A harsh reminder that “the cloud” really just means “someone else’s hard drive.”
32 Replies to ““Melted into thin air…””
After a quarter-century or so of being a consultant in the IT/Internet space, I would never consider using remote anything to store/back-up my softcopy. It’s mine, goddammit, and I’ll archive/protect it — and if necessary, blow it away so that no one has access to it ever again.
I don’t get why so many people trust the ‘Net to store their stuff.
‘cloud’ a derivative of the old saying ‘head in the clouds’.
nice
This is at first glance surprising. Chris Hedges is a hard-core leftist. He despises Trump and the Republicans, but he has also been very critical of Biden, the Democratic Party and Big Tech, which is no doubt why he has been disappeared.
This is what Hedges had to say about being disappeared:
“The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction. ”
re the link, oh my.
straight out of Orwell’s 1984 and the opening scenes where Wilson is shoving newspaper ‘THOOK’ clippings down the rabbit hole and revising them so that his replacement has a job doing likewise.
He disappeared because he was publishing through RT, which got yeeted. It was nothing to do with his particular content.
Hahahahaha……..talk about idiots
well he did do work for the “Russians” so it’s to be expected in this climate….
of course not having your own backups in inexcusable
Yikes. Brutal reminder, but what was he thinking not having a backup of all those years of work? I have double backups of all my work files and every crappy digital picture I’ve ever taken. Total worth about 10 dollars (plus sentimental).
And I wouldn’t trust having anything I wouldn’t want on the local bulletin board in the cloud.
I’ll just store all this important stuff in some stranger’s garage?
“the cloud” really just means “someone else’s hard drive.” Truer words were never spoken.
“Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal.”
———————-
Mumia is NOT a political prisoner. He is a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.
My “FRY MUMIA” t-shirt heartily endorses this comment.
“The Cloud” is for access, not for storage. I don’t have anything on somebody else’s hard drive that I don’t have on at least three of mine.
YT is denying us access, but hopefully RT and Chris have their own copies, so the material itself is not yet lost.
I’ll note that what I said about “The Cloud” is equally true for your own NAS. NAS is not storage. It is a working copy kept for ease of access. Array data redundancy is not data protection, it is access protection, uptime. The array, although composed of multiple drives, is a single device and single point of data failure, just as your drives are multi platter devices, but a single device. Think of adding more drives to your NAS as adding more platters to a single drive, making up a drive of higher capacity, but not as more devices.
If you have a NAS with 4 drives and three computers each with a drive and all of which have copies of your data you still have no storage drives. Those are all working copies, ephemeral, prone to the failures of working devices. Your first storage drive is the first one that holds your data sitting on a shelf not attached to power except when updating the data.
The lesson here should apply to all libraries who insist on subscriptions where they don’t own physical materials. Stop subscribing and all the past issues of journals will vanish. Supposedly it was done to ‘save space’ but the real reason looks more to be not having to dust, file or reorganize as the collection grows. Does anyone believe your photos or musical choices kept in ‘The Cloud’ aren’t appraised for future
sales considerations ? Picture library archives are worth money to the the Getty institution. All that can be monetized will be monetized and you can quote me.
There’s an interesting YouTube series out there called “Soft White Underbelly” where the host interviews those in society who, for lack of a better descriptor, fly under the radar.
One interviewee was a computer hacker who could only shake his head at those who have Facebook, Instagram and God knows what else accounts are out there.
His analogy was on point…and I’m paraphrasing here – ” Would you set up a table on your front lawn and invite neighbours to come look at your family albums and other personal items? Of course you wouldn’t but people do.
Sad.
Yup … people will post on FB and Instagram without a thought , but would be horrified if you asked them to nail a family album on the nearest hydro pole.
… same difference.
All photos in the cloud are backed up on a stick. I might decide to stop paying them one day.
In this case, good business practice would be to give a five business day head’s up first. He may be able to sue since he wasn’t given a chance to do his own back up.
“All photos in the cloud are backed up on a stick.”
3-2-1; Three copies, on two different types of media, one of which is kept off site. Make a second stick. Burn a Blu-ray. Put the Blu-ray in somebody else’s house.
“He may be able to sue since he wasn’t given a chance to do his own back up.”
YouTube is offered as a “free” service without warranty. It’s in the Terms of Service, which are, in this aspect at least, perfectly legal.
It’s not his data, it’s RT’s. RT made the original which it retained, uploading a copy to YT. If RT disposed of the original, I’m afraid that’s on them.
The problem is that you and I cannot download it. It is “gone” from us.
Storing files on “the cloud” and then whining when they all disappear. Well, duuuuh….
One reason I never used “the cloud” and never will. It’s called privacy. I don’t want anybody snooping through my data without my knowledge or permission.
B A,
I’m with you a 100%.
