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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.
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.
Back in my day we called that a server
With props to Homer Simpson:
Google: The reason for and reason for not moving to cloud computing!
Exactly. If the word "cloud" means anything at all, it means that the server is owned and maintained by someone else. Thus "private cloud" is an oxymoron.
"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...
"Disruptive" is both positive and negative, it just depends on who you are.
By definition, a "disruptive" technology is a technology that is going to be laying down a little of the old Schumpeterian creative destruction on somebody's business model and/or existing capital base. For the incumbents, "disruptive"=bad.
However, for everybody else, the incumbents are a bunch of sluggish, reactionary, rent-seeking parasites. Hurting them is an important aspect of progress.
A "private cloud" is generally understood to mean a cloud maintained by an internal IT department which sells services on the cloud to other departments within an organization. So, it's just like any other cloud, except it's on the intranet, and the customers are departments within the same company, rather than the public at large.
In those days you didn't waste expensive computer time for writing documents. There was an army of secretaries with typewriters. Speaker-independent voice recognition and intelligent spelling that was far more effective than today's computers. Best of all, you didn't have to touch a keyboard.
ah you know the rest.
The fact that they are using any "filter" at all is a reason never to use the service.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
Yes, and this is indistinguishable from the concept of "a server," which makes the "cloud" part of "private cloud" even more meaningless than usual. As I said.
And those secretaries were much sexier than any computer hardware.
A technology that ends up dying a risible death, alone and unloved, can, at best, have been touted as a disruptive technology. Actually disruptive technologies have to do some disrupting.
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.
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.
You did get to touch your secretaries though. Man, those were the days.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Disruptive technologies are well defined. They are technologies that have a major impact on existing business models. The car was a disruptive technology; it put a lot of horse-related companies out of business and provided a lot of opportunities. So was the Internet, the aeroplane, and so on. Business people like disruptive technologies that they know about before the competition, because they upset the market. People who adapt to them faster than their competition can make a lot of money.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
And those secretaries were much sexier than any computer hardware.
Sexier than computer hardware? I don't think so. Ye Gods, man, think before you post such nonsense here.
``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.
What does that mean, changing the timestamp on your secretary? How do you do it? The manual isn't exactly clear on working with secretaries.
I'm very confused.