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KateVershovSecondPaper 6 - 26 Jun 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Comments would be greatly appreciated. | | | -- KateVershov - 28 May 2009 | |
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- In fact, the telecoms are trying to create another set of walled gardens in their proprietary networks, providing "access to the Internet" rather than the Internet, and controlling all the software that runs in all the devices connected to their nets. The contingencies that determine freedom don't all lie in the past. You know?
| | | In discussing the issues related to cloud computing, you seem to raise and then dismiss several possible solutions, noting them to be insufficient. Is this to say that there is no easy solution to reverse the trend of moving in the direction of cloud computing, and we should just accept its coming (whether or not it is appropriate now)? Or would even a partial push with one of the incomplete solutions be preferrable to simply giving in to cloud computing? | | | From what I understand, there isn't going to be just a single alternative that we turn to in lieu of centralized data services. What may work for some applications, won't work for others. Perhaps there will be some tasks for which workarounds are not feasible or are just plain too slow to be viable. However, my point is that that doesn't mean we shouldn't seek those alternatives and mitigate our reliance on those services to the extent that we can. But, I think there's a window for those technologies and we're either in it right now or it has already passed us. The more reliant we become on centralized web services, the less we look into alternatives, and the more infrastructure we invest in that caters to these types of services, the harder it will be to turn around.
-- KateVershov - 04 Jun 2009 | |
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- Your inquiry needs to participate in what Philippe Aigrain calls the taxonomy of services: as you say, there's no answer that covers all cases, because services aren't uniform in their structures, scalabilities, etc. Without a language for discussing all the relevant differences among and classifications of services, the conversation cannot advance systematically in any direction. Not being a technologist means you collaborate with technologists, not that you can't succeed in making sophisticated and accurate policy analyses based on a real grasp of technical detail.
- You could, however, make some immediate progress, even without a technical collaborator, if you reduce the "cloudiness" of the subject for yourself by treating the entire Net as one computer, composed of pipes and switches, processors and memory, and asking how, without having physical ownership or legal control of almost all the hardware, you could still feel safe using the computer. Where do you insist on processes and memory that you completely physically control? Do you also need (as my colleagues and I think) legal control over all the software? If so, what about other parts of the machine, etc. Thought about in this fashion, I believe, the cloud is not so cloudy, though the answers are still immeasurably more complex than a soundbite contains.
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