Steve Wozniak: "I worry about everything going to the cloud"

http://www.france24.com/en/20120805-apple-co-founder-wozniak-sees-trouble-cloud

by esolyt • 14 years ago

93 47 14 years ago

Terrible article, veers way off subject from the headline. So I'm going to forget the article exists and talk about the headline.

I'm personally more interested in personal cloud type services. Little plug computers that you hook to your wall and run services such as FTP off of. You pay for brain dead easy DNS service at whatever rate and all of your data belongs to you. If your DNS provider gives you the finger you switch and give it right back.

Right now these devices are expensive. In time though they'll be cheap. So I'm just waiting on it until I can build my own or buy one for <$50.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

I'm working on that particular project right now(1). Its much closer than you think.

(1) Like code windows open next to this one, right now.

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

>Its much closer than you think.

I'm not exactly a patient man. If I suspected I'd be waiting long I'd start my own project.

pyre2• 14 years ago

Your own project, or are you working on the 'freedom box'?

olalonde• 14 years ago

Please don't editorialize the headline. The original title is fine: "Apple co-founder Wozniak sees trouble in the cloud".

Bjoern• 14 years ago

There is a huge privacy issue in the Cloud. Some progress has been made with Homomorpohic encryption, but its still some time away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption http://blogs.teamb.com/craigstuntz/2010/03/18/38566/

ams6110• 14 years ago

Privacy is the big reason I don't put anything really private in "the cloud." I don't care how good the security is, ultimately humans run these services, and humans are corruptible.

anusinha• 14 years ago

One possible answer is to use encryption of some sort when uploading/downloading files. This is annoying to implement though.

gadders• 14 years ago

I worry about people reeling Woz out to comment on stuff every time something Apple related happens.

Is he not a bit past his sell by date?

brudgers• 14 years ago

It's Woz or Wayne if you want a comment from an Apple founder...and who quotes Wayne?

coob• 14 years ago

Woz has no need for the cloud, he has one in his backpack:

http://gizmodo.com/5926598/the-amazing-contents-of-steve-woz...

stroboskop• 14 years ago

Most people are complaining about the headline, but it is in line with what Woz is saying:

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

He added: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away" through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.

"I want to feel that I own things," Wozniak said. "A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

I wouldn't be surprised if many people around HN do not agree with Woz. After all the cloud is how many here earn their living.

That said, Woz is absolutely right. I wish more people of his standing would speak up.

DanBC• 14 years ago

> I wouldn't be surprised if many people around HN do not agree with Woz. After all the cloud is how many here earn their living. That said, Woz is absolutely right.

There's a weird split. People running a service do not want to have to depend on a 3rd party service; but they do want to encourage other people to depend on the service that they are providing.

maayank• 14 years ago

If I put my thesis paper and vacation photos on a service that uses EC2 as a backend, I'm not a competitor to either the service or Amazon.

If I'm the provider of said service, Amazon are a potential competitor.

ap22213• 14 years ago

What he says may be true, but convenience + cheap wins out (almost) every time.

esolyt• 14 years ago

Most people around HN don't seem to have a problem with using a non-free and closed source operating system. Ultimately, it's all about trusting a company. People who use OSX trust Apple, without asking to see the source code of any part of it. Likewise, in the case of cloud users, it will be trusting another company such as Dropbox or Google. For private data, you can encrypt. For critical data, you can keep local copies.

alan_cx• 14 years ago

Well, Im still trying to work out why people are trusting storage clouds at all. Personally, and that means for me, I see no practical use and only danger. Outages, ownership, authority snooping, seizures, hacking, etc, etc. And then I read something here about a cloud hack being used to wipe computers, tablets and phones. (And don't give me crap about misunderstanding it, I don't need to understand it to be freaked out by the general plot as it were) All I'm told is that some how a cloud is convenient. Leaving my front door open is convenient, but also stupid.

If I were to use a cloud to store files, I would treat it like my hard drive, ie, I would want to back it up. Nothing vital to me would ever sit in or on a cloud. I've seen too much go wrong to ever trust them.

