What's Needed For Freedom In the Cloud? 81
jrepin writes "Georg Greve from Free Software Foundation Europe has often been asked to explain what he considers necessary prerequisites for an open, free, sustainable approach toward what is often called 'The Cloud,' or also 'Software as a Service.' He gives 7 ingredients that are necessary for freedom in the cloud. For example, 'it should be illegal to change privacy policies on users without their explicit consent. They need to know what is changing, and how, and what will be the resulting level of privacy they enjoy – in the same clear, transparent and understandable manner.'"
Don't use cloud. (Score:4, Insightful)
That's all you need for freedom..
Competition and easy transfers (Score:5, Insightful)
There needs to be lots of choices for users, and an easy, free way to transfer all data from one company to another. Otherwise all the disclosure in the world is meaningless, since they can hold your data hostage to make you accept their new terms.
Freedom lay with the user (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't trust a third party with your information and data. Memory and storage are dirt cheap, pipes are fat and the cloud is just gee-whiz yet redundant technology.
Those are mere wishes (Score:4, Insightful)
So I got to read the article, and the author lists a bunch of good, desirable things there. But none of them will happen until the businesses that provide those cloud services are forced to listen to wishes of the clients.
However majority of clients are not very wise in terms of network security (or anything else, as matter of fact.) So those companies will always have plentiful harvest of suckers, and that's who they will focus on. If you are a green-skinned geek in glasses you are not their audience, and your whimpering that "their service is not perfect" will be summarily ignored.
Geeks can't use the cloud, basically. Anyone who does that surrenders a bit of his|her|its privacy, and on top of that has to obey the arbitrary rules that are imposed by those companies. The only solution is not to play.
I did just that last night. I needed to change the email on Yahoo to something else. I type the name in, and I get in return "#604,E4 This email address is blocked by owner." No help anywhere; other people report this error too, with no resolution. I was able to resolve that. Want to know how? I deleted the whole Yahoo profile. Google profile will be next.
Re:No subject (Score:2, Insightful)
"Destroy capitalism"
Capitalist urges are primal and natural, which is why Capitalism or something like it asserts itself even in anarchic conditions.