Join us as Henry Mike and Chris chat about the Cloud. What exactly is the Cloud and why has it been such a great innovation to help the Internet grow? Without the Cloud, the Internet would be much smaller and less accessible to people without computers but that conveniences comes at a cost.
The Cloud is synonymous with using someone else's computer to host a service and the cost of using that computer is your data. Cloud services are not software, you don't own a Cloud-based service you rent it and in return for the convenience of accessing these services you may be giving up your identity and the ownership of your data.
It's time we all understood the Cloud a bit better and The Decentralists will try our best to help explain.
Join us as Henry Mike and Chris chat about the Cloud. What exactly is the Cloud and why has it been such a great innovation to help the Internet grow? Without the Cloud, the Internet would be much smaller and less accessible to people without computers but that conveniences comes at a cost.
The Cloud is synonymous with using someone else's computer to host a service and the cost of using that computer is your data. Cloud services are not software, you don't own a Cloud-based service you rent it and in return for the convenience of accessing these services you may be giving up your identity and the ownership of your data.
It's time we all understood the Cloud a bit better and The Decentralists will try our best to help explain.
Henry : Hey everyone, it's Henry, Mike and Chris of Decentralization Education. Decentralization Education is our short 10 to 15 minute segment where we explain technology terms and topics that we often reference during our regular podcast, The Decentralists. This time, we're going to talk about The Cloud, Mike. Everybody's heard that term forever, but not everyone may know exactly what it is and where it came from. What is the cloud?
Mike : Well, Henry, I don't know if I should feel proud or ashamed that I'm actually old enough to have predated the cloud, so maybe that makes me uniquely positioned to explain it. It's for those of us who've been involved in this greater thing, ‘The Internet’ since the beginning. It started off where we all had a personal computer or we had some lab that was at university that we access through a dump terminal. What we did is generally all of the work that we did, the computing, whether it was word processing, whether it was playing a game, whether it was all of these things was done on the actual computer.
Henry : Mike, this must have been when Microsoft was starting, whereby you had to buy software for your computer and use it on your computer because the Internet did not exist.
Mike : The Internet at the beginning, when it was called ARPANET or something, was basically a backbone of hardened telephone cables, copper wires that were buried underground in these huge hardened pipes. They connected all the key military installations, research labs like the jet propulsion laboratory and DARPA, with the sitting in the nuke silos in North Dakota. The idea was if somebody at some point said ‘Hey, wait a second. What happens if somebody goes into the right place in, say Chicago or something, cuts that wire, we can't talk to half of the armed forces.’ So they buried this cable and said this is the Internet. Basically, all it was, was phone lines. So you'd connect to a phone line, just the same way that we connect to WIFI. Then your computing device would do the computing and would go out and look for other computers that had people on them and you could maybe even chat with them.
Henry : That was dialup back then.
Mike : That was dialup. What you did is you hit this point though. When Microsoft became a company and personal computers became a thing. There were times I remember Bill Gates, he is a young guy and he's like ‘You give it 10 years and everybody will have a computer in their house.’ Everybody laughed at him. So the idea was now you had all these people that were starting to buy computers, young kids. My parents bought me a Vic 20 or a Commodore 64, those are the early ones. I remember I started playing games, but then all of a sudden you had these things like use nets, BBS and all these other bulletin board servers where you could talk to people. It was very cool. Now it was just a blinking cursor. So all of a sudden you fast forward a couple of years and now there's people, every college student has a computer. There're computer labs everywhere. Computers are very important. But the problem is the backbone where you actually access the applications, where you actually stored stuff was really expensive. Storage was super expensive. Phone lines were super expensive. You had to run a piece of cable from the wire down to the house. So how do you now provide access to these hundreds of thousands soon to become millions and ideally billions of people on this planet who want to access this internet in order to share? What happened was is somebody said we need 2 billion people to be able to connect to the internet. The phone company said ‘Like hell, I'm going to go and run 2 billion phone lines. Are you crazy? I'm not doing that.’ They said ‘Okay, how about the universities? You guys have got all this computing power. Can we use that?’ They said ‘Like hell, I'm a university. I don't have any money.’ So somebody in Silicon Valley raised their hand and said ‘I've got money.’ At that time we were just starting to see things like search engines. Google was starting to come out. The cloud’s only been around for like 25 years or so. What they did is they took all of these big servers that they had built host things like Google search, indexing all of the websites in the world, and they had all of these servers that were used to process transactions. Somebody said ‘Wait a second, but we've got all this extra storage and we've got all this extra compute. So why don't we just take the search? Instead of everybody having an individual search browser on their computer that they can use to search the Internet, why don't we just have one browser on our computer and allow everybody to just come to our website and access it?