I use MS Word quite extensively and Microsoft’s default save option is to their cloud server. Screw that! I save everything to my laptop and backup my files to an external hard drive somewhat regularly (I know should backup more frequently).
Is You-Tube even “the cloud”? It’s a serious question. I pay to store stuff in the cloud. I also have back-ups of my own. The cloud is a very useful tool for data transmission – keeping big data available on-line for download when needed (by you or others you invite), but not as a permanent archive. I would be very upset if my cloud provider deleted my cloud files if my account was up-to-date. No, I think this guy is just an idiot who thought You-Tube was a data storage company.
“Is You-Tube even “the cloud”?”
Yes.
” . . . keeping big data available on-line for download when needed . . .”
Q.E.D.
“I think this guy is just an idiot who thought You-Tube was a data storage company.”
YouTube is still storing the data, they’ve just delisted it for download.
Has he called Bob from NSA?
They have a copy of everything.
As others have pointed out, I am routinely dismayed – although no longer surprised – by people who flat-out do not understand the basics of information archiving, and outsourcing critical parts of your business.
This has nothing to do with the cloud. These issues have been around since long before the cloud. Arguably before computers.
“Arguably before computers.”
Hence the idiom for “enduring” — “carved in stone.”
Well, are these files gone . . . gone, or just not accessible in the West. Does RT not still broadcast in Russia? Who owns the content? Chris or RT? I think he should contact RT. They may have stored copies. I think I read somewhere that RT could still be accessed via a VPN.
A terabyte of storage literally costs about $20. Why wouldn’t anybody keep multiple copies of their life’s work? It’s the equivalent of an artist storing their masterpieces in an old barn.
I just went to http://www.rt.com, from the US, without a VPN, and pulled up all of Hedges videos.
He just doesn’t understand the technology, what has actually happened and what he can do about it.
Told to me 25 years ago “If you don’t have three copies of it it isn’t important to you” (have still been burned though…..).
After a quarter-century or so of being a consultant in the IT/Internet space, I would never consider using remote anything to store/back-up my softcopy. It’s mine, goddammit, and I’ll archive/protect it — and if necessary, blow it away so that no one has access to it ever again.
I don’t get why so many people trust the ‘Net to store their stuff.
‘cloud’ a derivative of the old saying ‘head in the clouds’.
nice
This is at first glance surprising. Chris Hedges is a hard-core leftist. He despises Trump and the Republicans, but he has also been very critical of Biden, the Democratic Party and Big Tech, which is no doubt why he has been disappeared.
This is what Hedges had to say about being disappeared:
“The most vocal cheerleaders for this censorship are the liberal class. Terrified of the enraged crowds of QAnon conspiracy theorists, Christian fascists, gun-toting militias, and cult-like Trump supporters that grew out of the distortions of neoliberalism, austerity, deindustrialization, and the collapse of social programs, they plead with the digital monopolies to make it all go away. They blame anyone but themselves. Democrats in Congress have held hearings with the CEOs of social media companies pressuring them to do more to censor content. Banish the troglodytes. Then we will have social cohesion. Then life will go back to normal. Fake news. Harm reduction model. Information pollution. Information disorder. They have all sorts of Orwellian phrases to justify censorship. Meanwhile, they peddle their own fantasy that Russia was responsible for the election of Donald Trump. It is a stunning inability to be remotely self-reflective or self-critical, and it is ominous as we move deeper and deeper into a state of political and social dysfunction. ”
https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/28/hedges-on-being-disappeared/
re the link, oh my.
straight out of Orwell’s 1984 and the opening scenes where Wilson is shoving newspaper ‘THOOK’ clippings down the rabbit hole and revising them so that his replacement has a job doing likewise.
He disappeared because he was publishing through RT, which got yeeted. It was nothing to do with his particular content.
Hahahahaha……..talk about idiots
well he did do work for the “Russians” so it’s to be expected in this climate….
of course not having your own backups in inexcusable
Yikes. Brutal reminder, but what was he thinking not having a backup of all those years of work? I have double backups of all my work files and every crappy digital picture I’ve ever taken. Total worth about 10 dollars (plus sentimental).
And I wouldn’t trust having anything I wouldn’t want on the local bulletin board in the cloud.
I’ll just store all this important stuff in some stranger’s garage?
“the cloud” really just means “someone else’s hard drive.” Truer words were never spoken.
In a related story … SalesForce stock headed UP !!
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/crm
Your work product in the cloudburst
“Gone are the voices of those who are being persecuted and marginalized, including the human rights attorney Steven Donziger and the political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal.”
———————-
Mumia is NOT a political prisoner. He is a ruthless, cold-blooded killer.
My “FRY MUMIA” t-shirt heartily endorses this comment.
“The Cloud” is for access, not for storage. I don’t have anything on somebody else’s hard drive that I don’t have on at least three of mine.
