What could EVER go wrong with the Cloud services?

[Shooshie]

Good grief.

Hackers who do things like that really suck, IMO. There was no need for that.

The hacker guy said he's "really a nice guy," and that he doesn't know why he does what he does. No, someone didn't define "nice" for him as a kid. He is cruel. His heart is wicked, and he is cruel with no sense of compassion for others. He has no sense of boundaries, so he probably doesn't understand when he has crossed one. The fact that he can say he's really a nice guy tells us a lot about how twisted he really is.

I'm sorry for the guy who got hacked, but I'm sad that the hackers had no more compassion for their fellow man. Their victim had never hurt them and didn't deserve what they put him through. What can you say? That sucks? There's nothing you can say that will change them. They'll have to do that themselves. But how many people do they have to hurt first?

I'm sick of these people.

Shooshie

[kgdrum]

The hacker defined himself as a textbook example of a true sociopath.

I just don't trust the cloud concept as it has been conceived & brought to the market,it works off of the assumption that the companies & individuals involved are all honorable & respectful of others property,this is not reality based from my perspective.
Without getting political there's also a Big Brother smell to the cloud that makes me leery as well.
I see the cloud as a marketing of backing up storage while dumbing down the hopefully complacent user base.
I see enormous potential profits for the companies with an intentional over simplistic presentation never stating the obvious risks involved from both a privacy and security perspective.
I have trouble seeing the advantages for the consumer other than the implied convenience and selling the concept of we will do this to make this all easy for you.

[Nibiru]

Very well said and could not agree more. How many of us here have iPhones and use Siri? I have an iPhone, and never use Siri for basically the same reasons as never using iCloud. Read the privacy notice right before you're about to turn Siri on. If that doesn't freak you out a little...good grief. Maybe once everyone has cameras on every corner of their phones, front and back, and Siri is built into every digital device on the planet, maybe then humanity will be what our masters have been waiting for. Why are we so ready to give up everything all the time? Not us of course but, just saying. Love you all!

[bayswater]

From the article:

"to get access to an iCloud account: a billing address and the last four digits of the credit card associated with the account."

The first is easy to guess, and the second appears on every card receipt.

So I'm wasting my time entering a 16 character random password.

[billf]

Two days ago Steve Wozniak said this:

WASHINGTON — Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with the late Steve Jobs, predicted "horrible problems" in the coming years as cloud-based computing takes hold.

...

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," he said. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

He added: "With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away" through the legalistic terms of service with a cloud provider that computer users must agree to.

"I want to feel that I own things," Wozniak said. "A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... 1da926.671

Be very careful with your IP, especially all those raw in-progress files. And keep your main computer rigs off of the cloud.

All a hacker needs is a few minutes to wipe you out completely:

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/ ... n-hacking/

At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers posted a message to my account on Twitter taking credit for the hack.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Yeah, but how are you going to sync instantly with all your devices? You'll miss lunch with Aunt Sally in 3 months! Or worse, that invoice you sent back in 1983 won't be instantly available in a meeting 5 years from now for reference in how to spell some dead guys name in a Facebook post.

Seriously, is syncing so hard? Do you really need access to everything all the time? Then get iteleport or use go to my PC. But giving access to all your stuff or even part of your stuff for a perceived convenience that places you at such high risk makes no sense. It makes plenty of dollars for the guys with the remote server and THAT truly is what this is all about.

Wake up and smell the Koolaid!

[billf]

But giving access to all your stuff or even part of your stuff for a perceived convenience that places you at such high risk makes no sense. It makes plenty of dollars for the guys with the remote server and THAT truly is what this is all about.

