Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last couple years, cloud computing has been the overhyped rage. Sure it’s a nice back-up and way to have your stuff on hand through multiple devices…until the big fat EMP we’ll probably experience in the next decade renders your crap gone. The uglier issue is how the storage companies just hand over your data to the NSA and their ilk without a fuss, plus they can’t disclose the activity to their customers. One provider does the opposite, they can say they haven’t been bugged, when the sign “drops,” it will inform everyone the NSA has come snooping with a rubber-stamped warrant from the 20 special judges (19 of which are Republicans, imagine that).
For Mac users who miss the iDisk mounting in the Finder, a huge feature lacking in iCloud, many went to Dropbox. It’s free, you gain more space by liking them on FaceBook, blah blah blah. I also attended their job fair last Summer, see what my options were to keep Apple from taking me for granted. I wasn’t impressed with their weak revenue stream (subscriptions) and concerned about how quickly they were pissing it away; one executive bragged about how much they spend on band gear at the CA office.
The final straw beyond all the Russians they employ was Condi Rice joining their corporate board. Really? One of the architects of the snooping state we have is now getting her corporate welfare check from them. No thanks.
Edward Snowden, love him or hate him, mentioned Spideroak in an interview for The Guardian. I jumped aboard right away because Spideroak encrypts everything before it syncs, therefore, they have no idea what’s in your cloud storage nor do they want to know. I’m sure if people store illegal, egregious stuff like child pornography, they’ll want to know in order to stop the account, distance themselves. I know encryption isn’t perfect plus it’s debatable whether or not the State has the keys. Either way, I feel better that the terrible corporate flunkies we’re governed by will have to work a little harder to see my D&D NPCs in their witch hunt for non-existent, domestic terrorists on the Left.