, gravatars. I’ve been had!

Posted on 08-Feb-09 at 2:58 am | Permalink
Sunday Mix « Authsider wrote:

[...] Scott: Fuck the cloud: So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it [...]

Posted on 08-Feb-09 at 3:40 am | Permalink
Bill Sithiro wrote:

It (cloud) has its uses… However, everything new (or recycled) that comes out doesn’t mean you have to be threatened by it nor just blindly embrace it. This goes without saying. At the end of the day itâ€™s just marketing; annoying as it can be at times. The cloud is far more ambitious than being there just to hold pictures of your cat and other artefacts of your digital citizenship. Itâ€™s about the next big thing: infrastructure as a service. Hosting service companies have been doing it for a while now, so theyâ€™re in the line of fire more than anyone. Sure you can keep it in-house, it might even give you a competitorâ€™s edge, but it better be faster, cheaper and safer! The only â€œsuspiciousâ€ thing about that cloud is that only a handful of companies can pull it off as a viable business or product line solution. Maybe that was what T.J. Watson was thinking of when he said: â€œI think there is a world market for maybe five computers.â€ Maybe the cloud is, IBM’s revenge.

Posted on 08-Feb-09 at 9:08 am | Permalink
Minhajuddin wrote:

Nice blog post about the free services. One up for “De-clouding software”

Posted on 08-Feb-09 at 5:54 pm | Permalink
Fnord. » Blog Archive » Some things are harder than you expect wrote:

[...] now has your full addressbook – it’s all or nothing. I’m not paranoid, but I dislike [...]

Posted on 11-Feb-09 at 5:07 pm | Permalink
mreklektik wrote:

Yeah, this is all fine for u guys who have connections to the Internet that don’t have hosting restrictions on them. And who has time to keep up with the latest **nix patches – not me brother. I say if you need something quick and dirty, why not use the cloud to your advantage. If you need to do something that’s so important that you can’t lose it, then you should back it up anyway! This whole “ftc” movement is just so much fluff and nonsense.

Posted on 24-Feb-09 at 10:14 am | Permalink
sbeam wrote:

apparently some of you people think “cloud computing” means “free websites like Gmail and Twitter and delicious you put your personal shit on”

that’s not it.

How about running insanely CPU-intensive Bioinformatics algorithms that run on genomic datasets measuring in terabytes. I do it on a distributed, redundant set of virtual systems owned by a 3rd party (AKA, a cloud) for about 1/10000th of the cost of running enough dedicated hardware to do the job in the same time.

I also backup all my personal photos, writings and other stuff to AWS/ECC with persistent storage. Costs $5/month for about 250Gb now. What do you do, put it all on DVDs in your closet? hope you don’t have a fire…

The cloud is over-hyped and kinda meaningless but sorry, the author of this post doesn’t know what he is talking about, at all.

Posted on 27-Mar-09 at 2:33 pm | Permalink
Bill wrote:

640 K should be enough for everyone.

use two clouds, Problem solved.

Posted on 15-Apr-09 at 6:16 am | Permalink
Oyunlar wrote:

The cloud does have one usage pattern I like. A data sync hub.

Posted on 01-Jun-09 at 12:08 am | Permalink
oyun wrote:

Fuck the cloud !..

Posted on 16-Jun-09 at 1:59 am | Permalink
internetting for the paranoid – email – menga wrote:

[...] may want to check out FUCK THE CLOUD. It’s worth the read. It basically states that if you put your trust and faith into anything [...]

Posted on 04-Jul-09 at 12:35 am | Permalink
tahrey wrote:

and now for a light, frothy, throwaway comment with little real value:

fucking hell, I’m so glad to find I’m not the only one with this opinion. though it took a while to wake up to realising that my webmail is part of it… :-/

maybe we just need to come up with a big golden rule that _the internet is not a reliable place to put stuff_. Consider it as an old and well-used 5.25″ floppy disc. Sure, it’s convenient, and you can pass it to your friends, and it seems to work ok when you put the data on… but you’d be freaking insane to have it as your only copy of something precious. Like business documents…

Posted on 14-Jul-09 at 2:59 am | Permalink
corq wrote:

I realize this is an ancient posting, but after coming back from DefCon and knowing for a fact that anyone, and any time, can essentially be ‘up in ur stuff’ however they please, I prefer to keep my stuff where I can physically walk over and yank the cord, and interrupt my participation in the presumed botnet. Or, in the case of utter failures, at least make a feasible attempt at recovering data. I take a calculated risk using gmail for correspondence, but it isn’t where I archive my meaningful crap, I promise you. I’m still not in the least convinced that cloud computing, distributed processing, or any other remote outsourcing of data management. Recreationally I love Web 2.0 gadgetry, but I’ll draw the line at staking my sustainable income or my privacy to it.

Posted on 07-Aug-09 at 11:52 am | Permalink
Çilingir wrote:

in the case of utter failures, at least make a feasible attempt at recovering data. I take a calculated risk using gmail for correspondence, but it isn’t where I archive my meaningful crap, I promise you. I’m still not in the least convinced that cloud computing, distributed processing, or any other remote outsourcing of data management. Recreationally I love Web 2.0 gadgetry, but I’ll draw the line at staking my sustainable income or my privacy to it.

