(no subject)
In more interesting news: this weekend, Flickr suddenly highlighted the problems of relying on cloud storage for your files. A photoblogger who'd used the service for five years, sticking about four thousand photos on there, informed Flickr about someone plagiarising his work and passing it off as their own. In response, Flickr accidentally killed his account. More importantly - even when they realised their mistake and reset his account, they maintained for some time that they weren't able to reinstate his photos and that there was nothing they or he could do.
By the time of my writing this, the photos have come back - it's amazing what some media coverage will do for the state of your backups - but their initial response is very interesting given how many experts expect people to move entirely to cloud storage. Right now there's really no assurances from any cloud provider that your stuff will either a) stick around for a practical amount of time or b) be easily recoverable if something happens to them or the intern pushes the wrong big red button, and everyone is very keen to point this out in their terms of service. Even if there were any recourse, how do you mandate that against simple business pressures? Are you going to have a central body demanding that a cloud storage company stay solvent for x years? If a company can't pay the bills, it can't pay the bills, and if their servers get grabbed by the bailiff, well, there go your files with it. What about malicious entry to your account? Credit cards have fraud protection - are we going to need fraud protection for your personal data in case of modification by unknown parties? And all the audits that then requires?
Flickr's got something like billions of files, and it's understandable that they can't reliably back it all up, and can't say for sure that something could be recovered. But there are companies out there that are adamant that cloud storage will become even more important - most notably, Google's laptop OS doesn't even have a local file browser. I have to admit that at the moment, the idea of it all seems very rose-tinted on the part of the designers involved.
By the time of my writing this, the photos have come back - it's amazing what some media coverage will do for the state of your backups - but their initial response is very interesting given how many experts expect people to move entirely to cloud storage. Right now there's really no assurances from any cloud provider that your stuff will either a) stick around for a practical amount of time or b) be easily recoverable if something happens to them or the intern pushes the wrong big red button, and everyone is very keen to point this out in their terms of service. Even if there were any recourse, how do you mandate that against simple business pressures? Are you going to have a central body demanding that a cloud storage company stay solvent for x years? If a company can't pay the bills, it can't pay the bills, and if their servers get grabbed by the bailiff, well, there go your files with it. What about malicious entry to your account? Credit cards have fraud protection - are we going to need fraud protection for your personal data in case of modification by unknown parties? And all the audits that then requires?
Flickr's got something like billions of files, and it's understandable that they can't reliably back it all up, and can't say for sure that something could be recovered. But there are companies out there that are adamant that cloud storage will become even more important - most notably, Google's laptop OS doesn't even have a local file browser. I have to admit that at the moment, the idea of it all seems very rose-tinted on the part of the designers involved.