Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution, because at the drop of a hat, some user, or someone could drop in a picture of an underage girl showing some boob, or some folder of MP3 songs or whatever, and then everyone starts shouting 'Oh god won't somebody think of the children', and you come back to your data centers are in ruins, locks cut, doors broken in, and all that is left is cat5 cables, and a 7 year legal battle (from another legal system in a different country) ahead of you.

It's because of stories like this that I keep hidden secret offsite offline backups, that only I know about and you would have to torture me to get that info. That way when your entire business is squished from the judicial system of a different country based on the behaviors of a person you don't even know, at least you can salvage what you have and try to pivot and get your stolen income streams back while you enter a 7 year legal battle where you win.

You have to plan for hurricanes knocking out your individual data centers, and you have to plan for legal hurricanes that knock out ALL your data centers. It's part of the new world. You have to be able to replicate, or else the mafia don walks into your shop, and you have to do everything they say.

With prior preparation, you can tell the don you are not interested in his insurance, and then buckle down for the legal/illegal hurricane coming your way.

Many international businesses include over zealous US law enforcement in their disaster recovery plans as a disaster to recover from. US government interference is considered a disaster along side fire, flooding, war, hacking, criminal activity, and so on.

So, sure, store data in a convenient, well run, good value, US based cloud, but what do we do if the FBI raid the data centre the cloud lives in and we lose our data or access to it.

Kinda sad that people actually have to consider that.

Cloud Computing is still the perfect solution.

The problem isn't technology, it's the states unwillingness (or inability) to adapt laws to the future or reality. Combined with excessive law enforcement where they seem to be compensating for their failure to actually stop technology.

> Cloud Computing is still the perfect solution.

We're talking about computer systems designed by humans? There is no such thing as a perfect solution, just a solution that hasn't shown any downsides yet.

Perfect at the moment... we don't have decentralized personal data storage yet and "hidden secret offsite offline backups" is a big regression in terms of usability.

Encryption is the big missing piece in a lot of cloud computing.

That being said, this is still about the law and not technology. Although I'm confident in technologies ability to provide self-defence.

  | "hidden secret offsite offline backups" is a
  | big regression in terms of usability.

How so? Because you have to manually do the backup and put the data there? Is it that much of an issue if you only do it once per month (for example)?

  | Although I'm confident in technologies ability
  | to provide self-defence.

That self-defence only goes so far.

> Because you have to manually do the backup and put the data there?

Yes, data failures can happen anytime. Also, I'm extremely lazy. I much prefer using Truecrypt and Tarsnap with automated scripts.

  | Yes, data failures can happen anytime.

Right, but you could also get accused of a crime at any time. If police take your equipment, then good luck getting it back. It doesn't matter if you're proven innocent, or if proven guilty, and have served your time. If the police take it, it will gather dust in evidence storage somewhere for years (or mysteriously disappear to show up in possession of friends/family of a LEO).

loss of control? That's a pretty big one.

I think there's being a very noisy contingent of people complaining about that one for a while. I count myself among them.

Loss of control sucks >:(

Cloud computing is a perfect solution for a world which is not run by humans. In the actual world, however, cloud computing is only a good solution for data you don't care about very much.

I keep local backups of everything. The HP Microserver I bought is very handy for stuff like that. If anything happens to my servers (ALL of them) being back online will be a matter of hours/days and not years.

What is the noise output of one of those?

HP claims 22dB. I saw a blog post that swapped the fan and added a variable resistor to achieve 6dB. The one I got at the office is barely noticeable (it's at my feet).

On a home setting a closet would be a good place to hide it and shield any sound from the hard driver or fans.

Just to throw in, my synology purpose-built nas is virtually silent. The drives chatter a bit now because I turned off their automatic acoustic management (AAM), but other than that I cannot hear it unless I am right by it.

But that doesn't really scale to a "solution". Yes, it works for you, or any other technically savvy person. But the average cloud subscriber wants a solution as an ALTERNATIVE to that.

How would that help in a situation like Dotcom's? Their servers were taken and his house was raided. Any backup system at his house would have been taken as well.

Not him, but the people whose data he hosted. Dotcom was acting as an ISP, not a consumer.

The number one rule of backups is to never have them in the same place (i.e. local) as the live data.

I've got a hp microserver but haven't yet set it up. I've never set up a server from scratch before, do you have any advice or guidance or any good tutorials? Good to hear that they're serving you well though

Depends on what you want to achieve with it. I installed Ubuntu Server, threw and configured SAMBA and a small LAMP server on it and not much more. For getting the backups from the production servers I use rdiff-backup and cron. I'm not using RAID at the moment as it suits me better to just have four big drives.

A friend of mine is running the same setup plus a Plex Media Server and some small toys.

My Twitter and HN handle are the same and my email is on my profile if you have any specific question.

Thanks for the info, that's kind of what I want it for - backups, general file storage and possibly a development server. I'll be sure to get in touch if I need some advice, the offer of help is much appreciated.

