Mistrust of Today's Technology 176
narramissic writes to tell us that Sean McGrath has an interesting look at a general mistrust of today's technology and draws a comparison to the proofreading of photocopies. From the article: "The constant availability of web services out there in the cloud is one such idea. Today, we do not trust the cloud and the services on it to be always available. Few of us can remember any incidences in recent time when, say google.com or amazon.com or live.com was offline but we still do not trust them to be always there and available. I predict that this day will pass. The day will come when outages of big commercial services on the cloud are as unusual as outages in the phone system or the electricity supply system. Sure, losing power will also lose you the services on the cloud but your business most likely has bigger problems to worry about when the power goes."
Beta (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, by the time Gmail is out of beta we'll all be salivating over ZMvnxjowi (pronounced "Leonard") mail, and the cycle will begin anew.
Re:Beta (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm... that's a strange way to pronounce ZMvnxjowi. My first instinct would be to pronunce it "Zee, Emm, vunks, jowee."
Re:Beta (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Beta (Score:5, Funny)
I thought it was pronouced "throatwobblermangrove" (Score:2)
2) Everything is beta.
Seriously, my electricity and DSL have been out more in the last 3 years than all the big web sites combined, including MySpace.
Re:I thought it was pronouced "throatwobblermangro (Score:2)
Jargon usage (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm surprised that they seem to sprinkle this term "the cloud" around with such childlike glee, and I don't really know precisely what it is. Either that means I'm not in the target audience, who are probably conversant with this term, or that the author has a buzzword fetish. And "mistrust"? I actually had to look at one up to make sure it wasn't, like, place trust in something unworthy thereof, rather than a synonym for everyday, "distrust."
Weirdo writers.
Anyway, on a more salient note, I really don't like how Google's stolen the term "Beta." When you talk to a lot of people out there in "the cloud," or whatever the hell, they think "Beta" means that it's up 98-99% of the time, like GMail, and aren't really aware of the fact that beta software contains bugs, or that there is some inherent risk in using it.
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This is probably just some weird, catastrophic oversight of mine. I probably preferentially hear/read distrust just because it's the term I prefer to use. As for which is proper, according to the Shakespeare Search Engine [usyd.edu.au], both terms have been in use for at least 400 years.
This site [bartleby.com] claims they're rough synonyms, and that distrust adds an air of suspicion in addition to lack of trust.
And I'm still not entirely sure what this cloud is.
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The internet, or any significantly large network, is usually represented as a cloud on network diagrams. It's somewhat fallen out of use outside of a few technical areas. My bet is this guy heared it being used somewhere and decided to use it as a buzzword.
Re:Jargon usage (Score:5, Informative)
For example, discussing how something got from a desktop to a computer (at a really really high level) might be depicted as:
Desktop -> Cloud (labeled as "internet") -> Server
Given that the professor I had for internetworking and operating systems was a student of Comer's, I got to know the material and conventions used in the book pretty well.
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That's very interesting. Thanks.
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As far as applied things at college went those two classes were in the four toughest. The other two were probably Programming Languages (done in Scheme) and the class I had in Assembly.
The ones I never want to think about again, though are Algorithms, Stats and Probability for EE (Baysean distributions at 8am is just wrong), and Discrete Math (as taught by an anal reten
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Refer to any EULA and you'll see that there is inherent risk in using pretty much any software, Beta or not. For example, I just found the following in the
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To secure traffic over "The Cloud" on networks, we use VPN. The article is apparently using that as a metaphor applied to the idea of securely using untrusted third party e-commerce infrastructure.
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We don't distrust new technology because we don't understand it (like the photocopiers), but because we understand it all too well.
You'd think the writer had never installed version 1 of anything, never seen a website Slashdotted, Wanged, Farked or Dugg and never had his modem carrier drop in the middle of a session. I'd be willing to bet my life he's certainly never coded anything that relied on third-party libraries of variable quality, and he doesn't seem to
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Internet companies as Utilities? (Score:2, Informative)
This is why if SBC has a major phone service outage, the Feds can levy heavy fines... but if Google goes out... they lose some face and ad revenue but are not responsible to the gov't.
Re:Internet companies as Utilities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until then... I have other things I would prefer the government worry about.
Re:Internet companies as Utilities? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is in no way in the same position. There's no monopoly, no government subsidies, etc. And you, as the customer, are free to switch to ask/yahoo/msn at any time.
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Even "bulletproof" hosting has its limits.
The best that you can expect in the future would be localized outages.
