Cloud computing in the surveillance society

Cloud computing is a digital hell that burns data, security, reliability and privacy for users and companies, a technology cancer that within the short turn of a summer brought new evidence of the fact that the worst, for the fools willing to completely tie themselves to the feudal power system of the new digital Lords, is yet to come. It’s therefore important to keep a constant track of the incidents, the unfulfilled promises, the countless privacy violations and the pure and simple lies the unscrupulous corporations persistently try to sell as the future of everything. The future, on-line, has an expiration date and is intermittent.

Let’s start from reliability, a feature that always-on services give for granted when they have to sell the user a subscription: it’s the first, colossal lie advertised by the “cloud” market players, and in the few months passed since my last post on the topic there have been partial issues and unavailability for Microsoft’s on-line services – complete with a worldwide outage on the Windows Azure platform due to the usual update gone wrong – and for the Salesforce.com ones, Amazon disappeared from the net for a while and so did the sites running on AWS (Amazon Web Services) and those which had the bad luck to be hosted on the Amazon’s US-EAST-1 data center in Northern Virginia…