Wozniak Predicts Horrible Problems With the Cloud

Hugh Pickens writes "'I think it's going to be horrendous,' said Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak when asked about the shift away from hard disks towards uploading data into the cloud. The comment came in a post-performance dialogue with audience members after a performance in Washington of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, monologist Mike Daisey's controversial two-hour expose of Apple's labor conditions in China. 'I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.' The engineering wizard behind the progenitor of today's personal computer, the Apple II, expanded on what really worried him about the cloud. 'With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to. I want to feel that I own things,' Wozniak said. 'A lot of people feel, "Oh, everything is really on my computer," but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it.'"

Comments

The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[crazyjj]

....but, sadly, doesn't.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[Kenja]

He's not at Apple and has not been for a long while.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[White Flame]

But let's not also forget the "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" flipside of this coin:

At Home: Make your own backups. In Cloud: Included feature, depending on service. (but make your own backups, too!)
At Home: Downtime based on home equipment & residential net access. In Cloud: Hot failover of equipment and connectivity.

The first is pretty important, and far too often overlooked. The second is just a non-catastrophic cost vs simplicity tradeoff, but still should be weighed.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[postbigbang]

It's maintenance. No one does it. They pay fantastic sums of money to retrieve really strongly valued data. Why?

The real secret is that it isn't fear, it's sloth.

Some of my data is priceless to me. I have a backup here, and one far, far away from me. There's a third being cached as I write this. To others, they could care less. This is my data.

What they missed was: data has value like the currency in your billfold. Not the onesyes, but the hundred dollar/euro/whatever bills. And a fat fistfull of them. Backup to the cloud? Ok. When I see the SAS70-II and the vendor's commitment to best practices and an F5 NOC with dual grids and a 48hr UPS, yes, I'll backup to the cloud. And yes, I found one, but I'm not a shill.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[EdIII]

The answer to all of this is encryption and strong contractual agreements.

"Cloud" is a fucked up retarded marketing term. It is not any different, or more special, than any other group of servers that have load balancing, virtualization, redundancy, hot fail overs, redundancy across multiple data servers, etc. Why people give it special significance is beyond me. Heck, i'm running my own mini-cloud at home and in a several datacenters then.

There is nothing inherently wrong with SaaS. It can be vastly cheaper to pay a 3rd party corporation to host something for you, and benefit from their platform coding costs being distributed across hundreds of businesses.

For businesses, it can be a very smart choice. Strong contractual agreements with a reputable company and offsite backups of your data, or rsync'd copies of your data to your own backup, can greatly mitigate whatever concerns that there are.

If you are hosting your data elsewhere, ENCRYPT IT. Not rocket science here. Same thing at home. Government wants to come in and take it? Sure. It will take lawyers and extensive jail time to get the keys from me.

There are a plethora of online backup solutions now that have encryption setups where they have no way of turning over the keys to the government.

The "cloud" is perfectly fine and as long as you are using it correctly with the appropriate safeguards.

Of course, I would never personally store plain text data in the "cloud" that can be data mined. They can lick my balls first. I might possibly make an exception for a service that had very strong contractual language that prevented them from doing so, but that is still unlikely.

So does everyone in IT...

[Kenja]

Only people who are really in favor of the cloud are in management.

Re:So does everyone in IT...

[Jailbrekr]

I disagree. there are some valid applications for the cloud, such as outsourcing low volume or low priority services such as FTP or fax. But once you cross the line into storing office documents then the business risk grows exponentially. It is all about finding a balance.

Re:So does everyone in IT...

[mlts]

There are a number of people who gain from moving stuff to the cloud:

Cloud providers for one. They can charge rates near the cost of a full fledged data center [1], and they really have no responsibilities for security or backups. Security breaches can be hushed with the finger pointed at the client. Legal action? If someone finds something sue-able, good luck getting past the binding arbitration clause which essentially sue-proofs the cloud provider. Of course, don't forget that if/when that cloud provider goes under, the next owner has full and unrestricted access to the server data (the data from Borders being bought out by B&N comes to mind). Far less scrupulous organizations can buy the servers too. PII? Here is the magnet link, hope someone cares enough to keep the seed going.

PHBs without any ITIL or other basic IT experience love the cloud. It means that someone else shoulders things and keeps staff small. Plus, it isn't their responsibility should data get lost or a security breach happen. By the time blame actually gets assigned, the breach would be forgotten about.

Blackhats love the cloud. Imagine having access to the backend hard drives of hundreds of businesses, all at once. Just sit back and copy anything relevant, or if bored with a business, start altering some figures on stored documents so that company faces big penalties from the IRS or the EU. If an intruder really hates the cloud provider, it doesn't take much to drop all backend LUNs, stored snapshots, and replications.

ISPs love the cloud. They can also watch the bits fly past, not to mention the bandwidth costs for businesses relying on the cloud.

Of course, the cloud has its uses. However, once someone gets an encryption key management framework in place, an ability to have known good backups, yadda, yadda, with the bandwidth charges and charges for fatter pipes to and from the cloud service, it might be far cheaper to just have a data center.

[1]: Regardless of where the servers are located, a company has to buy them to host locally, or is going to pay someone else's cost to have them in their facility. The cost of the server will be paid for, somehow.

Re:So does everyone in IT...

[MickyTheIdiot]

I wish I could attribute the quote, but someone said that, as far as us old IT farts are concerned, "the cloud" is just a synonym for "someone else's server."

There are people that know stuff in IT and there are bullshit marketing artists. The latter category are the ones that think "the cloud" is something new. People will put too much data to "the cloud" and get burned and the pendulum will swing back the other way again to local storage.

File this under "no shit"

[neokushan]

We've already seen what can happen when a cloud service goes down. Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have both went down recently, causing havoc for many businesses. When Megaupload went down, it caused a huge loss for many legitimate customers as well. If your Steam account gets suspended, or you disagree with the new TOS - you're shit out of luck, all that you "own" is gone for good and you can't do shit about it. Dropbox lost a shitload of emails due to a security breach, Sony lost the details for 70million+ customers for a similar reason. Every single example of a cloud operation that I can think of, be it a service or a product, has had issues and it's not going to change.

The cloud is a wonderful idea in principal, but we need a completely different outlook on it. And possibly a hell of a lot of new laws governing ownership of the content.

It's all about profit and control

[John3]

Moving to the cloud, whether Apple or Microsoft or any of the other players, has two main purposes:

- Guarantee ongoing profits through subscriptions and micro-payments to the providers for storage, use of cloud-based applications, or viewing or listening to cloud-based media.

- Control of digital media, making DRM easy to enforce since your audio and video files will all be on their servers to be scanned, audited, and confiscated.

Even with the fluctuating prices for hard drives the cost to store media locally is lower than ever, and there are plenty of options for sharing your media over the web yourself due to the low cost of high speed Internet access.

There is no "Cloud"

[sycodon]

"the shift away from hard disks towards other people's hard drives"

Fixed.

I hate the term "the cloud". It's fucking remote servers is all. I can just see some guy with 20 years experience managing network server applies for a job and HR screens him because he doesn't have "Cloud" in his resume. It's a stupid marketing term that people are taking for a technology.