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Mistrust of Today's Technology
narramissic writes to tell us that Sean McGrath has an interesting look at a general mistrust of today's technology and draws a comparison to the proofreading of photocopies. From the article: "The constant availability of web services out there in the cloud is one such idea. Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system. Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud but your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes."
Sure we mistrust the internet. Why wouldn't we? Most of us have had broadband providers with poor service, or just good old fashioned blips in our ability to connect. It is hard enough as is to get what we need done on the local services we run on our computers today... running them from the internet when there are so many potential problems is sure to be a bit scary.
I know that in many ways it is the future to move applications to the net. One that I respect a ton is salesforce.com, thats an amazing product.
But still, I think that most people are skeptical, like myself, about the viability of it currently.
Some things we do on our computers are extremely important... and the thought of adding in another variable can be disturbing. It will be interesting to see how these things are deployed and how succesful they are in the near future.
Hrmmm, even my blog has crashed on me a time or two.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
When Google going down disrupts my ability to get the police, firemen, or ambulance to my place in an emergency then I will worry why they are not responsible to the government.
Until then... I have other things I would prefer the government worry about.
Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system.
No no no no no no. It's not about them losing electricity. You're right! That doesn't happen much.
To my mind, it's the same as what happened to S&Ls. People felt their money was safe there until the scandles broke and a bunch of people lost their money. Trust went away! The similarity here is that a tech company makes a big break on the scene, they chug along promising "forever" services, they experience problems, then they change their business model or shut down leaving users that depended on their services in a lurch. I'm not scared of power outages! I'm scared of companies simply changing their minds.
So, go ahead and use an online backup service, but I'll never believe that they'll be around "forever."
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I think the reason that SBC/ATT get more heavily regulated is because they made a promise to be reliable in exchange for local monopolies. If they fail the public trust, they haven't earned their monopoly.
Google is in no way in the same position. There's no monopoly, no government subsidies, etc. And you, as the customer, are free to switch to ask/yahoo/msn at any time.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Indeed, power, phone, ISP ... all are much more vulnerable to failure because they typically have a long stretch of single path. Google has multiple datacenters, and the failure of one won't make google unavailable. All the serious internet companies are long over this hump.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
...as power out at the datacenter. The whole reason that businesses park their e-commerce platforms (and web services, and increasingly their accounting platforms and messaging systems) out at a for-real datacenter is so that when their local office utilities puke, their customers can still "see" them online, send them an e-mail without it getting spooled up or bounced, etc.
In the sense that a good datacenter's got local power generation covered, the failure of the larger cloud is the bigger risk. I know, not for all business profiles (like call centers, etc). But I'd say that the "we don't care if our cubicles are in the dark, as long as our web site is up" description probably fits 80% of my clients. Just sayin'.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
People mistrust photocopies because they didn't understand the technology. Now we just make sure there's toner.
People mistrust new technology because they do understand them (to a degree), and all the moving parts, and what can break. Coding to handle an outage is a good practice of safe programming, not an excessive overhead.
The only truth to this is that knowing how to survive in the future without google may be as pointless as knowing how to survive during a power failure today. Actually, there's still a good reason to be able to survive on your own.
I'm surprised that they seem to sprinkle this term "the cloud" around with such childlike glee, and I don't really know precisely what it is. Either that means I'm not in the target audience, who are probably conversant with this term, or that the author has a buzzword fetish. And "mistrust"? I actually had to look at one up to make sure it wasn't, like, place trust in something unworthy thereof, rather than a synonym for everyday, "distrust."
Weirdo writers.
Anyway, on a more salient note, I really don't like how Google's stolen the term "Beta." When you talk to a lot of people out there in "the cloud," or whatever the hell, they think "Beta" means that it's up 98-99% of the time, like GMail, and aren't really aware of the fact that beta software contains bugs, or that there is some inherent risk in using it.
The average person's experience of computing is that it's a crap-shoot. You back-up like crazy, because you never know when you might get a blue-screen-of-death. You walk into a coffee shop, and pray your computer will connect. You accidentally open the wrong attachment, or click on the wrong button on a web site, and you've got new spy-ware or worse. Most people need a geek friend to come over just to tell them if they have a problem (and they usually do). How are average people suppose to know if there a bot recording their credit card numbers and sending them to Russian hackers? Can they trust their computers with financial information? Can they trust a computer with an active wireless connection?
Web sites record our visits. They leave cookies on our machines, and our computer records web-page visits in it's cache. They execute javascript and java applets, and show us tits when we wanted bits. We try and censor our children's access, and worry about pedophiles on myspace.com.
