Careless Computing
Nothing is safer in the cloud

Richard Stallman weighs in on the cloud and coins a new phrase: Careless Computing.

Spotted in the comments:

“The trouble with lovely fluffly white clouds is, one day they will go dark, rumble a bit then break and rain a lot.”

In the light of the week’s revelations of 1.5+ million logins/passwords stolen from gawker, (an extremely good analysis here in forbes) another 200,000 public records left in plain text on a public backup server for months without anyone noticing, McDonalds getting breached, and the University of Wisconson being exposed for over 2 years… It’s time to rethink our attitudes towards data, ya think?

An answer to the privacy problem is to keep your own data inside your own computers and home, where there are clear boundries between your stuff and their stuff…

The bigger the cloud, and the more people that have access to it, the larger the security problem. A bigger cloud = a bigger target, and the higher price that one mistake that one person can make that everyone else has to pay.

“I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there’s a sucker born every minute. The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear.” -RMS

In other news.. every major Australian editor-in-chief - save two - have called upon the Australian government to do their damndest to protect Assange. In the Washington Post (of all places!) - Eugene Robinson has essentially echoed my arguments regarding terms of service.

February 10, 2011
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