Cloud computing, I think, can work if we make compute clouds completely public and accept David Brin's thesis in 'The Open Society' that all privacy is a thing of the past.
Short of that, cloud computing is an exceptionally powerful tool - the most powerful technological means yet created in human history - for an unaccountable elite to take control of all personal and corporate information.
It's going to be an interesting next few decades.
The reason I say this is because cloud *computing* - unlike cloud data *storage* or packet routing - cannot be made secure against the company that hosts the VM. You can encrypt data before you transmit, but you can't encrypt a VM.
The only possible technology that offers some possibility of VM encryption is the new on-chip 'secure enclave' RAM encryption capability - which depends entirely on the CPU containing a secret authentication key, known to the chip maker.
The NSA will have this.
So, given that the NSA exists, and can be considered to have hypervisor root to all US clouds, and that some extremely *motivated* forces on the US far right with access to the White House would love to have the NSA's capability (as yet they don't - but I expect eventually they'll get that)...
... the world is in the position of actual Nazis and just plain ruthless people having at least read access to *all* corporate clouds.
Expect this. Understand it. Imagine what it means.
Please.
It means, at the very least, that *all private keys and passwords on all cloud-hosted VMs* will be very quickly vacuumed up. If they're not already. What credentials haven't already been harvested by botnets, that is.
That's an incredibly powerful strategic cyberspace-dominance capability, which means that the top US military brass - regardless of their political affiliation currently - will NOT want to give that up.
So expect the US info-defense complex to pwn all the world's computers.
Next, also expect a US political-information-defense complex network of 'princelings' (in the Chinese sense) or oligarchs (in the Russian sense) to form.
This is practically here already, with Peter Thiel. There are no doubt more.
But expect it to become pervasive. Expect all jobs to be controlled by this group. All the US economy. All retail and transport and housing and food.
Now remember that some of these people are actual Nazis. Not all. But some.
The Cloud doesn't *cause* all this...
... but it sure doesn't help.
All information (both private phones and corporate datacenters) being trivially searchable and rootable by this defense-oligarchy princeling network gives them enormous leverage. If they're smart enough to use it.
They're not there yet, and they're not quite smart enough.
But it will come.
If your company's servers, all your email, your data, weren't in the cloud? You might have a chance against them. You'd have *more* chances, anyway.
On that front: watch how things shake down between Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Why? Because Amazon runs a large amount of Netflix's computers.
I have a nasty untrusting mind, one that has heard very bad things about how Amazon treats its customer-competitors, and so I expect Amazon to make full use of that interesting fact.
If Netflix still exists in ten years time, I will have been well and truly wrong.
> completely public
The only way to accomplish this would be to find a way to make it seem attractive to an increasingly underinterested public, compared to the seemingly private compute clouds -- and I can't imagine how that could be done.
I hope I'm wrong, though. And I agree, for what that's worth.
> It's going to be an interesting next few decades.
That's one way to put it. :/
@natecull
Hot take:
Cloud computing would be great if it ran on foglets (i.e., was literally cloud computing). (Or, more practically: if we distributed computing across many tiny sandboxed user-owned low-power devices, & service providers actually owned none of the hardware.)
But, until I own the hardware that serves Netflix to myself and my neighbours, I cannot trust Netflix to act in my best interests. And, were Netflix acting in my interests, its centralization would conflict with its own.
@vertigo @natecull
Does it run on the ESP82xx?
I spent some time writing a logic-programming system intended to be distributed across a bunch of those cheap SoCs, with the idea that they'd be embedded in walls and clothing. ($8 isn't cheap enough to do that, but the ESP82xx looks like it'll be the parent of whatever device puts wifi into cereal box toys and anti-theft systems.)
Nate Cull (.social)
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Vertigo