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Hard to say that we don't really. (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that in many ways it is the future to move applications to the net. One that I respect a ton is salesforce.com, thats an amazing product.
But still, I think that most people are skeptical, like myself, about the viability of it currently.
Some things we do on our computers are extremely important... and the thought of adding in another variable can be disturbing. It will be interesting to see how these things are deployed and how succesful they are in the near future.
Hrmmm, even my blog has crashed on me a time or two.
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I'm going to be keeping my apps local for a long time to come if for no other reason than I like to take my notebook with me and do things from strange locales. Work from the park, fiddle with pictures in the mountains, things like that.
Power you say? (Score:4, Informative)
Net services are more stable than electricity where I am at the moment. Storms have a habit of knocking out the power for short periods of time - generally 2-20 minutes. (not counting the 5 days that the power was out after an ice storm a couple of years ago).
The power supply when I was living in town was so much more reliable.
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I have a laptop and the modem is on a battery backup.
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I seriously doubt that the modem can draw much power so I'd say you'd probably get 20-30 minutes out of it if that's all you have on a small ups.
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I used to run a small radio and a 50 watt compact flourescent light for about 14-18 hours on such a setup (and from time to time a desktop with CRT -- though that was
Re:Power you say? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the last 10 years <3500 people in America died in 3 terrorist attacks. 40,000 Americans die every single year on America's highways.
I'd like some of that Homeland Security money to go towards a few guardrails, bacause face it: I'm a thousand times more likely to get killed by a bimbo in her SUV yakking on a cell phone while putting her makeup on than by some islamic nutjob.
I'm also amused by people who talk about how they don't have sex anymore because of aids while they smoke their cigarette they lit up after that Burger King Doublewide Fatass Burger. How many people do you know personally who died of aids? Cancer? Heart disease?
I'd like to see Fox gone, and Bush with them.
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Actually google went down to a virus not long ago (Score:3, Informative)
Heres the slash coverage [slashdot.org]
I'd read TFA (Score:3, Funny)
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Oy veh! (Score:4, Insightful)
No no no no no no. It's not about them losing electricity. You're right! That doesn't happen much.
To my mind, it's the same as what happened to S&Ls. People felt their money was safe there until the scandles broke and a bunch of people lost their money. Trust went away! The similarity here is that a tech company makes a big break on the scene, they chug along promising "forever" services, they experience problems, then they change their business model or shut down leaving users that depended on their services in a lurch. I'm not scared of power outages! I'm scared of companies simply changing their minds.
So, go ahead and use an online backup service, but I'll never believe that they'll be around "forever."
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Misplaced mistrust? (Score:2)
The technology I see people not trusting are the ones we cannot control. Voting machines? With the punch card style we can still see where our vote goes. Most kiosk type services have withstood time (ATMs, for example), but people are still afraid of airplanes on a purely mechanical level. And when even pacemakers
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That aside, I'm not sure how much I agree with the rest of your point in general. I think a lot of the time people are more apt to trust a black box, because they can't see the possible failure points. This is a problem with a lot of things, especially computers- since if you're not an IT
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The question is more pertinent to web "services" that one would presumably rely on day-to-day. IE. online banking (more specifically - banks like ING that don't have brick-and-mortar presence), online photo albums, or better yet: online word processors and spreadsheets. If any of these suddenly become unavailable whether due to problems with connectivity or sudden unf
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I'm afraid that you will find people tend to take these systems they cannot control for granted, and trust them more. If you think about it, that's _really_ scary.
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It's a question of time. It won't matter much if the latest Harry Potter ships this week or next. Except to your kids. It will matter if your time-sensitive corporate calendars, collaborative documents, and inter-office posts, are sitting on a server you can't access.
I would have seen this earlier... (Score:2, Funny)
Power analogy (Score:2)
I don't buy the power-is-gone analogy, because while a power out is really bad, how do you explain your customers you can't do business because you preferred to store your valuable emails/docs/spreadsheets/data at the last über-hyped dot com beta and it's down on maintenance?
--
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Or, for that matter, on a system that got hit by the latest malware? And you couldn't defend against it, because Microsoft/Apple/Ubuntu/whomever hadn't released a patch yet? Or because you were locked out by WGA?
How about you couldn't get at your patient's records because you hadn't paid your proprietary s
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These are all examples of things that actually happen...
And are a great argument in favor of open source.
