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Lost In the Cloud
Colonel Korn writes "Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain suggests in an Op-Ed piece that the seemingly inevitable move toward the often locked-down cloud is stifling innovation and threatening our privacy: '... many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple. If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents. We've only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That's not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.'"
Or, you know, developers could still write code that runs on one computer and do whatever they feel like doing.
Somehow, I don't think that Facebook is going to be the technology that drives computing forard...
Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives -- tax breaks or liability relief -- that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents
That is in a word, stupid. The thing about online services is, there is little requirements to entry and they are easy to change from one service to another. Its trivial for me to switch from Facebook to any number of different social networks. Same with search engines, etc. All it takes is simply replacing the URL. Regulation will only stifle innovation.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
the cloud is not taking over everything, not everyone is going to give up their computers for a network appliance that depends on the cloud to do anything and everything, the cloud will at best become useful for a few people but not everyone
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'm actually surprised at how quickly some of these platforms like the iPhone have developed completely closed programming environments with barely a peep of protest from the normally pretty libertarian tech crowd. Even on /., there doesn't seem to be much of a stir about it. Every now and then someone complains, or advocates jailbreaking, but I hear more howling when MS proposes to make IE a default browser than when Apple completely locks down an entire product line to outside developers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Lost in the Cloud" sounds like a really awesome stoner movie title. Perhaps the subtitle to the next Redman and Method Man movie?
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Let em' stifle all they want. Somebody else will make another cloud that doesn't stifle...or just build their own platform.
any software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
You're suggesting Facebook and Apple actually care about your privacy? Are you from the past?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Nothing says innovation like government regulation!
There will always be people, like me, that will not want to use cloud computing. I don't think we are surrendering our rights to the big corporations. This is needless worry and concern. You don't have to use Google Docs or Microsoft Office (when it goes cloud.) You can still choose to use Open Office or KOffice. If you care about privacy, you will avoid the cloud as much as possible. There will always be traditional developers writing software for the hard core users. Who knows, developers might create a cloud version of Open Office that you can deploy yourself.
First of all, clouds aren't a good foundation to build stone walls on (;-))
Secondly, and more seriously, a smart user will buy a service that gives them a virtual machine or a JVM to run an application on, and control the app and it's storage themselves.
At the expense of sounding grumpy, a lot of the cloud stuff reminds of software written for script kiddies
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Having our collective heads in the cloud, as it were, will run into a much more pragmatic barrier pretty fast, probably faster than privacy issues that are certain to also rise. When ALL of our software becomes streamed through data cable, how much of a DSL or cable bill are we going to receive monthly from providers who will have long since rescinded and phased out unlimited bandwidth contracts in favor of nickel-and-diming their consumers into oblivion?
If through the clouds
You want to fly
Wait for radar
Or likely die
Burma Shave
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I am so SICK of hearing about the "cloud". Can someone please come up with a new buzzword? This one has worn out it's welcome.
Error reading device 'Signature'. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?
perfectly.
I agree with pretty well everything you said.
Remember how Microsoft setup 'Plays for Sure' and then when it failed, shut it down meaning that people who had bought stuff were no longer able to play it or made them incompatible with their new toy, the Zune.
Any Service that stores your data on their servers is open to misuse. They have something you want so what is to stop them from holding you to ransom and charging you an arm and a leg to get it back.
This is almost as good a business model as drug dealing.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Right, because all "smart" users have the capability to do that. This is mostly consumer stuff, large firms do exactly what you suggest. Most consumers simply don't have the ability to match what the enterprises are doing.
Just because this is within your area of expertise doesn't mean it is within everyone else's expertise as well, nor does it mean it *should* be, or that everyone without this capability is dumb.
This is a topic I've been thinking about recently. Unfortunately the government doesn't even understand what the internet is all about, hence their dedication to the whining of the RIAA. I shudder to think how long it will take politicians to understand what the effects of locking down the cloud will be to innovation.
Or, if you don't like reading, you can watch his thoroughly engaging book talk here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2008/04/zittrain
Zittrain knows his stuff. He was friends with Postel. He's got an AI background from Yale in addition to his Harvard Law degree.
why we had to innovate past the grid computing...its paradigm of short-sighted operational mindsets was impacting our productivity!!! and challenge owners couldnt fully own our new vision without an expanded cloud worldview of the datagrams which had for so long embodied our vision of a face-forward actionable adoption processes at this juncture?
its time to sharpen our pencils and be above-board about this situation..
seeing these impacts to our mission goals in the new cloud is a new challenge requiring breadth and depth in mastery. who will be the next subject matter expert to synergize such an emerging change? who can, for lack of our current brain dump, drill down to the core competencies of cloud-based service oriented architectures to achieve actionable efficiency across the piece?
I mean, am i right or am i right?!
Good people go to bed earlier.
Just when I thought I'd heard the worst usages of 'cloud', someone upped the ante!
