[HN Gopher] You can't control your data in the cloud
___________________________________________________________________
You can't control your data in the cloud
Author : starbugs
Score : 75 points
Date : 2023-09-29 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (karl-voit.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (karl-voit.at)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _2021-12: Gravatar lost 167 million names, usernames and MD5
| hashes of email addresses (Source, German Source)_ "
|
| Bad to pick one item and grumble, but I'm going to anyway. With
| Gravatar your identity is the MD5 hash of your email address. Go
| to any forum which uses Gravatar and look at the URL of avatar
| image, that blob of text is the MD5 hash of their email. And of
| course you click to go to the Gravatar profile, and see their
| username on the forum page. It makes no sense to say they are
| "lost" or leaked - they are published in normal use.
|
| You can then make a few guesses that their email will be some
| variant of username@gmail.com and that the first part will be
| nice enough for a human to type, and the second part must be a
| valid domain - and likely a common domain. So if you think "MD5
| is too big to brute force", this is a very restricted input. [At
| least, this used to be true, I haven't verified if Gravatar have
| changed anything - but I doubt it because the idea is that you
| sign up your email address at a new forum and it's magically
| connected to your Gravatar on another domain, so if it had extra
| salts and passwords it would lose all its convenience].
| oneplane wrote:
| To control your data you'd already have to have a notion of
| "data" and "control", and that's already lacking from most
| people's daily life. And when you do have those concepts swirling
| around in your mind, you'll still find that out of the people who
| feel they care about it, most don't know what they're doing, how
| they could change, or what they can do to affect any change. By
| the time you've informed and sorted everyone you ever talked to,
| to get to the people that care enough and want to control their
| data, you might be left with 1 or 2 people...
| capableweb wrote:
| I'm not sure where the state of art is currently, but what about
| Homomorphic encryption?
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption) Data that
| can be encrypted at rest while non-readable by the one holding
| it, while still being able to perform computations on it.
|
| I'm not experienced/knowledgeable enough to know if it's feasible
| or not, it seems kind of immature at this point, but on the
| surface it sounds like something that can give more privacy than
| today where most things are clear-text, while still enabling the
| use case of hosting said data somewhere else.
| alwayslikethis wrote:
| It's still far too slow to have any practical use at this
| point, iirc.
| johnklos wrote:
| This article is a good place to send people who don't understand
| why their ignorance plus the assertion that "everyone else does
| it" makes the cloud somehow OK.
|
| The cloud has its uses, but people need to be aware of the
| complete lack of accountability and poor security before they
| decide to upload important data. This goes a long way to helping
| with the "I didn't know" defense. Read this article. Now you
| know.
| capableweb wrote:
| > This article is a good place to send people who don't
| understand why their ignorance plus the assertion that
| "everyone else does it" makes the cloud somehow OK.
|
| I'm not sure, the article seems to have been written with a
| highly technical audience in mind, and those folks tend to
| already care more about their privacy than people who are not.
| Example:
|
| > Additionally, please note that I am using a simplified term
| of "cloud" which refers to storing data or meta-data of us in
| the public cloud. I am specifically not referring to cloud-
| computing in terms of processing nodes that may be even
| stateless.
|
| Most people are not gonna have any idea what most of the domain
| terms in there mean. "data" vs "meta-data"? "public cloud" vs
| "private cloud"? processing nodes? stateless?
|
| Sending this to someone who doesn't care about privacy/where
| data is hosted, won't be convinced by an article speaking a
| language they do not understand.
| johnklos wrote:
| True, but it gives people a jumping off point if they want to
| learn more. Many / most people don't want more than just the
| summary ("assume everything you put in the cloud might be
| leaked, so consider the consequences"), but for those who
| want to learn more, this is where I can point them :)
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Using the popular technique of `s/cloud/somebody else's computer`
| this becomes:
|
| > You Can't Control Your Data in Somebody Else's Computer
|
| Which seems like a pretty "common sense" sentiment.
| fangorn wrote:
| When cloud was a young buzzword there was a popular test: replace
| "in the cloud" with "on the internet" and see if you want to
| continue.
|
| - We store pictures of our kids [in the cloud|on the internet].
|
| - We store all our proprietary code [in the cloud|on the
| internet].
|
| - We store all our secrets [in the cloud|on the internet].
|
| - We store all the sensitive customer information that we could
| be fined millions for losing [in the cloud|on the internet].
|
| It still is a good test, but I guess this ship has sailed...
| j45 wrote:
| Another test I like is replacing that phrase with "someone
| else's laptop/computer"
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| I might just move a few things to Resilio Sync and/or
| Cryptomator where possible, altho I wonder if you feel
| similarly about such quasi-replacements. I definitely need
| something that preserves something somewhere dynamically so I
| don't have the worry about data loss which would absolutely be
| catastrophic. Some things are impractical to constantly have to
| manually and consciously version control to preserve, is the
| way I would phrase my sentiments.