Overall, I just don't understand why people who have decent, cheap local storage and back up ability already, while retaining complete control, would suddenly hand all their vital data over to somewhere where you lose all control. Even if I want to get my data from elsewhere on the net, I have a cheapo Iomega drive that allows that easily. This cloud lark simply makes no sense to me at all. It just looks like another corporate data grab, which added snooping.

Cloud = Kings New Clothes. I feel like the little boy.

rimantas3• 14 years ago

  >  I see no practical use and only danger. Outages,
  > ownership, authority snooping, seizures, hacking,
  > etc, etc.

Yep, selection bias. Cloud is not used for anything else, just snooping and hacking. I see a practical use: I dont' care what device I am on, I always have my contacts in sync, I can now see the same tabs open, I can access my presentation which I started yesterday on MBP on my iPhone.

  > Nothing vital to me would ever sit in or on a cloud.

Well my kidneys are not on the cloud. Neither my lungs. My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all. But damn is this convenient to have that stuff up there.

  > I've seen too much go wrong to ever trust them.

Then don't.

  > Overall, I just don't understand why people who have decent, cheap local
  > storage and back up ability already,

Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore. And local does not really cut it.

  > while retaining complete control, would suddenly hand all their vital data
  > over to somewhere where you lose all control.

Maybe some are not control freaks? And maybe some just have some data what is not "vital", but can be kept in the cloud? Like music collection?

pyre2• 14 years ago

I think that the severe anti-cloud reaction comes from the extreme pro-cloud cheering that we see on HN. While you may have a level headed approach, just look at all of the 'post pc era' people that want all computers to be ipads and all data to reside in the cloud... Ignoring the fact that this opens up all of your data to warrantless searches by law enforcement, or remote wipes by hackers.

Silhouette3• 14 years ago

I see a practical use: I dont' care what device I am on, I always have my contacts in sync, I can now see the same tabs open, I can access my presentation which I started yesterday on MBP on my iPhone.

But there is no reason we couldn't do that with a basic home or small office network, adding basic VPN functionality to allow remote access if necessary. It's not particularly difficult to set these things up today for anyone who can set up a broadband router and home wireless network. If they were the must-have technologies being promoted instead of the cloud then it would get even easier, as the people making the equipment built more user-friendly interfaces that didn't need much in the way of technical skills at all, and as ready-made server software to co-ordinate your mail or calendar or music collection or whatever became as simple as a one-click download.

My contacts? Not vital at all. My presentations? Not vital at all. My music? Not vital at all.

Somehow I suspect you'd disagree if all your contacts started getting phishing e-mails that looked like they came from you, or if you blew a million-dollar business deal because your presentation wasn't available when you visited a prospective client, or if you had thousands of dollars' worth of music that you'd spent real money on and it disappeared overnight because the service provider closed down the system or you didn't realise you couldn't transfer something between accounts or you sync'd the wrong thing the wrong way. Things like these can and do happen, but I think there's a perception of "It'll never happen to me".

Because when I figure in my time needed to configure and maintain this decent, cheap and local storage it is not that cheap anymore.

I guess you're looking at this from a personal point of view. I'm not sure it's really true even then, but I acknowledge that setting up and maintaining IT systems today does require technical skills that most home users don't have, and if your new tablet or laptop or smartphone ships with the vendor's pet cloud services already integrated then of course that's an easier user experience since it just works (as long as you're happy to use those services and don't want any others).

I don't really buy that argument at all for businesses, though. Usually there are all kinds of gotchas if you're doing serious work in the cloud. Just look at the string of pathetic excuses and weasel words every time Amazon's services go down about how you should have used redundant something-or-other and different availability-wotsits, and then look at how many businesses either hadn't understood this or hadn't wanted to spend the extra money or simply hadn't done it yet and wound up offline as a result. I defy anyone to claim that the time and money to configure cloud services to be reliable per all these recommendations is harder than setting up equivalent equipment on-site or with dedicated hosting and a decent off-site backup system, assuming that you have someone who knows what they are doing in each case to do the work.

jimbobimbo3• 14 years ago

Speaking of music collection - for the past week I'm trying to download two albums that I bought, off of Amazon's Cloud Player. Apparently, their own MP3 Downloaded is horribly broken on Windows 7 (given that screenshots on their support page show Windows XP in 2012, I'm not that surprised). Makes me wonder if I ever want to keep anything up there, if I can't get it out.

