Lauren Weinstein: Trusting Your Friends -- and Trusting the Cloud


A must-read for all cloud-phobiacs. I agree with Lauren 100%. Excerpt:

"But for some who dislike the cloud, no amount of technical and legal assurances will ever suffice, simply because they have a fundamental distrust of remote services -- "We never really know what's going on in the cloud!" they say.

And yet, do we really know everything going on in our local computers, even those of us who have spent our professional lives building these technologies?

In most cases, the answer is no. Unless we've written every line of code ourselves, or have compiled every program personally from source code that we've inspected (and presumably understood!) line by line, there is a leap of faith involved in everything we do on these machines."

Posted by Atanas Entchev at 7/21/2010 10:45 AM
Categories: Data, Cloud, Opinion, Design, SaaS, Software, Technology, IT
Tags: Data Cloud Opinion Design Lauren SaaS Software Technology IT Weinstein
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  • 7/21/2010 4:02 PM Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne wrote:
    Excellent point. There was an issue in the results (I forget what exactly) for a remote sensing project many years back that was traced to a rounding error in one particular chip. It was found because they received different results from different computers.
  • 7/22/2010 5:42 AM John Reiser wrote:
    I recently bought an ec2 instance from Amazon. The default login (with a private key) is root. Root! How can you not know what's going on? Physical access is so last century.

    I can understand the hesitation. We're still in testing phase and haven't shared links to the service with anyone outside of NJ, but Amazon still served up some of our data from Japan, at a slightly higher rate. I guess the load balancers thought Japan was "closer" than Northern VA. Oh well.
  • 7/22/2010 8:01 AM atanas entchev wrote:
    I love this statement of Lauren's: "Just as we trust our friends and lovers -- whose inner thoughts we can never truly know for sure -- we need to make decisions about trust related to technology as well."

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