A CLOUDY FUTURE by Michael S. Malone
If you own a T-Mobile/Microsoft Sidekick smartphone I don’t have to tell you this. But if you are among the millions who don’t: on October 1st literally every user of the Sidekick data service lost the private personal records – emails, notes, calendar entries, contacts, etc. — they had stored on the system.
Initially, it was believed that information was now lost forever. The official statement from Microsoft/Danger (the latter being the company that builds the Sidekick) and T-Mobile is that the data “almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.” Then, Thursday, Microsoft announced that it had managed to recover ‘most’ of the lost data.
Needless to say, the lawsuits have already begun.
Exactly how this happened is still a matter of dispute. One rumor is that Microsoft hired its fellow electronics giant Hitachi to upgrade its Storage Area Network . . .and that something went wrong. According to this story, in the resulting meltdown it was discovered that Microsoft had created no independent back-up files of all of this data. Another rumor had it as a quickly covered-up case of industrial sabotage.
Still a third rumor argued that this was the scenario Microsoft wanted all along – that it bought Danger a year ago for its roster of talent and intellectual property and didn’t really give a damn about the Sidekick . . .indeed, saw it as a nuisance. And what better way to retire the product quickly than to break the heart of every one of its loyal users in one fell swoop.
Microsoft publicly blamed a “system failure in the core database and back-up.”
The vehemence and paranoia of some of these rumors only underscored what was the single unassailable truth about this episode: that the Sidekick’s one million users had a deep emotional (and often financial) investment in the device . . .and that loyalty had been betrayed.
T-Mobile tried to assuage all of those hurt feelings by offering users, by way of apology, a $100 gift card and one month’s free data service. As you can imagine, that only made many users even more angry. A hundred bucks? For the hours it will take to reconstruct a lost contact list and full appointment book? A month’s free service? For that last photo of grandma in the hospital – now lost forever?
My friend Scott Budman, the veteran tech reporter for KNTV television in San Jose and the “TechNow” television series (and fellow Edgelings contributor), has just written an interesting analysis of the Sidekick debacle (see home page). In it he suggests that, ultimately, this is a case of misplaced trust in the reliability of far-off servers operating in that imprecise, ineffable reality of “the Cloud”:
“Hardly a day goes by where I don’t get a pitch for something new involving ‘The Cloud,’” he writes. “And, really, in a rough economy, what could be softer than a cloud? The banks have let you down, your house has crumbled in value, your CDs have all-but stopped paying interest. But the Cloud? It’s tech-friendly, safe, and always there to protect your personal data. . .except when it’s not.”
In other words, and I think Budman is right on this, we have a dangerous gap between consumers’ expectations and what the supplier believes it is obliged to deliver. In this case, Sidekick users expected the data they put on their devices to send to some safe place in the computing cloud where it would always be protected as part of the contract with Microsoft and T-Mobile. Apparently, those two companies thought differently; that their job was to provide the highest quality product and service possible, and to make a good effort to keep customer data secure – and effort that, it seems, did not include creating redundancies and back-up files.
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This is actually the level of service that most Microsoft customers are accustomed to. It would be a major disappointment to people with reasonable expectations – but expectations for MS are so low now, it is improbable that they can further disappoint. I have trouble understanding why anyone would entrust MS with their sensitive personal data – particularly without keeping a backup. There is no excuse for this from a company with such massive resources – somebody screwed up big time.
On the flip side, Apple shares might be a good buy….
Peace.
DS
1973-
My computer instructor held up a large 5 inch floppy disk and said “this disk holds 237 KB enough to store a King James bible,
and if you don’t make backups you will fail my class.”
2009-
I now own a 1/2 inch usb backup device that holds 16 gigabytes probably could store all the books in the universe.
The first thing Microsoft Sidekick lawsuit lawyers and their judge will ask you-
“why didn’t you backup your data?”
ok +1 for Mike.
We may never know about the “why” part,but as a tech-geek I want to know how this
happened. Trust IS important in the customer service area, but to expect MS not to
fail? It is like they never heard of raid-5. A case of “Do as I say,not as I do”?
