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The Cloud Ate My Homework
theodp writes "Over at CNET, James Urquhart sings the praises of cloud computing, encouraging folks to 'really listen to what is being said, understand how the cloud is being used, and seriously evaluate how this disruptive model will change your projects, your organization, and even your career.' Fair enough. Over at the Google Docs Help Forum, some perplexed cloud computing users spent the month of November unsuccessfully trying to figure out why they've been zinged for inappropriate content. Among the items deemed inappropriate and unshareable include notes on Henry David Thoreau ('the published version of this item cannot be shared until a Google review finds that the content is appropriate'), homework assignments, high school yearbook plans, wishlists, documents containing botanical names for plants, a list of websites for an ecommerce class, and a list of companies that rent motorcycles in Canada. When it comes to support in the cloud, it kind of looks like you might get what you pay for."
This is exactly why I never want to move everything "in the cloud", or in to Internet services for that matter. Locally ran applications are there for a reason and things like this wouldn't happen for example with MS Office or Open Office. You're the one controlling your work, not some algorithms that suddenly decide to mark your work "inappropriate". And you don't have to wait for days for someone to answer to your support ticket with a copy-pasted "things to try" list.
Even if you're going for "cloud" services, get a reliable one that states exactly their backup plans and other things. And for gods sake, put out a few dollars for it if you're excepting any level of support or reliability.
Anyone who thinks they can rely on online stored data, with no offline physical backup or physical access, is living on Cloud 9.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's exactly why I do any serious work by "offline" means. And I hope I can still keep doing this in the following years (aka: I hope Chrome OS's way of going "everything online" doesn't catch up)
This is a concern, but remember we're talking about the free service here. Google's free services are great while everything works, but if you need a human being's attention, you're likely to be waiting a long time. I've had bad experiences with YouTube publishing glitches.
I'd hope that the paid Google Apps service has much better support. Can anyone confirm?
Meanwhile, in these cases, all that these people were unable to do was make their docs public. They could continue to edit them. They could presumably share them with specific contacts.
I think there needs to be a fix for this, but I don't think it's the end of the world for SaaS.
Rule #1 of cloud computing: "Do not trust the cloud".
Why is Google even able to review the content? Content should be encrypted.
My Dad has a Cloud that my sister and I used to store our homework assignments.
One night, I was writing a paper on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk. The screen started flashing and the whole paper just disappeared. All of it.
And it was a good paper!
I had to cram and rewrite it really quickly. Needless to say, my rushed paper wasn't nearly as good and I blame that Cloud for the grade I got.
And I am totally not stoned right now. Really. Dude.
dont these idiots realize that they are handing control of their data over to a corporation? corporations that are fundamentally driven to make profit and please shareholders? then these idiots bitch when they are censored about what they write? is this really for real, i mean, am i actually reading this?
Ok, I understand that unencrypted content is never guaranteed to be safe, so don't put anything of value in there. But the general assumption people make is that there's just so much stuff in there and most of it is so uninteresting that nobody will probably bother looking at it, unless it happens to show up in debug traces by chance, or something of the sort.
But, "review" suggests somebody at Google *will* look at that content. Imagine that -- some drone at Google will be looking at your private work you want to share only with select people, or company data, and decide (when they get around it) that you can share it after all.
IMO just the possibility of this happening at all makes the whole thing suspect, and could bite you in the ass right in the worst moment. "Sorry boss, I can't share that report because Google thinks there's porn in it. We'll have to wait until somebody at Google looks at it". I'm sure that would make for an interesting day.
You can setup your own cloud and have all the advantages of a local PC with the flexibility of a cloud device. More importantly, a school or a corporation might consider this a welcome feature. The ability to flag content and control their data may be a valuable selling point. I understand your reluctance to move everything into the "cloud". My parents have boxes of old photographs, LP's (that's kind of like a physical copy of an uncompressed MP3), and bank statements. Heck they still write stuff on paper and put it in that box on the front lawn with a little red flag.
Like everything else, nothing can be referred to in absolute terms. Some apps make sense for the cloud - MS Exchange for example, and some don't - MS Office for example.
Some work needs to remain private no matter what "security" is in place, and some work is by nature collaborative and shareable.
