Day: April 15, 2009

Fuck The Cloud?

I couldn’t agree more with Jason Scott’s essay, Fuck the Cloud — if you are entrusting important data to a service that you don’t control and don’t have a migration path out, you are a fool.

Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service (or ad-supported service), quietly flinging you past an End User License Agreement that indicates that, at the end of the day, you might as well as dragged all this stuff to the trash. If it goes, it’s gone.

. . .

Contrast, though, when people are dumping hundreds of hours a year into the Cloud. Blowing out photos. Entering day after day of entries. Sharing memories, talking about subjects that matter to them. Linking friends or commenting on statuses or trading twitters or what have you. This is a big piece, a very big piece of what is probably important stuff.

Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please:

  • Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.
  • Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Don’t let them.
  • Recognize a Cloud when you see it. Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. You are giving people stuff for free. I pay for Vimeo and I pay for Flickr and a couple other things. This makes me a customer. Neither of these places get my only copy of anything.
  • If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties and cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

I think this is a much bigger short term problem than the sort of more basic data preservation problems. People are dumping all of their data into different services and coming to rely on those services without ever thinking, “what if this company goes out of business next year?” In many cases, people won’t even realize just how much they’re dependent on other people providing them access to their data until that disappears.

Personally, I do use a lot of cloud services, but I am also fairly obsessive (ok, ridiculously obsessive) about making sure I have personal copies of everything so the day those services go asking for a bailout I’m not stuck wondering whether I’m going to be able to get my data back or not.

This is also one of the reasons those offering such services need to be pressured to adopt open standards so it is simple and straightforward to create local copies of any data and/or migrate to another service, whether it be on another web service or on a server the user controls. Most of the sort of web services today that Scott is bitching about seem to think that locking their customers into their specific service is the way to go, emulating the Microsoft’s of the traditional software market.

In Defense of Polyamorous Marriages

Lee Stranahan took a lot of grief in the comments section of the Huffington Post with his piece earlier this year, Why are gay marriage advocates not defending polyamory? One answer, of course, is some gay marriage proponents don’t see polyamorous marriages as legitimate in the same way they see a homosexual version of a heterosexual marriage as legitimate.

Another response is that there are already legal solutions to polyamorous marriages such as settng up chapter S LLCs, etc. This, however, strikes me as a different version of the “why can’t you be happy with domestic partnerships?”

Ultimately, however, I suspect the reason is that the fight over gay marriage is focused largely on the ‘gay’ part of the equation rather than the marriage part.

Over the past decade or so, it has become less and less acceptable — both culturally and legally — to discriminate against homosexuals. As a result, marriage really sticks out as an area where there is a bright shining litmus test that screams ‘no gays allowed’. To some extent the opponents of gay marriage are correct to the extent that they fear that allowing gay marriage will complete the project of legitimizing and destigmatizing homosexual behavior.

Polyamory, meanwhile, goes pretty much to the core of what exactly we mean by marriage at all, and why we have specific laws that treat married individuals as a separate class.

Personally, I’m all for also recognizing n-tuple marriages; if the cultures of the Old Testament could do it, surely we can too.

Update: for another take on polyamorous marriage, see Lindsay Beyerstein’s 2006 article The legal logic of polyamorous marriage.