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

[swanzilla]

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

(The other one isn't saying much)

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[Anonymous Coward]

O, ye of little faith.

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

[whargoul]

No

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[jhoegl]

perhaps you are not understanding what he is saying.
At Home: Files secure. In Cloud: unknown variables. Server down, backup processes, human intervention, government intervention, service turned off without notice
At Home: Legally yours, and cannot be searched without a search warrant. In Cloud: Search warrant given to cloud provider, if at all, and data is searched without your knowledge.
At Home: Files not datamined unless you download a virus. In Cloud: you can be sure, datamined.
At Home: Files are accessed by known individuals pending hacking In Cloud: People you dont know have access.

So... maybe you are right, simple files like MP3s can be stored there, just be sure you have proof of purchase, lest the RIAA come after you.
Hey... maybe you can store the Proof of Purchase on the cloud!

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[smittyoneeach]

I'm not sure Jobs perished from a rectal cancer.
May your sphincter fare better, in any case.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[K. S. Kyosuke]

im so glad that asshole got cancer and died...

That was a pancreatic cancer, not a colorectal one.

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]

At home:

- no one makes backups
- no one protects from coffee spills or burglaries, for that matter
- people lose their machines all the time
- download malware, and let cats sleep on their machines

At the Office, which if you're smart, will be the same practice as the cloud:

- Backups are rarely checked for integrity
- People spill coffee on their machines, and they get stolen
- Someone forgets to pay the Symantec tax, or doesn't look at the CVE and oops-- all gone!
- Nearly 100% of networks get cracked every few years

There isn't much difference, except that in the cloud a few people have training, which they may or may not use correctly.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[thetoadwarrior]

I backup at home and remotely. What's the point of only backing up in one place? Your host could go up in flames or your house can go up in flames. I think he's missing out on that and is assuming that storing things in the cloud only means storing them on questionably secure services like dropbox.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[Pieroxy]

- no one makes backups

For me, i have use the cloud for backups. My cloud is a friend a few hundreds miles from home giving me an access to a VM with 1TB of data available. I do the same for him.

- no one protects from coffee spills or burglaries, for that matter

Coffee spills are covered by backups.
Burglars don't give a fuck about my data, they want my hardware. Hackers of the cloud don't give a fuck about my cloud's provider hardware. They want my data. So, from a security standpoint, where is my data safer?

- people lose their machines all the time

Fine. See my previous point. You're better off losing your Android with NFC configured than losing your credit card. So far.

- download malware, and let cats sleep on their machines

Cats are fine on my machine. Malware, well, there is a risk. Is it greater than the risk in the cloud though?

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.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[dgatwood]

It's maintenance. No one does it.

Only in the Windows world. On the Mac platform, where reasonably convenient backup functionality is built into the OS itself, and where it is cleanly integrated with the manufacturer's wireless access point/NAS solution (Time Capsule), about 55% of users back up regularly (source: PC Magazine), as compared with only around 11% of Windows users (source: TechTarget).

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[AmiMoJo]

Nearly 100% of networks get cracked every few years? I can assure you my home network and my employer's network are totally secure. We have loads of very valuable information so naturally we take steps to secure it. It isn't hard, really.

HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[drkim]

Yeah because the true genius that is Woz went on to do so much later in life and it's not like he's still collecting a paycheck from the big bad evil Apple.

Last things first: Woz gets a 'symbolic' $120,000/yr. from Apple. I'm sure that's chump change to someone with his bank balance; but I sure wouldn't sneeze at $120k.

Second, it's easy to sneer at those who pave the way... When Woz created the Apple computer, people didn't have computers in their homes, they were big-iron mainframes that cost millions.

For him to conceive, and create, machines that even kids could afford, modify, hack, program, and in general have fun with was amazing. He helped change computing and the world.

National Medal of Technology, Inventors Hall of Fame, Heinz Award for Technology, he's the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, Silicon Valley Ballet and Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose and is Chief Scientist for Fusion-io. So, he's been busy "later in life" too.

Re:The Steve at Apple everyone SHOULD listen to

[dbIII]

In that case you may as well just dump the stuff in a directory on a webserver anywhere on the planet.
The problem with dropbox is it pretends to be secure and useful but is instead a pointless polished turd.

