Is cloud storage unreliable?

In the digital age, your files and memories will no longer really belong to you, they belong to the cloud.

Once upload, never owned

Kerl Gudwin wants to take back what belongs to him. One day he decided to set up a company to shoot local sporting events in Ohio. For a while his business was good, but what happened next made him furious.

To preserve the precious images they had taken, Goodwin put them in the cloud, the most popular storage facility. The tragedy is that, on January 19, 2012, all these assets disappeared without warning. People like him who put everything in there are said to be over 150 million. He wanted to return these Gbagbo videos, but his request was mercilessly rejected. So he decided to get a word in the court.

Goodwin's experience raises a deep-seated question, which is the core issue of how we use technology today. Corny Maxery, a prominent lawyer for the American Electronic Frontier Foundation, provided legal aid to Goodwin, saying it was about the future of Internet users and the use of the Internet. And why? Goodwin's video recordings are digitized and stored on the "cloud" side of the computer server. The United States government confiscated his material and claimed that he had lost his ownership of the uploaded digital property.

Life in the clouds, are you ready?

The impact is at stake, since almost everyone is using cloud computing in some way online, whether it's online mail, social media or reading e-books. Our favorite music, photo memories and important communications are on servers far away. We are moving towards a time of digital life in the cloud, but these developments are poised to change our basic assumptions about the ownership of digital property in surprising ways.

A few decades ago, computer users often shared a machine (host) with others, accessing office or campus networks from local terminals. Because CPU time and storage space are very expensive, resources are pooled. The advent of low-priced PCs has ended all this.

Now the pendulum is back. The difference is that these shared computer resources are in huge data centers owned by companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft. However, the biggest joke that cloud creators make is to convince the world that it doesn't exist. In a recent study by the Wakefield Research Center, half of the respondents said they did not use cloud computing, but in fact 95% of the participants were using it.

The impact of cloud computing is pervasive in our digital life. Amazon has 450,000 servers all over the world, providing storage and other services to thousands of websites and businesses that are considered more economical and convenient than investing in their own servers. According to a 2012-year study, One-third of U.S. Internet users every day visit a Web site that relies on Amazon servers.

The cloud also builds on the basis of our personal activities, allowing us to access online services and digital property from any device conveniently. This includes photos, videos we posted on social media sites, and communications and attachments stored with e-mail providers. We are also increasingly using digital file storage bins provided by Google Driver, Microsoft SkyDrive and Apple icloud.

By 2020, cloud computing will run all digital life, which is widely regarded as the general trend. In this case, many of our electronic devices will become wordless, empty objects, the only thing to do is to access the Internet, all computing and storage at the other end of the processing.

This vision makes many people feel uneasy. Computational pioneers and activists Richard even call cloud computing "sloppy computing," which is more or less the voice of many people.

Cloud assets, I have wood there

Storing personal property in a server provided by a third party, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, is like pouring all your possessions into someone else's warehouse. The challenge here is that the cloud storage service agreement has become a standard term, which is unacceptable for warehouses made of bricks and cement. If you have created and uploaded photos, videos, or text, and although you still have the technical copyright, the reality is that agreeing to the terms of service (which, to be honest, you may not have read at all) usually means that you have given up on many of the rights that you have taken for granted. For example, the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram, has changed its terms recently after being acquired by Facebook, empowering itself to use photos uploaded by users for advertising marketing.

In addition, cloud-based services sometimes deliberately delete files. The algorithm of the service provider crawls the text that is considered illegal or pornographic in the mail, and they can throw away your things without being penalized. Conversely, if you want to delete your files, you cannot be assured that the service chamber really deletes files from its cloud server. Maxery said: "Whenever you give your property to a third party, there is a risk, but people do not even realize what the risk is, they are simply greedy for convenience." ”

These questions are at the heart of the lawsuit that Goodwin is about to fight. Like millions of people, he stores files in a digital network company called Megaupload. Unfortunately for its legitimate users, Megaupload is notorious for being a stronghold of pirated movies, games and software. As a result, it ended up being forced off the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Goodwin turned to the court to bring a lawsuit to return his image. The court has not yet ruled, but the US government responded that Goodwin had lost his property in the clouds.

