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Ed On not using cloud services

Blue Mountain

Resident Skeptical Hobbit
Blue Mountain
Joined
Jul 2, 2005
Messages
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Waging war on woo-woo in Winnipeg
On a support site unrelated to email, a user posted a message referencing Thunderbird. Another user then posted a couple of messages dismissing the first user as backwards and stuck in the 1900s (for clarity, the term "MUA" means "Mail User Agent"; that is, a program for reading email):

Second user said:
btw lol @ using a desktop MUA in 2013
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Second user said:
Desktop MUA is an obsolete curiosity regardless of it using IMAP or not. Good web based client will provide the exact same functionality while being much easier to access. Convergence, people. We're not in 1990 anymore.

Same with IM or chat or calendar (lol outlook) or w/e other lightweight applications.
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I'm still using a desktop MUA and not a web based service. Yes, the company I'm using for my email (not one of the Big Three of gmail, Yahoo, or Microsoft) has a webmail client, but I prefer not to use it, choosing instead to download my messages to my destkop client.

My primary reason is it's my data, and I want my data on my computer. Yes, my provider could be siphoning off my email to long term storage as it arrives, thus eliminating any security I may have in not trusting my entire email history to a third party. By "security" I mean that if some government agency wants to see my email history, currently they have to gain physical access to my computer, which requires a search warrant. If my all email history is with another provider, in theory said agency could read my email history by requesting it from the provider, and it's up to the provider whether or not they want to give it up without a fight. For example, see what happened with secure email provider Lavabit.

Another reason: I like to keep my email history, even though I rarely go back and look at old messages. If my email is being stored at a third party provider, the entire history is at their mercy. If they decide to shut down their service, I could lose it all, maybe overnight.

On the "pro" side, as long as the provider is doing their job properly, my email is safe from hardware failure. If my email is stored on my computer, I'm one disc failure away from losing it all unless I'm careful with my backups. I've been doing I/T for thirty years, and I have good backup of all my data ... the vast majority of computer users don't.

Overall, this is a symptom of a bigger issue. Big companies like Google and Microsoft want people to use their services for everything: email, documents, calendars, chat services, etc. Being able to access this information from any computer at any time is a big convenience. But in my opinion they cost is very high: all that information is being kept for you by the good graces of the providers, and a changing business model may mean that they suddenly don't want to store your data any more. Or hold it for ransom by changing a free service into a paid service. Or turn it over to the government without your knowledge, and even being forbidden from informing you that they have. Or getting your account hacked into and all your data deleted.

Am I anachronism for not wanting to use the "cloud" for storing my personal data?
 
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Blue Mountain said:
Am I anachronism for not wanting to use the "cloud" for storing my personal data?
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No, you're sensible

The only "cloud" service I use is Dropbox and I only use it for three things

1. as a convenient desktop folder to send documents and other files to and from home & work (I have synchronised Dropbox folders at each end).

2. as a means of sending large image files to companies I deal with for outsourced large sized printing (I email a Dropbox link rather than the image itself)

3. for images I wish to post in forums and blogs

In all three cases, the files are eventually deleted.

I commit NOTHING to an online service that I don't have a backup copy of on a computer at home or at work, or both, and never personal data on a long term basis.
 
Blue Mountain said:
On a support site unrelated to email, a user posted a message referencing Thunderbird. Another user then posted a couple of messages dismissing the first user as backwards and stuck in the 1900s
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The second user is an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. A well designed thick client will always beat a web interface for usability. Good luck accessing your email off line with a web interface.

Am I anachronism for not wanting to use the "cloud" for storing my personal data?
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No. The cloud is just a marketing term for "servers that somebody else owns".
 
I posted this in another thread on this sub-forum. I feel just as strongly about this as I did when I initially wrote this:

Adobe has announced that from now forward, the Creative Suite will be available only on the Creative Cloud and that users will have to pay rent to use the applications. Their reasoning is that updates will be available to subscribers on a continual basis, as opposed to every year or so. Nonsense! It's all about money (geez, what a surprise that a hugely successful company wants to make more money!)

