Greg Stereo

I’ve been listening to all this talk of “The Cloud”, which to me is the new Web 2.0, which replaced the dot-com boom, which used to be the new black. And I think it’s interesting, while also being a load of crap.

Users are encouraged to think they can rely on the cloud to offload their machines’ data processing needs, to backup their valuable data, and to share information. Used properly, the cloud can probably play a partial role in these and other laudable goals. But just ask any user of the Sidekick smartphone how they felt when either Microsoft or T-Mobile or some invisible gnomes managed to fuck up one of the most basic server upgrades and lose all of their data…oh and render their devices largely inoperable for a couple days (the advisory at the time was that Sidekick owners not turn their devices off, as whatever little of their precious data was still stored on the client phones would be deleted when the phones restarted and reattached to the cloud). Many users numbly and obediently left their Sidekicks on in the vain and desperate hope that the powers that be (or the invisible gnomes) would be able to restore the cloud data…until their batteries ran down and buh-bye last desperate hope.

I’m sure these victims enjoyed their gift certificates to buy more smartphone services from the parties involved. If anything like that happens to Blackberry users, their will be geektards armed with pitchforks and torches in the streets of every metropolis in the U.S.

The cloud can fail. Hardware can fail. Software can and regularly does fail. These machines are just hunks of interconnected microprocessors pushing around a bunch of one’s and zero’s. And as usual the most common source of problems is, as HAL 9000 put it in 2001:A Space Odyssey, “human error.”

The Sidekick failure? Human screwup. Most cases of identity theft? Not malicious hackers, but often an employee leaving a laptop with sensitive data about customers or clients on it unsecured in public. Humans are the weakest link more often than people realize.

And the internet can be a very strong link. To understand that this is not just a misanthropic point of view, let me give you a bit of history in the form of a quiz.

Are “The Internet” and “The World Wide Web” the same thing?

Too many people with computers say yes. The internet and the web are not the same thing. The internet, as everyone who has been on youtube in the last few years knows, is a series of tubes. The tubes are connected together, kind of like the old version of “telephones” you made when you were young with two tin cans and a long measure of string.

The web, of course, is a layer on top of the series of tubes. It’s like frosting on a cake, except most of the frosting in this case is kind of hard, and discolored, but it’s plenty sugary. It’s a graphical layer on top of the tubes, and of course so many people like picture books and whatnot. No wonder it caught on.

The internet was invented by DARPA (a government agency) to provide a highly-redundant communications method in the invent of a Russian nuclear attack that disabled phones and the like (think Cuban Missile Crisis days, or when Reagan was president and the Russkies nuking us or us nuking them seemed like the big threat we faced).

The internet holds up very well under stress. The Web doesn’t. On 9/11, the internet backbones (for the most part) stayed up. A lot of telecom companies had hubs in or around the World Trade Center, which caused some spotty outages, but overall the highly-redundant system of networked computers that makes up the internet held up.

The web, on the other hand, did not. Web sites like CNN, all the other news sites, Drudge (I assume – I don’t go to Drudge even under the worst of circumstances) were crushed under the load. The Web can be worse for a person than TV. No matter how many people tune into a TV station, the signal strength and availability are unaltered. But if a web site gets a massive spike in traffic, it can go down. And God forbid we can’t get to our precious Twitter account, or login to Facebook, or surf for more porn.

And really, isn’t that what too much of the Web has become? There’s Too Much Information out there. Most of it is porn, online scams, or fear-mongering, sensationalism and distortions. Oh and spyware, I forgot spyware, much of which is so badly written it doesn’t end up doing anything malicious other than making your homepage something weird like www.hickoryfarms.com and slowing your computer down. Don’t get me wrong, malware scanning and prevention is important, and there are botnets out there harvesting thousands of computers, but in the end most of the applets like this are poorly-written pieces of crap.

So do yourself a favor or two. Get off the damned cloud and the social networking and the online gaming and whatever other “addictive” crap you’re spending too much time on. Fire up a full anti-virus scan and then a full malware scan. While that’s running, watch TV for a bit. Flip between MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. Then think on what you’ve seen and find a way to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake. The equivalent of one month worth of your internet access costs would go a long way there.

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