I read an interesting few articles
about Facebook. Big surprise right? Facebook in the news? Well this
time, like many other times, the spotlight is the bad kind.
If you haven't heard about cloud and
edge servers, maybe it's time you have. The idea behind a cloud
server is to store your data so that at any point in time, and from
anywhere, you can access it. Even if you are not on your home
computer where the data is stored originally, you can still access it
while on vacation without having to set up remote desktop connections
and leave your PC running. Many software giants are starting to use
this type of system so that they have more efficient access to their
own data and things you request, and to provide it to the end-user as
a convenience feature. One big name to note is Microsoft. Their
business strategy with Windows 8 and Windows 7.5(Mango for mobile) is shifting towards providing cloud services in
order to streamline all your windows and Microsoft devices to make the user experience more 'edgy'. Pun intended.
Another benefit of using this type of
system, is tying it into an edge server system. An edge server
system provides fail-safes and backups to all of a companies data or
services. Edge servers are what allowed Facebook to thwart the
Anonymous Distributed Denial of Service attack that occurred within
the past few weeks (Jan 2012.) The edge servers provided a detour
for data flow, in that if a few servers went down the other servers
would kick in their services. Edge servers are also good for
regional purposes. Suppose you are in London, you would not want to
wait for a response from a server on the other side of the world to
load your images, would you? This is how the Google Code
Distribution Network (CDN) works, instead of having static script
files, such as the JQuery framework in your web-page, you can use
Google's CDN to link to those script files and they will be provided
to the user regionally. This greatly decreases slow load times of web-pages, and slow web-services, that are mainly caused by
latency issues between you and the server.
Recently, as reported in this article,
Facebook's cloud servers were storing data across many servers. This
redundancy meant fiasco. If you deleted a picture from a FaceBook
profile, the cloud server would have resolved any direct links to it
for a short period of time afterwards (several days reportedly.)
This is bad news. Suppose for example
someone hacked into your account, posted incriminating pictures, and
then sent that picture through e-mail to several people in your
contact list. Even after you regained control of your account and
deleted the picture, all those users would still have a copy of it
sitting in e-mail. What if this was your credit card data, or a bank
statement, or other things that could be used against you financially
or socially.
This is one of the problems I find
with cloud storage. I feel as though we need a new system for cloud
storage. One that can be secure, redundant, but efficient at
tracking your data. I for one cannot disagree with the convenience
of cloud storage and edge servers, they are a very nice thing to have
around. However, I think that if sensitive data gets compromised on
these systems, there is no way of knowing or stopping it, or tracking
that data in order to make the process of destroying it quick and
efficient. This could be personal data 'phished' or 'pharmed' from you
illegally by advertisers, and now all of the sudden it is on 12
different servers, and there is no way of eradicating it. That is a
big issue today with all this data flying around, we need a system to
track the propagation of data that we didn't want tracked in the
first place.
Here is the article that sparked my interest enough to write this blog:
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