Creator vs. Consumer

[Gothmolly]

Woz is a creator. So was Jobs. But they both needed Consumers - Jobs was more aware of that than Woz obviously.

Woz wants to build something, own it, and carry it around in his pocket. Most modern IT stuff is designed to give you a means to consume content.

Re:Creator vs. Consumer

[AmiMoJo]

User generated content has been a revolution. People get news and information from each other instead of central news agencies and big content providers. The whole attraction of things like Twitter and Facebook, and of course Slashdot, is the user generated content.

People are no longer consumers of content, they are creators. The shift now is that instead of creating on your PC and uploading you can create online directly. I have documents that I made entire in Google Docs, web pages and blog posts written entirely in a CMS, G+ posts that never touch my HDD. I back what I can up locally but a lot of people use them as their only storage medium, trusting that they will never go away or steal their work or otherwise abuse it. And as Woz says, no-one reads the T&Cs.

Re:Creator vs. Consumer

[cpu6502]

And what happens when the cloud provider decides to start "messing" with your online creations? Just last week Amazon announced they were converting people's stored-on-the-cloud songs to higher quality 256kbps versions.

In theory that sounds okay, but what if Amazon makes a mistake and replaces a personal song (perhaps you singing David guetta's "Titanium") with the official song release. Ooops. You just lost your creation.

You can't trust other people with your data, anymore than you can trust a random stranger to borrow your CD or car and return it unscratched/clean.

Re:Creator vs. Consumer

[osu-neko]

Woz is a creator. So was Jobs. But they both needed Consumers - Jobs was more aware of that than Woz obviously.

Woz was his own consumer. He probably would have lived a perfectly happy life with none beyond that and maybe a few fellow enthusiasts.

He's right

[Jailbrekr]

you *should* be concerned. It started with hotmail when they disabled the ability to download email to your home computer, and its only going to get worse. I literally cannot archive my email to an offline store and it is, in effect, owned by Microsoft. They can do with it as they wish, and I can't stop them.

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.

Re:File this under "no shit"

[oakgrove]

All of your points are correct but the risks are certainly manageable with due diligence and planning.

Amazon and Microsoft's Azure have both went down recently, causing havoc for many businesses.

We don't use either of these services since we don't really need the scale but I would imagine that provided they didn't go down too long, money is still saved in the aggregate. You have to look at the numbers and strike the right balance. What is the likely downtime of $CLOUD_IAAS_PROVIDER? Will that much downtime cost us more in money, goodwill, and customers than just building and maintaining our own gear? What hurts is just jumping on the bandwagon with both eyes closed. We use Google Apps here but we also keep copies of all of our documents and emails on the premises. The value adds like collaborative editing, etc. are nice but we could go a few hours without them. And we might not be able to get new emails during an outage but we can definitely read the old ones and send what we need to with different accounts temporarily. Running our own mail server isn't really something we're interested in getting into but so far Google's been pretty reliable and they'd be damn fools to misuse the little amount of strategic info they could glean from our communications as the goodwill fallout if something like that came to light would destroy them.

When Megaupload went down, it caused a huge loss for many legitimate customers as well.

A stack of blank DVDs is like 10 bucks at the walgreens down the street. There is no way I would make the mistake of thinking that something like filestube.com or 4shared.com is some kind of legitimate back up service. That's pretty much laughable. Hopefully the word got out to people that don't realize this and they won't be making the same mistake again.

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.

I've never bought anything through Steam but as far as I can tell, the only thing you actually have to pay for is the games and DLC for the games you have. The social features are just added stickiness keeping people there but you aren't directly paying for them. I have a Steam account but only as a test of installing the client on Linux. It works, I can browse stuff and participate but I've never spent a dime. I say that to say this, if I lost access to my games, I'm pretty sure I could find some backups somewhere. I paid so I wouldn't feel bad at all doing that.

Dropbox lost a shitload of emails due to a security breach

That didn't have anything to do with their cloud stuff though as that was chalked up to an employee's stupidity of having a weak password on a laptop or something. It could have happened to anybody that happened to have some personal info about users. I think the UK lost a bunch of data a while back by some goof being careless.