When I upgraded my system late last year with a new (for me) Intel Mac Pro tower, I also invested in Adobe CS6 for about $1,500. It has more than I need, but I needed to upgrade from CS2, which ran on my PowerPC-based G5. Now if renting the use of the complete suite costs about $50 a month, that means that after three years I'll be paying for software that I should have owned outright after just 30 months. And again, CS6 has all the bells and whistles I need, so the idea of continually paying for something I don't want or need just because it's bundled together with something that I do need really puts my nuts in a juicer!

Michael
 
"Second User" appears to think that a MUA means you can't use a web based e-mail on the road. You can, so you don't lose that ease of access by having a MUA.
 
jeremyp said:
The second user is an idiot who doesn't know what he's talking about. A well designed thick client will always beat a web interface for usability. Good luck accessing your email off line with a web interface.
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Well, email isn't too much use offline, unless you want to review old messages, or you want to download a lot of messages in one go, reply to them while you're away from an internet connection, then upload the replies later. These days that's not a very common use case.

No. The cloud is just a marketing term for "servers that somebody else owns".
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Partly that, and partly a way to provide services to a geographically diverse audience, possibly at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house. Photo sharing sites is one example. This forum is another. But when it comes to email, the local client is a well established paradigm that has its uses, such as allowing me to keep my own mail store. (A point that no now no one else in that other thread has raised. I'm not participating in it at the moment, just watching it.)

coalesce said:
I posted this in another thread on this sub-forum. I feel just as strongly about this as I did when I initially wrote this:

<useful stuff snipped to save space>

And again, CS6 has all the bells and whistles I need, so the idea of continually paying for something I don't want or need just because it's bundled together with something that I do need really puts my nuts in a juicer!
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That's certainly a problem. Where I work we're still making use of software we bought a decade ago, because it still works for the job we want it to do.

RecoveringYuppy said:
"Second User" appears to think that a MUA means you can't use a web based e-mail on the road. You can, so you don't lose that ease of access by having a MUA.
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In another post in the same thread, "Second User" also found it laughable that people actually pay for web based services. I get the impression he's probably in his early to mid thirties, because he wrote a program nearly a decade ago and is still maintaining it. Now, he's a good programmer despite his dismissive attitude toward anything that's not web based. But I fear he may get badly burned one of these days when one of the web-based services he's currently using for "free" either becomes a paid service or suddenly shuts down. Like Google Reader, for example.
 
The company I work for moved over to the cloud some years ago (E-mail and some documentation). More recently giving the entire corporate sever operations to a cloud file server service. It has given me access to equipment drawings when I needed them in remote locations. However, I could just as easily had (and did have) the files on a flash drive or computer. My concern being that with too much reliance on 'the cloud' I might find myself in a bad situation and information not available if the server service or just web access is down and perhaps I might not have soft or hard copies with me. Personally, I will never store personal information on the cloud. It is something the company I work for choose to do and as a result certainly quite a bit of my personal information (for the company) is out there as well as other information I need to do my job. It is their company and working for them I have to work and live with the choices they make (though chances are I'm still going to have a hard and/or soft copy of whatever I might need with me).
 
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You're crazy :p .

The government looking at mail is overstated, and highly overwrought IMO. Here is the EFF report card for 2013 on privacy matters.

It will depend on who your provider is, and what your settings are, but it is quite probable that your mail is still on their servers and they require warrants and will inform you of government requests. The big guys agree that it is your data.

I was using a desktop client for a while, but a number of things moved me straight to the web. Sometimes they get out of sync with the mail on the server, or label or folders you create don't carry over right. This greatly impacts when moving from one device to another, whether temporarily or permanently. It is very nice to have your read/deleted/new/folders all right were you left them when you move to your phone or a new computer.

The mystique behind the cloud is plain silly. How secure is your hard drive? How many years will it last? The smart ones won't count on those blindly either.

And remember when Google Reader went down? Google gave plenty of notice and made it easy for people to transfer. You can download all the data Google has on you, and even download all your mail. When was the last time your hard drive gave you notice before crashing?

Personally, I have overlapping backups. All my files are on my desktop computer. The bulk of my Documents file was put in the Google Drive folder. And then I have an external HDD that backs up my computer and that folder yet again.