Henry : The cloud.
Mike : That becomes The Cloud. Since that started, Google would search every single thing that we do has either been on the cloud or pushed into the cloud. You can't even buy Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office anymore. What do you get? You get a subscription to Office365. That's not a piece of software. You don't own that Henry. You get to access a bunch of your documents, your Word processor, and all that stuff on Microsoft’s server. Everything you do is within Microsoft's wall garden. And that's where the cloud is a convenient thing, but also an inconvenient thing.
Henry : At first there was no way they had enough storage on their personal computers. It was too expensive.
Mike : Absolutely. It was too expensive. It wasn't fast enough. Nobody had lines. The phone companies aren't digging holes in the ground. It was a perfect storm.
Henry : So Chris, what does this have to do with Social Media, the cloud?
Chris : First I would like to say that there's nothing about social that requires the cloud. Skype at one time had peer-to-peer functionality.
Henry : When it first came out, I think you're right.
Chris : It was only recently that they removed that functionality. Also, email doesn't have to use the cloud either. Email can be peer-to-peer if you want it to be. There's a whole host of services that do work peer-to-peer. I'm going to mention why they now work in the cloud though. The reason is very simple, companies want your data. Making all this software work through the cloud allows there to be a middleman listening in and snooping in on your conversation.
Henry : Analyzing everything you're interested in.
Chris : That's right. They can later sell your data to the highest bidder. There's a reason why they're giving it away for free to you. It's because you are the product.
Henry : Essentially what you're saying is the architecture of the cloud, the concept of the cloud enables this business model to work like a charm.
Chris : That's right. It wouldn't exist. I'm convinced that we would not have the advertising business model. We would not have the manipulation. We would not have all of these crazy things that happen. And
Henry : Probably few data breaches.
Mike : Of course, because that's the thing. Remember, like Chris just said now you've got this cloud and this is where it's really dangerous in social, because in social that cloud not only allows and facilitates the connection between two people, but it also contains all their identity information.
Henry : So it's a honey pot. It's such a prized treasure that every major serious hacker wants to attack it, as opposed to 1 billion individual computers at home where it's a heck of a lot of work to try and get a little something from everyone.
Mike : Absolutely. So back in the days, Henry, at the beginning before the cloud, if somebody wanted to get in and hack my communications, what was coming out of my computer, they would literally have to crawl up the telephone pole and stick one of those wiretaps on it, like they used to do in the movies back in the day. Now all they need to do is put a scraper-bot on the incoming thing on Facebook and they'll grab all the data they want.
Henry : Of course, remember back in the day, individual computers for most of the day they were off. That's not the way things are today.
Mike : That's exactly right. So the cloud is always pinging your phone. You're walking down the street, it's always pinging you. It's tracking you, it's doing everything.
Henry : So in other words, the cloud, a great concept, was created for a valid reason, but it has morphed into a monster when it comes to privacy and control.
Mike : Remember Henry, it's very important, the cloud is an inanimate object. It is a bunch of computers and a bunch of servers in Iraq somewhere. It does nothing until its human masters, tell it what to do.
Henry : The biggest clouds in the world, Chris, are the providers?
Chris : There are a lot of providers. There's Amazon, I would probably say they're number one. Microsoft definitely as well, IBM, there's Rackspace.
Mike : Google.
Chris : There are just a lot of cloud providers. Too many of them and that's another reason why most people should be concerned. It’s because you don't know where your data winds up.
Henry : That's right. Whether the cloud is in one country or another and therefore what legal ramifications that may have and all that sort of thing.
Mike : Totally.
Henry : We can't go on forever here, but tell me, how does this relate to Peer Social and Manyone, the cloud?
Mike : We're not using it. It's kind of that simple.
Henry : It's a fundamental change.
Mike : It's a fundamental change. We don't need it. Nobody at Peer Social or Mayone needs to host or look at or be in the middle of anybody's communication. It's not part of the business model. It's not what we want to do. I personally don't care who's buying shoes. I don't need to sell advertising because there's enough of it out there. We don't need another freaking channel of advertising. So the reality is, the cloud can be great to do things. If what you do is you set it up and you say all this thing is going to do is just store or data, and that data is encrypted as we talked about in the last session, then the cloud's okay. It's okay because it's just that inert piece of material.
Chris : It's like a parking spot for your data.
Mike : Exactly, it's just a parking spot. you know where the parking spot is, you have the key to the car. It's all fine. It's when it's Google's car and they're renting it to you and they can just take it away from you whenever that's when the cloud becomes a problem.
Henry : Thank you so much, Mike and Chris. The cloud, it's pretty simple, but it has gotten a bit complex over the decades. Thank you very much.
Mike : Thank you, Henry.
Henry : Take care.