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"Welcome to the cloud!(tm)" Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario: * Store your files in several places. For example use Dropb

"Welcome to the cloud!(tm)" Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario: * Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe. * Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener (http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&submit=Search http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&submit=Search) * For files you'd like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener. * distribute the shortened links * If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location. If you don't trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of 'How to build your own OpenSource Dropbox clone' recipies out there. (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone). AFAIR they all suck in different regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least. If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here: http://www.hackerspaces.org http://www.hackerspaces.org . Don't ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product. The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when the freebies are being taken away from us. I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only. /rant

mapleoin 15y ago
And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product. I need to print T-shirts with this quote.
- oscardelben 15y ago
  Sometimes you're both (see magazines)
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
4554544 15y ago
This is not a welcome to the cloud, this is a welcome to the crappy legislature. Dropbox provides 2gb free, how much time will it take to have a megaupload v0.2?
- jsilence 15y ago
  Cloud storage providers can go down for different reasons. Crappy legislature is one of them. If you entrust your valuable data exclusively to one provider without having copies and/or backups somewhere else, you are doing it wrong.
  - darksaga 15y ago
    I agree. It's 2012 for God's sake, How times do you have to see the commercials and ads about not backing your stuff up before you get a clue?? I would also add if you think using shady file serving companies to store your legitimate files is a good idea, then you're also doing it wrong.
jimmy1234 15y ago
Use personal cloud devices like TonidoPlug. Allows you to keep copies both local and public cloud: still you can access from anywhere.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
cliveholloway 15y ago
"I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only." That's all well and good, but what about the other 95% of the population that just want to pay someone to host their files? Why should consumers have to know the best technical solution? All they want is to pay for a solution to a problem.
- tomflack 15y ago
  You can change your last sentence to be about anything a consumer buys though. "Why should consumers have to know the healthy food? All they want is to pay for a solution to their hunger." "Why should consumers have to know which cars have good gas mileage? All they want is to pay for a form of transport." Because there are advantages to consumers in being knowledgeable about what they buy. Like knowing your cloud storage isn't (and can never be) perfectly reliable.
  - cliveholloway 15y ago
    I don't care how cars work, I trust the mechanic to fix the problem. I don't care how the financial markets work - I trust my 401k to pay for my retirement. Life is far too short for me to want to know about things that don't interest me. One of the points of an advanced society is that we can pay people to do things for us. People shouldn't have to second guess every professional service they use. Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?
    - kiiski 15y ago
      "Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?" So... Lets make it illegal for a site to lose your data by being shut down by the FBI? Seriously though, is it really a good idea to make more (artificial and unsolvable) problems for cloud service providers to worry about?
      - im3w1l 15y ago
        Better idea: Lets make it illegal for FBI to lose your data by shutting down a site.
feralchimp 15y ago
You're not wrong, Walter. On the other hand, one of the reasons Normal People dislike the hacker community is the prevalence of "see I told you so" and/or "bad things wouldn't happen to you if you weren't such a dumbass" culture. The fact that a technical workaround exists for this particular brand of destructive and capricious behavior by the U.S. Federales is not, in itself, a great reason to transform the story into Yet Another Personal I.T. Teaching Moment. The safety deposit box example is apt here. If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit, and the Feds confiscate some family heirloom along with all the bricks of heroin from the bank vault, what should we demand from our government in that case? And if we're not likely to get what we feel entitled to demand, what are our realistic options for doing something about that?
- fennecfoxen 15y ago
  The Libertarian community has been on top pf this sort of thing for decades and would surely be able to offer a lot of "see I told you so" as well. Remember that analogy about how people said SOPA provisions were like shutting down the Ritz Carlton because occasionally politicians cheated on their wives there? Take away a few layers of class, and there have been some motels that the government has seized (or tried to sieze) because occasionally tenants would do drug deals there. A handy article on the topic that was easy for me to find: http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/singlepage http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/... In short, don't hold your breath waiting for your data to come back.
  - rcfox 15y ago
    > The Libertarian community Note for the future: This adds no value to your comment, and makes you look like you're trying to spin this story in someway to benefit your political alignment.
    - fennecfoxen 15y ago
      It's a shout-out to the parent poster's use of the phrase "the hacker community" and its own attendant "I-told-you-so"-ism (which I'm pretty sure is construed as a negative). It's a community I personally completely identify with but I've read some of their work and respect certain parts of it. Here, let me write a 50-page essay on the minutae of my political views, that'll be real interesting reading for the HN people. cut me some slack, jack.
rsingel 15y ago
Also realize that Dropbox's architecture leaves an evidentiary trail - nothing is ever actually deleted from your account. If you upload anything copyrighted, you have opened yourself up to the possibility of being sued or prosecuted for copyright infringement. For most, that's a minuscule chance, but it exists and you have no ability to delete your history - http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=48975 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=48975
- Dylan16807 15y ago
  Dropbox has builtin 30 day history for everyone, through the web interface. You're saying they keep track of things indefinitely (when you haven't purchased that addon)? Do you have a citation for that?
- mortil 15y ago
  Yes you can. If you delete an item from your Dropbox you can see it by choosing "Show deleted files" from here you can choose to permanently delete the file. In my testing this also removes any trace of the file ever being created from Events. While Dropbox certainly could be keeping an undeletable log of everything you ever upload, there is no evidence that they are doing so.
  - nitrogen 15y ago
    While Dropbox certainly could be keeping an undeletable log of everything you ever upload, there is no evidence that they are doing so. It is safer to assume that they are than to assume they are not. Maybe they got an NSL with a gag order that requires them to silently store logs indefinitely. There's no way of knowing, so just assume that's the case and plan accordingly (e.g. don't upload embarrassing college photos that would cause you problems if the upload logs were hacked and released to the public).
- jsilence 15y ago
  Yes. In Germany it is allowed to make a small number of copies for friends and family (Privatkopie). So if I transfer a song to DB for a friend, the evidentary trail will also show that the file has only been downloaded very few time, which is legal.
J_Darnley 15y ago
Why use a shortener at all? All it seems to get you is another point of failure.
- jsilence 15y ago
  Because if you use your own shortener, then you can switch the storage without breaking the links. And using you own domain and service gives you control. Obviously this only works when you use your own personal URL-Shortener and not one of the ubiqious cost free shortening services like bit.ly et.al.
sdizdar 15y ago
Welcome to the cloud indeed. And what we discovered that just coping data to your home computer in a format which can be used back in some other cloud services is gettings harder and harder as virtualization of data and information increases. And you need to upload all that data again... So the right solution is to have your (important) data replicated in a couple of different cloud services (Google Docs replicated with Dropbox, etc.). That is reason I started cloudHQ: just sync and replicate data between cloud services in real time. Nothing sexy: but fast and reliable.

