WARNING: Tin foil hat content below!  May not be suitable for minors.

If you know me at all, you know that I'm not a big proponent of so-called cloud computing, and prefer to do things the hard way by storing all of my personal and non-personal information on machines I own or manage.  This includes avoiding things like Gmail, AWS, Dropbox, Google Docs, and others.

Why?  Well, first off, I hate the term cloud computing.  It's just a new buzzword that's used to describe the same types of services that have been around for several years.  The underlying technology is not new!  Secondly, I've got some grave concerns about privacy and security.  In fact, I agree with most of Richard Stallman's views on cloud computing (and many other things, but that's a separate discussion).  News stories like this, where Amazon pulled Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from people's own devices scare me to death.  Also, that whole situation drips in a deluge of irony.

Google's Chrome OS freaks me out, too, since it's designed from the gound up to not store anything locally and rely on Google's servers for everything.  It's amazing how much trust the general population will put in big companies to hold onto their personal data.  Most of the individuals who I talk to about such things always just tell me: "oh, I don't put anything sensitive in the cloud."  Suure..

Building on the above, if all your information is stored in the cloud how do you know it hasn't been modified?  It could be deleted without your knowledge, too!  Sometimes I feel like one of those weirdos at the dawn of the digital age who continued to keep hard copies of documents when the same information was stored on magnetic tape or disk.  I think they were doing it for other reasons (reliability, lack of search capabilities, etc.), though.

Contradicting myself like most Americans, every once and awhile I'll relax my principles and buy into certain cloud-based things like the Amazon Kindle store (recall: bookmarks and notes are all stored on Amazon's servers) and Netflix.

Netflix is a no-brainer for most folks.  Unlimited streaming of Netflix content for $8/month!  Sure, that doesn't include all of the content on Netflix, but most of it (the other stuff you can get via mail on the cheap).  I bought into this early in 2011 and have been happily streaming things like The Office and Babylon 5 on my Mac mini HTPC.

I was just thinking this past week that Netflix and other cloud-based streaming services are going to eventually cause Blu-ray and DVDs to be completely phased out over the next couple of years, when Netflix pulled a fast one and removed Babylon 5's streaming capability.  Yep, I had just watched The Coming of Shadows (2x09) on Thursday and last night tried to watch Gropos (2x10) and received a nasty message on the screen:

I suspect this is just due to some bickering between Netflix and Warner Home Video, but it exemplifies my original concerns about cloud services.  The cloud can change on a daily basis, and so can the data stored there!

Let's think about this in a scarier way, for a second.  A country is generally on its way out when it starts burning books, right?  What's the modern day equivalent of books from a few decades ago?  E-books, you might say, but I'd say it encompasses a little more than that.  It includes blogs and articles on the Internet, too, which are searchable by engines like Yahoo!, Bing, and Google.  Well, if this information is stored in the cloud and the search engines index the cloud, modern day book burning doesn't need 451°F at all. Remove the index and delete the content.  If everybody's running Chrome OS or relies completely on the cloud, it's gone for good.

In the past, Google hasn't hesitated to turn over personal data to the United States government.  What if the government doesn't like the lyrics of a new track by an up and coming band, and to cut costs that artist only made it available electronically by Google Music and iTunes in the Cloud?  Just food for thought!

Anyway, moral of the story?  I'm not going to get hooked on a TV show via Netflix ever again!

Thoughts?

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