Laptop,netbook,phone-PDA,mobile computing is still in the “Gee-Whiz” era.
Screens:too small Computing:too weak Back-up:No raid
Just to disclose:
I run XP for one reason, that I work with HD video and use a widget that allows me
to write to D-VHS. So,other than some special video work,and some games,I might be
running Unix or Linux etc…
Heck, even my old and still used moto razr has USB that I could back-up…sort-of.
In the end,it comes down to:It’s your data,you back it up.
Cloud computing was a concept re-invented by Steve McNealy of Sun Microsystems as an alternative to the PC based computer concept because he wanted to sell “smart’ terminals. I say re-invented because this is nothing more then bringing the IBM time-sharing concept into the personal computing age. Remember the slogan “the Net is the computer?” Well, it’s not. The computer is the computer and if you want to secure your data and applications use your device and not the network cloud. I agree with SteveoftheNorth. It’s your data, your applications, you take the responsibility. Don’t rely on someone else for your ability to compute and work on the net. Cloud computing is socialist computing. Like all socialist institutions it will fail you in the end.
Anything created by man is going to fail. It is inevitable. All those users need to get their heads out of a certain orifice and take responsibility. If you don’t take matters into your own hands and back up your own data, you are going to get burned. All the electronic advancements are great, but paper still doesn’t crash. So backup your own data, even if it is on paper. Sure it will be a pain to put all that info back in, but better a small nuisance than a major headache. And guess what, you would have saved yourself the pain by not relying on others to do what you can do for yourself.
Some of us have always been suspicious of “cloud computing”.
It takes power away from individuals, and gives it to companies and governments. I’ll manage my own data, thanks.
How long is it going to take for someone to declare that this would have been prevented if the government had taken charge of a free for all (a.k.a tax payer funded) cloud?
If you trust some cloudy entity to be the ultimate custodian of all your intellectual property, how far are you, really, from trusting your destiny to the government?
I’m just amazed that there is some truth in this statement: “We assume that information is safe – from hackers, from data miners and bad guys, from the government, and from erasure.” On what basis would a rational person feel their information was safe?
From hackers? To paraphrase Willie Horton, “You hack data centers because that is where the money is”
From data miners? Follow the money and the money comes from exploiting your resources. The data service providers do not provide safe deposit boxes, they just let you pile your valuables on the safe floor with everybody else.
From the government? Your data is in the control of a third party who can consent to a search. They will consent without warrant too since the threat will be a search warrant that takes down the whole data center while the investigators take their good time perusing it.
This has always been true. What is truly confusing is why people continue to support devices and services that do not provide a way for the user to back up to their local or third party storage and restore their data to the service and device when they desire.
BTW, those backups everyone wants, well that means that you cannot ever truly remove your data from the service and it will always and forever be vulnerable to government search, data mining and hacker theft.
Funny, my little black note book with contact information scrawled in pencil (because water makes ink run) still works just great and I don’t have to depend upon some lying company. And that pic of grandma? Well, I printed that out on good paper, thanks.
This articles basic assumptions are mind-boggling naive. I’ve been scanning, recording and backing up since data was stored on my TRS-80 cassette recorder. Fast forward to present day and my family syncs general family files to 4 computers and an appended DVD backup set, which has a backup. If your information is important, learn to treat it as such. Hell I treat pictures of my dead pets with more respect it seems, than some sidekick users treat the information critical to their daily lives.
You really never need a Backup ….. Until you Need it B A D
Backup: v. To Compound Errors, while merely attempting to perpetuate them.
The real scandal is that this is moronic, and Microsoft should know better. There are countless, public-domain, secure methods of distributing data so that multiple device (and even site) failures cannot destroy information.
Think of it as RAID writ large. The effing cloud is SUPPOSED to spread data over multiple sites, using spreading and encryption methods that have been known for decades.
NOT doing it this way is the scandal. The customer has a right to simple competence, and Microsoft/Danger showed themselves to be either utter fools or frauds. “Our disc failed” isn’t an acceptable answer anymore.
