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The BBC reports on a sign erected by Swansea Council. In line with the Council's bilingual policy, it contains both English and Welsh versions of the same phrase.
Nothing wrong with that, you may say... unless you can read Welsh. Translated, it reads, "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated." What do they say about assumption being the mother of all cock-ups?
Imagine how you'd feel if your web browser suddenly disappeared for 24 hours, or worse still, if you simply received an email from its developers saying, "Sorry, mate. No more browser, and by the way, all your bookmarks are gone too."
You'd be outraged, right? Now imagine that instead of it being your browser, its an entire office suite that disappears along with all your documents. Everything. Your fundamental ability to continue your business is affected. It's a good job software doesn't work like that, isn't it? The trouble is, it's beginning to do so in a very big, very frightening way, and I don't understand why.
Cloud computing is, "Worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign," GNU founder and open source guru Richard Stallman told The Guardian recently. He may be a controversial figure, but I can't shake the feeling that he's right. You see, instead of keeping your infrastructure on your own server behind your own firewall, cloud computing involves handing everything to a vaguely-understood third party, accessing it using a web-based service, and trusting that everything will remain both safe and available.
According to the Cloud Computing Incidents Database (CCID) Wiki, such services have already experienced 12 major incidents this year. But here's the kicker: One service has actually closed down, taking a lot of people's data with it. The Linkup ceased trading on 8th August after what began as a simple data transfer from a legacy system. After losing an incredible 45% of data in the process, it seems to have simply shut up shop. Nice one, lads. Way to increase confidence in what Larry Ellison of Oracle has described as "complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?"
The steady stream of cloud computing service outages is gathering pace. The CCID Wiki shows just 2 incidents for 2007. At the time of writing, however, it shows that 10 of the 12 incidents recorded so far for 2008 occurred in the latter half of the year. Would you gamble on it sticking at 10 until New Year's Eve, with a drop in 2009?
Stallman's advice is to, "Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program," but it's not always easy to afford hardware when you're in a hurry to get a start-up off the ground and make your first million cheaply.
The evidence so far is that when you buy into cloud computing, you also buy exposure to any potential data storage, network and business continuity problems your service provider may have. Maybe the only way to limit that exposure is to use cloud computing (if you must) only for non-essential tasks. Like all things in life, you get what you pay for.
This is a story that is sure to run like a toddler's nose, but if I ever set up a company, I'll be paying for my own hardware, thank you very much.
The BBC is following the story of a couple from Scotland who received a letter from Atari's UK attack dogs Davenport Lyons accusing them of illegally sharing a game called Race07. The letter demanded £500 not to prosecute. Fair enough, you might say, but there's a problem: Gill and Ken Murdock, aged 54 and 66 respectively, have never heard of the game, don't know what peer-to-peer file sharing is, and anyway, they don't play video games. I'm sure you can guess where this is going...
For those hell-bent on destroying the games industry by illegally dishing out the fruit of its labour for free, someone else's computer is a god-send. Simply trojan it with p2p software and store your stolen goods on it for others to take at will. The poor sap who owns the computer takes the blame. The trouble is, this is 2008, not 1998, and this simply shouldn't be happening.
The problem is the owners of the hijacked machines. Though they perceive the need and have the resources to acquire and hook up to broadband something that would put a Cray-2 to shame, some people seemingly don't perceive the need to secure it. What other reason could there be for a middle-aged couple being caught innocently ripping off Atari? This has to stop. We live in a time when perfectly good anti-virus software exists, and much of it is free, free and free.
So, what's the solution? To scare the population into protecting themselves by wrongly convicting a few until they get the point? To make it illegal not to take basic online security seriously? To insist on every Internet user having a yearly computer MOT? While the problem persists, software companies are going to lose out, and possibly even go bust. Chasing the file sharers doesn't work, and as the NLP lot are fond of saying, if what you're doing doesn't work, do something else. So, maybe it's time for the likes of Atari to be taking charge and teaming up with anti-virus companies to ensure that people like the Murdocks are safe to be let out on the Internet in the first place.
For reasons of cash flow if nothing else, that's not practical. To write operating systems that behave as if they were designed for use in 2008 rather than being shipped as an easily exploited work in progress also seems to have become impossible. An easier alternative might be to follow the example set by a group based around ETH Zurich. Their research into the number of out-of-date browsers still in use (it's a hell of a lot, and I'm willing to bet the Murdock's browser is one of them) led to the idea of creating software that tells you that it's out of date. The logical conclusion is to build this feature into Windows, so that after several attempts to get you to update, your computer will not perform any other networked function until you do so. Let's just hope Microsoft can get it together to implement something like this in a form that isn't badly holed below the waterline - again.