mapleoin 15y ago

And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product. I need to print T-shirts with this quote.

oscardelben 15y ago
Sometimes you're both (see magazines)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

4554544 15y ago

This is not a welcome to the cloud, this is a welcome to the crappy legislature. Dropbox provides 2gb free, how much time will it take to have a megaupload v0.2?

jsilence 15y ago
Cloud storage providers can go down for different reasons. Crappy legislature is one of them. If you entrust your valuable data exclusively to one provider without having copies and/or backups somewhere else, you are doing it wrong.
- darksaga 15y ago
  I agree. It's 2012 for God's sake, How times do you have to see the commercials and ads about not backing your stuff up before you get a clue?? I would also add if you think using shady file serving companies to store your legitimate files is a good idea, then you're also doing it wrong.

jimmy1234 15y ago

Use personal cloud devices like TonidoPlug. Allows you to keep copies both local and public cloud: still you can access from anywhere.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

cliveholloway 15y ago

"I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only." That's all well and good, but what about the other 95% of the population that just want to pay someone to host their files? Why should consumers have to know the best technical solution? All they want is to pay for a solution to a problem.

tomflack 15y ago
You can change your last sentence to be about anything a consumer buys though. "Why should consumers have to know the healthy food? All they want is to pay for a solution to their hunger." "Why should consumers have to know which cars have good gas mileage? All they want is to pay for a form of transport." Because there are advantages to consumers in being knowledgeable about what they buy. Like knowing your cloud storage isn't (and can never be) perfectly reliable.
- cliveholloway 15y ago
  I don't care how cars work, I trust the mechanic to fix the problem. I don't care how the financial markets work - I trust my 401k to pay for my retirement. Life is far too short for me to want to know about things that don't interest me. One of the points of an advanced society is that we can pay people to do things for us. People shouldn't have to second guess every professional service they use. Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?
  - kiiski 15y ago
    "Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?" So... Lets make it illegal for a site to lose your data by being shut down by the FBI? Seriously though, is it really a good idea to make more (artificial and unsolvable) problems for cloud service providers to worry about?
    - im3w1l 15y ago
      Better idea: Lets make it illegal for FBI to lose your data by shutting down a site.