Great comments, but some seem to be a bit cloudy on names:
It’s SCOTT McNealy and Willie SUTTON.
I use “the cloud” both for business and pleasure.
At home, I use Shutterfly to manage and share my photos, and Yahoo for my email. However, I backup my photos on an external harddrive and download my email regularly.
At work, we’ve been using the Amazon cloud for our projects. It’s far cheaper ($5000 vs $25000 per month) than physical servers in a data center and automatically replicated and backed up.
I trust Amazon because they clearly have extensive experience managing very large collections of data. They also know that if data integrity or security were compromising, it would ruin their reputation and cost them money.
Companies that want to stay in business take the trust their customers have in them seriously.
That said, everyone, from companies to individuals, have the responsibility to make backups. Every software program tells you to do so. Inexpensive devices tell you to do so and provide the software to do the backups.
As a consultant, it does still amaze me to have clients who haven’t regularly backed up their data and put their code in source control. It’s part of IT 101. For a company like Microsoft to not ensure the safety of customer data should be the death of them.
What? I thought all of us were micro-chipped by now? My data is all up here *taps on right side of head*.
Huh?
I’m the only ONE???????
Amazing.
Two things stand out – one is that people think that online services are like banks, what I put in I can get out again, its insured against loss, no one but me can use it.
The other thing is that people think that this is an exclusive failing of Microsoft. I would hasten to remind people of the whole Mobileme fiasco when Apple introduced their new email system, which promptly bit the wax tadpole and lost millions of users’ data.
What most people don’t understand about backing up large amounts of data is that it’s hard to ensure the backups are good. Generally the volumes of data means that you need to sample the backed up data here and there in order to validate the backup. Checking the entire backup can take longer than backing up the data in the first place.
Now, there are ways to do this for every bit of data you backup, but truth is its hard, expensive and this is not important data. Validating all data ina backup is usually reserved for very important data. Not your Sidekick contacts.
“Cloud” computing and data storage, like similar high-tech, lean-and-mean solutions, works well, inexpensively, and efficiently. Until it fails spectacularly and with horrifying consequences.
Those who do not back up their data deserve to lose it.
JKB: That’s Willie Sutton, not Willie Horton, you racist. Racist, I say!
Some joyless nits to pick:
Scott McNealy, and
Willie Sutton.
Mike, you are correct, sir.
#5 says, `Cloud computing is socialist computing. Like all socialist institutions it will fail you in the end`.
Great analogy!! Couldn`t say it any better. This reminds me of those TV advertised security companies that people pay to call 911 for them during an emergency. Is it really that hard to push 3 numbers on a keypad?
Back up your important data and don`t rely on someone else.
By the way, BHO will fail for the same reason.
Backup….to your other computers,to your friends computer(if you trust them)on a disc,to USB/flash,to a remote server,did I miss any?Don,t do any 1 of these,Do Them All!
Bob
P.S. did I say,Backup?
Every backup scheme I have ever employed — going back to my Mac SE — has failed me when my hard drive crashed and I actually needed it.
Why should the Cloud be any different?
@floppys: it is my understanding that sidekick users had no facility for local backups: no software that would sync with the thing or make it easy to export your data.
That alone would have invalidated that device for me, if I had actually wanted one.
I don’t know if this damages cloud computing as much as MICROSOFT cloud computing (Azure). _Real_ clouds have SLAs and are explicit in whether or not (or how) they guarantee availability and backups.
(I’m currently in the process of planning an expansion of a website from hosting to cloud, and trust me, these questions are being asked by folks that have taken Enterprise Server 101, which apparently Microsoft people decided to skip)..
If you can’t figure out to keep your stuff backed up, you shouldn’t be using a computer.
tdiinva… “(cloud computing) is nothing more then bringing the IBM time-sharing concept into the personal computing age”
Agree that cloud computing is basically a modernization of time-sharing…but IBM was by no means the creator of time-sharing and in fact was a laggard. The innovators were MIT, Dartmouth College, and GE, to mention a few.
