Live by the Cloud, Die by the Cloud 5

Posted by JD 12/17/2016 at 20:10

Longtime readers know that I’m not a fan of most cloudy services. Not just about the privacy sucking aspects, but also about the inability to control your own data.

This week, we’ve seen two huge cloud providers do dumb things.
Dropbox disabled public folders. Seems they didn’t like people transferring files? I dunno. The other was a change in ToS for Evernote. They wanted to clarify that their people could read your notes. Gee – put stuff on someone else’s server and wonder if they can read it? Duh.

Remember Google Reader? They weren’t able to make money off it, so after years of happy users, they shut it down.

I’m not including links for these things because I’ve learned those will disappear quickly.

If you have a broadband connection, you can run your own cloudy services. A $35 raspberry Pi can do it. There are some projects that will setup a raspberry pi to provide file sharing, family photos, read-it-later, centralized contacts and other handy tools like a family calendar for your family. You should run a VPN to access these things securely too. These things can all run on the same $35 computer.

If you are really nerdy, check out the sovereign project. It provides about 20 cloudy services including a VPN.

Say no to cloud services. Just say no!

Saw this quote on /.

The cloud is someone else’s hard drive attached to someone else’s server in someone else’s data center at the end of an Internet pipe controlled by someone else. If that works for you – and it might! – great. But do be aware of what you are doing.
– by sphealey

  1. jd 12/17/2016 at 22:03

    We really don’t need external cloud providers anymore. We just don’t.

  2. Tyler 01/11/2017 at 13:35

    Just recently got up and going with nextCloud. Unfortunately my Internet is prohibitively slow, so I ended up hosting the server. Encrypted disk, 2fa-secured SSH… not ideal, but better than before.

  3. JD 01/12/2017 at 09:44

    Tyler, I hope you put up a VPN. HTTPS is NOT secure enough.

    Encrypted disks are only secure when the machine isn’t running. Think about it for a few minutes. It must be decrypted to be useful. The hosting provider can see all that data as they like.

    I have been really impressed by some cloudy providers fighting for the privacy of their users.

    Sadly, I fear that is the exception. As a small business owner, I honestly don’t know what I’d do, but my ability to fight the FBI in court would be limited.

  4. JD 01/23/2017 at 17:57

    Was watching some old episodes of LAS today and they were talking about all the great things about cloud services AND all the terrible things about cloud services, especially as these relate to IoT stuff.

    • If a new version of the IoT is released, they can shut off support for older versions. This has happened with a few devices already – some from google.
    • If it has a software license (and a key) and you move or cause reactivation to be required for any reason, they may refuse to reactivate older versions/releases. This happens in commercial software all the time. After all, they want the money.
    If it is important to you and you want to own it, and you want to own it and manage it, then you shouldn’t let it connect to the internet.

    paraphrased from Chris Fisher

    Do you use services like slack ? Who owns the data? How hard is it to fire them and keep the data?

  5. JD 03/02/2017 at 20:40

    Seems there was a massive die by the cloud yesterday:
    https://www.wired.com/2017/02/happens-one-site-hosts-entire-internet/