Thursday, February 23, 2012

Facebook, Cloud-fully edgy?...


     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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