Current Conditions: Partly Cloudy. Forcast: A Bad Storm A Comin'

Which doesn’t belong:

IMF, Apple, Google, the U.S. Senate, Sony, Lockheed Martin, Chase, CIA

To my knowledge, only Apple hasn’t been hacked.  I’ve written about this before; but, for the life of me, I don’t understand putting anything important in “the Cloud.”

First, there is no “cloud.”  The Cloud is a bunch of servers sitting all over the place – you send your stuff to them and they will let you retrieve it. Usually.  If all of the entities listed above can’t keep hacker’s out, why does anyone think they can protect your important stuff?

If someone wants to hack the text of my Gmail’s, fine. I never use Gmail for anything important, precisely because it’s all sitting on Google’s servers ready to be hacked.  For work, I use a domain service that deletes Emails when they are downloaded by me – it’s scary enough that I’m trusting strangers for the short time the Emails are in their servers.

The trouble with the Cloud is that it makes vandalism and theft a lot more efficient.  It used to be that bad guys had to physically break in and take or damage your stuff.  Now they can sit in a basement, drinking Mountain Dew, and wreak havoc at their leisure.

Cyber-war is a word we’re hearing more and more about.  The U.S. is thought to have screwed up Iran’s nuclear reactors by messing with the computers used to run them.  Someone in China hacked Google and Lockheed Martin.

Computers and the internet were supposed to be a boon to mankind.  We just forgot that mankind is the reason we can’t have nice stuff.