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What's Needed For Freedom In the Cloud?
jrepin writes "Georg Greve from Free Software Foundation Europe has often been asked to explain what he considers necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach toward what is often called 'The Cloud,' or also 'Software as a Service.' He gives 7 ingredients that are necessary for freedom in the cloud. For example, 'it should be illegal to change privacy policies on users without their explicit consent. They need to know what is changing, and how, and what will be the resulting level of privacy they enjoy – in the same clear, transparent and understandable manner.'"
That's all you need for freedom..
this year's marketing bullshit term for a "thing designed to extract money and/or information from fools". Like any cloud, it will soon vanish, never to be seen again.
There needs to be lots of choices for users, and an easy, free way to transfer all data from one company to another. Otherwise all the disclosure in the world is meaningless, since they can hold your data hostage to make you accept their new terms.
Don't trust a third party with your information and data. Memory and storage are dirt cheap, pipes are fat and the cloud is just gee-whiz yet redundant technology.
Kill -9 `ps ax|grep politition"
Thanks.
And that service is providing a sync path for my data. I'm willing to pay a premium for it. Yet I can't use and enjoy my Android phone with a simple sync path for any price. Its practical functionality depends upon me handing over all of my info to Google's cloud (and that's just for the basic apps, nevermind what I'd like to add on).
How about we start with sustainable database connections?
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
Dream all you want; your view of the way things should be would *not* work in a world that is about greed for money. We can get more money juicing you.
For some values of "freedom". After all, the "Patriot Act" exists to protect our "freedom", right?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
So I got to read the article, and the author lists a bunch of good, desirable things there. But none of them will happen until the businesses that provide those cloud services are forced to listen to wishes of the clients.
However majority of clients are not very wise in terms of network security (or anything else, as matter of fact.) So those companies will always have plentiful harvest of suckers, and that's who they will focus on. If you are a green-skinned geek in glasses you are not their audience, and your whimpering that "their service is not perfect" will be summarily ignored.
Geeks can't use the cloud, basically. Anyone who does that surrenders a bit of his|her|its privacy, and on top of that has to obey the arbitrary rules that are imposed by those companies. The only solution is not to play.
I did just that last night. I needed to change the email on Yahoo to something else. I type the name in, and I get in return "#604,E4 This email address is blocked by owner." No help anywhere; other people report this error too, with no resolution. I was able to resolve that. Want to know how? I deleted the whole Yahoo profile. Google profile will be next.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
Just like our email needs email police to be free, obviously we need cloud police to free us!
"Destroy capitalism"
Capitalist urges are primal and natural, which is why Capitalism or something like it asserts itself even in anarchic conditions.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And if you try, you will fail. The problem here is the data location. The only thing that will ensure privacy is to not give your data to "the cloud".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
So much of data is already given to the cloud, at least of the set of data that the cloud would be interested in. The cloud doesn't care about your diaries and personal documents, not enough to attempt to decrypt them. The most valuable data you possess is your profile to advertisers, which is available now unless you take measure to prevent it from being so.
just saying
Freedom is needed for freedom in the cloud.
As long as you are relying on a company with a datacenter to hold onto your data, you giving up freedom for convenience. If you want freedom without storing the data directly on your own computer, then look into a peer-to-peer (possibly just friend-to-friend) network to store the data. That is, store it on your own computer and your friends' computers, with the assumption that one of them will be up any time you need to use it and the p2p network will prevent you from needing to care where exactly it is.
You still are dependent on someone else' hardware. You are dependent on how they maintain that server, that router, that infrastructure. THAT, is not freedom. All you have done is create a veil, a facade of safety.
I just emailed one of the admins at Slashdot to find out how do I download my comment file. By now I've built up some 100,000 words that I would like to merge and rework into a blog.
So here I go with a test case of one of the sites that should know how! Let's see what answer turns up. I asked for a "few-click" method if possible, without having to install any utilities etc.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Obviously if you can not easily move your data to a competing cloud - or back to your own computers - if dissatisfied, you have no freedom. Your are stuck with what one particular company is offering.