> It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution

I think it's important to note that it's not the technology's fault that this is happening, it's built into the way that we execute it. What if cloud storage wasn't just disk or datacenter redundant, but it was provider redundant as well? That way when one provider goes out of business, users aren't affected.

It's still way too early for this to happen (nobody likes turning into a commoditized service), but I think (hope) some day it will.

Or maybe it's the way the law is executed by law enforcement, interpreted by courts, and legislated by legislators.

Sure. That was envisioned as a problem too back when the Internet was created (or maybe I'm just giving too much credit after the fact), so they structured the technology in such a way as to circumvent the problem.

Technology should be made to be resilient to bad laws. The Internet should protect us from government overreach, not magnify the effect of it.

What technology should do seems to be open to interpretation - it's not surprising those in power have a different interpretation than those who are not.

This is the whole "Innocent until proven guilty" thing is being replaced with "Guilty until proven innocent" in the world of web services.

One itch I would like scratched is a cloud service that protects against the Insanity of the legal system. I have a dream that a program or set of hardware can stay online until a judge has ordered its termination. You can't take the thing offline with an ax first, and then give the broken pieces back to the defendant (without anti-static bags) after the judge clears you of wrong-doing. That's not right.

A service where the judicial system can rape your data centers and get all the information they need to convict you, while your income streams remain intact, UNTIL the judge decides you are illegal.

The notion of having a business destroyed upon accusation, and then giving the broken pieces back to the defendant after the judge says: "No wrong-doing here", makes me sick to my stomach. I don't want to give my kids a world that works like that.

I imagine step one for prosecutors will then be to get the judge to specifically order the service shut down, due to hard caused to third parties or some other reason (whether valid or not). It's a common and vital tactic for prosecutors to seize funds of defendants so they can't mount an adequate defense.

I think the only way around that is to get laws changed, or have provisions in place to illegally host your service after it's been ordered shut down. The latter will probably just cause more legal problems.

> It's a common and vital tactic for prosecutors to seize funds of defendants so they can't mount an adequate defense.

I've heard about this tactic on more than one occasion already. It sounds horrible, and I think it should be made illegal.

As a side note, why can't the feds get all the mob bosses this way, for example? Do they only use this tactic against people like Dotcom?

As I understand it, the trouble is that money isn't evidence, necessarily (while Dotcom's server data would be) and civil seizure of money only applies to the proceeds of a crime. If you're a mob boss, you probably have lawyers and accountants working to keep the illegally-earned money out of your legitimate bank accounts.

I've heard about this tactic on more than one occasion already. It sounds horrible, and I think it should be made illegal.

I agree. More accurately I could have said "It's a common and to their belief vital tactic..."

This only applies to criminal cases, where the evidence can take months. For civil cases it's closer to "a preponderance of evidence leans towards guilt unless proven otherwise."

I too keep hidden secret offsite offline backups. But there's little to worry about Dropbox or other large US clouds. It's a safe bet that the only judicial system that will squish a cloud will be the US's, for a small cloud or one not based in the US.

Cloud Computing is fine if it uses proper encryption etc.

That few players do this is a market opportunity. If I was running a cloud service there's no way I'd want any ability to tell what data was being stored....

No idea why you are getting down-voted. But you are right. Cloud Computing is fine - if cloud services were properly implementing user sided encryption.

It's a short term issue. When I mean short term it could last at least 20 years.

I earnestly believe that society is trying to find boundaries but technology is updating far faster than a democracy can change the rules.

I live in the cloud now for the reasons like many do: price and features. As much as I want to follow the principles that you have set forth, Drobos and quality hard drives are expensive when I can rely on Evernote, iCloud, Everpix and Vimeo for securing my data at a far cheaper price and less problems.

> It's because of stuff like this that Cloud Computing is not a very good solution

Yes it's the technologies fault. It's not the policies or the ridiculous regulations...

I don't think maeon3 is saying it's the technology's fault exactly. The point seems to be that, since you have control over your stack but not over government regulations, you should probably do what you can to protect your data or your company's data.

> but not over government regulations

That's a scary thought no? Isn't that why we elect officials to represent us?

since there are millions of different competing interests in electing officials, and passing policies, you always risk not having control over government policies and regulations.

It doesn't really matter. Compare the statistical odds of your vote impacting an election (forget for now the odds of an election actually impacting policy in the way the voters intended) to the odds of you being able to switch your stack away from a cloud service.

There will always be bad policies and ridiculous regulations. If you are building technology which fails to take this human reality into account, you are building bad technology.

None of that is a particular issue with cloud over any other way of hosting your data.

Of course, there's an argument where the cloud provider or colo is too willing to hand over your stuff, and if you have your own, in-house datacenter, at least you get to tell them to come back with a warrant. But when they do, you're done. Even though it was found illegal, I'm pretty sure the dotcom raid was done with warrants.

It's because of stuff like this that IP cops are not a good solution.

This seems a little alarmist

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