The Clouds
Oakley Rankin
So what is this Cloud that you are encouraged to float around in? Does it have a silver lining? Does it portend a storm? It’s really simple: the Cloud is a corporate computer storage system storing all your personal data and for which you pay a subscription price. In its full blown form—Software as a Service or SaaS—the corporate computer contains not only your data but also the software and apps which you use to create it. In essence it is all about ownership of resources as the graphic indicates:
In the graphic, white boxes are resources residing on your home computer and thus under your control; black boxes are resources residing in the Cloud under the corporation’s control; the boxes labelled ‘Databases’ contain your personal data. There are two end stages; On-Premise and SasS; and two intermediate stages Iaas and PaaS. I have little doubt that SasS is where we are heading with everything you create existing on someone else’s computer while you operate only what we used to call a ‘dumb terminal’—now a laptop, phone, tablet, etc.
Why after 30 years of more of storing all our data on our own computers are we now being sold the Cloud? Essentially because of the astronomical drop in the price of storage media driven largely by IBM—remember them? And curiously enough in our world where technological advance is supposed to occur almost overnight, the backbone of this cheaper storage is magnetic tape, the same tape many of you used in cassette recorders and which was first developed by IBM in 1951. A current version, the IBM TS4500, combines extremely high speed tape storage with discs in a single unit to store up to 400 petabytes. A petabyte is a quadrillion bytes or 1,000,000 gigabytes bytes and it is estimated that the entire content of all U.S. academic libraries could be stored in 2 petabytes. I used the progenitor of these devices, the IBM 3850, back in 1975; it had a maximum of 705 tape cylinders storing 35 Gigabytes which were loaded as needed by a truly Rube Goldberg system of motors, pulleys and chains to 14-inch discs of 5 megabyte capacity—I have such a disc hanging in my office window.
Operationally having all software and data on a single computer eliminates the constant updating of millions of personal computers and makes a subscription price much more acceptable. The corporation updates both the operating system and application software once and it is immediately available to millions of users; this is your advantage; your machine is always up to date with nothing to do on your part. For the corporation however, the advantage is control of everything in a much more secretive fashion—you won’t know when or what updating has been done and whether it is any advantage to you. And subscription pricing legally reinforces the corporation’s claim of ownership to everything while allowing more features to be charged as ‘extras’ with ‘flexibility’ in overall charge.
If you recently bought a computer with Windows 11 the chances are good that it has been preset to take you to Microsoft’s version of the Cloud—OneDrive. It is not quite full SaaS as the operating system and some apps remain on your computer but much of your data will be stored on the OneDrive computers either as backup or as the only copy. Microsoft can block your account and access to ALL your data if their regular PhotoDNA checks find any human nudity, online surveys or pirated resources among many other deliberately unstated reasons. Apple has iCloud and Wikipedia lists thousands of companies offering Cloud service.
You have already used one aspect of the Cloud for years: webmail; your missives come into corporate computers for Gmail, Hotmail, etc. for storage. And there they stay; when you read them you are reading a temporary copy of the original which stays in the hands of the corporation.
We will undoubtedly accept the Cloud fairly willingly. And the genuinely stupid who claim “I have nothing to hide” forget that they have never been the ones who decided what should or should not be hidden. Jews were not consulted as to their status in the Third Reich and you are not being consulted as to the corporate use of your data by the thousands of websites that currently collect it. Welcome to Cloud-Cuckoo land where your personal data is dumped into someone else’s nest.
Further Reading:
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power / Shoshana Zuboff
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires / Timothy Wu