| jansenmac wrote:
| I think this article is over the top. You don't lose control of
| your data if you store it, let's say, on S3. Use encryption if
| you wanna be safe.
|
| You can write a similar article about storing data on a local
| system. It can get stolen, it can get hacked (ransomware). If you
| delete a file from your local drive there may be still data on
| disk. Software and OS often ping home and may read along. To
| think you have control if not in the cloud is an illusion.
|
| Sure, cloud services have different security concerns but to
| think that it is uncontrollable is just a step to far for me.
| Also note that there a lot of different cloud services. A lot of
| privacy concerns have been related to SaaS. To think that you
| lose control of your data at the moment when using dropbox or S3,
| start a container (or an enclave),is just not realistic.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| I think this is a great point. The primitives that cloud
| providers have are pretty good. I wish that there was some way
| to federate data storage, e.g. I provide third-party services
| an S3 bucket where they can store any data related to my
| account. I grant them access to read/write just data related to
| their service, and I can revoke it at any time.
|
| For example, with YouTube, my account credentials, settings,
| watch history, uploaded videos, would all be stored in an S3
| (or S3 compatible) bucket that I allow YouTube access to. If I
| ever want to view my data, I can. If I ever want to revoke
| access, I can do that too. If YouTube gets hacked my data would
| still be safe (depending on the attack of course), since it's
| all in S3. If S3 gets hacked I'm still safe as long as there is
| encryption at rest.
|
| I know that there will be some tradeoffs, e.g. data locality,
| pricing, etc., but I feel like such a model would work so well.
| Taking the idea one step further: sell a plug-and-play consumer
| server that hosts the S3 storage. A consumer would purchase
| some off-the-shelf box, plug it in, and use a device they
| physically control to host all of their online data. This would
| require things like IPv6 to be more widely adopted, and for
| upload speeds to increase, but it would solve so many privacy
| issues.
| endigma wrote:
| I think this is sort of what spacedrive does
| effnorwood wrote:
| [dead]
| Chiba-City wrote:
| [dead]
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| I am not convinced installing competing services locally on a NAS
| or home server device will get all that much easier to setup. We
| are at the stage where you buy a thing, run some setup for
| storage and then a few clicks for installing the application. The
| challenge is setting up the bits on your phone too and dealing
| with networking. This is just too much for too many people who
| long ago decided renting cloud whatever meant when it broke
| someone else would fix it.
|
| I would love to see a move to Self hosted but I just can't see it
| happening. Cloud software as a service doesn't have to be a
| dishonest business but it happens to become so every single time
| so someone can make even more money.
| sysadm1n wrote:
| `The cloud is just someone else's computer`
| pdonis wrote:
| My reaction to the article was "huh? this is news?" Hasn't all
| this been obvious for years now to anyone paying attention?
| warrenm wrote:
| It's not just "in the cloud" - once data leaves your person, it
| is no longer under your control
|
| This has been true for countless millennia: write it down? It's
| leakable.
| jdoss wrote:
| Don't forget the lies of cost savings that the Cloud providers
| have shoved down our industry's throats. We are paying out the
| nose for cloud services and we are giving up all the rights to
| our data. It's a bad deal in the end.
|
| I have a bunch of friends that work at SaaS companies and their
| cloud spend for pretty basic deployments is in the many thousands
| of dollars a month. Most of their deployments could be handled by
| a half rack with beefy servers in a couple of datacenters for a
| fraction of the cost. I pay for a full rack myself and it costs
| me ~$1200 a month for space, power and bandwidth (10Gb pipe with
| a current 1Gb commit), and my hardware costs for everything in
| that rack were a one time cost of around $3000. I have 160 GHz of
| CPU and 141 GiB of memory for my workloads with a few servers
| that are not yet provisioned into my Nomad cluster.
|
| And before you say well there are costs involved with finding
| people that have the skills to do that kind of thing and time
| needed to set all of that up, yes that is true, but our industry
| has moved from one bucket to another one that is more expensive
| in the end with a bunch of downsides. I think there is a middle
| ground where you can use some cloud services and run the
| important stuff on hardware you own. The tooling to self-host
| your own stack in a rack of servers you own is light years better
| than it was 10 years ago and it keeps getting better. Tools like
| https://nebula.defined.net/docs/ and
| https://github.com/poseidon/typhoon for example enable you to use
| whatever providers you want and build a deployment can cost less,
| gives you more control over your data, while being agile enough
| to make changes when the team needs something new or different.
|
| I am excited for the next 10 years of progress and I'd expect we
| are going to see more companies self-hosting their deployments on
| bare metal.
| icedchai wrote:
| I've seen companies host a ton of tiny web sites, each in their
| own AWS account, replicating the same infrastructure N times.