Amplifying Dr. Kenneth’s observation: I don’t know if this damages cloud computing as much as the use of the word “Cloud” to describe it. Cloud computing at one time had a quite specific meaning which has been completely obscured through misapplication, poor marketing and journalism, and the like. One could point out that what MS/Danger was doing wasn’t cloud computing at all, rather it was just storing customer data on a single server. Remote storage isn’t cloud computing, especially when your provider is too lame to provide redundancy. Poor service is poor service, regardless of how it’s provided.
But really that doesn’t matter any more. “Cloud” has come to mean anything that’s done over the Internet; so be it. Let the term “cloud” die an embarrassing death if it wants to.
Computing over the Internet is a fact of life now, regardless — and vendors had better get with the program.
Practically all companies have mandatory backup policies. The benefit/cost ratio is extremely high. Microsoft probably has very reliable backups for their internal files. They just don’t care about user data, because Microsoft has never cared about users. It’s like the line from Animal House: “You f***ed up — you trusted us.”
The first thing Microsoft Sidekick lawsuit lawyers … will ask you: “why didn’t you backup your data?”
The answer, of course, is: “Because Microsoft promised they’d do it.”
Which is why the responsible parties are releasing a cloud of $100 bills and hoping the storm blows past.
Joe:
So what would you call the Apple MobileMe fiasco when then lost millions of user’s email, account data and couldn’t seem to route mail for months? Another Ballmer “secret project”?
@16. Koblog:
Every backup scheme I have ever employed — going back to my Mac SE — has failed me when my hard drive crashed and I actually needed it.
A sure sign you are not doing it rite. Backup is not a scheme – it is a religion. You must practice to be saved.
Peace.
DS
Some of you may not have a concept of the amount of data we’re talking about here. If they had a SAN fail and physically destroy enough drives to trash the LUNs, there’s little they can do. The SAN *is* the backup. It’s a series of massive devices hosting a few dozen terabytes or more, with a 24/7/365 uptime requirement and practically no way to ‘back up’ the data. It’s not like somebody forgot to change the tape, folks – this is a different class of data management altogether.
The only way to ‘back up’ this stuff is to build another identical setup somewhere else and run a constant mirroring job that keeps the two in sync. This is, of course, what they should have done. The problem is that mirrors easily go out of sync and break apart, and I can easily see how the whole debacle might have unfolded. In fact I *have* seen it while working the queues at Dell’s Platinum SAN support center.
Yeah, MS should have been more careful, but I suspect they assumed the SAN was reliable… after all, that’s the whole point of buying one. There are about eleven layers of redundancy in the things – they shouldn’t fail catastrophically. They’re designed to keep going through multiple failures of disk, backplane, fiber cable, processor, RAM, switch, and so on.
Yet sometimes they do. That’s what disaster planning is for! I bet their risk assessments look a little different now…
This is sort of like flying vs. driving except it’s cloud data storage vs. local data storage. Flying is much, much safer than driving but when flying goes wrong it is morbidly spectacular and a large number of people are impacted all at once–whereas car crashes are common and only a few people are impacted at once. Regardless, statistically, any one individual is many times safer in an airplane than in a car. Similarly, compare your data security when it’s stored on a cloud vs. stored on your own device. Many, many individual devices crash all the time. I don’t know anyone (myself included) who has not suffered a computer crash at one point and lost something important (if not everything). Statistically, I’d be willing to wager the cloud is much, much safer than your own individual device, which is likely to fail at some point and be imperfectly backed up. It’s just that when cloud data is destroyed it is morbidly spectacular and many people are impacted all at once…. It’s logic vs. emotion-the (relatively safe) cloud/airplane is terrifying but the (relatively lethal) individual device/car feels comfortable and secure…
From #3: The first thing Microsoft Sidekick lawsuit lawyers and their judge will ask you-
“why didn’t you backup your data?”
Because, your Honor, it wouldn’t let me.
There was no way to back up your data from a Sidekick. There was no local sync, and while a program sold by T-Mobile would let you connect the phone to your PC, it was widely laughed at as useless.
