Proof that software as service/cloud based, will never work for long term ...

[bd139]

To be honest Google docs is pretty good. But that's not actually making and cloud dependencies go away. The API is amazingly powerful.

Apple's products are dire in this space. Absolutely the worst. Numbers is like using libreoffice with mittens full of concrete on

[peter-h]

"We have a forefront policy that removes ALL MS office documents from emails."

That's pretty aggressive.

OTOH I would never send somebody (who I didn't totally trust) a MS Office document in its raw form - because of hidden data which it may contain. I know a guy who lost a multi million $ contract via that route. He sent somebody a quote which he produced by editing another quote and using Save As, and the former recipient found interesting stuff under Document Properties (so he didn't even have to look hard)

I would only ever send a PDF.

[olkipukki]

To be honest Google docs is pretty good. But that's not actually making and cloud dependencies go away. The API is amazingly powerful.

Hard to swallow that Google has considered as cloud-free solution in this thread 

I'm happy have zero dependency on Google and if tomorrow they will disappear my happiness should be on a same level. 

Wondering how it was 20-30-... years ago in dark on-premises only time

[free_electron]

With the corona virus going around , the air pollution now is so low i can actually see my data in the clouds ...

[mrflibble]

Another fun example...

https://designer.genomecompiler.com/

Company acquisition, gobbler company gobbles up goblee design software, trusty online version goes *poof*.

[Mr. Scram]

"We have a forefront policy that removes ALL MS office documents from emails."

That's pretty aggressive.

OTOH I would never send somebody (who I didn't totally trust) a MS Office document in its raw form - because of hidden data which it may contain. I know a guy who lost a multi million $ contract via that route. He sent somebody a quote which he produced by editing another quote and using Save As, and the former recipient found interesting stuff under Document Properties (so he didn't even have to look hard)

I would only ever send a PDF.

Pdf can include anything and everything and regularly does. It's not intrinsically better.

[Karel]

"On May 29, 2020 the Wemo NetCam servers will be decommissioned.
Although your Wemo NetCam will still connect to your Wi-Fi network,
without these servers you will not be able to view the video feed or access
the security features of your Wemo NetCam, such as Motion Clips and Motion Notifications"

https://www.belkin.com/us/support-article?articleNum=316642

[BravoV]

"On May 29, 2020 the Wemo NetCam servers will be decommissioned.
Although your Wemo NetCam will still connect to your Wi-Fi network,
without these servers you will not be able to view the video feed or access
the security features of your Wemo NetCam, such as Motion Clips and Motion Notifications"

https://www.belkin.com/us/support-article?articleNum=316642

Wishful thinking that they will fully secured or even better completely destroy the user's credentials of the cam owners.

As these days, once leaked say the list is released in the darknet, or even turned as hot commodity for criminals, in the wrong hand, worry many of those owners may become crime victims. 

[rdl]

Am I understanding this Wemo thing right? You hooked it up to your home network from which it connected to the internet then sent your video out to some "cloud" server somewhere and you could only access it from there after setting up an account? You had no direct connection to something on your own network? If that's correct it's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. People are idiots.

[BravoV]

Am I understanding this Wemo thing right? You hooked it up to your home network from which it connected to the internet then sent your video out to some "cloud" server somewhere and you could only access it from there after setting up an account? You had no direct connection to something on your own network? If that's correct it's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. People are idiots.

No, in some cases, the product owners probably fully unaware of this matter not because of ignorance, but they're just victim, say like blindly trusted to the who ever installed/sold/procured it, and put it in their house, say elders or moms & pops type that are not techno savvy at all.

Scary thought. 

[bd139]

Well this thread and a couple of major explosions I've had recently kicked off some risk analysis over the last few weeks. I've actually been looking at how to get ALL my shit out of the cloud just as a thought exercise. This turned into an actual project because the risks are tangible when I look at them and I've just changed jobs so there's no need to maintain all the old shit and keep paying for it. There's also a financial incentive to just do it myself as well. Analysis shows there are two things you just can't get rid of:

Email. I am quite happy to run my own mail server if I'm honest. However that's not really feasible now due to how the Internet has turned into large corporate islands. Your email has to be spurged out of and delivered to one of them rather than self hosting it otherwise you end up in a mire of RBL systems and some upstream MTU's telling your impolitely to fuck off even if you have SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly. There is also no process to appeal to some provider so you can send mail to them either. To do business via email you need to play in the cloud still. I've chosen FastMail as probably the least shitty option. There is no GOOD option. Ideally I'd like an SMTP relay on the public internet that just forwards to my internal network and back again but I can't find a single provider that does that.

Identity. This one is difficult. A lot of services require sign in and this organically spreads. Consider smartphones (that may change for me as well) and things like streaming services. You'd have to burn those services entirely to benefit from declouding. Not quite ready for that yet. Streaming can be replaced with torrented media but that has ethical concerns around it as well. Then again might as well read a book instead

Project continues as and when I get time ...

