Am I the only person that doesn't like the CLOUD?

[Rigby]

You guys are wrong on some very fundamental facts about advertising and revenue generation.

Have fun with your "everyone is out to get me" fan club.

[suicidaleggroll]

You guys are wrong on some very fundamental facts about advertising and revenue generation.

Have fun with your "everyone is out to get me" fan club.

 
Just keep telling yourself that everything you send to Google is protected and encrypted and nobody can see it but you.  And the next time somebody sends you an email or you do a Google search for Tektronics and you start seeing Tektronix ads on every page you visit, just tell yourself it's coincidence.  Let me know how that works out for you.

By the way - what good is encryption when you aren't the one holding the key?

[AlfBaz]

You guys are wrong on some very fundamental facts about advertising and revenue generation.

Have fun with your "everyone is out to get me" fan club.

To paraphrase a common internet problem, the internet is a vast place with many, many ideas and philosophies. The more you carelessly traipse over it the less you are exposed to it's vastness until your own little bubble is so self affirming that you are no different to the religious nut jobs waving tambourines shouting "Hare Krishna"

...and don't tell me this aint right, from where I sit it appears the internet is all about electronics  (thank god for InPrivate Browsing  )

[zapta]

For all the tinfoil hats out there, I highly recommend the Chrome's Ghostery extension or a similar one. It will show you for each web page you visit what third parties are directly notified in real time about your visit.  This is for example what is shows for www.eevblog.com



The longest list I ever seen (not on eevblog.com) had more than 70! items and that page very slow to load which is also a performance issue.

[aroby]

I host my own email and websites and other services.  If my ISP allowed servers and provided static IPs I'd even host it all at my house, but a data centre will have to do.  I try to stick to ones in Canada so my traffic should not go to the US, though some trace routes have shown me this is not always the case.

Since you're in Canada, use easydns as your DNS provider.  My ISP technically doesn't allow servers and, in particular, blocks inbound and outbound SMTP on the standard ports.  I host my own email, and use a feature provided by easydns to port forward port 25 to my own server port which my ISP is clueless about.  I also route my outbound email through them.  They are more expensive than godaddy, for example, but are rock solid.

[SL4P]

TO RECAP:

[elgonzo]

For all the tinfoil hats out there, I highly recommend the Chrome's Ghostery extension or a similar one. It will show you for each web page you visit what third parties are directly notified in real time about your visit.  This is for example what is shows for www.eevblog.com

[...]

The longest list I ever seen (not on eevblog.com) had more than 70! items and that page very slow to load which is also a performance issue.

Interesting. For me (running Firefox), Ghostery shows less for www.eevblog.com.

[Rigby]

You guys are wrong on some very fundamental facts about advertising and revenue generation.

Have fun with your "everyone is out to get me" fan club.

 
Just keep telling yourself that everything you send to Google is protected and encrypted and nobody can see it but you.  And the next time somebody sends you an email or you do a Google search for Tektronics and you start seeing Tektronix ads on every page you visit, just tell yourself it's coincidence.  Let me know how that works out for you.

By the way - what good is encryption when you aren't the one holding the key?

In reverse order:

I already said that there are cloud providers which force you to keep your own keys.

Google knows I searched for Tek scopes, not Tek.  Google serves the ads, not Tek.  If you'd spent 10 milliseconds looking at the advertiser side of this, which you can easily do, but have chosen not to do, you would see only basic stats on ads: number of impressions, click through percentage based on certain demographics.  ZERO personally identifiable information AT ALL.

I never said that Google's data on me is visible only to me.

[suicidaleggroll]

I already said that there are cloud providers which force you to keep your own keys.

Why do you keep changing topics every time you get called out?

We're not talking about other cloud providers, we're talking about Google.  YOU brought them up as a prime example of a great implementation of a cloud service, not anybody else.  YOU brought up their encryption, not anybody else.  YOU are the one that said they don't use your information for personal gain (HAH!).  The fact is, your "great example" of a cloud service is a company that collects all of your personal information so they can sell you as a product to advertisers.  Google's encryption means next to nothing since you do not hold the key, they do, and they can and DO use your personal emails for targeted advertisements.  Are you seriously arguing that this is a prime example of a great cloud service, and is the direction all cloud services should go?

[zapta]

  The fact is, your "great example" of a cloud service is a company that collects all of your personal information so they can sell you as a product to advertisers. 

Will this help you?

https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662922?hl=en

[Rigby]

Zapta, there is no speaking to these people.

I gave an example of why someone might consider GMail to be a good, "cloud" based alternative to running your own servers, and this apparently means that I think Google is the best cloud provider in the entire fucking universe and that everything about them is flawless.  There is absolutely no way to combat arguments like those because they are not based on logic or reason.

I'm done with this topic.

[aroby]

@suicidaleggroll - just delete your cookies.  What you are and others are talking about is the web, not cloud.

[Dave Turner]

Over fifteen years ago I used to work with a small team to run an international company's network systems, which included our email. Over 5 years we only had 2 serious email outages; one of which was caused by a virus that internationally caught everyone by surprise. Our team had already proposed investment to reduce the possibility of future problems amortised over 5 years. 