People have predicted the fall of Windows for years but it is bigger and the clients are fatter than ever.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
...for anyone who uses the word "zing."
The cloud can kiss my shiny white ass. My data is mine, I own it, I control it, and they can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
"seriously evaluate how this disruptive model will change your projects, your organization, and even your career"
For the worse? Anyone who thinks that "disruptive" is a positive attribute is someone who is divorced from real-world concerns.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
With props to Homer Simpson:
Google: The reason for and reason for not moving to cloud computing!
"Censorship" is the proper word to describe this. The notion that I cannot express myself except in some "inoffensive" manner, for whatever values of "inoffensive" are acceptable to the owner of the cloud. I can see the "great wall cloud of China" already. Haven't big search companies already kowtowed to the Chinese government in order to access their markets? Is it inconceivable that Google would agree to Chinese government review of shared documents in order to serve the Chinese "cloud computing" market? I don't think it is.
Even here, imagine trying to write almost any kind of literary critique of Henry Miller, Ferdinand Celine or Vladimir Nabakov...
It sounds like Google is using the "Beavis and Butt-head" filter. Heh Heh, he said ASSpirin
I'm not so sure I want to trust anything important to that.
I run a really dope cloud computing system that never fails. It's called ssh into my server and use nano.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
ah you know the rest.
Indeed, and what hosts that dinky little personal website for 10 bucks a month is also a server.
So, slashdot, help us all out then: what is an easy to install open source document manager that these people can use as an alternative. It needs medium to fine grained access controls, user logins, expiries, log and file activity logs, and be able to run unhindered with the amount of traffic permitted by the typical website hoster. Come on - find these good people an alternative. Easy non-techo install. Encryption would be a bonus. PHP based would be nice for ongoing popular support.
I repeatedly encouraged my girlfriend to store her PhD documents in Google Docs, rather than on her laptop (that she takes everywhere). Eventually she complied; then, after a week or so, all her Google Docs vanished without trace.
No previous versions, nothing. I was at a loss to explain it, and have you tried contacting Google with a tech support request? Not a chance.
She's reverted to her low-tech solution (keep on laptop, occasionally email self with document attachments as a backup). I can't blame her.
I'm not saying this WILL happen to anyone else, but it completely destroyed my faith in 'cloud' storage. I'm quite happy storing documents remotely, when I know where they are, but cloud storage by definition could be anywhere - or nowhere.
"is this really for real, i mean, am i actually reading this?"
No, you're writing it, I'm reading it. Well, OK, now I'm writing.
What I see cloud computing as is a return to the good old days of terminal access to applications. In this world the user is not continuously downloading updates, rebooting the machine, or fighting viruses. Instead the user is doing the tasks for which they actually bought the computing device. This requires the significant bits to be centralized, which requires the dreaded keepers of the sacred hardware. Techies rebel against this idea, and techies should have their own hardware, but the average person not really want the responsibility of maintaining all hardware, software and data if there is a competitive alternative. This is a culture shift from the currently prevailing individual standalone PC scenario, but as we become more networked it will move towards it, in the same way we moved away from mainframes as microcomputers became cheaper.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Right!
That's why you store a LaTeX document in git.
Oh, and get some nerdier friends ;-)
Ultimately, the outcome will depend on the value of the "disruptive" technology. Remember, Microsoft Bob was once a disruptive technology too.
Honestly, I don't even like using Gmail. Leaving all my email on my Gmail account makes me fringe a bit. I've always had local copies of everything. I can back to 95 and look at whatever crap I had then. Including emails! Now here we are using shared web services to store all of our work. Look at these idiots. Store your graduate thesis on Google? Come on! Talk about educated idiots. All this could disappear tomorrow. When it comes to retained knowledge I am afraid of what all of these "services" are really doing to humans.
Having the *right* to your own work is different from somebody letting you have it--for now. Google's TOS says loud and clear that they're in control, not you.
It's funny that commenters with low membership numbers -- which I assume means folks who've been around the computer scene since the Stone Age -- make that point, while the ones with the What-Me-Worry attitude sound less experienced.
Cloud computing is just thin clients all over again, thin clients with graphics. Now all that remains to be seen is what we're willing to hand over in exchange for those nice shiny beads.
