Craig Grannell
@craiggrannell@mastodon.social  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

Just saw someone whose Google account was shuttered. They’d been… using Sheets to track movies they’d watched.

A question people should ask themselves, but rarely do: What would you do if, tomorrow, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, and every other cloud provider you use closed your account without warning? Then maybe spend some of today safeguarding against that eventuality.
Jan Henkins
@dotslash@social.underza.net replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@craiggrannell This ties in very neatly with Cory Doctorow's idea of "enshittification" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification). The profundity of the term adds just enough shock value to either make you smile or blink, and then think. It's a big, meaty and actually rather intimidating subject - how can ordinary non-techy Joe Citizen solve this effectively without losing money and/or sanity? How do one get rid of Big Tech and still have a functional experience on the Internet? Very topical in today's age.
Elliot
@elliotblackburn@fosstodon.org replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@craiggrannell this is exactly the scenario I'm concerened about these days. We've moved everything away from google and dropbox. We're now on proton drive which for sure isn't much better, but at least we know they're not making decisions based on the content.

Next step is a NAS in the home, but it's going to take some time to get all the drives.
DrYak
@dryak@mstdn.science replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@craiggrannell We already point users to both repos hosted on GitHub and our University's self-hosted GitLab, so when GH is down (or in case of MicroSoft's Azure closing) we aren't affected.
...and that's the extent to which I depend on megacorps' cloud.
Everything I work with is backed up on our Uni's self-hosted NextCloud and/or my own offsite server.

Google merely serves as a nice collaborative editor.

But the Univetsities' overreliance on Microsoft365 is frightening.
Keith Ammann
@KeithAmmann@dice.camp replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@craiggrannell I'd be pretty OK, since I've spent the last six months trying to disentangle myself from them.

The one thing I'd have trouble with is Joplin, since I use Joplin Cloud to sync my notes on desktop, laptop and phone. I'd also lose some of my iTunes music—the songs with password protection on them—but with the upside that I'd never have to log in upon firing up iTunes again.
Steve Riggins
@steveriggins@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@craiggrannell I recently moved 100% of my documents into iCloud Drive because why not haha and I set up a carbon copy cloner job on the mini to back up cloud storage to my NAS. That causes CCC to download any updated files so it can back them up.

It’s been fantastic having my laptop and mini synced, and also knowing I have a copy elsewhere.

The weakness is if Apple removes all of my files overnight and the job removes them from the NAS, so I have spinning hdd archives as well.
Barry Cook
@bazcook@mas.to replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@craiggrannell - the major point behind a ‘personal computer’ was that a user had a device that was not simply a ‘dumb’ keyboard, relying on a distant mainframe for everything else, including the storage of information. It would seem with the cloud, we’re playing back to the future.
Forget a company closing an account or closing / changing services - let’s not forget the lifespan of some companies. I use cloud for some backup, but all stored locally on many different media.
Barry Cook
@bazcook@mas.to replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@craiggrannell - the major point behind a ‘personal computer’ was that a user had a device that was not simply a ‘dumb’ keyboard, relying on a distant mainframe for everything else, including the storage of information. It would seem with the cloud, we’re playing back to the future.
Forget a company closing an account or closing / changing services - let’s not forget the lifespan of some companies. I use cloud for some backup, but all stored locally on many different media.
SlightlyCyberpunk
@admin@mastodon.slightlycyberpunk.com replied  ·  activity timestamp last week
@craiggrannell @nanu there was also the guy a few years ago who got his account banned for texting his child's doctor. Google reported him to the cops who spent a few months investigating him and confirmed he had not actually done anything wrong. He sent that police report to Google and they still refused to unblock his account. Lost his online data, lost his phone number, lost his internet access...also couldn't access his online banking and other services that used email or SMS for 2FA...

All because some automated system thought that discussing his child's medical condition with his doctor constituted child abuse (and because he had those texts automatically backed up to Google's servers.)

NYT did a pretty massive article on it so seems legit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220823055404/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html