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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."
Considering how many useful services in "the cloud" currently bear "beta" tags, I think it's a pretty easy to argument to make that reliability will improve. Google's own search engine was "beta" the first time I used it 7-8 years ago.
Of course, by the time Gmail is out of beta we'll all be salivating over ZMvnxjowi (pronounced "Leonard") mail, and the cycle will begin anew.
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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.
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.
Net services are more stable than electricity where I am at the moment. Storms have a habit of knocking out the power for short periods of time - generally 2-20 minutes. (not counting the 5 days that the power was out after an ice storm a couple of years ago).
The power supply when I was living in town was so much more reliable.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
(Ok, so it was 2004, but it was the first thing that popped into my head reading the header)
Heres the slash coverage
liqbase
But my printer is out of paper.
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
I would have seen this article earlier, but our corporate internet just came back up after being down all day. Thank god that's a thing of the past.
...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.
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has definitely not been maintained in the computer era.
Electric power system reliability in the United States is down, mostly as a result of deregulation. Rate-of-return regulation tended to encourage utilities to overbuild their systems, which was good for reliability. When there's a free market in electric power, no one bears responsibility for downtime.
I don't expect things to get better. Not after Cleveland had a five-day outage and nobody went to jail.
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.
See, that's why you DOWNLOAD the pr0n. Don't just leave it on the web site.
what?
A Human Right
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.
When you expect people to trust the unseen middleware which runs a frighteningly high percentage of their lives (both at home and work), you have to remember most of them have no idea how it works and have enough experience with today's crappy OS of choice that they don't see computers as reliable. In 20 or 30 years, some of us will wonder how on earth our kids trust a computer with a Microsoft core to drive their cars for them while they watch movies over their wireless broadband dashboard videoscreens. They will trust it because they are used to computers that are reliable. Remember, we are only in the first 20-30 years of computer technology that is available for average people to directly interact with on a daily basis. How reliable was an electrical home appliance 100 years ago or a mass produced car 75 years ago? Think of how long it took us to fully trust these technologies (jokes about the quality of current American autos aside) and realize how early we are in the personal computer age (which is again the only way that most people experience "computer technology").
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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.
Here
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.
...it's with privacy. I don't trust the web services to not use my information for their own nefarious purposes. They all expect to analyse my dataflow for marketing purposes, and I've no doubts that most of them will sell out specific information in a heartbeat.
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