Maybe I'm old and stuck in my ways, but having my important data stored somewhere else and not locally makes me jumpy and nervous.
Blar.
I suspect there will be some really bad times before the ideal of an armed society being a polite society comes to pass.
Blar.
This sort of problem isn't at all new; it's much of why the "personal computer" approach took over computing back in the 1980s.
Before that, and still today in some large organizations, the "mainframe" was the only computer. When the little desktop computers started appearing, the "computer center" people in most companies and other organizations argued against them, mostly on the grounds that the work could be done much cheaper on the mainframe. Buying a lot of single-user machines was illogical from a purely cost-oriented viewpoint. But people kept finding ways to use their funds to buy the new little computers for a very simple reason: The mainframe was in the hands of a bureaucracy that had completely controlled what you could do on it. If you wanted to do something new (like run one of those newfangled "spreadsheet" programs), you had to go begging the DP people for permission. You couldn't install software on the mainframe yourself; the DP people had to install it for you. If they didn't think you needed it, you didn't get it. They usually had no idea what a "spreadsheet" was, so you couldn't get it. You couldn't have a terminal that did real-time interaction with software on the mainframe anyway, so a spreadsheet was sorta unusable on a mainframe.
So people bought the new little machines, not to save money, but so that they could do the things that the people in the computer department wouldn't allow them to do. Eventually the people at the top learned what was happening, and the sensible ones figured out that it was to their benefit to take the side of the workers and allow this to continue. The ones that forbid the use of desktop computers found that their company was slowly being made uncompetitive by the lack of ability to do the sorts of data processing (such as spreadsheets) that their competitors were doing.
The "cloud computing" idea has its merits. But it will always have the same problems that mainframe computers had. It will be under the control of the giant organizations (mostly secretive corporations) that run the cloud. Those organizations will have unfettered access to any data stored on their part of the cloud, and will use your data for their own purposes whenever they see a profit in doing so. If they don't like something you're doing, they will be able to block it. If you want control of your own data for any reason, you will have to keep it and the associated software on hardware that you own and control. If you don't, you'll find your pictures of your kids being used commercially. If your photo collection contains a picture of your kids in the bathtub or otherwise naked, they'll be labelled as "child porn" and deleted or sent to your local police. (Gotta bring in "Think of the children" here. ;-)
It's the way things have always worked, and always will. There are reasons people want privacy, some frivolous and some serious. And there are things that are best done in public settings. For those things, the "cloud" will be a big win for everyone.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
and raped my mother!
Blar.
I'll use the cloud when the vendors decide on a open data access standard (along with standard data import and export capability) and actually adhere to it. Til then they can keep it. Submitting to vendor lock in is not a very intelligent IT strategy, which means using cloud computing isn't an intelligent IT strategy if it involves development.
Sometimes cheap isn't very cheap at all.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Google's support for paid services is non-existent also, at least in my experience. I have sent google queries re both my google ad words account and my google voice account, and have never ever heard a whisper from them. I have used google voice for international calls, which you do have to pay for.
It seems that google is not a real company like ATT with quaint notions about customer support. I can call ATT or Comcast or any grown up company and get a real person on the line in a short while; or email them. Google does not offer that kind of service.
In short, google has some nice paid and free offerings, but they do not hold themselves to any standards re customer support. The small experiences I've had with them with paid services does not lead me to want to get more involved with them as a vendor. They're kids.
This is one of those things where I've been sort of blinking to myself ever since I figured out what people meant when they said, "Cloud Computing". --You'd have to be nuts to store personal important documents out there on the web and not keep a local copy.
I can see the advantage for large companies using specific paid plans with expanding and contracting resources depending on the scale of their operations. That sounds like it could be smart, with the right level of oversight and the recognition that there's no free lunch. But for personal use? You'd have to be totally nuts. --Heck, how many times a week do you go to a website only to discover that it fails to connect or otherwise flakes out?
A LOT more often, I bet, than my home computer suffers a catastrophic meltdown where I can't even retrieve back-ups.
