[sdiy] Cloud or not cloud... That's the question..

[Jay Vaughan (ibisum)]

> All my Synth DIY files are on Dropbox. This means I can access them from my Mac or PC depending on what software I'm using. I can also access them from the CNC machine or from my mobile to forward them as attachments in emails.

See .. I am of the opinion that you’ve got a perfectly good computer to serve all your files from, and you can leave it at home and have it accessible - and very safe - from anywhere in the world.  Why, on earth, do you need to depend on a 3rd-party for this shared-/safe-/acessible filesystem functionality?

Cloud services are selling you things you already have at hand, duh. That Dropbox plugin should be in the OS.

So, highly opinionated claim: Cloud services are the dickens: avoid at all cost.  Its a con.


> This functionality far outweighs and potential security concerns. I trust the security guys at Dropbox know far more than me about security. Any sensitive documents are encrypted and password protected.
> 

Encryption means you can pretty much put your data anywhere you want, and as long as you can get it back somehow, and nevertheless remember the key, your data is ‘safe’ - or at least, as safe as the network on which you have copied it.

>> Anybody who puts their very precious data in any single place is looking to lose it.  Backups and multiple providers are key.

Well, they’re all subject to severe damage.

The new hotness is IPFS: http://ipfs.io/

For a few months now I’ve been serving the content I want to be accessible to me by way of a set of 3 raspberry Pi’s loosely distributed among a set of trusted high-bandwidth locations (friends and family with permission), and it means we have a few hundred gigs of always-accessible file archives for the cost of dinner and a few beers and a bit of golang.  But with the added advantage that I can completely manage my data myself, without really involving other people I don’t ‘trust’.  Oma and Opa, a few cousins, my homies and so on.. a real ‘cloud’ of people I trust have the machines, and it just plain works.

IPFS is a very good implementation of distributed trust, and there is a lot to be said about that.  There are places it can improve, sure, but .. so far it works so well.  Quite easy to DIY.

>> 
>> I find it highly doubtful that any classified data is in a public cloud, even encrypted.

I dunno about that.  For sure various governments have their own infrastructure, but a lot of the Western governments are all pretty much hooked on Google, Amazon, and things like SAP cloud services.

>> I could see the FBI possibly "outsourcing" to external providers who specialize in dedicated secure cloud storage, but that's not "the public cloud”.

In the case of the US, most government agencies are supposed to out-source to qualified bidders, which of course are many and sundry, in the ‘public’ sphere (inasmuch as these co’s are publicly tradable).  And of course, those providers have to qualify.

In the case of the spooky criminal NSA/GCHQ/&etc. though, its clear they’re building their own, “ultra secret”, super-computer systems to control the planets’ resources.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up just pushing encrypted traffic all over the worlds’ networks, just coz they can ..

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Jay Vaughan
ibisum at gmail.com