Woz is right on the money - anything we put in the cloud make us be on the mercy of provider's business plan, reliability and plain quality of QA processes.

minm5• 14 years ago

Woz is absolutely right. The real problem with cloud is stewardship. Hypothetically, let us assume the advertisement model fails for Google, what will i need to pay for my cloud apps ($20/month or $200/month). What if Facebook changes hand and run by Kuwait Oil Barons? What if the cloud service provider sold to my arch competitor?

After seeing the TWiT.TV show about Roll your Personal Cloud (http://twit.tv/show/know-how/1) I have started using Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) for my remote access and sync needs. It can be run completely local and authentication is between my browser and the Tonido device. I am happy sofar and completely own my data.

EvanAnderson2• 14 years ago

At least where I am, in the US, hosting your own services at home is all well and good until you become frustrated with the piddly upload bandwidth you get from your ISP and the potential of running afoul of transfer caps. Consumer acceptance of "personal clouds" isn't going to happen if using traditional "cloud services" is cheaper, faster, and more reliable. I don't see that story getting better anytime soon.

minm5• 14 years ago

It works out for me. Because 70% of my access happens within my home from different devices and i get to use my gigabit connection in the LAN. I think for many users it is the right setup (Unless otherwise you are a traveling salesperson).

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

It all depends on what you define as the "cloud" and where your data actually lives.

Would I worry about all my data living in one enormous datacenter in the USA right next to everybody elses, all owned by one gigantic corporation? Sure.

Would I worry less if it was hosted locally by a company in my home town with a datacenter that I can actually go and visit and some agreement in place so that I can have take a copy of the raw data myself and have their copy deleted? Certainly, not to mention that the latency would be better.

I think fast upload is the answer to this and I believe that google fiber plans on providing this. In that case you can simply have a home server which is basically a NAS+Router on steroids with a static internet IP (thanks to IPV6) , this server could provide a pretty web interface for "normal" users and a unix shell for l33t h4x0rs. Since upstream is fast enough the service is going to be indistinguishable from something like dropbox in terms of speed and I will have full control.

The issues here are data and power reliability , what happens if the disk in my home server dies? There is only so much redundancy you can cram into a small low cost box. I guess the solution would be third party backup services that take advantage of fast upstream to sync the contents of your local box and perhaps can also perform as a "failover" box if your local node fails. The difference here is that you would get a choice of third party backup suppliers, though I imagine most ISPs would provide this as part of the broadband service.

One thing that does concern me somewhat on HN and other development oriented websites is that people do a lot of talking about stuff like APIs and Web services rather than protocols and standards. Web APIs provide the illusion of data portability since you have some way of interacting with it, but the reality is that you need a way to dump all of your data and you also need 100% compatible software to move it to.

I guess it's difficult to make a business case for designing Email 2.0 unless you know that you can monetise users through some kind of lock-in. Otherwise you could design a fantastic open service only to have someone copy it , undercut you on price and steal all of your users. For example if you could set up your own third party "facebook server" that allows users to interact with FB users without agreeing to facebook TOS or seeing facebook ads.

Jun8• 14 years ago

Before you agree or disagree with Woz try this simple experiment: Try to view or download your old (e.g. two year-old) status updates from Facebook and see what happened to the longer ones.

thereallurch• 14 years ago

As someone without facebook, care to enlighten me as to what happens?

woobles• 14 years ago

Encryption encryption encryption.

spins4u22• 14 years ago

Well I've been hacked and cloned and I'm positive it happened from blackberry, do take your best shot, this guy has taken over my computer, phone, and my identity, so how do you like them apples. I'm scared to death of what he's doing on my computer. I doubt if its leagle.

spins4u22• 14 years ago

I got snipits of info on my phone and google would put in his phone numbers for me, so I did a little detective work and found out that my hacker worked for rim. I think he's since quit, as he has a lucritative business on my computer in my name. Blackberry refuses to help me at all, so I'm thinking of taking action.

Steve Wozniak: "I worry about everything going to the cloud"

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