You really believe they will still be in business 5 years from now, let alone 99 years?
My point was that there are alternatives to cloud services that have a monthly or annual charge that never ends. As you point out, there are potential risks with these options.
Fundamentally, the risk that the cloud service provider stops providing the service you are using is a risk of any cloud service. The only way to completely prevent someone else's bad business decisions from affecting your data is to keep your data on servers you own that are located on property you own. Of course, you must have full control of the hardware, operating systems, software, etc. that are used to access your data (e.g. no DRM controlled by a 3rd party).
Even if this company shut down long before your lifetime or the 99 year term expire, you would still be saving money by purchasing their service if the service remains available for longer than it would have taken you to spend the same amount of money on a service that charges by the month or year. The lifetime service option that I mentioned in a previous post costs less than 5 years worth of the same service billed on a monthly/yearly basis at this company and most of its competitors.
Buying this service, of course, involves some risk related to the business continuity of pCloud. However, there have been plenty of other cloud services that have billed on a monthly or annual basis that have been discontinued with little or no warning (e.g. Xmarks), so monthly or annual charges are no guarantee that the service will remain available as long as you want it.
If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.
pCloud offers a "lifetime" cloud storage service for a one-time fee. Their definition of lifetime is the shorter of your lifetime or 99 years.
Disclaimer: I do not own, work for, or have any other financial interest in pCloud.
It seems google is more and more deciding whats good and whats bad, all they really should do is create a browser that does what the website asks it to do and not decide to do something else.
Even if the website wants to download malware, send spam, etc.?
Need browser feature that removes all cookies created by tab when tab is closed. Have ability to add exceptions for sites where you want the cookies to persist (like banking, slashdot, etc).
Does anything like that exist?
The Self-destructing cookies extension in Firefox does that. By default, all cookies created in a tab get deleted a few seconds after the tab is closed. You can set overrides on individual domains to either keep cookies until the entire browser is closed or permanently.
No, there's a simpler solution than that: don't let municipalities keep the money from traffic tickets (or any kind of fine). The payments should be made directly to the state's general fund. Take away the profit motive, no more profit based policing.
North Carolina does this. The state constitution actually requires that all fines collected "shall be faithfully appropriated and used exclusively for maintaining free public schools."
I've seen this work to have the desired effect.
The campus police at some of the state universities used to issue all sorts of nuisance parking tickets for things like "parked too close to line". At the time, the universities were keeping the money from the fines. Quite a few years ago, there was a legal case that went to the state supreme court where they ruled that the universities couldn't keep the money. After that, the number of nuisance fines dramatically decreased, even though officials claimed that there was no correlation between these events.
You have no need to travel with HIPAA PHI on your laptop..
The policy of the medical school where I used to work is to consider any device that even accesses PHI as "contaminated with PHI", even if such access should never have resulted in any PHI being stored on the local hard drive of the machine accessing that data. It's possible that OP may have worked at a place with a similar policy.
Our internal forensics group was able to demonstrate too many cases where it wasn't necessary for a laptop user to even do something as dangerous as download a file containing PHI for the local hard drive to still end up with PHI on it. One such case was OS swap/page files. There were others.
While we took steps to minimize the likelihood of these events happening and PHI ending up on portable/mobile devices, we still treated devices that merely accessed remote PHI as if they contained PHI in local storage and required required them to have appropriate controls in place, such as whole disk encryption, local firewalls, mandatory reporting of lost/stolen devices, etc.
Signs indicating which road has right-of-way are common in Finland and some of the nearby countries. While it's been a few years since I've driven there, the last time I was in Helsinki, many traffic signals were turned off (as in dark) late at night or on weekends. They also had a number of intersections where there was no Stop or Yield/Give Way signs in any direction. Drivers were expected to know the rules of the road and who had right-of-way.
When I was in Australia in the '90s, they had already eliminated their coins smaller than 5 cents, and the common practice was to always round down cash transactions. So, if your total was $1.99 and you paid with cash, you'd only get charged $1.95. If you paid with EFTPOS (debit card) or a credit card, you'd be charged the full $1.99.
how does redundancy help you when the main power switch goes down / on fire and there is no one there
If you are a big enough operation, you have redundancy at the data center level. i.e. you can lose an entire data center and have no loss of service on your production applications. Other than a possible speed/performance degradation, your average customer has no knowledge that anything bad has happened.
Requiring users to download and install some codec is probably a non-starter in both cases, though.
While it would be better if free codecs were included "out of the box", I wouldn't say it's a non-starter. There are an awful lot of systems out there where the user has chosen to install Flash. If major "trusted" web sites required WebM, Theora, etc., I would expect that most users would install the appropriate software to view that content, just as many users install Flash today.
Slashdot Mirror
You really believe they will still be in business 5 years from now, let alone 99 years?
My point was that there are alternatives to cloud services that have a monthly or annual charge that never ends. As you point out, there are potential risks with these options.