For the absolutely paranoid there is SpiderOak:

SpiderOak is, in fact, truly zero knowledge. The only thing we know for sure about your data is how many encrypted data blocks it uses (which we would have to know to bill for the appropriate amount of storage). On the servers, we only see sequentially numbered data blocks -- not your foldernames, filenames, etc.
How is this reconciled with our ability to do a password reset? The short answer is: It isn't! We cannot reset your password. When you create a SpiderOak account, the setup process happens on your computer (after you download the application) and there your password is used in combination with a strong key derivation function to create your outer layer encryption keys. Your password is never stored as part of the data sent to SpiderOak servers.
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Linky.

Anyway, pros of cloud storage:
  • Ease of sharing - Whether it is using the server to host a direct download, creating public links for pictures to post in the forum, or collaborating with others on a project, cloud is superior (Dropbox for the first two, Google Drive for the last)
  • Backups - or backing up backups.
  • Portability - I can work on something at school, view it on my phone, and finish it at home. Don't need to worry about having a flash drive with enough storage on it. I can also move to a new computer in no time at all. This includes all my contacts and other data as well.

Heck, you can use the best encryption methods out there and then load them up, but at that reaches the edge of practicality for most of the benefits.

Now I know what you are saying, "Tsukasa, how can you risk North Korean hacker terrorists reading your poetry and that your grandmother is in your contacts?!"

Because that is how I roll.

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I did quite a bit of investigation into cloud storage, as the business I run has medical information involved in it. The bottom line is, no matter how secure they claim to be, none of them are secure from hackers. IMO, it is a moot point with email however, because that is all stored on servers through which it travels on it's way to you anyway. You are gaining absolutely no privacy from keeping it on your hard drive but you are able to keep it indefinitely, whereas I doubt that is possible otherwise.

As far as applications go, in just a few short years, that is all you will be using - cloud based programs. Word, Excel, etc. will all be cloud based, just as Adobe has done with CS6. Unfortunately, it will eventually be inevitable. I agree with not liking it, I just don't see being able to avoid it.
 
Ampulla of Vater said:
I did quite a bit of investigation into cloud storage, as the business I run has medical information involved in it. The bottom line is, no matter how secure they claim to be, none of them are secure from hackers. IMO, it is a moot point with email however, because that is all stored on servers through which it travels on it's way to you anyway. You are gaining absolutely no privacy from keeping it on your hard drive but you are able to keep it indefinitely, whereas I doubt that is possible otherwise.

As far as applications go, in just a few short years, that is all you will be using - cloud based programs. Word, Excel, etc. will all be cloud based, just as Adobe has done with CS6. Unfortunately, it will eventually be inevitable. I agree with not liking it, I just don't see being able to avoid it.
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Well, you can, if you're willing to dig around. Case in point: when Adobe announced their Cloud-only service moving forward, Corel came out and said they will never be Cloud-only. And if I understand it correctly, Corel is Adobe-compatible.

I don't mind the idea of the Cloud for certain things. I like the idea that my iTunes purchases can be accessed on my AppleTV through the Cloud—as long as I have a high-speed Internet connection—and I don't necessarily have to have my computer on to view/listen to my purchased media, but I can also bring my purchases along with me wherever I go (iPod, CDs, etc.) and not have to use the Cloud. What I do mind is Cloud-only. Offering your product only through the Cloud is the antithesis of choice, and Adobe is not too big to fail.

Michael
 
This seems as much an attitude issue as an IT one. I don't use cloud storage for anything except email. To be honest, until I read this thread , I never even thought of webmail as a "cloud" application- which is fairly dim , I realise. I was using webmail long before the term "cloud" swam into my ken.
None of my emails is secret. I guess some might be embarrassing in the wrong hands, but worse things happen at sea.
Maybe I should rethink my attitude to storing photos online. I don't have any other form of data that couldn't be fitted on a 4GB USB drive.
 
I use Thunderbird for my email needs, with several accounts from different mail providers set up in it. I find it convenient to have all those accounts in one place, and not have to keep signing into them several times. I also have Apple Mail on the machine if I care to use it.

I don't use the "cloud" for anything at this point. I have no need of it. All my documents and photos are on the computer and a back-up hard drive. For a long time I used web mail exclusively. But after 7 years of working on a genealogy project, and over 430 mails later, I started getting nervous about all that information existing only on the MSN and Yahoo mail servers. That is why I started using a desktop client. Were it not for that, I might not have bothered with it.

So no---desktop clients are not going away.
 
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