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But services do go down.. (Score:2)
Local power outage? Not as big a problem as... (Score:4, Insightful)
In the sense that a good datacenter's got local power generation covered, the failure of the larger cloud is the bigger risk. I know, not for all business profiles (like call centers, etc). But I'd say that the "we don't care if our cubicles are in the dark, as long as our web site is up" description probably fits 80% of my clients. Just sayin'.
Losing power? (Score:2)
Not for long, I think. Service providers already provide fault tolerance in the form of multiple data centers with redundant power and network connectivity. With the Net getting increasingly important to users, it's only a matter of time before backup power and Internet access become commonplace.
Mistrust or understanding (Score:4, Insightful)
People mistrust new technology because they do understand them (to a degree), and all the moving parts, and what can break. Coding to handle an outage is a good practice of safe programming, not an excessive overhead.
The only truth to this is that knowing how to survive in the future without google may be as pointless as knowing how to survive during a power failure today. Actually, there's still a good reason to be able to survive on your own.
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There's definitely reason to be able to survive on your own! You never know when or why power goes out, or when it will be back. The plant might be bombed to pulp, or someone might set something sensitive on fire, or snow might cause the power lines to collase, or there could
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Infact, unless you're literally chained to some electricity-using machine it'd be pretty darn hard to die just due to lack of power, even if you tried to.
Come on. You can't watch television. So don't. (won't kill you). You *may* not be able to cook food. So eat whatever you have that doesn't need to be cooked. This is literally 99% of the food in your house. Eating raw meat won't kill
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Coding to handle an outage is a good practice of safe programming, not an excessive overhead.
if(!power)
turn_on_power();
Doesn't seem like that'd be too much overhead to me!
It's not so much that I mistrust technology... (Score:2)
A tool is just a tool until there's human intervention involved.
Mistrust of Today's Technology (Score:2)
There hasn't been a significant regional power outage here since the Northeast Blackout of 1965 [wikipedia.org]. There hasn't been a significant regional POTS failure here since the Northeast Hurricane of 1938.
When power doe
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I was without power for most of a week in March after the tornados hit. My cell phone wouldn't make long distance calls for a day or two, either.
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The Niagara region of upstate New York and southern Ontario (where the giant hydro plants are located) escaped the 2003 blackout.
Reliability is decreasing (Score:3, Informative)
In the entire history of electromechanical switching in the Bell System, no central office was ever out of service for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. That record has definitely not been maintained in the computer era.
Electric power system reliability in the United States is down, mostly as a result of deregulation. Rate-of-return regulation tended to encourage utilities to overbuild their systems, which was good for reliability. When there's a free market in electric power, no one bears responsibility for downtime.
I don't expect things to get better. Not after Cleveland had a five-day outage [cleveland.com] and nobody went to jail.
Computers don't deserve our trust. (Score:5, Insightful)
Web sites record our visits. They leave cookies on our machines, and our computer records web-page visits in it's cache. They execute javascript and java applets, and show us tits when we wanted bits. We try and censor our children's access, and worry about pedophiles on myspace.com.
I think trust isn't a word most people would use in the same context as anything related to a computer. Let's face it... we've kinda got these things working, but just barely.
OT (your sig) (Score:2)
This is why I save important data localy (Score:3, Informative)
See, that's why you DOWNLOAD the pr0n. Don't just leave it on the web site.
what?
DRM - not vailability, is what kills "services" (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been hesitant to adopt. For example, I still insist on a local email client that stores all of my email
But in the last year it seems that the real money push on the 'Net has been in not just PROVIDING content, but rather CONTROLLING content.
So while in the past remote applications were pushed as a means to providing a better service to the customer, nowadays they seem to be pushed, unspokenly, as a means to provide better service to the PROVIDER.
If you can lock someone into your DRM vehicle, you can make the customer dependant on you. If they stop paying for your service, oh, so sorry, you can't access any of your application data anymore. Or you can't share your application data with anyone who isn't running our application. Basically the service provider can use DRM to control what you can do with your data.
My other concern with a remote application is privacy. Sure they
So my biggest source of distrust these days for a remote application is not the AVAILABILITY of the service, but rather:
* Being at the mercy of the service provider in terms of DRM.
* Privacy.
And finally, I just don't
Steve
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In what format? If it's stored as a big blob of binary garbage, you're just as much held to ransom as if it were on a remote server. You still can't get at your data except by going through the 'official channel', in this case running that particular mail program and hoping it doesn't crash or corrupt its data store.
Insist on mail stored in a readable format like mbox files or maildirs!