Chris Ride, of the University of London in the Law on cloud computing, argues that while the U.S. government's defence may sound laughable, it is based on a fairly solid legal basis. The problem now is that our understanding of property rights is based on the physical. However, none of these digital information has an existing entity that can be pointed to.

After all, a digital file exists as a material state (that is, a variety of magnetic states), not the material itself (disk). If the cloud service provider gives you real property rights, there will be thousands of owners on the disk where you store the information.

In any case, your cloud property will rarely exist only in one place. For example, if you upload data to a digital storage box Dropbox (using Amazon server), it will reach a data center in the Amazon via your Internet service provider (ISP), most of which is located in North America. Once you get there, your files will be replicated to multiple servers and sometimes even split into pieces to balance the load and keep the customer's data flow. You have no way of knowing the end of it.

More importantly, if your files are uploaded by someone else, such as a digital copy of a music album, Dropbox will only link you to existing files instead of wasting network bandwidth and space uploading an identical piece of stuff. Are you all the files that other people uploaded? Of course not. It is really a mess to clarify your property rights in the cloud.

Technical solution or change of concept

There has been a tense relationship between our intuitive concept of property and the reality of technology. How can we solve this problem?

It has been suggested that the basic structure of the cloud be readjusted to bring it closer to traditional notions of property. Brad Dumpton, former chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes that while maintaining cloud computing, we need to maintain some control over personal computing. Between the two should be able to find a pleasant middle zone.

Templeton advocates this idea as a "data safe model". For example, a photo posted on Facebook will be stored on a Web server that you have some control over, possibly a small server in your home, or a neighbor's server that you share with your home. The general idea is that you don't have to argue that you own a photo legally because it's stored in a place like a rented apartment, or a safe safe, not a third-party server on Facebook. Images on Facebook pages are provided by your local memory at all times.

Templeton that such facilities could be provided as part of the ISP. Currently, there are projects that allow Easy-to-use software such as Diaspora and Freedombox, which allows individuals to run data safes. Members of the Diaspora community have even opened up their own social networks, a self-made mini Facebook. The disadvantage is that the balance that Templeton expects is hard to achieve unless it contracts with websites like ISPs or Facebook.

Is there any other option? Perhaps, but not the redesign of the cloud, the new choice will make it easier to explore and understand its operation.

In order to deal with these problems better, it is important to understand what people are missing in the experience of using the cloud, says Mr Harper of Cambridge, UK. To that end, he and Ville Odom of Mellon University are studying the attitudes of people towards cloud ownership from a sociological perspective.

One respondent told them that the collection of photos uploaded to the site was one of his most important possessions, "but at the same time I didn't know how to have them, as if it were just an illusion, a strange sensation that always haunted my mind."

This feeling seems to last for several generations. In a similar study, Microsoft Research's Tim Riegen interviewed a group of teenagers about how they felt about using Facebook. Although these children initially did not care about the online posting of personal photos, they later produced questions and concerns about "where and who they are", which is even so alarming that people are unwilling to face it.

So what's the best way to avoid this unease? Mr Harper thought it would be helpful to design a computer interface that would give people a sense of "geography" in the cloud, so that we had a way to rummage through the digital items. "People always like the feeling that they know where their stuff is."

Last year launched the app "Discovery" (Found) or a start. This program allows you to view and search everything you have on the web, whether it's Gmail, or Dropbox and other similar services, so you know that your "shares" in the cloud are still there.

Ultimately, we may need to radically redesign our visual display devices to explore the digital world. Fortunately there is a precedent. Before the Windows and icons and other interfaces occupy the desktop computer, the average computer user cannot intuitively feel all the digital files on their hard drive. In principle, designers can do the same for cloud computing.

Before this hypothetical cloud interface arrives, many people are predicting cloud "catastrophe" in the coming years, such as massive and widespread cloud data loss. ' We are now faced with a choice: either to back up a cloud of assets or to give up some ownership, ' Reid said. We are in a period of turmoil in which everything is changing. It will take at least 20 years for the legal and social issues of cloud assets to be resolved.