Professionally or personally (got my idea from this thread).
Maybe it’s because I don’t work with it directly, but I don’t see the benefits other than people not wanting to manage the servers themselves. It adds complexity (eg SQL Server vs SSAS) while putting your data behind some amorphous entity where you don’t know what goes on.
And for communists it’s a privacy nightmare. Convenience shouldn’t be a selling point when you have no idea what anything you’re putting up there is bring used for or if it’s accessed at all. Google Drive, Telegram, Discord, have all been said that they use “The Cloud”™️ and make it easier for people to use.
We live in a world where tech envelops almost every aspect of our lives, yet the amount if basic knowledge people have is abysmal. There really needs to be attempts to taking computers seriously and not assuming everything is friendly. People should be aware that “The Cloud”™️ means some corporate entity controls your data, that “encrypted” messaging is not safe when done through software controlled by Facebook, or that using Windows puts your trust entirely in a company that has never deserved it.
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If the day ever comes where I can have non-shit internet, I hope to move anything I run from VPS’ to actual self-hosted hardware
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I just call it someone else’s computer and with that in mind, keep my data, as much as I am able, on my computers. Networking needs seem to constantly get in my way, however…
But, the general populace does not want to learn how to run a server, or solve any issues relating to software, networking, etc. It’s impractical to expect everyone to suddenly develop such an interest. Much as the average person does not really care enough to learn how to brew beer, grow food, or build good furniture.
Although, I do admit that raising general tech literacy, especially with the basic concepts, is realistic and necessary.
We definitely can’t expect everyone to run their own servers, but tech literacy definitely needs actual attention. So many millenials and zoomers, generationally expected to have a grasp on tech, don’t know what a filesystem hierarchy is and now to access saved files, don’t know the general idea of how files are transferred online, or have complete indifference to the corporate consolidation of tech.
Our lives are far too intertwined with technology to stay oblivious to its uses and its dangers.
Sure thing. Having a few required fundamentals of technology classes (including the drawbacks, privacy issues, etc.) in schools would go a long way, given there are enough qualified teachers available. I myself had a mandatory touch typing class as a wee lad.
Aside from services like Lemmygrad (where everything is public, aside from messages), I try to avoid it as much as possible; the only exception I can think of is email, and that’s only because I very rarely send anything and whatever I receive will be sent without encryption anyway. It can be useful to have a VM in some large data center (e.g. for reliable server hosting), but that’s not relevant for the vast majority of people
(btw, you can just write
(TM)to make ™)For me The Cloud is “a service abstracted away from where it physically resides and how it physically works”. It’s got some uses (eg. email, as fighting the antispam shit is just so tiring), but one needs to keep in mind its limitations and that it’s not magic.
Privacy concerns aside, I think it’s a convenient solution for people without the time or know-how to do anything different. It’s as simple as drag and drop and they don’t have to worry about replacing faulty hardware if the server goes down. But like you said, the privacy aspect kinda invalidates all that for those who care about privacy. I’ve stopped using cloud storage since I’ve become more privacy-conscious a few years ago and have moved to syncing important files across my devices with Syncthing instead. I have been toying with the idea of self-hosting my own cloud storage, but I don’t really have any reliable hardware at the moment.
It’s also worth mentioning that it may be possible to securely use a cloud storage service with the help of a tool like Cryptomator. I haven’t used it myself, but it’s a FOSS program that allows you encrypt your data yourself before you upload it to the cloud.
and have moved to syncing important files across my devices with Syncthing instead.
Syncthing is criminally underutilized. It’s p2p, entirely self-reliant, and incredibly fast. But since it doesn’t upload to the cloud, it confuses people despite essentially being like Dropbox. And I don’t want to sound elitist as tech education (at least in the US) is absolutely miserable. Bourgeois hegemony has dictated that the only thing to learn is Microsoft Office and everything else is magic and left to tech nerds. I don’t know if it’s still the case now with Office as it was 20 years ago, they may have switched to teaching Google Docs, but the point still stands.
I dislike it, but for some things the convenience of it is useful. Plus, for some things it’s just easier than self hosting.
The cloud is amazing for businesses.
For personal, the reality is that we have not spent enough time as a society figuring how to make residences into self-organzing utility nodes. Every residence needs to control its own data and compute infrastructure. We have the tech for it, but we don’t design for the citizen to be in full control over their assets.
We even have some breakthroughs in mutatable crypto that would allow us to superposition a distributed cloud on top of citizen hardware without any data exposure.
But the pressures of military intelligence requires centralization. And a revolution isn’t going to change that any time soon.
