Fuck the Cloud (2009)

First off, I'm not your 'bro'. And what do you mean a DOX, you yourself wrote that on this very site. Or are you saying that you consider yourself anonymous from hereon in and therefore get to spout whatever nonsense you feel like and invite people to do dumb stuff 'because you said so' and we should ignore this in the context of your other postings?

I'm responding to you the way I do because you run (or apparently, ran) an AWS hosted service.

I'm a piece of shit because you disagree with me, but it just so happens that you've been all over this thread with a continuous stream of (hopefully) purposeful mis-understandings and/or downright trolling. If you want to do that from an anonymous account go ahead but don't do it from the same one that you use for 'Who is hiring' posts.

Just like say if cperciva writes about online storage I interpret that in the context of his tarsnap business.

People here are pretty open about the projects they're involved with and so are you, if you don't want that link to be made then I suggest you don't post about your company on HN or you create a separate account to share your 'pearls of wisdom' like you do in this thread.

Oh, and your anecdote of how many years you were up and running holds zero water by your own standards.

Attacking people and their professional reputations can get your own professional reputation called into question, get used to it.

Yes, it could be. The trade-off is usually measured by the cost to the company of re-creating or losing the data entirely. So for some stuff such a system is feasible, for others it isn't and then you'll have to compromise. Log data for instance does not need to be stored like that unless there are legal rules saying that you have to keep it no matter what.

For each business this is a delicate affair and you should spend some time on figuring out what you really absolutely have to have and what you could lose without losing the company or getting in trouble with the law.

The bank would have the power to stop you from selling your house in some circumstances (such as a short sale).

> And I want to be clear your moded and nonsensical jabbering is not why you are a piece of shit.

Ah ok, that's what caused it. Well, that's fine but there is probably an aggregate several 100 years worth of experience in this thread that seems to be in violent agreement on you not really understanding the matter under consideration.

> An attempt to call attention to my potential customers in a forum because you disagree with me is why you are a piece of shit.

If you present yourself as a representative or founder of a company here then by extension you represent the views of that company unless otherwise noted. If you don't want that then you are free to make another account which is not in any way associated with your professional HN profile, it wasn't me that made the choice to join the two, you did (as do many other people here). But most of us are careful to speak in such a way that we do not bring our partners or employers trouble by drawing attention to either our lack of knowledge or ability or by making statements that would - when viewed in the light of our professional engagements - show our employers in a bad light.

So, whether or not you agree with me is besides the point. If you feel like totally mis-interpreting Jasons writings and on top of that you call me 'alarmist' you are actively attacking our professional reputations, and what goes around comes around.

The points in this article also apply really nicely to websites and other services, many of which seem to make the mistake of outsourcing everything to other people's platforms. Oh sure, you may be using 'the cloud' to host your webmail, or your forums, or your chat, or anything else... but what if that goes missing? You're in an even worse situation than the individuals using these services to host their personal files. Remember what happened to IPBFree? They were shut down for some weird, unexplained reason (rumour has it as a raid for illegal activity), and literally everything on their servers was wiped out. Now imagine if the same sort of thing happened to one of these services, like Dropbox or the likes... Millions of people would lose most of their files overnight.

Use such services for backups, sure. But don't rely on them too much, you don't know what might be going on behind the scenes at the other end of the line. You don't know their financials (usually), whether they're under investigation for something, whether an intelligence agency is spying on their servers, whether their security is up to par in every possible sense...

And if they're offering it for free... well, they don't have much invested in keeping you as a customer when things get tough. Became unpopular recently, for saying something controversial or 'stupid' on social media? Made enemies in the political world? Then a lot of companies will be quite happy to shut down your account to avoid bad PR. By using these services, you provide a nice target for the social media mob the minute you do something that a lot of people don't like...