Sony lost the details for 70million+ customers for a similar reason

Heh. Sony. No sympathy. Their customers didn't deserve that though. My suggestion is use a different email for all of your online stuff. Maybe use some pattern like oakgroveSony@gmail.com or whatever floats your boat. Same thing for passwords. Of course nobody does that but it is a solution.

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.

Yeah, if it's a server hooked up to the 'net, it has the potential to be hacked. Act accordingly and encrypt your data if you're uploading files, make backups, don't use the same credentials across different sites as you are trusting the security of the person you gave those credentials to and always assume that the provider will go under at some point or be bought out. Personally I use "cloud" services like its going out of style but I keep my wits about me and have had no problems yet.

That Mike Daisey?

[Hatta]

Why would Woz legitimize the work of that liar?

the cloud is the ultimate monthly payment scam

[alen]

for years car dealers pushed monthly payments to clueless buyers to scam them into higher prices. same with the cloud.

dropbox, only $100 a year
cloud storage of music? $25 a year via itunes or amazon
remote backup? $50 a year
virtual server? $xxxx a month. oh you don't like the service, OK just buy your own for $15000 plus hosting

dollar here and dollar there and soon its real money

when you think about it a machine at your location is a consumer class CPU/hard drive. cloud provider will have multiple machines with enterprise class CPU's, overpriced enterprise hard drives, precious metal support contracts, etc. I bet the hardware vendors love it and are pushing the cloud hype through the tech media

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.

Incorrect -- Woz is still employed by Apple

[blahbooboo]

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

Wrong. He may not work there daily, but he is still listed as an employee of Apple

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak#Employment_with_Apple

Re:Incorrect -- Woz is still employed by Apple

[blahbooboo]

Must be true since it came form wikipedia....

Wiki was first I found to easily cite. Then the 3 sources back up the wiki claim. I think it's fair.

Re:Incorrect -- Woz is still employed by Apple

[turbidostato]

"He still draws a check, sure but that's different than being a functional member of the organization."

I bet he isn't a true Scotsman either.

Re:Incorrect -- Woz is still employed by Apple

[oakgrove]

I never quit Apple. That suggestion was based on an incorrect Wall Street Journal that said I was leaving Apple because I didn't like things there. Actually, I had told the Wall Street Journal writer that I wasn't leaving Apple because of things that I didn't like and that I wasn't even leaving, keeping my small salary forever as a loyal employee. I just wanted a small startup experience and a chance to design a smaller product again, a universal remote control.

--Steve Wozniak

Re:Incorrect -- Woz is still employed by Apple

[oakgrove]

Almost forgot:

$ whois woz.org

[...] Registrant Name:Steve Wozniak[...]

Re:Incorrect -- Woz is still employed by Apple

[Sulphur]

"He still draws a check, sure but that's different than being a functional member of the organization."

I bet he isn't a true Scotsman either.

Have you seen the Wozniac tartan, you insensitive clod?

pop

[slashmojo]

Hotmail provides pop3 access so you can certainly download your mail.

Oblig XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/908/

I don't *mind* cloud hosting and storage

[Junta]

So long as it's trivial to sync to your own privately held computer infrastructure.

For storage, I love the concept of a provider keeping bits (that I have pre-gpged) for my reference. The problem is the trend seems to be more and more limited and convoluted storage capability in favor of more exploitive pricing and schemes (e.g. Amazon changing from a modest capacity to a pathetic song count on their cloud).

For compute, so long as you own the DNS name and all the data needed to reconstruct your presence elsewhere, it gives smaller businesses a chance to have a presence without a lot of up-frot cost. Too bad the trend is overwhelmingly fewer and fewer businesses making this benefit moot.

Re:The problem is

[jones_supa]

How about Tahoe-LAFS?

By the way, it has a too hard name -- every now and then I want to mention it but keep forgetting what Totse-TANSTAAFL was it again!

Stallman said it first

[Anonymous Coward]

Hasn't RMS already warned us all about this?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman

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.

Re:Incorrect summary - not an expose

[gmhowell]

"fabricated facts" sounds too bulky a phrase. Let's try to think of something else. Fize, thighs, ties, no, no, no... Wait, I got it:

Lies.