Fundamentally, the risk that the cloud service provider stops providing the service you are using is a risk of any cloud service. The only way to completely prevent someone else's bad business decisions from affecting your data is to keep your data on servers you own that are located on property you own. Of course, you must have full control of the hardware, operating systems, software, etc. that are used to access your data (e.g. no DRM controlled by a 3rd party).
Even if this company shut down long before your lifetime or the 99 year term expire, you would still be saving money by purchasing their service if the service remains available for longer than it would have taken you to spend the same amount of money on a service that charges by the month or year. The lifetime service option that I mentioned in a previous post costs less than 5 years worth of the same service billed on a monthly/yearly basis at this company and most of its competitors.
Buying this service, of course, involves some risk related to the business continuity of pCloud. However, there have been plenty of other cloud services that have billed on a monthly or annual basis that have been discontinued with little or no warning (e.g. Xmarks), so monthly or annual charges are no guarantee that the service will remain available as long as you want it.
If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.
pCloud offers a "lifetime" cloud storage service for a one-time fee. Their definition of lifetime is the shorter of your lifetime or 99 years.
Disclaimer: I do not own, work for, or have any other financial interest in pCloud.
It seems google is more and more deciding whats good and whats bad, all they really should do is create a browser that does what the website asks it to do and not decide to do something else.
Even if the website wants to download malware, send spam, etc.?
Need browser feature that removes all cookies created by tab when tab is closed. Have ability to add exceptions for sites where you want the cookies to persist (like banking, slashdot, etc).
Does anything like that exist?
The Self-destructing cookies extension in Firefox does that. By default, all cookies created in a tab get deleted a few seconds after the tab is closed. You can set overrides on individual domains to either keep cookies until the entire browser is closed or permanently.
No, there's a simpler solution than that: don't let municipalities keep the money from traffic tickets (or any kind of fine). The payments should be made directly to the state's general fund. Take away the profit motive, no more profit based policing.
North Carolina does this. The state constitution actually requires that all fines collected "shall be faithfully appropriated and used exclusively for maintaining free public schools."
I've seen this work to have the desired effect.
The campus police at some of the state universities used to issue all sorts of nuisance parking tickets for things like "parked too close to line". At the time, the universities were keeping the money from the fines. Quite a few years ago, there was a legal case that went to the state supreme court where they ruled that the universities couldn't keep the money. After that, the number of nuisance fines dramatically decreased, even though officials claimed that there was no correlation between these events.
The actual report has more details, including some real numbers. See http://www.rootmetrics.com/us/...
You have no need to travel with HIPAA PHI on your laptop..
The policy of the medical school where I used to work is to consider any device that even accesses PHI as "contaminated with PHI", even if such access should never have resulted in any PHI being stored on the local hard drive of the machine accessing that data. It's possible that OP may have worked at a place with a similar policy.
Our internal forensics group was able to demonstrate too many cases where it wasn't necessary for a laptop user to even do something as dangerous as download a file containing PHI for the local hard drive to still end up with PHI on it. One such case was OS swap/page files. There were others.
While we took steps to minimize the likelihood of these events happening and PHI ending up on portable/mobile devices, we still treated devices that merely accessed remote PHI as if they contained PHI in local storage and required required them to have appropriate controls in place, such as whole disk encryption, local firewalls, mandatory reporting of lost/stolen devices, etc.
Signs indicating which road has right-of-way are common in Finland and some of the nearby countries. While it's been a few years since I've driven there, the last time I was in Helsinki, many traffic signals were turned off (as in dark) late at night or on weekends. They also had a number of intersections where there was no Stop or Yield/Give Way signs in any direction. Drivers were expected to know the rules of the road and who had right-of-way.
Sensible merchants would just use divisible-by-5 prices to avoid issues with rounding.
This doesn't always work. A common example where it doesn't work is grocery stores where certain items are sold by weight.
When I was in Australia in the '90s, they had already eliminated their coins smaller than 5 cents, and the common practice was to always round down cash transactions. So, if your total was $1.99 and you paid with cash, you'd only get charged $1.95. If you paid with EFTPOS (debit card) or a credit card, you'd be charged the full $1.99.
how does redundancy help you when the main power switch goes down / on fire and there is no one there
If you are a big enough operation, you have redundancy at the data center level. i.e. you can lose an entire data center and have no loss of service on your production applications. Other than a possible speed/performance degradation, your average customer has no knowledge that anything bad has happened.
This was tried, and rejected by the government in the past.
http://www.thestreet.com/s/dish-directv-deal-wont-fool-feds/newsanalysis/technology-update/10432145.html?puc=googlefi&cm_ven=GOOGLEFI&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA
Requiring users to download and install some codec is probably a non-starter in both cases, though.
While it would be better if free codecs were included "out of the box", I wouldn't say it's a non-starter. There are an awful lot of systems out there where the user has chosen to install Flash. If major "trusted" web sites required WebM, Theora, etc., I would expect that most users would install the appropriate software to view that content, just as many users install Flash today.