The whole POINT of the Sidekick was that you didn’t need a local backup because the Cloud would backup everything. If you lost your Sidekick, if it died, whatever, you’d get a new one and in one easy step the Cloud would re-load all your data.
Unless the Cloud, of course, is hosed.
Contrast this to the iPhone: backup on the iPhone is local (via iTunes to your Mac or PC), and while there is a Cloud (via MobileMe, for example), there is no backup expectation from the Cloud — it’s your local computer.
Pluses and minuses to both approaches, of course, but MS/Danger just illustrated the danger of trusting the Cloud with everything.
ps… which by no means excuses MS… Just like an airline is not excused for a crash due to its negligence, even if flying is safer, broadly speaking. I’m just talking about where your data is likely to be most safe from crashes. I store things in a cloud environment and locally.
Policies about backups do *not* matter when it is your data lost. “oh well, I guess the policy wasn’t followed. Sue us.”
To make this story about Microsoft is really narrow minded. Just save it.
What happens when your business or key personal assets are dependent on Data? You really are the only one you can trust with your most important data. Ignore the hype, be suspicious of the cloud.
20. David S,
You need to backup and punt. You’re a midget pretending to be wikipedia/google/mental-midget-with-a-big-stick smart.
Is there a sticky-note on your head? Yes. There is.
It reads in your tainted mirror:
tish kcus I.
*wee tear*
Why do you think it’s called cloud computing? Computing for those whose heads are in the clouds, whose thoughts are cloudy. In HK slang, if you don’t think straight, you are living on a cloud. In American translation, you are a moron.
What fool, people asked, would entrust their vital medical records to the Fed, where they would be lost or tampered with?
My dentist told me once, “You don’t have to brush all your teeth, just the ones you want to keep”.
Substitute data for teeth and backup for brush and it’s still true.
Like SteveOfTheNorth said, it’s your data — back it up. Relying on the “Cloud” (whatever that is) is nuts.
@21. Delia:
You need to backup and punt. You’re a midget pretending to be wikipedia/google/mental-midget-with-a-big-stick smart.
Thanks, Delia. I’m so glad you got it! That’s exactly what I was shooting for.
Is there a sticky-note on your head? Yes. There is.
Next time you stick something on my head, could you spell it correctly? Your depravity is much more entertaining when it is literate. Thanks!
Peace.
DS
“On the flip side, Apple shares might be a good buy…”
Only after Apple’s OS are forced open and Jobs isn’t in charge.
I want to be able to buy any app anyone feels the need to write.
Gates isn’t half the monster Jobs is.
Every day we place more and more of our trust in computing Clouds – that is, we shift an ever-greater fraction of our personal information from stand-alone personal devices to unknown servers off in some distant data center.
Thanks, Evil Pundit #7. No, we don’t; or at least, I don’t. Call me a Neanderthal, but I don’t completely trust any device-dependent storage media.
Yes, I realize that a data disc is a device. But… data on a disc is yours, and you can do anything with it you want, on any machine that will read it.
#5: Great analogy!
Not to take anything away from the backup advocates here, but after having worked in the industry, I remind you that ‘backups always work – it’s the restore that’s the problem’. Most customers I had (I worked for a certain TLA company, and business partners) had great backup plans, and executed them. But they never tried a restore…and then when they needed to, they found the problems in their backup scheme.
And with today’s storage, companies keep synchronous copies of data in geographically dispersed centers – imagine if, oh, say Amazon lost their data. How much business would they lose during the (successful) restore period? Why didn’t Mickeysoft et all have a synchronous backup elsewhere? Cost & stupidity.
Another old saying: there are two kids of hard disks: those that have failed, and those that will.
Can I say that the first mistake everybody is making it putting your life on a phone? Can’t find a paper and pen to write down dates and addresses and numbers?? Really?
Have we gotten so tech crazy this is a lawsuit driving event?
“You lost my fab five numbers so I’m going to sue?”
