[CS-FSLUG] Apple and Amazon security lapses exposed after writer has 'entire digital life' destroyed by hackers in minutes

[Mark Clayton]

I have a real love/hate relationship with the cloud. I live in rural
NC so my dslam connection is painfully slow most of the time. Also,
cell reception is even slower if at all. But I still use the cloud for
calendar, contacts and email storage and a few documents. I would love
to do more cloud based stuff but I find aspects of the cloud
frustrating. For instance, I use gmail and it and icloud do not play
nice together. My phone has duplicate contacts b/c the two services
handle companies differently. And i can't find an iphone app that
display's Libre/Open Office docs properly.

I would love to host my own cloud too. I guess I've been burned too
many times by some piece of critical software getting dropped or
getting so buggy it's unusable or getting too expensive to justify. I
looked into ownCloud, and it's ok but you have to sync manually and it
doesn't sync calendars on the iPhone. These issues make it something I
can't ask my wife to use. In the next 6-12 months my wife and I are
going to buy a campground. When we have that I'd really like to
explore cloud based reservations software. I'd like calls to ring
through to a cell phone where we can place reservations from anywhere
on or off the grounds. But I guess that'd be considered more web
based, not cloud based.

Mark

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Timothy Butler <tbutler at ofb.biz> wrote:
> On 2012-08-07 23:36, Fred A. Miller wrote:
>
>>  Backup AND stay OUT of "the cloud."
>
>
> Well, I'm not sure I'd go that far. I'm pretty dependent on several clouds
> floating around for me and it makes my life vastly easier because of it. My
> documents all go on Dropbox, which ensures that I can get to what I need
> whether I'm on my laptop, I'm at my office at church or my office at the
> university where I teach (or my iPhone). Mac OS X makes it super simple to
> create encrypted disk images if one needs to ensure that Dropbox can't view
> it.
>
> I use iCloud to keep my contacts, calendar and bookmarks in sync between my
> computers, my iPhone and my iPad. This is really essential, since I'm far
> too absentminded to remember to keep my contacts and calendar in sync the
> "old fashion way." (I might move to a self-hosted ownCloud for this.) iCloud
> also streams all the photos I take on my iPhone straight to Aperture and all
> the photos I import into Aperture to my iPhone and iPad.
>
> And then, of course, my e-mail is all cloud based using IMAP or Exchange
> servers (my self-hosted e-mail addresses are IMAP, the college and the
> seminary both use Exchange).
>
> In any case, I think the Cloud is here to stay. But, one can still protect
> one's data just by backing it up offline too... The nightmare described by
> the journalist could not happen to me unless someone broke in and stole my
> physical backups...
>
> Blessings,
> Tim
>
>
>
>
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