[LINK] SMH: 'Megaupload closure hits legitimate users'

[Scott Howard]

On Sun, Jan 22, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Roger Clarke <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au>wrote:

> [I've got a paper in press at the moment that examines 49 reported
> cloud outages.  If I'd held off a bit longer, this could have made a
> nice 50th.


Out of interest, did you also analyze how many non-cloud outages there were
during the same period?  How many companies Exchange servers went down due
to power outages, hardware failure, bad (or no!) sysadmins, or any one of a
thousand other causes - compared to how many times Google Apps or Microsoft
Office 365 went down?  Or what the time to recover was in either situation?

Picking on cloud outages without considering the alternatives is like
claiming that airplanes are unsafe because hundreds of people died in plane
crashes last year, without taking into account the fact that they are still
orders of magnitude faster than any other form of transport by any
reasonable measure.



> (That's leaving aside the question as to whether
> Megaupload is genuinely cloud computing, i.e. uses virtualised
> servers, or just another ISP).]
>

I'd be interested in what definition you could use to decide that
Megaupload were NOT a cloud provider for their customers?  "Cloud" is
definitely a vague term, but I don't think it's that vague!


"THE operation to arrest the founder of the online file-sharing
> service Megaupload and close down the website has left users
> worldwide in limbo and prompted warnings that consumers should not
> rely on "cloud" storage for their data.
>

I think the real moral of this story is that you need to investigate your
cloud providers with a level of diligence that is relevant to the type of
service they are providing you.

How many people, when looking for a "cloud money-box" (more commonly
referred to as a "bank" now days I believe) would simply trust the first
random website they came across for such services?  A few minutes research
on Megaupload with Google shows that it's probably not the type of service
you should be relying on for anything important.  Similar research on other
similar services will show some that are clearly far more legitimate and
safe sites than Megaupload/Rapidshare/etc.

(Interesting, when I typed "is megaupload" into Google, it's autocomplete
gave "is megaupload safe and legal" as the first response - so it's not
like some poeple haven't been doing their research!)


"Carlos Sanchez Almeida, a Spanish lawyer known for his crusading
> stance on issues of online privacy and piracy, has urged users to
> take stock of the data they have lost in the Megaupload shutdown in
> preparation for a possible class action against the US government.
>

Given that the Megaupload Terms of Service specifically stated that they
were not responsible for the safe storage of people files, and that they
could stop providing service to them at any time, it's hard to see how the
loss of such files is the responsibility of the US government, rather than
the users that uploaded them.

  Scott.