Take a step back, find a pencil or pen, write it down somewhere and learn to back it up in another system.
It is a risk you take when you allow something else to harbor your life. Your fault if it breaks. It is like being a passenger on the Hindenburg and being surprised when it burned up. Had you taken a second to think about it, you allowed yourself to be suspended in a box under a bag filled with 200,000 square meters of highly flammable hydrogen. It’s a “duh!” moment at best.
Just saying…
“literally every user of the Sidekick data service lost the private personal records – emails, notes, calendar entries, contacts, etc. — they had stored on the system.
-Women and minorities hit worst!
David S.,
You can’t read backwards?
LOL
You suck hsit.
There. [in case you're too retarded to 'get it']:
http://www.all-acronyms.com/HSIT
It’s a play on tech words.
Doh boy.
If you really want to know what was going on in this T-Mobile/Microsoft cloud computing problem, you should read this story at this link.
(http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/15/microsofts-pinkdanger-backup-problem-blamed-on-roz-ho/#more-3877)
It wasn’t a failure of cloud computing concept it was just the normal Microsoft management SNAFU.
53. Neal,
“normal Microsoft management” is a misnomer wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in an oxymoron.
Just sayin’.
“Fifteen years ago, when Oracle’s Larry Ellison first proposed the idea of ‘net’ computers – i.e., cheap laptops that would use the Web for both software applications and data storage – he was met with derision. What fool, people asked, would entrust their vital medical records and family photographs to the Internet, where they might be lost or tampered with?
These days, it seems, we are all that fool. What, after all, is a Blackberry – or a Sidekick – but one of Ellison’s net computers with, thanks to Moore’s Law, a little bit more processing power? Yet, somehow, during those intervening years – perhaps merely through habituation – we’ve lost our fears about the risks associated with the Cloud. Now that we’re fully committed, it appears that we have made a mistake”
Not all of us, I’ve never bought into the ‘cloud’ concept precisely because of the inherent insecurity of it, and the reasons extensively covered in the above thread. Oh, I have a few bits and pieces on it, that I don’t really care about the privacy or reliability of, but I keep my important stuff on my own hard disks and backups, and some of it I back up on paper where that seems prudent.
But the real problem, the reason people are willing to trust ‘the cloud’ is precisely that most users of computers, cell phones, etc, are _not_ tech-savvy. At all. It’s a magical black box and they don’t have the slightest clue how it works, not even a layman’s approximate grasp of the concepts. This is _especially_ true of a ot of young people who grew up with these services and devices and just ‘take them for granted’.
When these individuals (who aren’t stupid, just unaware) put some given piece of data into their phone or PDA or computer, they don’t know and don’t care whether it’s stored in an internal hard disk, a flash memory or other solid-state equivalent, as melted spots on a CD or DVD, or stored in some server farm in California or Inner Mongolia. All they know or care about is that when they want the data it appears on the screen of the device in their hand.
As such, they don’t have the slightest idea of why it’s more or less secure to store data on a hard drive, a flash memory, or in the cloud, or whether there is legal difference between data on your hard drive or data on BigCo.’s server farm in France. They just know they put the data in their neat black box and it comes out when they want it to.
(Likewise, the lack of any tech savvy is why so many people fail to realize that the data you ‘erased’ from your hard drive is _still there_ for people with the right tools, or why any information you put on the Internet is no longer yours to control, regardless of what rights you _think_ you have.)
What’s the solution? Good question…
“INTERNET security”
Another oxymoron.
lol
No such thing as internet ‘security’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling
I wanted to further explain ‘rickrolling’ because wiki does not fully explain the REAL reason behind the meme.
I figure this is as good as any place to explain this meme.
You see, Rick Astley sounded ‘black’ on the radio. Everyone who heard his music thought he was some soulful black man. When his video came out on MTV…people were SHOCKED that it was a pasty faced white dude with freckles and red hair. LMFAO!
So, now you know the REAL meaning of being ‘rickrolled’.
heh
There aint no free lunch. Does every generation have to learn that? These days, the generations last as long as the current most-popular fad.