Friday, January 20, 2012

Blow back — Cloud Storage Permanence In Doubt


Unintended? consequences casting a pall on technology.
The by now globally famous shutdown of Megaupload by an FBI coordinated global operation, has raised questions about the ultimate security Cloud based services.This is no small matter. As we begin to take our lives from our PCs and laptops to our phones and tablets we enter a truly digital existence where most of our activities are based in the Cloud. The picture of a conference I take using my Android, for instance, is uploaded automatically to my Google profile from where I can share it with my social network (if I so wish) or use it in my Google equivalent of PowerPoint to create the files necessary for my next presentation, which will be available for me to show next time I go to a conference (now in another country) and connect my laptop to their wi-fi.
The point is that I take all this seamless integration for granted and so do countless millions of others. The speed at which we do things and the sheer accumulation of information makes it difficult to keep copies, make sure they are updated and back them up and keep the back ups current. So there is little surprise that we subconsciously see the cloud as our saviour in terms of time and consider it to be secure.
This out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality however is now coming under the spotlight as Megaupload’s shutdown highlights the vulnerability of our data. Even when due diligence is done and we go for a service like Dropbox, Google’s extended storage service or Apple’s iCloud, there really is no telling what kind of security measures they have put in place to safeguard our data. [emphasis added]
Read it at Technorati
Megaupload Saga Drives Painful Lesson of Cloud Storage Permanence
by David Amerland

UPDATE: eWeek | IT Security and Network Security News
FBI Megupload Shutdown Cuts Off Uses From Personal Files, Business Data
by Fahmida Y. Rashid
Megaupload users who stored backups and personal data on the site protested the loss of their files, highlighting the risks of using a consumer file-sharing service for business purposes.
After law enforcement agencies authoritiesshut down Megaupload, a popular file sharing service, for violating copyright laws, Internet users took to Twitter and online forums in protest, calling it a form of censorship.
For many users, the shutdown had nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the fact that their backups and data were now gone.
The Department of Justice executed more than 20 search warrants in the United States and in eight other countries to seize servers and domains belonging to Megaupload, according to a 72-page federal indictment unsealed Jan. 19. Megaupload is an online "locker" service in which users can anonymously upload large files to the company servers and share the content via a unique URL.
While users may have used Megaupload to illegally share music, TV shows, movies and software, as the indictment claimed, there were plenty of people who used the service to store personal and private files, including work documents, videos and photographs. After the shutdown, these users complained on Twitter that they had been using the service to store their own content.
"I & many other musicians use #MegaUpload to store & share files created & owned by us. Surely their access & deletion by the FBI is illegal?" Suzanne Barbieri, a musician and writer, posted on Twitter....

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