The powers that be elected for an outsourced email system which was more expensive and less flexible. Sadly I confess that I lost interest in any complaints that were based on such loss and reverted to 'I told you so'. Still it was no longer my problem. 

Truthfully, at least in my and my teams' view,b the company lost out in flexibility, bottom line and satisfaction for user and the  IT knowledge base.

Anyone/company who uses a 'cloud' based system is relying on a third (fourth, fifth, etc.) party to maintain security.

Of course the internet itself cannot be be thought of as secure anyway.

So what next?

[madires]

For a small company without any IT staff cloud services like gmail make sense unless there are security/privacy issues. It's simple and everything is handled by gmail. But that's also the big problem with it. If gmail has an outage you can't send or receive email. And yes, that already happened several times. So much for high availability If you need a special feature which isn't supported by gmail, you got bad luck. Can you do it better? Yes, with a savvy IT staff you can achieve less downtime, get more/special features, anti-spam as good as gmail (or even better) and so on. A single unix admin can do that without much struggle for several services, not just email.

[zapta]

For a small company without any IT staff cloud services like gmail make sense unless there are security/privacy issues. It's simple and everything is handled by gmail. But that's also the big problem with it. If gmail has an outage you can't send or receive email. And yes, that already happened several times. So much for high availability If you need a special feature which isn't supported by gmail, you got bad luck. Can you do it better? Yes, with a savvy IT staff you can achieve less downtime, get more/special features, anti-spam as good as gmail (or even better) and so on. A single unix admin can do that without much struggle for several services, not just email.

There are other email cloud options other than GMail so it's not 'gmail or nothing'.  ;-)

I would think that the larger the company is, the more it makes sense to have email and cloud services in house but this this is just another outsourcing dilemma.

Personally I use some cloud services (email, shared docs, music repository, version control, file transfer) and not others (photo albums, backup).

BTW, one of the most popular cloud services are from Amazon (storage and computing). It's interesting that they are not mentioned here. They are required though higher level of sophistication than using let's say web based email. Never used them by talking with people they seem to be very popular.

[Galenbo]

...
Do you pay Google? Have you ever sent a check for your Google subscription? No? Well that means you're not the consumer. You're the product. You're being consumed by Google and their clients (who actually do pay money for their Google subscriptions).

Even if you pay, you're the product. Samsung TV's listen to what is said in the room now.

[Rigby]

For a small company without any IT staff cloud services like gmail make sense unless there are security/privacy issues. It's simple and everything is handled by gmail. But that's also the big problem with it. If gmail has an outage you can't send or receive email. And yes, that already happened several times. So much for high availability If you need a special feature which isn't supported by gmail, you got bad luck. Can you do it better? Yes, with a savvy IT staff you can achieve less downtime, get more/special features, anti-spam as good as gmail (or even better) and so on. A single unix admin can do that without much struggle for several services, not just email.

There are other email cloud options other than GMail so it's not 'gmail or nothing'.  ;-)

I would think that the larger the company is, the more it makes sense to have email and cloud services in house but this this is just another outsourcing dilemma.

Personally I use some cloud services (email, shared docs, music repository, version control, file transfer) and not others (photo albums, backup).

BTW, one of the most popular cloud services are from Amazon (storage and computing). It's interesting that they are not mentioned here. They are required though higher level of sophistication than using let's say web based email. Never used them by talking with people they seem to be very popular.

AWS is freaking awesome.

I work for a large company and we have a huge number of things on "the cloud" now, primarily because it is SO MUCH less expensive to scale with cloud services than it is in-house.  I can go on to AWS and have 3,000 identically configured servers up and running in about 3 minutes.  We've done this several times, so that's not a theoretical number.  If we were to attempt that in-house, we'd need to have enough infrastructure go unused to spin that size of a deployment up at any given time, so that's time spent procuring servers, VMware licensing, cooling and power capacity, hiring people to keep them up, and accounting things like depreciation and other things that affect the bottom line.  When we don't use servers on AWS, we don't have to do or pay anything. 

Also, there is absolutely no chance that our guys are as good at virtual infrastructure as Amazon.  That's not to say they couldn't be, mind you, just that they have other things on their plate.

HIGHLY recommend looking at AWS for anyone that needs (or even thinks they might need) a simple virtual machine running and accessible from somewhere.  I keep one up all the time just so I have a shell, and it costs me less than $10/mo.  It's more expensive than keeping a Raspberry Pi or BBB on my home network, yes, but I don't have to worry about creating an intrusion vector for my home network, nor do I have to worry about my home broadband going down. 

It's something that everyone will weigh out for themselves, I guess.  It's an absolute no-brainer for myself and my employer.

[zapta]

Never used AWS but is't definitely on my todo list. A friend of mine has a small startup that requires significant amount of computation (indexing) and they run it on AWS.

[miguelvp]

I agree, AWS, Terremark, Google cloud, Azure, you name it, they are awesome not just because on how they scale, but also how close they are to tier 1 networks. The cost to bring the network connectivity to your in house servers to compete with these services would be cost prohibitive.