Proofing photocopies? (Score:2)
The connection between proofing photocopies (which just don't work that way -- you can get a smudge, but you CANNOT get the wrong character) and mistrusting Internet reliability (which CAN go down and DOES go down, albeit rarely) is specious. One is not understanding, and the other is understanding and knowing damn well that there are vulnerabilities.
This is puffery.
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Although it's been awhile, some of us do remember outages at MAE-West (1998 [wired.com], 2000 [com.com], for example) which slowed the Internet to a crawl for many people. So, that mistrust is not without basis.
Most importantly, though, it's not just availabilit
Wrong basis for distrust (Score:2)
There's a fundamental difference in the basis of trust/distrust. We trust the power grid because the power company's a financially-stable entity that's not going to close it's doors tomorrow, and because we have a contractual relationship with them (that bill we pay every month). They're going to suffer financial and legal consequences if they just stop providing power for any length of time. And even at that, those of us who depend on having power don't put all our trust in the power company. Three words:
I disagree with TFA (Score:2)
The fact is, no technology, old or new, is perfect. I'm sure there were a few people who thought the machine "retyped it" like a secretary, but they were used to secretaries! It's like today with computers, s
Privacy (Score:2)
Privacy is.
And that is the reason I don't use them as much as possible.
reliable technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe some mistrust is a good thing (Score:2)
Yeah, like the fact that you're trapped in an elevator and the VOIP phones suddenly, mysteriously, stopped working at the same time as the power went out.
You mistrust computers? (Score:2)
I guess I must be one of the "few" (Score:2)
Proofreading photocopies? I call BS. (Score:2)
I am old enough to remember the introduction of the Xerox 914, and while it was revolutionary, the only things revolutionary about it were the speed, the copy quality, the copy durability, etc. I never ever ever heard of anyone suggesting that the copies needed to be proofread.
Similar processes had been available literally for centuries. There was nothing new about the idea of an exact image copy. The "Shovel Museum" at Stonehill College in Easton, M
I slurp pages I need just in case.. (Score:2)
It's not outages I fear (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's not the internet I mistrust. It's those who wield powers that I have no faith in. I trust computers more than people. They don't decide whether information is to be made available. Computers store and distribute it. People destroy and withhold it. So tell me, which should I mistrust?
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How about both?
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Currently, I can still trust my computer to a certain degree to be "mine". But yes, that is changing far too quickly.
Mistrust is well placed (Score:2)
Techies are just as mistrusting, and that mistrust is warranted. Maybe google.com doesn't go down, but my broadband does occasionally go down, which is effectivally identical to google.com being down for me. My job (a major university with multiple connections to different providers) has an outage perhaps once a year. Ignoring full outages, minor hiccups cause things like Google Spreadsheets to occasionally pop up the "Warning: You have been disconnected and your data has not been saved" message. Meanwh
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Incidences? (Score:2)
If the author can't be bothered to spell check his article why does he think we should bother to read it?
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You use google as a spell checker? Wouldn't it be better to use something like a, uhm..., spell checker? Or at least a dictionary?
If the author can't be bothered to spell check his article why does he think we should bother to read it?
Maybe because we think he has something interesting to say? (Ok, he didn't, his article was a collection of lies, half-truths, and wishful think
some mistrust in technology can be healthy (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
Apparently photocopier machines were greeted with suspicion ... How can you know that the machine has made a perfect copy of your vital
document.
I still check photocopies of multiple page documents, if it is important. It is not the first time that a page was omitted. Also, small printed parts or graphics is not always copied correctly.When dealing with technology, I always try to have a backup plan. Take two laptops for an important presentation. Have a second computer in sync with the main production computer, have two printers available, a backup plan if a slide presentation would not work due to a broken projector bulb etc.
not reliability. look for longevity (Score:2)
my trust issue isn't with availability... (Score:3)
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Imagine my suprise when I could not connect to usatoday.com via my dial-up ISP GulfPines.
Then I tried my Comcast cable modem connection and usatoday.com was there, and perfect.
I more or less figured out that the DNS Gulfpines uses did not have usatoday.com, so I got on the phone and called them, told them what I thought was wrong. They fixed it right away, and then called me back to see if I could get usatoday.com via their service.
I did not have the actual IP address of usatoday.com, so c
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I use spam.com because I trust it to
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"instructions for how to manufacture the information by combining the numbers that are stored in our boxes" = "shared-dictionary-encryption ciphertext"
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*blank stare*
Say, would it be possible to take a look into your server room? I mean, I just wanna peek, no touching...
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Sure. I sent some Internets this morning (Score:2)
It's out there in one of those tube thingys
D