Now sites with a lot of users are considered the cloud? Is WoW the cloud? MySpace is "the" cloud?
Requiring applications meet certain criteria for your site is now somehow part of "the Oppressive cloud"?
Seriously, go die. Thx.
I found you, you are here. If that doesn't help try going here here. If that doesn't work I'd recommend wandering around until you find the big blue room then start asking anyone you see where you are.
Hey! You can fly endlessly in my cloud!
Will occur the year after the year of the Linux desktop.
One could argue that move from time-sharing systems to PCs stifled innovation by constraining developers to 64-640k of memory and single-threaded applications running one at a time. Yet, lots of progress in using computers was made this way. Now we see a resurgence of modern time-sharing systems. While their administrators may impose restrictions, they enable many new options at the same time. For example, hosted apps make it easier for individual users to adopt Linux, since they are no longer tied to Windows apps. And employees enjoy an increase in privacy by using a word processor hosted over HTTPs as opposed to storing files on their work desktops. Neither personal nor time-sharing systems are going away, although an advance made in one or the other naturally attracts developers in that direction until the newness wears off.
I entirely agree: what's being offered seems aimed at the level of someone who isn't even a consumer, more of a learned-by-rote kind of user. That's survivable by consumers, although it may be frustrating.
That's less than useful to a company that wants to use the cloud for something profitable: they're limited to a very restricted set of things they can do. I've worked with one of the big packaged-services providers, and the service they offer limited, hard to adapt to your business and breaks in mysterious ways, such as telling me "you don't have permission to read this page" when I'm following an emailed link that says I must respond to the page.
And I assume commercial users a pretty smart, albeit more about money than about bits and byte (I'm a capacity planner, so I talk a lot to financial managers).
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Now that you bring up the smart phone perspective, let me just say that's different than cloud services. The reason is that, comparing, say, a Facebook app with an iPhone app, while the environment is pretty fixed in both cases, in the latter case you have the additional element of needing to have hardware in the hands of the users.
The OpenMoko project is trying to address that, but its struggles show the great difference between open source software and ditto hardware. Software is just so much easier to multiply and get out there.
I guess that's one reason why people aren't up in arms so much because they realise that they need someone to provide the hardware, and are willing to 'pay' for that by living in a walled garden.
Personally, I'm leaning (at least, since PalmOS died) towards Android for its superior openness compared to the iPhone -- but it's still very, very closely knit with the huge storm cloud that is Google, and it does not provide (nor promise) true freedom.
But as OpenMoko is the free but still very experimental counterpiece to the big-brand smartphones, so is the Appleseed Project a free yet incomparably tiny counterpiece to Facebook. After all, what is all that freedom really worth if you can enjoy it only with the other six other users? ...but what do I know. :D
"Good news, everyone!"
No, I did not RTFA... but about Cloud Computing and all the conserns that come with it:
First, let's define the Cloud. If you have your backups "In the Cloud", my understanding is that you have your data hosted by somebody other than you. You reach them over the internet. You're using the internet to access the services. Because you're receiving this service from an outside network, you're getting it from the "Cloud".
Traditionally, you would be doing this yourself, within your own network. This is defiantly not from the "Cloud".
But what if you were running a business with multiple offices? What if the services you want are only at HQ? If you allow access to these services over the internet, isn't this "In the Cloud" for branch offices? Isn't that just a self-hosted cloud?
Hopefully, for anything you wish to keep private, you encrypt your data.
--Pathway
Apple iphone may be popular now, but once something like Android starts showing up on multiple phones through multiple carriers, there will be a more attractive (and open) platform for developers. As long as there is good open stuff out there, there will always be a viable solution for those who don't like to be locked in to specific platforms/rules. As far as cloud computing goes (if we're talking about google docs, facebook, etc), the majority of it will always be not quite good enough for enough people that issues like these will always be somewhere near inconsequential. I don't believe it will ever be secure, robust or flexible enough for the business community. It's the consumer market, not the business market, that will be affected these concerns. Issues like privacy or who controls the api are the very things keeping the business world out of the cloud in the first place except for their own in-house implementations. I think services like Facebook will eventually go bye bye, because a whole generation of kids growing up right now is sick and tired of seeing their parents glued to a computer screen updating their damn facebook status.
That's the computing / data dystopia portrayed by Gibson...
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
So now Apple calls the tune for an internet quantity?
Let's talk about the technology-stifling that Microsoft has done for a quarter century! Just try to get an investor to back a program that runs on Windows. Just try. But first talk to Sybase, Netscape, and Blue Mountain Greeting Cards to get a feel for the procedure.
Did that stop anyone? No! We went to the web (and in a way) invented this "cloud" thing that seems to be as much hype as product.
Ya know, if you're on the net, and your business lets a tiny company like Apple to block your access to the entire net....you've got the thing plugged in wrong!
Linux is still free. Make with it, what you want.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov