GWL/Power is a company in Prague who sell LiFePOâ‚„ cells and associated gubbins. This blog post is pretty blunt but makes a good point worth bearing in mind with the spread of the Internet of Things which Go Bump In the Night:

http://gwl-power.tumblr.com/post/130875724381/the-pain-of-the-cloud-solutions-saying-no-to-the

“The pain of the cloud solutions. Saying NO to the clouds!

Customer A: I have used the Ubiquiti mFi solution in the past. But the mFi cloud has crashed and has been down for many months now, without any support from UBNT. Can you support me as a supplier of the hardware?

Customer B: I have used the Involar SEDAS system for monitoring of my solar installation. Now the SEDAS is not working reliably. What will you do for me?

Answer: Well, we need to say honestly and openly: We will do nothing for you.

Any cloud service or software support is a matter of the manufacturer of the equipment you have decided to buy. If the manufacturer has a problem keeping the service functional, we as „the middle-man” have no ability to do anything for you. We as a distributor are not responsible in any way for these solutions and services. We suggest you keep contacting the manufacturer, you keep complaining publicly at discussion forums, blogs and web page comments. This may be only way to push the manufacturer to some action.

Having been in the IT business since 1970’s, we can only say: The cloud is just a dream. What you have is what you have. We discourage customers to make solutions that rely on the clouds and dreams.

Just think: In case of an international conflict you can be 100% sure, your data stored in an enemy country will not be available to you. So do not waste any time with the cloud and on-line systems (Google Apps, Office 365, etc), work on solutions that will be 100% in your own possession.”

Having long been derided as a bit of an IT dinosaur I feel thoroughly vindicated by this article. Just the notion of storing any of my stuff (docs, photos etc) on some remote server is anathema to me.

OK, I know my emails are out there somewhere, probably being monitored by GCHQ as we speak (along with all my Internet connections) but I wish them luck with that, ploughing through hundreds of nerdy websites like the Green Building Forum, DIYnot etc! (No offence intended guys).

A cynic might consider it an old business model (timesharing, mainframe computing) repackaged for the current day by playing games with words *.

On that note a friend and colleague made a marvelous suggestion to me: anywhere you see "the cloud" in print, read it as "someone else's computer".

* http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/

I thought this thread might be about the environmental impact of the Cloud. Surely everyone backing up their data on servers that have to be kept in a permanent state of readiness humming away somewhere is less desirable than having it on their own back up drives or discs or whatever in a cupboard at home switched off. Also, re-downloading something every time you want it (especially for music and video) leads to enormous wasted bandwidth - this may or may not have a significant energy cost but just seems wasteful to me compared to havng the photo, video or music file on your own storage medium.

I think someone did a report about how much energy doing a search on Google too, same as a cup of coffee (what ever that is).

There are a number of issues when backing up, is it the only backup, or a copy, or one of many.
The real issue is why do we collect and save so much. I never delete a picture, no matter how bad. I now have several backup disks going back the last 20 years or so.
I think my last one was a 3 TB one and has most of my stuff on it, but I keep the old ones 'just in case'.
Be no good if my house was burgles or burnt down, but I am sure I would get over it.

Cloud storage for me is not a good option as my connection is way to slow, uploading at 1 mbs (0.125 of a megabyte per second) it takes 40 seconds to upload 1 picture, and I have thousands.

To do a proper incremental back up of the HD on my laptop would initially take over 200 hours.

The upside of the cloud, is that data centers can (theoretically...) outsource the storage (or backups thereof...), to physical machines in folk's homes
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32816775
The heat produced by powering the server is then utilized as home-heating, so there is an actual benefit...

gg

correct, *COMPUTING*...
(I was working from memory)
(so to speak...)

gg

I used to live near Buncefield:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire

The building I used to work in was shared with the NHS payroll company. I think it took a week to get the systems up and running again after the explosion.
Somewhere I have pictures of the racks all bent and twisted, in the bent and twisted buildings.
They had off site storage.

Yep, request SSH keys and so on (there are a lot of devices which run on arduino or rPi)

Posted By: SteamyTeaI used to live near Buncefield:
The building I used to work in was shared with the NHS payroll company. I think it took a week to get the systems up and running again after the explosion.
Somewhere I have pictures of the racks all bent and twisted, in the bent and twisted buildings.
They had off site storage.

If that's who I think it is[1], then it was more than just off site storage, They were/are a business that specialise in facilities/data management & resilience, so the fact that their own premises survived such an incident was quite a demonstration of their systems & that they practice what they preach.

[1] Pretty sure. A close relative used to work for them.

Posted By: SteamyTeawe have had this conversation before

I thought we had...

But I bet they charge more than ADrive, Google Drive, Dropbox or whatever MS call their service now.

Err, yes. Quite a bit more than that! Sometimes the adage "pay peanuts, get monkeys" runs true...

Another example, from Google:

https://medium.com/@arlogilbert/the-time-that-tony-fadell-sold-me-a-container-of-hummus-cb0941c762c1#.pmyeyn5pw

Unfortunately, that article doesn't make clear if they're just turning off the cloud service the box relies on or will actually send some command to really brick the box. Ie., if anybody had reverse engineered the protocol and built a substitute service, would it work?

I don't think you can expect an indefinite contract for any web service, particularly not for one for which there is just a one-off initial payment. On the other hand, selling a product which won't work after some period not much longer than just a year or so seems like an unfair practice which would be a cause for action, I'd think.

I bought a Kobo ebook reader largely on the basis that I'd read that they don't need to be registered to be used - you can download PDFs, etc, via USB. I was therefore more than a little cheesed off to find that it actually does need to be registered (must have changed since previous models/versions) and won't work after a hard reset until it's contacted the mothership. If Kobo goes broke I'll have to be careful to make sure it doesn't need a reset.

In general, avoiding dependency on web services seems safest. Ie., you're a mug if you buy something which depends on ongoing support from somebody else without a pretty solid contract that that support will be available for a useful amount of time.

It might be different for electronics but as far as I am aware for e.g. agricultural machinery there is a requirement for parts and support to be available for 8 years after the last manufacture date

the issue, I think, is the pace at which the devices are being cut-off and with no prior warning. In the software world, you'd expect a lifetime of perhaps 4 or 5 years or more with support and updates during that time. Then you'd expect an end of life announcement, perhaps giving a 1 or 2 year grace period following end of sale, where support would cease and updates would stop. But you'd likely still have working software (unless the software called back to some vendor platform, and that was to stop at end of life). And at end of life, an upgrade path, typically with some discount or incentive for existing customers would be normal.

But for this hardware situation, I am surprised both by the apparent aggressiveness and that no concession is offered to affected customers such as a heavily discounted replacement Nest unit. Perhaps there is more to the story - some reasons why they cannot afford or have chosen not to offer a 2 year end of life period. Google is vast and all gigantic corps, no matter how they try to craft their public profile and culture, are prone to ineptitude, clumsiness and crass stupidity. Whatever the reason, it is a PR blunder for both Nest and Google.