| Tons of overhead. Total costs is _many_ times what it would
| cost to host on a few mid range servers in a colo. But, it 's
| "secure" and "scalable". Actual utilization is single digit
| requests/second, summed across all the sites, on a good day.
| jdoss wrote:
| The problem is every company wants to have Google level usage
| so they plan for it and it never happens. This leaves them
| with an over engineered solution that costs an insane amount
| of money. The cloud providers continue feed our industry that
| FUD so companies feel using their services is the best and
| only option.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| When I switched from colo and managed datacenter services to
| AWS in its early days, I saved a ton of money. But all of that
| hardware was much more expensive back then, and the quality of
| OSS products wasn't quite as good, and all kinds of other
| temporal realities were at play.
|
| Now, it's flipped. Hardware is pretty cheap. There are high
| quality OSS products that have easy-to-manage, native HA
| capabilities. It's no longer impractical to operate a
| production-ready deployment for a few hundred dollars.
|
| I guess the early cloud folks saw this coming, and now they're
| reaping the rewards.
| briffle wrote:
| we are still way cheaper than before at a previous company.
|
| No need to worry about maintaining/monitoring HVAC (plus
| emergency AC systems) generators, security systems, water
| intrusion alarms, fire suppression, backhaul links..
|
| Secondary site for DR that has duplicates of everything else.
|
| Firewalls that can handle the actual IPSec traffic on those
| backhaul links. (large Junipers are not cheap)
|
| Crazy lead times on new systems (months?!), and needing to
| size everything to fit our peak load. (we have some machines
| that add 12x more CPU to the database servers, run their
| reports in an hour, then remove all those extra CPU's now.)
| jdoss wrote:
| It sounds like your workloads need that kind of flexibility
| and using a cloud provider makes total sense. My point is a
| lot of deployments most likely don't have those
| requirements (and never will) and there are way more cost
| effective means run them.
| jdoss wrote:
| For sure. I was at a company in the mid 2000s and we had 50+
| racks of servers and managing those back in the day was a
| very big lift. If we had the tooling we do now back then, we
| could have done it with a fraction of the cost. When I told
| some of my old coworkers I was going to get my own rack two
| years ago, there were some comments that I am a glutton for
| pain and suffering. Overall, it's been a great experience and
| cost savings on my end. I couldn't afford to run my workloads
| on any cloud provider.
|
| I also understand that I have a skill set that enables me to
| take advantage of running my own hardware, but with the
| advancements in tooling and cheaper hardware costs I believe
| the folks that don't have these skills have a better chance
| of doing the same. I am hopeful that datacenter providers
| will shift their business models in the future to enable
| easier access to getting space, power and bandwidth. That
| would help enable smaller teams to run their own hardware.
| The network/bandwidth part has gotten better. Almost all of
| the major datacenter providers offer some sort of software
| defined network service so you can get cheaper bandwidth and
| IP space than from the cloud providers. It is still more
| expensive in the long run than getting a bandwidth provider
| yourself. IPv4 space is still expensive but you can lease
| blocks pretty easily too.
| gfna wrote:
| Regarding control of data, the strangest diacussions i have had
| is related to the customers being in control of the keys used to
| encrypt the data. For some reason it seems like using customer
| managed keys, or even customer managed hsm keys in the cloud is
| enough to keep the lawyers happy and all compliance in check. Of
| course anyone who has a basic understanding of key encryption and
| data encryption keys will know that the actual keys used to
| decrypt the data will be available at the cloud provider. So in
| the end it all comes down to, do the customers trust the cloud
| service provider
| api wrote:
| It blows me away that this even needs to be said. You have
| precisely zero control over anything in the cloud, ever. Your
| provider is free to lie to you, scan or monetize your data, use
| anything you "own" to make competing products, etc. and the only
| protection you have is a thin ToS that likely mandates
| arbitration if it gives you any rights whatsoever.
|
| Most B2C cloud ToS documents reserve all rights to the provider.
| You own nothing and control nothing, peon.
|
| B2B can be better but it's still pretty meaningless unless you
| have negotiated a specific side document or contract. That'll
| never happen unless you are a big spender. If you aren't a high
| roller there's numerous cases of cloud and SaaS providers
| destroying businesses by randomly changing things, locking
| accounts for no reason, etc. There is nothing you can do to
| compel them to care.
|
| There is a reason for all this though. The market's "revealed
| preference" is that people hate system administration so much
| they will trade all rights, all freedom, all privacy, and
| control/ownership of their own data as well as pay rent forever
| with zero leverage to control cost increases to avoid dealing
| with it.
|
| The market has written cloud and SaaS an almost literal blank
| check in exchange for them taking on the hateful burden of system
| administration and IT.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-29 23:02 UTC)