Data in the clouds

The latest Internet concept involves the creation of a world-wide “cloud” to store massive amounts of data. Think of the cloud as an “information bank” which will largely replace your hard drive as a place to store your data.
To compete with Google’s massive data retrieval system, Microsoft is incorporating a data cloud with its next bloatware platform, Windows Azure. It will allow users to store and access their info from anywhere on the planet.
“The basic idea is simple enough,” writes Daniel Lyons in Newsweek. “Instead of storing your data on your PC, you store it on a server on the Internet. You don’t know, or care, where that server is located. Your data might, in fact, be scattered across a bunch of different servers. It’s just all up in the sky someplace (hence the name ‘cloud’).”
This might be okay for someone who decides to amass a collection of memory guzzling movies or a photographer with many thousands of high-definition shots. Personally, with flash drives (also called thumb drives) acquiring more and more capacity, I not only don’t need a “cloud” for data storage, but wouldn’t want my data floating around available to anyone who could hack my password.
Just for example: Google has a literature database with a $150 million fund to assure authors of their royalties when people access their books. To my surprise, I discovered that many of my 19 books still in print can be read, perhaps in their entirety, at the Google authors’ site. Supposedly, I’m to get a nickel every time someone accesses one of my books. I’ll believe it when the checks arrive. Google’s folks were obviously shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that authors whose books were in libraries Google duplicated were NOT in the public domain and that authors, who hardly make anything for their years of creative work, were miffed.
Data is mutable, as in cooking the financial records or going back to your previous tax records to delete a spurious deduction before the audit. How secure would data be in the “cloud”? And how vulnerable would such data be to industrial espionage?
And would the cloud be subject to tampering? Consider George Orwell’s novel 1984, which showed how you could change the past by altering last week’s newspaper. Would such a thing be possible by tampering with the data cloud? Simple example: change the authorship of all Shakespeare’s plays to Marlow. If nobody has a copy bearing Shakespeare’s name, how could you prove the Marlow attribution was a fake? This is what revisionists would love to do, as in denying the Holocaust.
Of course, if you in your foolish youth stored in that “cloud” nude pictures of you and the old soul mate, how about if some hacker on the other side of the world got hold of it? There goes your candidacy for vice president!
I suppose if you encrypted all your files they might be more secure in the “cloud.” When you see that little padlock symbol on your computer screen it means the data is encrypted, but it’s at the level of a 128 algorithm, whatever that means. The 128 level is considered weak encryption by the pros. My PGP encryption program offers a level over 500, which, when developed was considered virtually unbreakable.
But as cryptographers will tell you, there is no such thing as an unbreakable code. What there is is a code that takes so long to break that by the time it’s decoded, the event is long past, as in Washington’s plans for Valley Forge.
I’ll let Google and Microsoft fight it out, just so I don’t have to shell out another few hundred bucks for an instantly obsolete new platform. My security is in running programs that are so obsolete that nobody has the equipment to snoop. Go read my cuneiform clay tablets!

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