?Careless Computing? And The Cloud: Richard Stallman Warns Against ChromeOS

GNU creator Richard Stallman is back on the old "cloud computing is evil" kick again, and this time he's speaking out against ChromeOS. His basic premise, that cloud computing is dangerous because it places your data in the hands of companies that neither care about you or your data, is sound. As is his threat that when the police come knocking on your cloud provider's door asking for your data, Google is far more likely to give it up than you are. These are fine and good reactions to the slow erosion of privacy that comes from the rise of cloud computing.

"I think that marketers like cloud computing because it is devoid of substantive meaning. The term's meaning is not substance, it's an attitude: ?Let any Tom, Dick and Harry hold your data, let any Tom, Dick and Harry do your computing for you (and control it).' Perhaps the term ?careless computing' would suit it better.

To paraphrase Raymond Carver, Stallman is talking and Stallman invented GNU so sometimes that gives him the right. But I worry his FUD in regards to the cloud is misplaced. The obvious issues aside, given the current state of most people's computer security and back-up practices, I'm will not disregard the cloud as a good alternative to those who can't maintain their own PCs. Stallman comes from a culture where everything is in one place. The Linux architecture itself is, to an extent, monolithic (not in the computing sense but in the metaphorical sense), and every action you perform on data within it is self-contained on the disk. Copies of copies are propagated through the network, ensuring that important data is replicated and not linked.

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