Bill Thompson, argues that the skies are becoming dark for cloud computing, and makes several assertions why this is so. In his article on BBC News, the point that rings truest to me is the possibility of the need of information and the impossibility of access due to any of a hundred different reasons.

Infrastructure overload is a major reason the system just might fail on a regular basis. All over the world, there are service providers fully in maximum whine mode,  warning that the pipes will not allow much more, yet it can be shown, in a majority of situations the same providers chose to reap extraordinary profits during the time when everyone was getting on the internet bandwagon, and refused to put the requisite amounts of money back into their businesses. This is one of the reasons that they all cry over the use of bit torrents – yet it is the fact that they refused to make the pipes bigger that brought bit torrent to the forefront of their problems.

The open source community is probably blameworthy as well. That won’t be a popular opinion, but it happens to be true. How much of the current traffic is generated by many people, trying to find something better, downloading the three latest distributions of Linux (DVD versions, of course) to see which best fits their needs. No one is trying to remove this use, but it does contribute to the traffic.

Spam is another large contributor. How nice it would be to not get 300 messages a day that are junk. The alternative is to use filtration, which then causes a possibility of losing that 1 important piece in 300. Being that we, as humans, are not as efficient as computers, we sometimes forget to check the spam folders before that 1 jewel gets hosed along with all the spam. Spammers count on that. They generate thousands of messages per hour, in hopes that perhaps 1 person per day will respond to the ‘special offer’ just waiting for them.

But I digress.

Mr. Thompson talks about distributed computing -

The approach is growing in popularity, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the many large companies working on ways to attract users to their offerings, with Google Apps, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Amazon S3 all signing up customers as they try to figure out what works and what can turn a profit.

The technical obstacles to making distributed systems work are formidable, and while books like Nick Carr’s The Big Switch talk optimistically about the potential for utility computing to be offered to homes and businesses just like electric power, building robust, reliable and scalable systems around these new models will tax our ingenuity.

It doesn’t sound like all the bugs have been worked out just yet.

As we become more reliant on the cloud any problems will become more severe, as we can see in the irritation that many users feel with Twitter at the moment because of constant outages, dropped messages and general flakiness as the company tries to cope with what was clearly an unanticipated growth in usage.

It would be a lot worse if your spreadsheets or presentations were inaccessible because of problems in the cloud, or rather because of problems with the physical computers or network connections that make cloud computing possible.

Because behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the ‘cloud’ is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and the every network interaction connects two locations in the real world.

It is often useful to conceptualise online activities as cyberspace, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today.

but there are many who don’t bother to think about the intricacies of the implementation – they simply want to use what’s provided, and let someone else worry. This is much of the problem today – with many things, there just aren’t enough worriers.

Next is the talk about the fact that, as much as we would like to think that we are a world becoming smaller, and borderless, through computing, it simply is not so.

In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story.

The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.

Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.

If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else - apart from their lawyer - about it.

The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, more than 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.

Borders exist, wars happen, outages occur, and all of these things can cause you and your necessary data to become separated permanently. No one can guarantee it won’t happen, actually, at least on a small scale the reverse is probably true.

The push towards cloud computing may force us to be more realistic about the boundaries that have always existed. Perhaps it is time for the UN to consider a cyberspace rights treaty that will outline what it’s acceptable to do when other people’s data comes into your jurisdiction.

This could also be a problem, as we all know how the current crop of individuals in charge of the government don’t like ‘takin’ no orders from outsiders’.

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