I think trust isn't a word most people would use in the same context as anything related to a computer. Let's face it... we've kinda got these things working, but just barely.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
For a long time I have seen the push to try to get applications off the PC (ironically, after pushing them all out there from the mainframe days). All the usual cost benefits are cited: ease of maintenance, upgrading, compatibility, etc.
/on/my/computer/. I do not trust my email sitting on a server somewhere, for privacy and accessibility reasons. So to this extent, the article is right - I do worry about accessibility, probably irrationally in this day and age.
/claim/ to be secure. But every week it seems there is a news story about someone else who has let slip with their customer's data. Maybe files on Service Provider X's computer system are in reality more secure than the files on my PC, but at least if they are compromised from my own computer it's my own damn fault. Anyway I feel like my files are more private stored on my machine generated on apps on my machine instead of on someone else's machine across the interent.
/need/ my applications to be remotely served to me. The two biggest applications I use are word processing and email. I'm still running Office 2000 for these applications, and they work just fine.
I have been hesitant to adopt. For example, I still insist on a local email client that stores all of my email
But in the last year it seems that the real money push on the 'Net has been in not just PROVIDING content, but rather CONTROLLING content.
So while in the past remote applications were pushed as a means to providing a better service to the customer, nowadays they seem to be pushed, unspokenly, as a means to provide better service to the PROVIDER.
If you can lock someone into your DRM vehicle, you can make the customer dependant on you. If they stop paying for your service, oh, so sorry, you can't access any of your application data anymore. Or you can't share your application data with anyone who isn't running our application. Basically the service provider can use DRM to control what you can do with your data.
My other concern with a remote application is privacy. Sure they
So my biggest source of distrust these days for a remote application is not the AVAILABILITY of the service, but rather:
* Being at the mercy of the service provider in terms of DRM.
* Privacy.
And finally, I just don't
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
I wish you people would stop watching Fox and just forget about the damned terrorists. The red white and blue has turned yellow.
In the last 10 years <3500 people in America died in 3 terrorist attacks. 40,000 Americans die every single year on America's highways.
I'd like some of that Homeland Security money to go towards a few guardrails, bacause face it: I'm a thousand times more likely to get killed by a bimbo in her SUV yakking on a cell phone while putting her makeup on than by some islamic nutjob.
I'm also amused by people who talk about how they don't have sex anymore because of aids while they smoke their cigarette they lit up after that Burger King Doublewide Fatass Burger. How many people do you know personally who died of aids? Cancer? Heart disease?
I'd like to see Fox gone, and Bush with them.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Do you really think Duke Nukem Forever will be out that soon?
I do copy content to my locally available storage. Not because I fear that some provider suddenly and magically happens to vanish, or that he is suffering a power outage. My fear is that the content that I want to access suddenly vanishes and ceases to exist. Mainly because someone powerful decided that it's not "appropriate" for me to view it.
So it's not the internet I mistrust. It's those who wield powers that I have no faith in. I trust computers more than people. They don't decide whether information is to be made available. Computers store and distribute it. People destroy and withhold it. So tell me, which should I mistrust?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From the article:
Apparently photocopier machines were greeted with suspicion ... How can you know that the machine has made a perfect copy of your vital
document.
I still check photocopies of multiple page documents, if it is important. It is not the first time that a page was omitted. Also, small printed parts or graphics is not always copied correctly.When dealing with technology, I always try to have a backup plan. Take two laptops for an important presentation. Have a second computer in sync with the main production computer, have two printers available, a backup plan if a slide presentation would not work due to a broken projector bulb etc.
The terrorists aren't out trying to cause power outages -- they're out to create fear, which means killing large numbers of people, preferably in ways that create dramatic images for TV. I don't care how much economic damage it does, the prospect of terrorists causing billions of dollars in infrastructure damage or lost productivity, which gets absorbed by insurance companies, big businesses, the government, etc. doesn't scare anyone (yes I realize individuals ultimately pay these costs, but no one really notices it). Power outages happen all the time, nothing to worry about. Lots of people think "OMG the terrorists are going to kill me". No one thinks "OMG the terrorists are going to make my stock portfolio go down 5%" or "OMG the terrorists are going to make my utility bill go up $1 a month" or "OMG the terrorists are going to mess up my WoW character".
What's next, Al Qaeda launching a ddos against Google? Videos on al jazeera threatening to cause traffic jams in LA?
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?