feralchimp 15y ago

You're not wrong, Walter. On the other hand, one of the reasons Normal People dislike the hacker community is the prevalence of "see I told you so" and/or "bad things wouldn't happen to you if you weren't such a dumbass" culture. The fact that a technical workaround exists for this particular brand of destructive and capricious behavior by the U.S. Federales is not, in itself, a great reason to transform the story into Yet Another Personal I.T. Teaching Moment. The safety deposit box example is apt here. If my local bank gets busted for some shady-ass shit, and the Feds confiscate some family heirloom along with all the bricks of heroin from the bank vault, what should we demand from our government in that case? And if we're not likely to get what we feel entitled to demand, what are our realistic options for doing something about that?

fennecfoxen 15y ago
The Libertarian community has been on top pf this sort of thing for decades and would surely be able to offer a lot of "see I told you so" as well. Remember that analogy about how people said SOPA provisions were like shutting down the Ritz Carlton because occasionally politicians cheated on their wives there? Take away a few layers of class, and there have been some motels that the government has seized (or tried to sieze) because occasionally tenants would do drug deals there. A handy article on the topic that was easy for me to find: http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/singlepage http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket/... In short, don't hold your breath waiting for your data to come back.
- rcfox 15y ago
  > The Libertarian community Note for the future: This adds no value to your comment, and makes you look like you're trying to spin this story in someway to benefit your political alignment.
  - fennecfoxen 15y ago
    It's a shout-out to the parent poster's use of the phrase "the hacker community" and its own attendant "I-told-you-so"-ism (which I'm pretty sure is construed as a negative). It's a community I personally completely identify with but I've read some of their work and respect certain parts of it. Here, let me write a 50-page essay on the minutae of my political views, that'll be real interesting reading for the HN people. cut me some slack, jack.

rsingel 15y ago

Also realize that Dropbox's architecture leaves an evidentiary trail - nothing is ever actually deleted from your account. If you upload anything copyrighted, you have opened yourself up to the possibility of being sued or prosecuted for copyright infringement. For most, that's a minuscule chance, but it exists and you have no ability to delete your history - http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=48975 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=48975

Dylan16807 15y ago
Dropbox has builtin 30 day history for everyone, through the web interface. You're saying they keep track of things indefinitely (when you haven't purchased that addon)? Do you have a citation for that?
mortil 15y ago
Yes you can. If you delete an item from your Dropbox you can see it by choosing "Show deleted files" from here you can choose to permanently delete the file. In my testing this also removes any trace of the file ever being created from Events. While Dropbox certainly could be keeping an undeletable log of everything you ever upload, there is no evidence that they are doing so.
- nitrogen 15y ago
  While Dropbox certainly could be keeping an undeletable log of everything you ever upload, there is no evidence that they are doing so. It is safer to assume that they are than to assume they are not. Maybe they got an NSL with a gag order that requires them to silently store logs indefinitely. There's no way of knowing, so just assume that's the case and plan accordingly (e.g. don't upload embarrassing college photos that would cause you problems if the upload logs were hacked and released to the public).
jsilence 15y ago
Yes. In Germany it is allowed to make a small number of copies for friends and family (Privatkopie). So if I transfer a song to DB for a friend, the evidentary trail will also show that the file has only been downloaded very few time, which is legal.

J_Darnley 15y ago

Why use a shortener at all? All it seems to get you is another point of failure.

jsilence 15y ago
Because if you use your own shortener, then you can switch the storage without breaking the links. And using you own domain and service gives you control. Obviously this only works when you use your own personal URL-Shortener and not one of the ubiqious cost free shortening services like bit.ly et.al.

sdizdar 15y ago

Welcome to the cloud indeed. And what we discovered that just coping data to your home computer in a format which can be used back in some other cloud services is gettings harder and harder as virtualization of data and information increases. And you need to upload all that data again... So the right solution is to have your (important) data replicated in a couple of different cloud services (Google Docs replicated with Dropbox, etc.). That is reason I started cloudHQ: just sync and replicate data between cloud services in real time. Nothing sexy: but fast and reliable.