VonGeekenstein

Since I can’t think of an article to write today, I’ll post a question to y’all, if you don’t mind. I have a lot of friends who are of opposing sides to this argument. Some feel cloud computing isn’t secure enough to trust with their data. Others, like me, who put all of their information in the cloud (I bow to my new overlords, Google) so they can access it everywhere.

In my own case, all of my calendar, email and contacts are through Google, so I can access them anywhere, and I really like that. I don’t really have a trust issue with Google for some reason — I think I’m way too small a fish for them to care about what info I have stores there as long as I click on their ads — but I can see where folks might.

So, let me ask y’all. When it comes to your data, whether it’s your calendar, your contacts or whatever else, would you trust it to the cloud or not, and why? I’m looking forward to discussing this with you. Thanks for reading!

According to an article on Ars Technica entitled, Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are “fair use”, the Library of Congress has added a bevy of new exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act altering the way we’re allowed to use much of the digital media and devices we have.
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I’m admittedly something of a Google fanboy. I’ve got all of my email accounts (many self-hosted) set up through Gmail, I use Google Calendar and Google Contacts to sync to my phone and PC-based calendars and am mostly quite happy with these services. However, sometimes Google releases something that either makes you go “WTF?” (Wave, I’m looking at you), or they release something that makes you go…well…something much more colorfully worded that I won’t repeat here.
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In an interesting blog article entitled, Fuck you, Google, the author takes Google to task, and rightfully so I think, for major privacy concerns in the wake of Buzz’s release, concerns I wasn’t even fully aware of. Here’s a clip:

Oh, yes, I suppose I could opt out of Buzz — which I did when it was introduced, though that apparently has no effect on whether or not I am now using Buzz — but as soon as I did that, all sorts of new people were following me on my Reader! People I couldn’t block, because I am not on Buzz!

Kinda freakuy, huh? Head over to the blog entry to read the whole thing, it’s pretty damning.

According to both Reuters and Download Squad, our overlords at Google have launched Google Buzz.

What’s Google Buzz? Apparently it integrates social networking into your currently existing Gmail account (if you have one). According to the web-page, it allows you to track the people most important to you, share stuff and so on. It hasn’t been rolled out to everyone (including me), so I can’t give much more info on it, but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.