First step was grab a server for inside the house as I need something online all the time to handle some of the scripts I was running in the cloud and to write the odd bit of Linux software on. It's really inconvenient shutting stuff down all the time so server it is. To keep power, noise and costs down, this is refurb fanless tiny little Lenovo M600 dual core celeron box with 4Gb of RAM. It has an M2 slot so is getting a 1TiB WD M2 SSD and Debian on it and will run headless and network attached for internal services. The total expenditure of that node (179 GBP inc SSD) is approximately 4 months of my old AWS bill so I have closed that to pay for it. I looked at Raspberry Pi but quite frankly they are not proper computers designed for 100% duty 24/7/365 and there are some seriously nasty bugs with valgrind on ARM.

Edit: correct costings...

[Karel]

I've chosen FastMail as probably the least shitty option.

Have you considered Protonmail?

[bd139]

Yes. Twice as expensive as fastmail and I didn't like it as much.

[thinkfat]

With the corona virus going around , the air pollution now is so low i can actually see my data in the clouds ...

There is no cloud. Only other people's computers.

[rdl]

...
No, in some cases, the product owners probably fully unaware of this matter not because of ignorance, but they're just victim...

You're right, I have to agree. It's not so much people are stupid, they just don't understand how it actually works. I think I should have blamed the greedy companies instead.

[PlainName]

they just don't understand how it actually works

I understand how it actually works and really hate that kind of thing. However, it is suck it up or don't have - the norm is to tunnel off-LAN then back again for ease of implementation, and if you don't like that you either do without or write your own everything and create your own hardware.

It's not quite that black and white, but very close. I use itead kit because I convinced myself I could flash it and use a local setup only. Maybe another network outage or two along I'll do that. I also have Netvue doorbells, and with those I am stuck because there isn't a non-cloud option. Especially not if you want to tie into Alexa (which I use as a bridge - the doorbell being run flashes a light in my office courtesy of Alexa/itead).

[rdl]

I'd guess that "the norm" is so that it can be monetized in some way, not a technical necessity.

[Mr. Scram]

I'd guess that "the norm" is so that it can be monetized in some way, not a technical necessity.

In many cases it actually increases the complexity with all the penalties you can expect.

[PlainName]

Certainly monetisation comes into it but even for kit where there is no forward profit (for the vendor) or cost (for the user) it is just easier to have things talk via the cloud if there is ever going to be a chance it will be accessed off-LAN. And that's what people want to do - you don't whip out your phone to switch a device on when you're standing next to the wall switch (well, not more than a few times after you first install it). You want to turn your heated blanket on, for instance, as you're on the way home from the pub.

There is also the smarts involved - timers, device interaction, etc. Devices will have limited storage and not be privy to many things (such as what the weather is like, when sundown is, etc). Some cloud server makes that trivial, so these things are going to be talking cloud anyway and it's just too much hassle to walk the user through opening ports on a router that they're not going to do that (even for kit where they don't need to do it, because they don't want a dozen different protocols to maintain).

And we haven't looked at sending notifications to your phone without using Apple's or Google's push framework. Good luck with that, and battery life, without going off-LAN.

In the vendor's position I'd be inclined to do the same as they do. Life is just easier.

[Karel]

"In order to provide for development and continued growth, we are transitioning to a $4.99 monthly subscription, starting on May 13, 2020. "

"Should you choose not to sign up for a subscription you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app,
with voice control or through the API, and your automations will be disabled on May 13. "


https://blog.wink.com/wink-blog/2020/5/6/introducing-wink-subscription

[Mr. Scram]

Certainly monetisation comes into it but even for kit where there is no forward profit (for the vendor) or cost (for the user) it is just easier to have things talk via the cloud if there is ever going to be a chance it will be accessed off-LAN. And that's what people want to do - you don't whip out your phone to switch a device on when you're standing next to the wall switch (well, not more than a few times after you first install it). You want to turn your heated blanket on, for instance, as you're on the way home from the pub.

There is also the smarts involved - timers, device interaction, etc. Devices will have limited storage and not be privy to many things (such as what the weather is like, when sundown is, etc). Some cloud server makes that trivial, so these things are going to be talking cloud anyway and it's just too much hassle to walk the user through opening ports on a router that they're not going to do that (even for kit where they don't need to do it, because they don't want a dozen different protocols to maintain).

And we haven't looked at sending notifications to your phone without using Apple's or Google's push framework. Good luck with that, and battery life, without going off-LAN.

In the vendor's position I'd be inclined to do the same as they do. Life is just easier.

I can't agree. It's not complicated nor hard to do it locally and you don't need to maintain a backend and deal with many uncertainties.

[bd139]

Oh the irony

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsofts-github-account-allegedly-hacked-500gb-stolen/

[PlainName]

It's not complicated nor hard to do it locally

For you and me. For Joe Whatsaport it can lead to tears before bedtime. And it's Joe that's going to be failing to get your kit working with some router you've never heard of.

[Mr. Scram]

For you and me. For Joe Whatsaport it can lead to tears before bedtime. And it's Joe that's going to be failing to get your kit working with some router you've never heard of.

For the manufacturer.

[DimitriP]

Oh the irony

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsofts-github-account-allegedly-hacked-500gb-stolen/

Oh C'mon ....  it wasn't anything "too important" !!!!