Hmmm ... Microsoft does not own my wireless access point, nor my router, nor pay my ISP bill. Sounds like this will eventually be resolved with criminal charges for theft and/or tresspass. I wonder whether it will be a class action suite or some lucky plaintiff is able to set it in motion and keep all the money.

If google would only follow its very own original mission statement we would be fine. Power corrupts. Influence corrupts absolutely.

Ah yes, "Americans' scientific understanding". However no points awarded for difficulty.

/securityConcerns

If web pages could ever gain the same access to local disk that say, notepad.exe enjoys, then they would eventually have a shot at dominance.

Best practice in the cloud is to spin up from the default images provided by and with repositories supported by the cloud vendor. As noted, Amazon's EC2 base instance is using YUM and appears to be based on centos. IBM's primary offering is also Red Hat. I was a debian puke until the moment I saw what Amazon was doing and have been centos ever since. So if you want your students to go to Amazon and get a free year of EC2 with a micro instance then help them out by starting with centos; without the gui.

Yes. If your organization is “normal” then your data is definitely safer in the cloud for several reasons.

The definition of normal in this context is an organization that has some, but never enough, technical and CAPEX resources so it is struggling to make do through a combination of ingenuity and hard work. The end result of this is that individuals are forced to triage tasks to overcome the perpetual shortfall in funds and time. All of this is fine and hopefully results in a raise, or a parking spot, or at least an employee of the month plaque – however – the simple truth is that stones are left unturned and holes are left unplugged.

So this is the first reason that a fully formed cloud from a major provider like Amazon, or Rackspace, or Terramark is superior. They have lots of resources and smart people who have focused man-years on designing ONE secure process. When you buy into that you are getting the benefit of all that expertise and attention to detail and you just have to keep from screwing it up. For example, a new Amazon or Rackspace cloud computer has, by default, only one open port; SSH on port 22. Honestly, can normal folks be absolutely certain which ports are open and exposed from the various pathways into their terrestrial network?

Of course some organizations do indeed have the resources to dot every “i” and cross every “t” but the overarching point is that cloud computers from reputable cloud providers are, by standard measures, more secure.