I don't want to sound crotchety, but the Cloud is just another case of people being swept up in hype and failing to think. Too bad. Maybe they should remember how this pans out for them and then the next time a similar hype pattern begins to emerge in the world, they can map the two patterns together and then perhaps not act like fools. I'm not holding my breath.
-FL
Wasn't there just a huge fiasco with Danger losing all the Sidekick data that was stored "in the cloud"? You people *do* realize that when folks say "in the cloud", what they really mean is "on a server, somewhere" -- and that server may not have redundant drives, or backups, or it might be owned by a company that gets bought by another company (Danger was bought by Microsoft), and then the new owners decide to "downsize" the staff, until no one is left to take care of the server. Or worse, it might be like MLB where they decide to change vendors or some wacky corporate decision is made to theoretically shave costs, and boom, all your data's inaccessible, gone, or worse destroyed with no chance of recovery. What if the "cloud" becomes pets.com, and just runs out of money, closes up shop and shuts down the servers, and then sells them to a recovery company that takes your data and sells it to the highest bidder.
Rule #1) Do not trust the cloud.
Rule #2) When in doubt, see rule #1.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
OK, so she is in the third grade and has just started doing some homework on her mother's laptop.
But we're still dealing with this business of responsibility. If we don't sign off on her homework in her assignment book, she has to sit 5 minutes on the wall at recess and cannot play with the rest of the students. After about the third time of sitting on the wall, she began to understand that forgetting the assignment book was a bad idea.
I must say, this has put me off completely on cloud computing. Here are my reasons:
The cloud owner can choose to charge for their software.
They can increase the price.
They can delete your data if you don't pay an ever-increasing "storage" or "software use" fee.
They can change the terms of their agreement with you.
They can approve or disapprove of your content, deleting anything they don't like.
You have no recourse to any action they intend to take.
With local storage, you are responsible for backups and if you're smart, you'll be responsible. Your software license doesn't care what content you create or store, neither does your local hard drive. And there are no possible "cloud ate my research paper" excuses.
But I'll bet college professors hear about a lot more hard drive crashes than anyone else ever does.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
...as app store submissions.
Both locally run applications and "cloud"-based applications have problems. Choose among them based on your needs.
Next!
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but this is a problem with sharing? What does this have to do with the cloud? Why not just download the file and email it? If you weren't in the cloud using Docs you wouldn't have a 'share' feature and have to email it anyways. Why all this debate and comments of the stability of the cloud and what not. It's a share feature that 'doesn't work the way you want'.
Sharing documents via, say Google Docs: go to Google docs, work on your document, click "share". Sharing documents via a wiki: go to... where? To my knowledge, there's nothing even remotely as well known, easily accessible, and oh yes, free, as Google Docs. So you pretty much do need to know something about setting up a server to make this happen, and the idea that "with the state of software today", you need to have such expertise (or spend the money) just to be able to share a document with someone is simply laughable.
And regarding the sharing of homework... when did you go to school - the Neolithic? I went to high school around 30 years ago, and even then we had these things called "group assignments". You know, the same way that people actually work in offices and stuff. You should look into it.
Granted, I did not RTFA, but this story just screams Troll to me. It does little other than start an argument that has been fought many times before. Nothing to see here, move along.
What happens when you buy something (music, software, etc) that is infested with DRM and the company controlling the DRM goes out of business? You lose the material you paid for. If you don't own it, you can't control it. If you can't control it, then it *WILL* be taken away from you eventually.
The same applies to "the cloud". You don't own it, you can't control it, and anything you put there will eventually be lost. Whether it's Carbonite going out of business or Google mysteriously deleting your files, it will happen eventually.
Here's Richard Stallman's view on Cloud computing [about 40s in]:
[cloud computing] is so vague (or shall we say, nebulous) that it can't be used for meaningful statements. Basically what the term means is, don't pay attention to who has your data, or who controls any part of the computing you do, just ignore it. And ignoring it is what you shouldn't do.
If you let someone else control your access to your own files, consider that they might have a different idea of appropriate access to those files.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
This problem would never have happened if we didn't have copyright maximalists (RIAA, MPAA, etc) and those who would censor content.
