Clearing the cloud over Cloud issues

These days, in our daily rush in the rat race, anything convenient is deemed to be a godsend and accepted without much thought over the practical issues.

In IT, over a period of just 40 years of evolution, we have had mainframe computers the size of filing cabinets in air-conditioned rooms; desktop Apple II with only 64k memory; heavy laptops with limited memory and capabilities; notebooks; netbooks; iPads and Tablets; smart phones which could do some computing and so on.

The clutter of unsightly wires could be cleared with wireless technology in the form of WiFi internet connection, wireless keyboard and mouse, and so on.

With Cloud technology, we are now able to do away with physical possession of files, books, DVDs and so on, yet able to retrieve with ease from a well managed index... until something untoward happened... like when the cloud providers made mistakes like deleting your virtual files and records! Then there is the usual security issues over ownership and privacy. For any new technological breakthrough, the bad guys are having ideas on how to access to it. Often, we are lulled into 'ignorance is bliss' until it happened to us personally. Like our gated community with security guards which we assume takes care of the security aspect of our homes, until theft, robbery or rape takes place before we realise that security guards are also human.

The following article in Technology Review was featured in The Star yesterday...

"Our possessions define us. Yet today the definition of possession itself is shifting, thanks to cloud services that store some things we hold dear on distant Internet servers. When those belongings reside in Netflix's video service, Amazon's Kindle bookstore, or Apple's coming iCloud service, they become impossible to misplace, and easier to organize and access than before. They also gain new powers over us, and slip free of powers we once held over them—powers that have shaped our thinking and behavior for centuries. One consequence is to give the companies that provide cloud services tremendous amounts of unchecked control over these possessions. In some cases, that control has already been abused." ...

Rest of the article:
A Cloud over Ownership
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38391/


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