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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..
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.
Like any cloud, it will soon vanish, never to be seen again.
Judging from the "Error establishing a database connection" message I'm getting, the cloud is already gone.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Sounds like you need Ubuntu One. Just the free package gets you 5GB and access via Android/iOS.
http://one.ubuntu.com/
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.
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?