[Gerard]

The biggest area of concern for me is the shifting of user data from local, isolated storage locations into the 'cloud' of data. I'm fine with web-based applications, that's just another way of doing the same tasks, in many cases increasing efficiency in a number of ways (which we needn't detail as they're common knowledge by now). But cloud-based data storage = danger for individual users. Of course that same danger exists for many, perhaps most users anyway in the local storage scenario of 'old world' computing, considering how few people actually bother to make regular backups in reliable formats (using backup software, alongside separate 'ghosting' of data using simple copy/paste operations) and multiple locations, at least one being off-site. I've suffered enough hardware and software malfunctions to know only too well that backups can never be too frequent or in too many formats, bounded of course by common sense. I'll leave the extremes of backing up to obsessive/compulsive types.

So in this shiny new age of cloud-based data and processing power we are to trust that our admins will maintain flawless backups as we need them, while riding shotgun to protect against myriad sources of attack against both our data and their servers? A certain still recent event involving Sidekick users comes to mind. Rather a significant 'oops' and a cautionary tale which should not fall from general awareness, but seemingly does so anyway.

My reaction to these new devices and the new paradigm is largely hostile, not because I am power user, as really I am not. But the stuff I use it for cannot yet be done 'in the cloud' in large part, and even those things which could be done there I don't want to be done there owing to privacy concerns (I don't want my videos and still images to be shared unless by my intention, but there's abundant evidence no such expectation of privacy is justified when talking about social media sites, so why would cloud computing services be any different?), data loss concerns (if I lose a file, I usually have at least one spare copy on separate media because that's how I work - usually it's more like three distinct locations, five locations for my most important business data), and the simple desire to keep my stuff... as, well, my stuff, not anyone else's to mess with in any way, even if their intentions are good and their practices immaculately careful and thoroughly wise. The sense of being baby-sat is not fun, in my opinion. Some may like it, find it comforting knowing that Apple is maintaining their libraries of music, books, films, eventually iDocuments, whatever. Gives me the iCreeps.

So no thanks to the new world. I keep my old papers in places I can get at them and sort through them. Same with my old books (when I have let them out, a significant portion have not been returned), my CDs (don't want other people scratching them), my socks, whatever I need in my life. When I'm dead, whatever, 'they' can do what they like with my stuff both physical and virtual and I simply won't care. Meantime I want my computer-based information to stay home.

Discussions like this are the most 'out there' form of my personhood in the computer realm. And remember 'back in the day' when Dale Coffing's pocketpcpassion.com was one of the busiest places for guys like us? Remember how RAID failed him and lost something over half a million posts? Remember how, after painfully time consuming and expensive attempts he failed to recover any of it, but rebuilt anyway and people came back and contributed masses of further discussion... which was then all lost in another year or so, in another sort of crash, in spite of much greater (Microsoft-supported) precautions being taken? The 'cloud' back then was mostly in websites like that, filled to brimming with useful and accessible information, and guarded carefully by well-intentioned and well-trained people. And it got gone. What's really changed? Aren't servers still pretty much the same, if not more heavily burdened considering the vast increases in load and the difficulties in scaling hardware and support to meet such escalating demand? How is the cloud going to cope with a billion+ users expecting 100% reliability for their most important data, not just relatively trivial tech discussions such as we mostly see in forums? I see big, big problems ahead for this new world, and public relations disasters for any company providing such services without adequately cautioning users to make local copies of important data.