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Except of course, as we've learnt over the last few weeks, they're essentially one and the same thing. You can't trust a third party with your data if you want

Except of course, as we've learnt over the last few weeks, they're essentially one and the same thing. You can't trust a third party with your data if you want it kept secure. Period.

icebraining 13y ago
You can't trust a third party with your data if you want it kept secure. Period. It's impossible to do otherwise, though.
- marcuspovey 13y ago
  That is the rub of course. Self hosting is somewhat better, if nothing else because it presents a much less tempting target, and it is a privilege currently only available to the technical. Well implemented strong encryption is another avenue.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Even with self-hosting, there's a lot of third-party hardware and software that you have to trust.
    - marcuspovey 13y ago
      Absolutely, but it changes the economics substantially in your favour.
      - rdl 13y ago
        Especially if you design everything about individual components being potentially either backdoored or just buggy, and make it hard for failures to lead to successful outside penetration or inside data exfiltration. It doesn't help if everything is compromised fully, but if some things are not, they can usually block or at least detect problems. Defense in depth, and all.
- some_googler 13y ago
  Yep, for better or worse it's a digital life now. Good luck opting out of the cloud for your bank transactions, your health insurance claims, Amazon orders, etc. Our emails, chats and cat videos are but a small part of sensitive data that we have stored in somebody else's data centers; cynicism and Luddite rejection of the few items we can "take back" like email servers will not help much. The only solution is to fix the system. At Google, and other conscious internet services, we're doing everything we can. But users and voters have to help too. For example, yesterday it was revealed that the NSA has been able to successfully MITM users connecting to SSL-protected Google services. Now I don't want to use this to plug Google Chrome, but if you're using any browser without all bleeding-edge security features like cert pinning and PFS, then you deserve to be 0wned by various high-profile hackers.

Except of course, as we've learnt over the last few weeks, they're essentially one and the same thing. You can't trust a third party with your data if you want it kept secure. Period.

icebraining 13y ago

You can't trust a third party with your data if you want it kept secure. Period. It's impossible to do otherwise, though.

marcuspovey 13y ago
That is the rub of course. Self hosting is somewhat better, if nothing else because it presents a much less tempting target, and it is a privilege currently only available to the technical. Well implemented strong encryption is another avenue.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Even with self-hosting, there's a lot of third-party hardware and software that you have to trust.
  - marcuspovey 13y ago
    Absolutely, but it changes the economics substantially in your favour.
    - rdl 13y ago
      Especially if you design everything about individual components being potentially either backdoored or just buggy, and make it hard for failures to lead to successful outside penetration or inside data exfiltration. It doesn't help if everything is compromised fully, but if some things are not, they can usually block or at least detect problems. Defense in depth, and all.
some_googler 13y ago
Yep, for better or worse it's a digital life now. Good luck opting out of the cloud for your bank transactions, your health insurance claims, Amazon orders, etc. Our emails, chats and cat videos are but a small part of sensitive data that we have stored in somebody else's data centers; cynicism and Luddite rejection of the few items we can "take back" like email servers will not help much. The only solution is to fix the system. At Google, and other conscious internet services, we're doing everything we can. But users and voters have to help too. For example, yesterday it was revealed that the NSA has been able to successfully MITM users connecting to SSL-protected Google services. Now I don't want to use this to plug Google Chrome, but if you're using any browser without all bleeding-edge security features like cert pinning and PFS, then you deserve to be 0wned by various high-profile hackers.