Why "cloud" services are not ready for people.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Azure has a red face.

 

One should not guarantee 99.9% uptime if the software is buggy, eh?

 

This reminds me of the good old service bureau days when time-sharing services first came out.  Instead of having your own processor on your desk, you had a terminal and everything was on the server/mainframe at the end of the phone line.  Didn't take much of a hiccup to put a service like this down.

[CapTon 592]

Microsoft OneDrive isn't the same thing as Azure, correct? Because I use OneDrive to store some of my files and just wanted to make sure that this little fault didn't take any effect on my files.

[Xenocity 343]

Microsoft OneDrive isn't the same thing as Azure, correct? Because I use OneDrive to store some of my files and just wanted to make sure that this little fault didn't take any effect on my files.

Correct.

One Drive is consumer product and Azure is the business product. 

 

I use iCloud for everything and it works well now that 2.0 is up and going.

This allows me to seamlessly as possible sync all my files stored on iCloud to all my Apple devices (Mac, iPad, and iPhone).

It soon will allow seamless streaming of photos between them too. 

Google Drive is good for docs and collaborating on them, though iCloud allows this now too for Apple's Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. 

Google Drive also now allows for any file to be stored on it and used on any device that supports Google Drive and the Google Drive App. 

 

With that said, I don't fully entrust the cloud due to the ability to recover the files if something happens to their servers, I keep a file on my hard drive as well. 

I mean Microsoft had to bring in a bunch of other tech companies a few years back when their cloud service went down wiping out all the files, those other companies had to help them recover the "unrecoverable" data. 

Thankfully the other companies were able to recover most of the data. 

[Duke87 1,070]

For personal and for security reasons my devices are intentionally kept unsynchronized, both with each other and with "the cloud". Two words: air gap. I will not have one of my devices being compromised automatically resulting in them all being compromised.

[Xenocity 343]

For personal and for security reasons my devices are intentionally kept unsynchronized, both with each other and with "the cloud". Two words: air gap. I will not have one of my devices being compromised automatically resulting in them all being compromised.

I trust in Apple. 

 

U.S. DOJ publicly stated children will DIE due to Apple's security protocols in OS X 10.10 and iOS8.

There is no back door or private key for government from Apple in these new OSes. 

 

Also you cannot compromise all your Apple devices if one is compromised (unless you have passwords saved in a document), Apple also lets you kill/permanently lock any device of yours synced with iCloud (you get track their locations too). 

[CapTon 592]

Well I received 200 GB of free storage with OneDrive wasn't gonna pass that up. However, most of the files I store there are ones that I can either re-download (if necessary) from some website or have on my hard drive as well.

[Nesral Sredna 62]

 

For personal and for security reasons my devices are intentionally kept unsynchronized, both with each other and with "the cloud". Two words: air gap. I will not have one of my devices being compromised automatically resulting in them all being compromised.

I trust in Apple. 

 

 

http://www.zdnet.com/dropbox-sync-glitch-results-in-lost-data-for-some-subscribers-7000034610/

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cloud-computing-users-losing-data-205500612.html

 

You dont need a hacker to loose files, Apple manages quite well on their own to do that.

 

I therefore only trust my WD Mybook!

[T Wrecks 10,210]

 

For personal and for security reasons my devices are intentionally kept unsynchronized, both with each other and with "the cloud". Two words: air gap. I will not have one of my devices being compromised automatically resulting in them all being compromised.

I trust in Apple. 

 

U.S. DOJ publicly stated children will DIE due to Apple's security protocols in OS X 10.10 and iOS8.

There is no back door or private key for government from Apple in these new OSes.

Well, "publicly stated" is a nice way of putting it... it's the usual FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) routine: "If you do that, thousands of innocent children will die, and YOU will be guilty of that!".

 

At the end of the day, we have no way of knowing whether a backdoor will be in the final product or not. The only way to be sure would be to use open-source software that has been submitted to a thorough code review by experts. And even then, only a purposefully implemented backdoor could be ruled out with a decent amount of certainty. Hacks or exploits could still be used to get in through some vulnerability that managed to slip through the review.

 

As for the "I trust in Apple" comment, I believe Jennifer Lawrence and others may have a word or two to say about that... Then again, this was about a hack and not about an official backdoor, of course. But in the end, compromised is compromised, and it's common sense that a storage medium that can be accessed from pretty much anywhere in the world is at a higher risk of being compromised than a storage medium that requires physical access to one single location.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

When it comes to these 'new' services, I skip them pretty much entirely.  I have an account with dropbox that I've used something like twice. 

 

I have a small disk farm consisting of 1.3 TB of hard drives that are mostly used for backups and other stuff that can be recovered from the Internet if needed. 

 

My main system has 0.5 TB of storage of which only 50 GB is in use including my operating system.  My personal space occupies only 28.9GB. 

 

I don't store huge files like motion pictures. 

 

I am not mobile.

 

My account with imgur is strictly for posting images on sites, and I don't care if it is wiped out.

 

Besides my basic distrust of 'services', I have no need of them anyway.

[hym 358]

I trust in Apple. 

 

U.S. DOJ publicly stated children will DIE due to Apple's security protocols in OS X 10.10 and iOS8.

There is no back door or private key for government from Apple in these new OSes. 

 

Also you cannot compromise all your Apple devices if one is compromised (unless you have passwords saved in a document), Apple also lets you kill/permanently lock any device of yours synced with iCloud (you get track their locations too). 

 

 

No one cares if there is a company-supplied back door if you can build your own back door..  Apple claims that it would take 5.5 years to break the encryption key, but most security analysts believe Apple is vastly underestimating the NSA's code cracking abilities.  Furthermore, the NSA can easily decrypt most of the encrypted traffic on the internet, and it is a subject of debate whether the NSA has figured out how to effectively build its own back door into the "strong" encryption standards.  If that isn't enough, DARPA is hard at work developing the world's first practical exaflop supercomputer, and it is hoping to have it ready this decade.  The government would be cracking iPhone encryption in minutes or seconds.

 

Remember this: If it is in anyway capable of data transfer, it can be compromised.  Hackers demonstrated a wonderful proof of this concept against Dell several years ago.  They found the factory's connection to the internet, forced their way through the firewalls and down into the instruction code for the assembly line machines making the physical chips that would comprise the Dell desktop towers.  They modified the instruction code for the assembly machines to physically burn the code for a virus into the logic of some of the computer's chips.  The towers left the factory infected with the virus, never having once been "connected to the internet."