Clouds are everywhere, cloud property is in the spotlight.

Kerl Gudwin (Kyle Goodwin) wants his things back. One day, he decided to start a company in Ohio, the United States, to shoot local sporting events. The business was booming, but then he suffered a blow.

To protect valuable video footage, Goodwin placed them in a popular storage facility. January 19, 2012, all these assets disappeared without warning. Gone together, there are 150 million other users stored there. He asked for his livelihood, but he was rejected. So he decided to sue the court.

Goodwin's encounter reflects a much deeper problem that is at the heart of our current path to technological use. Corynne hoping, Mexeiri of the Electronic Outpost Foundation (EFF), is providing legal aid to Goodwin, saying: "This concerns the future of Internet users and the use of the Internet." "Why do you say that?" Goodwin's video footage is digitized and stored on a computer server in the cloud. The U.S. government, which confiscated the information, actually claimed that he had lost ownership of the property at the moment Goodwin uploaded the footage.

At this critical juncture, nobody is immune, because almost every Internet user is using cloud computing in some way, whether it's to log in to email or social media, or to read e-books. Today, the music we love to hear, the photos that carry memory, and the vital contacts are stored in a server cluster thousands of kilometres away. We are moving towards a world in which all digital life takes place in the cloud, but these developments are intended to change our basic assumptions about ownership in unexpected ways. Are we ready?

The cloud is everywhere.

"Cloud" is the result of a turn of computer technology. A few decades ago, computer users often shared the same machine, or mainframe, with many people on a local terminal, through office or campus networks. At that time, the processor time and memory are more expensive, so the computing resources are unified and shared. The birth of inexpensive PC PCs ended this situation.

Now the wind has turned back. The difference is that the computer resources now being shared are concentrated in large data centers owned by giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. But the biggest trick the cloud creator has ever played is to make it feel like the cloud is not there. In a recent survey conducted by the Wakefield Research Center, about half of the participants said they did not use the "cloud" and the actual user ratio was as high as 95% per cent. Wakefield

In our digital life, the impact of "cloud" is everywhere. Amazon alone, which is believed to have 450000 servers worldwide, provides storage and other services for thousands of websites and business organizations. For these sites and institutions, it is cheaper to use Amazon's services than to invest in their own servers. According to a 2012 study, 1/3 of Internet users in the United States visit websites that rely on Amazon servers every day.

The cloud also sustains a large part of our personal lives, allowing us to easily access online services and digital property through any device, including photos and videos posted on social media sites, as well as attachments to Web services such as Gmail or Microsoft Outlook.com. We are also increasingly using digital filing cabinets such as Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive and Apple icloud.

Many people believe that by 2020, "cloud" will inevitably dominate the entire digital life. In that case, many of our devices will become empty boxes without spirituality, their only function is to connect the Internet, all calculations and storage by the other end of the network.

This prospect is unsettling to many people. Richard Stallman, a pioneer and activist in computer technology, is one of Richard. He calls cloud computing a "careless calculation," and a lot of people's worries.

Storing personal property in a service provided by a third party, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, is like moving all your belongings into someone else's warehouse. The problem, however, is that a service agreement that is unacceptable to traditional repositories is a standard configuration of cloud storage. Although theoretically, if you upload photos, video or text is your own original, you should have the copyright, but the reality is that as long as you accept those terms of service, it usually means you give up a lot of the rights you might think you deserve-and, frankly, those terms of service you probably haven't read at all. For example, Instagram's popular photo-sharing app, which was bought by Facebook, recently revised its terms of service to allow it to use photos uploaded by people to advertise.

Even more, cloud-based services deliberately delete files-such as their text-grabbing algorithms that think they might contain illegal or pornographic content. They can throw away your things without any punishment. Conversely, if you want to delete your own files, there is no guarantee that those files will really be deleted on the cloud server.

"As long as you give the information you have to a third party, there's a risk," Mexeiri said, "but people don't even realize there's a risk." They did it just for the sake of drawing convenience. ”

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)