Posted on 11-Aug-09 at 4:22 pm | Permalink
I don’t trust the cloud - popcorn.cx wrote:

[...] Geocities. Archiveteam was setup by Jason Scott, creator of BBS: The Documentary. His blog post FUCK THE CLOUD prompted quite a reaction and now, six months later, it is still getting [...]

Posted on 15-Aug-09 at 5:31 am | Permalink
yashke.com » Blog Archive » Twitter musi się zmienić wrote:

[...] mi się cytat z Jasona Scotta, któryy warto mieć gdzieś z tyłu głowy: “These are not dependable enterprises. These are [...]

Posted on 17-Aug-09 at 11:22 am | Permalink
The perils of cloud computing, Photobucket edition. « Andrew Currie on WordPress wrote:

[...] I only wish to remind you all that there’s no such thing as a free ride on these internets — for more on that I’ll direct you to Jason Scott’s excellent essay entitled: “FUCK THE CLOUD“. [...]

Posted on 19-Aug-09 at 10:23 am | Permalink
wchulseiee.net wrote:

ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD…

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717…...

Posted on 05-Sep-09 at 10:27 pm | Permalink
Kral Oyunlar wrote:

I have never been excited about “the cloud” (about as substantive a label as “web 2.0″) mainly because the protocols and methodology are not truly open and there is a very, very high level of complexity underlying products that should be as simple as possible.
True.

Posted on 12-Sep-09 at 10:17 pm | Permalink
WD wrote:

I personally appreciate the ease of use in cloud web2.0 applications. But I can see its black use and general open problems to data control. I assume when signing up to any intranet to be very careful about the amount of personal data that is published on the internet. I cant imagine anyone using payment processing on their website and would suggest using a payment gateway like google that has a team of people protecting it 24/7

Posted on 16-Sep-09 at 7:10 am | Permalink
Bloggers Payback wrote:

Loved this. The only ironic thing is that the chances are very high that this post itself has been bookmarked somewhere, creating a cloud presence for yourself. There’s really no escaping it anymore, seeing as how you are out of control of who links to you etc. For the personal details you are still pretty safe, as long as you don’t go spreading it yourself everywhere. But as far as your web presence goes it’s pretty much engulfed in the cloud from the moment you make your first post.

Posted on 27-Sep-09 at 2:02 am | Permalink
ASCII by Jason Scott / Oh Boy, The Cloud wrote:

[...] FUCK THE CLOUD 111 comment(s) [...]

Posted on 05-Oct-09 at 3:19 pm | Permalink
ASCII by Jason Scott / Outlook is Cloudy wrote:

[...] FUCK THE CLOUD 112 comment(s) [...]

Posted on 11-Oct-09 at 10:17 pm | Permalink
Bits und so #169 (Dangerwolke) | Bits und so wrote:

[...] Sidekick verliert alle seine Daten Cloud Probleme Doch ein Backup gefunden? Ja. Immer wieder lesenswert: FUCK THE CLOUD [...]

Posted on 17-Oct-09 at 6:36 am | Permalink
Data Without Borders Episode 5: Check those Terms! :: Data Without Borders wrote:

[...] Archive Team Statement [...]

Posted on 19-Oct-09 at 2:37 am | Permalink
çöp adam oyunları wrote:

Frank, you have absolutley no fucking idea what cloud computing is

Posted on 19-Oct-09 at 4:13 am | Permalink
hosting, small and largeBuilti « Netcultures wrote:

[...] Not so much. There’s a key buzzword here that you can take home: cloud computing. Like most buzzwords involved in this course, it’s being used to sell so much stuff that there is no longer any real fixed definition left… but the gist of it is that it marks the new wave of web hosting and web services which de-emphasise the role of your particular piece of hardware somewhere, and concentrate on getting your stuff out there. I like Jason Scott’s definition: [...]

Posted on 21-Oct-09 at 9:19 pm | Permalink
hostgator wrote:

F*ck the Cloud – Jason Scott’s brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without…

Posted on 25-Oct-09 at 4:17 am | Permalink
oyunlar wrote:

The protocols and methodology are not truly open and there is a very high level of complexity underlying products that should be as simple as possible.

Posted on 04-Nov-09 at 6:47 pm | Permalink
Mike wrote:

I love the green font, reminds me of the terminals in university back in the 80’s.

Posted on 16-Nov-09 at 1:32 pm | Permalink
Kuro wrote:

The main reason that I’m anti-Cloud is that it seems to generate idiocy. With the Cloud, you haven’t got control over very much. It’s a pre-constructed world. As a result, users at bottom level don’t learn how to do anything. They don’t even know that they need more than 256MB on their computer because- wait, look, they have 300TB storage in the Cloud.

As epic as it first seemed to even me, the Cloud is riddled with security holes. The internet (or at least the HTTP protocol) is, in itself, not private. Sure, you’ve got it chmodded (or maybe you pressed the large, shiny-looking Mine Only button), but anyone who gets your account (and most times this is as simple as guessing one badly-constructed password) can get in, from anywhere. With local storage, it’s near impossible to grab your files from another machine, unless you have the common sense of a drugged-up amoeba.

Posted on 19-Dec-09 at 10:03 am | Permalink

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