Except the Mohammed stuff is made up and a joke. The holocaust really did happen, and makes most other events in human history pale in comparison. And those that would deny that it happened are doing so for the very purpose of repeating the event. The purpose of the Mohammed cartoons was to try and get Muslims to lighten up (A good thing) The purpose of denying the holocost is to recreate it (a bad thing.)

I do not support those laws, but they're like the child molester laws of free speech. It's really hard to argue they're bad no matter how hardcore you are into free speech.

So they have a temporary law, and they want to make it into a permanent law, and you're saying that's meaningless because they could make another law overriding it? Other events that could render this law meaningless: Civil war, Alien invasion, Meteor strike, Solar flare that destroys all electronics overnight.

eegads, this entire endeavor is meaningless.

Um... no.

This is a perfect example of what's wrong with government regulation. Usually regulation is introduced for a very real and justifiable reason. The problem is however that once "The law" governs how money is made, those who like money (everyone) get very interested in politics. They cajole and manipulate the regulation until it does nothing more than prevent new competition from entering the market.

I'd be willing to bet that if you reviewed the regulations in question you'd be rather surprised at how stupid they are. One example from my state is that they can't be open on Sunday. Wow, big consumer protection there... The same goes for a dozen other heavily regulated markets... Cabs, Airlines, liquor distributors (especially liquor distributors) and on and on.

The problem is, that hasn't been decided as of yet. It would make sense to any normal person that they wouldn't be. But law enforcement isn't sure how to deal with such services so they are doing their best to kill the industry with raids, but then drop the cases before they hit court so no ruling can hurt their efforts.

Uhm... I do no think you understand "Anonymous"
They're like a super geeky version of your drunken Redneck cousin Rufus. Any semi-passable pretext to start a fight is leap upon. Then you're forced to listen to several minutes of chest puffing and threats that are usually followed by his ADD kicking in, him losing interest and you feeling embarrassed that hes related to you.

Right, but you're talking about physical rackspace and not "the cloud" so you're entirely off topic. Why would they ever guarantee the security of a rack slot?

We're talking about "The cloud" here, which is entirely different. You don't even know where the data is stored. Is it in New York? Chicago? India? All 3 places at once? To the laws of the country its stored in make the data available to local authorities without a warent? Is the vendor hiring temp workers from a country that has poor privacy laws and allowing them to remotely access your data? Just because they signed a contract stating that they wouldn't 4years ago, does that mean they still abide by that condition? Or even know that it was ever agreed to in the first place?

Crappy vendor? They're all crappy vendors.

Quick, someone hack their website and put the cartoon up!

/bravo
Time to make fun of them in every outlet I'm still allowed to post in.

Ok, so you're about to enter the room against 2 dudes that spent a while in Africa getting trained by battle hardened terrorists. They have body armor and 7.62×39mm rounds that easily pierce most body armor on the planet. Here's your dart gun... GO!

A typical myopic view of the world.
You may find this enlightening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... ...and that's just the Christians...

I don't think you've ever used Cloud software. The entire point of it is to move development and maintenance outside your organization. Yes, I could upload encrypted data to "The cloud" and then write my own database and front end for it. But would defeat the entire point of putting it in the cloud in the first place. What you're describing is basically just an online data backup. No-one really needs that.

Lets say you're a small non-profit and you want to create a ticketing system to track donations. Buying anything at all... that you'd host locally would cost a fortune. You could get a free/open source app, but that doesn't come with any support or guartee that the product will even still be developed a year from now and you don't have the resources to continue development should you need to.

You can go get a Cloud based Saas ticketing system relatively cheap. They maintain everything for you. And if you need a special customization they have developers on staff year round ready to jump on your request. But is your data secure? You have no idea. You can write it into the contract, you can do audits, but you never really know. In fact, it's not possible to know. And being a small non-profit you don't have the clout to force a better contract on them or anyone else. All the contracts come with NDA's embedded so you can't even rely on other companies to report problems with the vendor. It's literally a black box that your data goes in an out of, and what happens inside that box is mostly a mystery to you.

That's not going to help. I've administer a lot of these cloud products in my time. The main point is, you don't get to encrypt it yourself.

You go to the vendor and say: "Encrypt it!"
Vendor: "Ok! It's done!"
You: "That was awfully fast, is it really encrypted?"
Vendor: "Yes!"

Demand an audit: We audited it and it meets our contract!
Give us detailed information about XYZ: That's proprietary and/or security related, we can't release it!
We want to put X in the contract: No, this is our standard contract and the only one we'll sign. Don't like it? Take a hike. By the way, we already have all your data and a migration would cost millions!
Go to a different service: Here's the same contract that other place had and no we wont alter it.
Find out its not encrypted when they said it was: Oh that was a bug or the fault of some admin we fired months ago. It's fixed now, trust us!

It's virtually impossible to "Secure" a cloud service. I had so many problems with it I finally resigned myself to assuming cloud services have at best barely passable security. So nothing goes in that I'm afraid to lose. Even in the best cases, you have their entire support staff sitting there, probably hundreds or thousands of people, with the ability to reset all your admin passwords and even more direct DB access you have. Even if it's encrypted, they'll have all the keys. Whats worse, they control the firewall and gateways so an attack could be ongoing for weeks or months and you'll have no idea.

You have no idea how this works. "Passwords" are not going to be the problem in a hacking event on the scale of an enterprise cloud service. Even with your admin passwords there should be no way for an attacker to get in.

You got modded funny, but that's exactly the point. The customers data is stored in my database. So I don't technically care if that data is stolen... other than the legal liability that would put me under. So I go to the Cloud service and they "assure" me that's secure and sign a contract stating as such. I'm done! It doesn't really matter if it really is secure or not. If the data's lost and the customer sues we point at the vendor.