The Cloud is a concept of moving data and computing off our local machines, and onto servers, usually somewhere on the internet.  The cloud concept is one of the major factors of the success of smartphones and touchpad devices. The storage capacity and computing power is moved off line. gaming is made even more exciting by interactive play between users. The linkage and technical bookkeeping  done in “the clouds”

The past few days though have exposed the potential issues of computing in the clouds. Amazon had a huge crash that took down a bunch of sites and lost data for many businesses

There’s no doubt that the recent “partial failure” of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing platform is giving enterprises, service providers, and developers pause–and will continue to do so for months to come. Amazon called the outage “partial” and a “degradation,” but it was a very big deal. A significant part of Amazon’s flagship EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was offline for a day, as were the related EBS (Elastic Block Store) and RDS(Relational Database Service) offerings. The failure affected only the northern Virginia data center (“US-East”), and the majority of AWS services continued to run just fine. But for the customers whose hosted IT was down, there was nothing partial about it; their sites and applications were substantially or completely offline. These included marquee Web properties like Foursquare, Formspring, HootSuite, and Reddit, among hundreds of others.

Upping the ante, the failure propagated across multiple “availability zones,” which are supposed to use physically distinct, independent infrastructure with no shared components–precisely to make such failure propagation impossible. Ooops! and OOOPS!! Even worse, it turns out that Amazon permanently lost some customer data. There probably is no greater sin in information technology than losing a customer’s data.

Sony also had to shut down its PlayStation Network, the private information including Credit card information of 77 million users are now owned by unscrupulous hackers.  Sony who is no stranger to hacking has shut  down the system for over a week now.  Perhaps people don’t understand how disreputable Sony has behaved in the past about hacking, and stealing gnu code,  while they participate in pursuing downloaders, It is curious that so many  would give Sony credit card information over the internet with their reputation for technological thuggery and heavy handedness.  Be careful with whom you do business.

The lesson learned thought is twofold.

1. Some of these cloud functions and services are experimental. Google still calls many of its older services ‘beta’ Amazon has what they thought was a bulletproof system. Like they say “Shit happens”  a series of events that weren’t understood beforehand is what caused their catastrophe.  The end result will very likely a better more powerful Borg system.
2. Be careful with whom you do business.  A company that hacks its customers computers, shouldn’t be trusted, and will attract other hackers and other disreputable types.  I might be Ludite, but maybe we would be just a little more circumspect about putting our credit card information out. There are other game platforms out there that haven’t actively hacked its customers computers.

Irony found at the Instapundit:

DAVID BERNSTEIN ON WIKILEAKS: “The harm to U.S. diplomatic and military interests is said to be quite large. I’m glad Koh is sending Julian Assange of Wikileaks a stern letter of reprimand, that will show him! Who said the Obama Administration wasn’t tough enough to protect American interests?”

UPDATE: Reader David Shimm emails:

Why is it that Wikileaks has been able to publish all kinds of classified State Dept. documents, but Obama’s Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law transcripts still remain confidential? Maybe we should have a university registrar’s office consult with the US government to assure that secrets remain secret? I’m just wondering, that’s all.

In my experience, university registrars are formidable and competent. Apparently the same can’t be said for the folks entrusted with our national secrets.

Most folks seem to be focused on Assange, a few are blaming  Manning, the PFC that actually leaked this stuff. The real blame lies with whoever made the decision to allow so much classified information to be accessible by hundreds of thousands.  Secrets that are shared by hundreds of thousands are not  real secrets.

The Department of Homeland Security shut down about 75 sites.  Some are are sites that offer inexpensive alternatives to expensive designer items.  Others sites that are search engines that help users find  torrent links on the web.

Aside from the fact that domains are being seized seemingly at will, there is a very serious problem with the action against Torrent-Finder. Not only does the site not host or even link to any torrents whatsoever, it actually only returns searches through embedded iframes which display other sites that are not under the control of the Torrent-Finder owner.

Torrent-Finder remains operational through another URL, Torrent-Finder.info, so feel free to check it out for yourself. The layouts of the sites it searches are clearly visible in the results shown.

While it may not be be obvious to most us what this has to doi with the security of the nation, it may have a lot to do with the fatcats who donated to the the Democrats, and to President Obama’s Campaign.

HOMELAND SECURITY is seizing Internet domains left and right. It’s not clear what protecting fatcat entertainment folks’ copyrights has to do with homeland security, though.

UPDATE: Protecting Rappers instead of the border. “What the devil are these idiots doing? . . . This is a case for the music industry’s lawyers — not the $35 billion-a-year Department of Homeland Security.” Well, to be fair, the entertainment industries make a lot of political contributions to Democrats.

It should be noted that torrent sites do not offer copyrighted materials, just the links or the small files called torrents which provide the identification and data to enable a user with the correct peer to peer software to exchange data.  There is a lot of proper and perfectly  legal files  also exchanged in this manor. In fact this is the preferred method to get updates on much of FOSS software such as Ubuntu O/S ,

Seems as though the government is turning on the heat Torrent users may wish to turn off their trackers in their torrents to avoid attracting attention.  Just Sayin’

Homeland Security seems oblivious to the part they are playing in bringing the current administration down.  The unpopularity of the the strip and grope of the TSA, Real terrorist seem to be getting more active, and our almost non existing border security,  They are really proving to have their heads inserted up their buttocks.

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