Capitalist urges are primal and natural, which is why Capitalism or something like it asserts itself even in anarchic conditions.
All sorts of urges are primal and natural. Many of them mutually conflicting.
People are also social animals by nature. Sharing and working together is primal and natural.
So, socialism or co-ops are just as primal and natural as "capitalist urges".
Maybe it's just that you're at a competitive disadvantage with sharing and caring against selfishness and ruthlessness?
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Sarcasm follows...
Wow! I can do exactly what I had been doing on my old local machine, on a underpowered machine, and I can pay someone for it!
I can pay money the same functionality I could otherwise get free in Libreoffice.
Together we can make a centralization of data, creating single points of failure, making sure that we create monopolies along the way, and do you know what else?
We'll slow the internet down to a crawl with traffic from processing that should be locally, until the day comes when we get hacked by some government that wants to finish us off before taking us over.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I'm a bit surprised. It is official policy of the FSF not to use the term "cloud". The issue with the closest thing, software as a service, is explained here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html
This is ridiculous - clouds are private for-profit run companies. To ask "what's needed for freedom in the cloud" is almost the same as to ask "why can't I set up my tent in a mall". The short answer - don't use the cloud - that just about summarizes it all. Someone set up the cloud for you, you want to play in it, so you WILL abide by THEIR rules. What freedom???
just everything to do with every online service.
it's not like you, as the user, have any idea if the data is in a cloud or not.
cloud is just a modern code word for "we're buying the servers from a generic servers service".
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
A competitor for the internet. Preferably competitors of the kind that appear and disappear before the corporate giants and their wholly-owned governments can sink their claws into them.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Maybe it's just that you're at a competitive disadvantage with sharing and caring against selfishness and ruthlessness?
A happy balance wins the day, as having this conversation on Slashdot on the Internet proves.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...is all you need for freedom in the [insert realm].
Article lays out a good set of rules for freedom in cloud computing, looks well thought-out.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
For freedom, the cloud needs to become just a layer in the protocol, as it were.
Some rules of the global cloud layer's operation:
1. Hosters must have no rights pertaining to hosted content (except to remove it, but see 3.)
2. Hosters should have no responsibility for content.
3. Hosters should be prevented technically (e.g. by strong encryption not under their control) from knowing what content they host.
4. No hoster should host more than an unintelligible (bit-wise randomly interleaved) fragment of any content document.
5. Hosting should be provided on a mix of consolidated data-centre stores (for performance) and a massively distributed and decentralized peer network, and costs of hosting should be shared by a combination of storage markets and storage-service trading (peering) arrangements, involving the edge players as well as the large-scale players.
6. Content fragments, in co-operation with simple, standard, uniform software on each storage host, should ensure the content's own long-term survival in the cloud, via a process of periodically checking across the globally distributed storage cloud to ensure that enough copies exist and are sufficiently well distributed on reachable hosts and are stored on a mix of old reliable and newly commissioned storage hosts.
7. Access to coalesced and decrypted content should only be possible for possessors of the encryption key for the content.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I don't understand this knee-jerk rejection of anything to do with cloud computing services. As far as I can tell, cloud computing is the mainstay of the IT industry right now, at least outside of desktop support and support for legacy applications.
Essentially you'd need a little plug-in server which gets an IPv6 address and displays an URL/QR-code on the display. This little server should then do your part of the social network for you by staying in contact with your friends servers and only handing out data to them.
That way no social network operator can just get _all_ the data to datamine it. They have to go through the slow process of tricking you into befriending them.
I don't know if you can say it's the mainstay of the IT industry because there is a difference between handing over your data, trusting an outside company to secure your information, and how IT solves computer issues. First of all, most companies have IT departments, so they do not handle IT issues with a vendor or 3rd party. Also, companies usually have their own servers, they don't hand over their personal and secure data to an outside company to store on their servers.