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Said no one.

Ever.

Just spent an hour delinking my laptop from the clutches of MS after the last 'update'.

@#%^ the cloud. My data is MINE.

Just pissed me off.

It's a losing battle. Soon every company will have a cloud (and it probably won't be optional). That ship left dock 20 years ago when a founder of Sun was fired for telling everyone what the tech industry was doing and no one bothered to give a damn till 2 decades later when the NSA started doing this stuff.

You're data is public in every sense except that you've tricked yourself into believing its not and its too late to tell the industry to stop.

Hopefully they enjoy those files as much as we do

Neal (SNowcrash) Stephenson had a novel, God 15 years ago in 1999 called Cryptonomicon.

One of the characters always used a level of encryption on his stuff that would take every computer on Earth 100 years to break.

It was both a sign of his paranoia, and his faith in the advance of information tech...

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Neal (SNowcrash) Stephenson had a novel, God 15 years ago in 1999 called Cryptonomicon.

One of the characters always used a level of encryption on his stuff that would take every computer on Earth 100 years to break.

It was both a sign of his paranoia, and his faith in the advance of information tech...

That was a fantastic book. Unfortunately, he missed the reality, which is that anyone who wants that information out of you bad enough will just toss you in a hole indefinitely until you cave.

Its just the direction in which the industry seems to be going and I dont think we can do anything about it.

Daemonhammer wrote:
Its just the direction in which the industry seems to be going and I dont think we can do anything about it.

We can't, but I've always had faith that a great American institution, the supreme court, will ride to the rescue, and smite down these tech companies.

 daedalus wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Neal (SNowcrash) Stephenson had a novel, God 15 years ago in 1999 called Cryptonomicon.

One of the characters always used a level of encryption on his stuff that would take every computer on Earth 100 years to break.

It was both a sign of his paranoia, and his faith in the advance of information tech...

That was a fantastic book. Unfortunately, he missed the reality, which is that anyone who wants that information out of you bad enough will just toss you in a hole indefinitely until you cave.

More likely install a keystroke logger on your computer, encryption means nothing when you're giving them your password. Plus it spares them the potential felony charges.

Holy @#$%, now EVERY #$%^ing time I use Skype MS is going to try and make me change to a cloud account?

@#$% this.

What other good voice/video services are out there?

Not suprised. Just like Facebook owns your images. Though what you've got to remember not a single person will probably look at your stuff, it's boring. I think it's just marketing/ security strategy.

 eskimo wrote:
Not suprised. Just like Facebook owns your images. Though what you've got to remember not a single person will probably look at your stuff, it's boring. I think it's just marketing/ security strategy.

Facebook doesn't own your images.

Facebook owns the links, and places the images on the public domain, it doesn't own the original images.
This can still be an IP problem.

 Orlanth wrote:
Facebook owns the links, and places the images on the public domain, it doesn't own the original images.
This can still be an IP problem.

Posting images on Facebook does not mean those images are public domain.

Only if the IP owner posts them.

That's why I use AOL and dial-up service.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Said no one.

Ever.

Just spent an hour delinking my laptop from the clutches of MS after the last 'update'.

@#%^ the cloud. My data is MINE.

Just pissed me off.

All serious now:

Which sortware updates 'offer' Cloud?
Can you opt out of them or are they marked essential, or not marked at all?
Does Cloud infect current Vista?
How drastic an action did you have to perform to 'delink'.

"Cloud" software is becoming standard in the business world. There are certain advantages for corporate users. It greatly simplifies the licensing issue and the process of keeping everyone up to date with the same version.

It is of course partly a scam, designed to make people keep paying for trivial updates they don't need.

It was an non-optional 'your computer will now reboot' type update. After which I was told I could no longer log in under my old account (2013 laptop) but had to log in under my hotmail/microsoft account with that password.

The new settings defaulted to saving documents etc in the cloud rather than the hard drive.

to get out i had to create a new locally-housed admin account, and port over all my files from the former account.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
It was an non-optional 'your computer will now reboot' type update. After which I was told I could no longer log in under my old account (2013 laptop) but had to log in under my hotmail/microsoft account with that password.

The new settings defaulted to saving documents etc in the cloud rather than the hard drive.

to get out i had to create a new locally-housed admin account, and port over all my files from the former account.

feth that. I hate those updates. So it's essentially a matter of time before they all tick over to the cloud?

Eventually yes. Likely most computers will eventually stop being 'computers.' They'll just be monitors, maybe a hard drive, a keyboard and a mouse. All the hardware will be replaced by server clusters serving as a cloud for mass access.

And yet nobody ever worried that Google has access to all of your search history, all of your email (if you use a gmail account), all your youtube comments/videos, and all of your Google drive files.

That's good marketing right there. I actually read a pretty interesting book that described a lot of the ideas behind Google and their products. Suffice it to say that I now see them as about the closest real life analogue to a cyberpunk style Megacorp we currently have.

 dementedwombat wrote:
And yet nobody ever worried that Google has access to all of your search history, all of your email (if you use a gmail account), all your youtube comments/videos, and all of your Google drive files.

That's good marketing right there. I actually read a pretty interesting book that described a lot of the ideas behind Google and their products. Suffice it to say that I now see them as about the closest real life analogue to a cyberpunk style Megacorp we currently have.

I'm afraid people don't care that huge multi-national corporations have more access to their private data than the NSA. They only care that the NSA has it

Definitely a crappy, grim outlook for email (and "privacy" in general), which is pretty much mandatory now.

Everyone needs a personal email account, but using one through an ISP or other paid service is a bad idea, as you might discontinue that service and lose the account. So you need a free, universal account that can be accessed from anywhere.

But nothing is free.

 dementedwombat wrote:
And yet nobody ever worried that Google has access to all of your search history, all of your email (if you use a gmail account), all your youtube comments/videos, and all of your Google drive files.

That's good marketing right there. I actually read a pretty interesting book that described a lot of the ideas behind Google and their products. Suffice it to say that I now see them as about the closest real life analogue to a cyberpunk style Megacorp we currently have.

That's why it's best not to speak ill of Google. They have robots now!

 LordofHats wrote:
Eventually yes. Likely most computers will eventually stop being 'computers.' They'll just be monitors, maybe a hard drive, a keyboard and a mouse. All the hardware will be replaced by server clusters serving as a cloud for mass access.

The future is skynet

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
It was an non-optional 'your computer will now reboot' type update. After which I was told I could no longer log in under my old account (2013 laptop) but had to log in under my hotmail/microsoft account with that password.

The new settings defaulted to saving documents etc in the cloud rather than the hard drive.

to get out i had to create a new locally-housed admin account, and port over all my files from the former account.

I'm interested in some more info about this as I got a new PC with windows 8.1. last Monday. I said no to all inquires about me signing for MS fantastic cloud service, is it going to try saving my documents to the cloud still?

M.