YT is denying us access, but hopefully RT and Chris have their own copies, so the material itself is not yet lost.
I’ll note that what I said about “The Cloud” is equally true for your own NAS. NAS is not storage. It is a working copy kept for ease of access. Array data redundancy is not data protection, it is access protection, uptime. The array, although composed of multiple drives, is a single device and single point of data failure, just as your drives are multi platter devices, but a single device. Think of adding more drives to your NAS as adding more platters to a single drive, making up a drive of higher capacity, but not as more devices.
If you have a NAS with 4 drives and three computers each with a drive and all of which have copies of your data you still have no storage drives. Those are all working copies, ephemeral, prone to the failures of working devices. Your first storage drive is the first one that holds your data sitting on a shelf not attached to power except when updating the data.
The lesson here should apply to all libraries who insist on subscriptions where they don’t own physical materials. Stop subscribing and all the past issues of journals will vanish. Supposedly it was done to ‘save space’ but the real reason looks more to be not having to dust, file or reorganize as the collection grows. Does anyone believe your photos or musical choices kept in ‘The Cloud’ aren’t appraised for future
sales considerations ? Picture library archives are worth money to the the Getty institution. All that can be monetized will be monetized and you can quote me.
There’s an interesting YouTube series out there called “Soft White Underbelly” where the host interviews those in society who, for lack of a better descriptor, fly under the radar.
One interviewee was a computer hacker who could only shake his head at those who have Facebook, Instagram and God knows what else accounts are out there.
His analogy was on point…and I’m paraphrasing here – ” Would you set up a table on your front lawn and invite neighbours to come look at your family albums and other personal items? Of course you wouldn’t but people do.
Sad.
Yup … people will post on FB and Instagram without a thought , but would be horrified if you asked them to nail a family album on the nearest hydro pole.
… same difference.
All photos in the cloud are backed up on a stick. I might decide to stop paying them one day.
In this case, good business practice would be to give a five business day head’s up first. He may be able to sue since he wasn’t given a chance to do his own back up.
“All photos in the cloud are backed up on a stick.”
3-2-1; Three copies, on two different types of media, one of which is kept off site. Make a second stick. Burn a Blu-ray. Put the Blu-ray in somebody else’s house.
“He may be able to sue since he wasn’t given a chance to do his own back up.”
YouTube is offered as a “free” service without warranty. It’s in the Terms of Service, which are, in this aspect at least, perfectly legal.
It’s not his data, it’s RT’s. RT made the original which it retained, uploading a copy to YT. If RT disposed of the original, I’m afraid that’s on them.
The problem is that you and I cannot download it. It is “gone” from us.
Storing files on “the cloud” and then whining when they all disappear. Well, duuuuh….
One reason I never used “the cloud” and never will. It’s called privacy. I don’t want anybody snooping through my data without my knowledge or permission.
B A,
I’m with you a 100%.
I use MS Word quite extensively and Microsoft’s default save option is to their cloud server. Screw that! I save everything to my laptop and backup my files to an external hard drive somewhat regularly (I know should backup more frequently).
Is You-Tube even “the cloud”? It’s a serious question. I pay to store stuff in the cloud. I also have back-ups of my own. The cloud is a very useful tool for data transmission – keeping big data available on-line for download when needed (by you or others you invite), but not as a permanent archive. I would be very upset if my cloud provider deleted my cloud files if my account was up-to-date. No, I think this guy is just an idiot who thought You-Tube was a data storage company.
“Is You-Tube even “the cloud”?”
Yes.
” . . . keeping big data available on-line for download when needed . . .”
Q.E.D.
“I think this guy is just an idiot who thought You-Tube was a data storage company.”
YouTube is still storing the data, they’ve just delisted it for download.
Has he called Bob from NSA?
They have a copy of everything.
As others have pointed out, I am routinely dismayed – although no longer surprised – by people who flat-out do not understand the basics of information archiving, and outsourcing critical parts of your business.
This has nothing to do with the cloud. These issues have been around since long before the cloud. Arguably before computers.
“Arguably before computers.”
Hence the idiom for “enduring” — “carved in stone.”
Well, are these files gone . . . gone, or just not accessible in the West. Does RT not still broadcast in Russia? Who owns the content? Chris or RT? I think he should contact RT. They may have stored copies. I think I read somewhere that RT could still be accessed via a VPN.
A terabyte of storage literally costs about $20. Why wouldn’t anybody keep multiple copies of their life’s work? It’s the equivalent of an artist storing their masterpieces in an old barn.
I just went to http://www.rt.com, from the US, without a VPN, and pulled up all of Hedges videos.
He just doesn’t understand the technology, what has actually happened and what he can do about it.
Told to me 25 years ago “If you don’t have three copies of it it isn’t important to you” (have still been burned though…..).