Ooops. Now, I've done it. I'll be in legal trouble for sure. By pointing this out, I've probably infringed someone's patent.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Google Docs
Zoho Write (amazing, with good APIs)
Thinkfree (works for some people)
Flyword (one of my favorites, has both local and remote storage, offline support, can work offline, has chat etc.)
writewith (was pretty primitive when I last looked at it.)
I am sure at the web 2.0 directory there are several more.
http://www.go2web20.net/
How about Google stops trying to be the world policeman? I'm sure Google will publish a response to this.
--Sam
--Sam
``When it comes to support in the cloud, it kind of looks like you might get what you pay for.''
Oh, please. The connection of "you get what you pay for" with support is only used to discredit whatever technology the speaker doesn't happen to like.
There are free products with great support just as there are expensive products with crappy or nonexistent support. The phrase "you get what you pay for" was widely used to discredit open-source software, but it turns out that such software is now actually preferred over commercial software in many instances. And you often get quite a lot of support that you didn't pay for if you browse the fora.
"When it comes to support, you get what you pay for" is a cheap, meaningless slingshot.
There are real disadvantages to cloud computing, but bad support isn't one of them. You get the support that the provider gives you, and that can be great or horrible, regardless of whether they charge for it and regardless of whether or not they provide cloud computing.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
and what I hear (and see) is that the stuff people get all gooey and doe-eyed about tends to be the flashes in the pan while the real game changers just sort of wander in and quietly integrate themselves. Sometimes the latter is widely dismissed and criticized in the early stages.
I'll use the cloud when they actually store data up in the clouds. How cool would that be? Damn!
I think many people miss the meaning of 'cloud' as it has been muddied by sales and marketing people.
It's a term that originated in the networking world. It refers the indeterminate path(s) a series of data packets would take when traversing a WAN; the more networks that are interconnected, the more indeterminate. The biggest interconnected network is the Internet, and not surprisingly, 'cloud' was most often associated with it.
Starting in the late '90s, startups began selling tools that allowed companies to scaleback/eliminate their private WANs by sending their data over the Internet instead (e.g. VPNs, extranets, etc.). In the process, 'cloud' was often used as a short-hand way of explaining that 'you don't know what links the data traverses, and you don't care, either, because you don't have to pay for them.' This worked because most people researching these products understood the original meaning of 'cloud', and got the analogy. Like a cloud in the sky, the shape was somewhat amorphous and ephemeral. Plus, the idea was not knew. Frame Relay sales people and marketers utilized the same concept, and the word 'cloud', to the same end. In fact, many companies were being pitched to replaced their private frame "cloud" with the Internet's packet "cloud." the key here is that network resources were abstracted from the hardware that they ran on (i.e. were virtualized).
Enter other new virtualization technology. New technologies gained commercial success over the last 10 years that let us distribute computing workloads over n-number of machines (e.g. clustering, live-motion, etc.), or to save blocks of raw data to disks that are not directly attached to a computer, often by utilizing TCP/IP as a "backplane" protocol. This allowed resources processing and storage to become abstracted from the CPU's and the platters that they "ran" on.
As this happened,startups began selling tools that allowed companies to scaleback/eliminate their private data centers by processing/storing their data in another company's much bigger data center(s). In the process, 'cloud' was often used as a short-hand way of explaining that 'you don't know which server/disk your data is computed/stored on, and you don't care, either, because you don't have to pay for them.'
What makes something "cloud-based" or not ultimately depends on a few things: abstraction of a computing resource from the hardware it is implemented on (i.e.virtualization), the ability to meter access to, and/or use of, that resource, and the use of a ubiquitous and low-cost network transport to provide access to/from that resource. That would include a "public" storage cloud like Amazon's S3, or a "private" compute cloud using Xen Center or vCloud and run in a company's own data center.I use the scarequotes because a "customer" could equally refer to another department in an organization, and 'private' and 'public' are user-centric terms, and could be just as well be replaced by the terms 'somebody' and 'everybody', respectively.
To say that there cannot be resource "clouds" that only certain people can utilize is of course valid English, but also nonsense. 'Cloud' just refers to a pool of shared hardware resources. It doesn't specify who owns them.
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She's failing a university subject because the cloud PROVIDED her homework and she got caught. I'm so proud of her (NOT!)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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I don't know if you're joking or I'm just too old to make relevant jokes around here.