Indeed, "the Cloud" is little more than placing your data and information on a computer and storage device that someone else owns and controls. If you're thinking of using the cloud for collaboration, it's better to set up your own VPN and webserver. If you're thinking of using the cloud for remote access to your data, it's better to set up your own webserver. Bottom line, if you care about the integrity, security, and reliability of your data, keep control over it. Otherwise, buyer beware.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I use Online FIle Folder from GoDaddy. It's like $12 a year for 10GB. Collaborations are pretty easy to accommodate and sending large files is a no brainer. That is NOT what the Cloud services are selling. If I was a suspicious type, I'd say it was a government conspiracy but even worse, you may well be sending you stuff to a foreign government and/or to hackers, who are having a feast with this stuff.

I really don't know how people can be so easily swayed, particularly in light of the fact that the Cloud services are just another way to do what you can already do, but not have to pay for it or put your information at risk.

[David Polich]

I was one of those who immediately disliked the Cloud concept as soon
as I learned of it.

Apple gives you - what - 5GB of free storage with your i-Cloud account?
Well who doesn't fill that up in no time? And then they want to charge you for
additional storage? Seems completely clear it's just a way for Apple (as well
as other cloud services) to establish yet another income stream.

I just hope the message of this particular hack reverberates with enough
people, including perhaps the folks at Apple.

[mikehalloran]

>At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone.<

That feature can be turned off - I have never activated it.

I like having the ability to work on a document on my iPad and have it show up on my Mac. Since I do not like having email on my iPad or iPhone, this works. No personal info shows up on anything I have on iCloud, currently Pages and Scriptwriter.

These reports are scary. Hopefully, taking every security measure, I won't be burned. Nothing is foolproof, though.

[billf]

If I was a suspicious type, I'd say it was a government conspiracy but even worse, you may well be sending you stuff to a foreign government and/or to hackers, who are having a feast with this stuff.

I really don't know how people can be so easily swayed, particularly in light of the fact that the Cloud services are just another way to do what you can already do, but not have to pay for it or put your information at risk.

If you use these services, your data is, and will be, mined to build a profile on you for marketing purposes. The business model for Facebook and Google and others is to sell your data profile. It's a marketeers dream. Also, look at the TOS for these "cloud" services. Often buried in the fine print is something that states (paraphrasing) "you agree that your data and files can be used by us to market the service."

What does that mean? Think about about it, because once you surrender that data, you're not getting it back.

[BobK]

Dave P - I misheard the Stones' lyric too - I guess it was really 'Hey, you, get offa i-Cloud.'

I have mixed feelings about 'the cloud.'

I use iCloud to sync contacts, bookmarks, and Calendars/Reminders and Dropbox for some other stuff (that I used to have on iDisk). I like the convenience. I don't think any of the stuff would be of much use to a hacker, and it's all backed up locally.

I recently got a network (NAS) drive for my iTunes library, and it offers cloud features which I haven't looked into yet. I assume that NOTHING on the internet is hack-proof, but if I can use it for some sharing and/or syncing, at least I won't be entrusting my data to someone else's servers. For those who don't trust big companies with their data but want some of the convenience - and have the patience to learn how to use network drives, which can get complex - maybe personal clouds are a viable option.

I also think it's wise to have off-site backup of critical data, and have started thinking about an online service (which would be more convenient than constantly updating a drive stored at a friend's house).

I think this fiasco is more about lame security measures and incompetent people, and these can potentially be fixed (well, I'm not sure about the latter...).

At the same time, I'm very wary of the whole push to 'cloud computing', and I don't get why the companies are doing it. Are the free versions of iCloud and Dropbox just 'loss leaders' to get you hooked, so you'll give them money for more space?

[twistedtom]

I know people who store all their photos and music on the cloud, I find that crazy. I back my stuff up on disks and removable hard drives. I only put small jepgs on places like photobucket to be able to show or post sites like this one. My wife has some odd stuff for her fire on Amazon’s cloud but nothing of importance.

I did not know about the erase data part of "find my iPhone" All I keep there is peoples numbers and a few non-important things; to my knowledge.

[James Steele]

Don't know if some already saw this. A friend emailed me the link. Apparently, Wozniak doesn't like the cloud much either:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/06 ... orrendous/

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Or this...