Miasma computing

The metaphor of “the cloud” is a seductive one, but it’s also dangerous. It not only suggests that our new utility-computing system is detached from the physical (and political) realities of our planet, but it also lends to that system an empyrean glow. The metaphor sustains and extends the old idealistic belief in “cyberspace” as a separate, more perfect realm in which the boundaries and constraints of the real world are erased.

Bill Thompson raises a warning flag:

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 every network interaction connects two locations in the real world … 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.

Now there’s a metaphor. I’m guessing, though, that the marketers aren’t going to allow “miasma computing” into our vocabulary. It’s kind of a downer.

Thompson goes on to explain how governments are coming to realize that data storage and transport raise difficult political issues. National sovereignty is not quite so diffuse as a cloud. Canada, he notes, reportedly “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.”

This is not just a US issue, of course, although attention has focused on the US because that it where most of the cloud data centres can be found. It applies just as much to the UK, where the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will allow the police or secret services to demand access to databases and servers. And other countries may lack even the thin veneer of democratic oversight that the USA and UK offer to the surveillance activities of their intelligence agencies.

Right before the manuscript of The Big Switch was shipped off to the printer (“manuscript” and “shipped off” are being used metaphorically here), I made one last edit, adding a paragraph about France’s decision to ban government ministers from using Blackberrys since the messages sent by the popular devices are routinely stored on servers sitting in data centers in the US and the UK. “The risks of interception are real,” a French intelligence official explained at the time.

The metaphor of “the cloud” seems to have been derived from those schematic drawings of corporate computing systems that use stylized images of clouds to represent the Internet – that vast, ill-defined digital mass that lies beyond the firewall. Those drawings always reminded me of the ancient maps of the known world, the edges of which were marked with the legend “Beyond Here There Be Dragons.”

The dragons are stirring.

19 thoughts on “Miasma computing

  1. RichM

    I recall that data retention laws were one of the motivations for Amazon when it extended S3 services to its European data centers. Last year Iron Mountain built a new data center in Toronto to specifically address the Canadian restrictions on US hosting for critical data.

    Cloud builders obviously need to consider jurisdiction issues in where they build their data centers, as it could restrict what kind of customers and apps they can host. Will we wind up with major SaaS providers having country-specific clouds?

  2. Ivo Quartiroli

    The roots of Western technology come from the Christian tradition, as David F. Noble documented in “The Religion of Technology”. Adding to this the separation between the “higher” world of the mind and the “lower” world of the body and of the senses, the metaphor of “the cloud” is the understandlable apotheosis of our historical trend toward being more and more detached from the ground. The human body itself is beconing a matter of digitalization and DNA algorithms. The cloud will live beyond our problematic environment, will “save” us from oblivion. The cloud is a place closer to God. We can go on spoiling the planet. I wrote about this in January on http://www.indranet.org/heavenly-technology/

  3. Andrew Doble

    What we are seeing here is something very mundane. It is called a service level agreement and applies if the computing service you are using is hosted on a machine in a data center or somewhere in the “cloud” (which as you point out, is really the same thing). The SLA you are referring to is the framework of agreements regarding access to the data (i.e. the particular laws of the country where the data is hosted). Others may be interested in other SLAs such as the availability of the service. The outcome is that SaaS providers will probably provide differentiated SLAs to different customers from different data centers – either virtual or real – and attach an appropriate price tag to them.

  4. Anonymous

    A couple of years ago I wrote:

    My generation draws the Internet as a cloud that connects everyone; the younger generation experiences it as oxygen that supports their digital lives. The old generation sees this as a poisonous gas that has leaked out of their pipes, and they want to seal it up again.

    Are you moving into the third camp there?

  5. alan

    Interesting post and I enjoyed discovering a new word. As terrible as a miasmic cloud might be, I would suggest that the metaphor is stretched about as tight as shrink wrap.

    The statement, “even the thin veneer of democratic oversight” is as understated as the above metaphor is stretched, which does bring unintentional balance to the piece!

    “I don’t expect a campaign of civil disobedience from the big hosting providers.”

    Why would one not expect some civil disobedience? Has a defeatist attitude penetrated so deeply to the core that those who should be marking the status of the encroachment have lost track?

    Does anyone know where the term “cloud computing originated?

    Cheers, Alan

  6. fishtoprecords

    A lot of this new “cloud computing” and worries about national security, privacy, etc. are old news. The Cypherpunks wrote about it in the early 1990s. Bruce Sterling wrote several ‘cyberpunk’ sci-fi novels about data havens.

    The only changes are that:

    1) the term is now “cloud computing”; and

    2) it getting mass coverage.

  7. daikonsensei

    I’m really interested in the effect of the “cloud” on the cloud of greenhouse emissions.. especially with energy prices going way high. I remember you posted an article about the emissions related to second life avatars. I wonder if energy cost will soon begin to have a bigger impact on internet usage..

  8. Greg Quinn

    I predict a boom in off-shore data centres. Service providers hosting data, in locations subject to either US or UK jurisdictions may find themselves at a commercial disadvantage. How about Swiss data centres or Cayman Island ones?

  9. Thomas

    That’s been happening for a while. RSync (good company) have a datacentre in Switzerland. Online casinos do good business in China, and obviously can’t put their servers there. And there are various “bullet-proof” (meaning the provider will try to keep the site unblocked and untraced) hosting services for the seedier side of eCommerce.

    (My email might be going offshore… It’s just the though of the government loosing the DVDs with everyone’s harvested mail!)

  10. Greg Quinn

    Maybe these off-shore data centres won’t have a very long life.

    You don’t know which power station generated the electricity that powers your home or business. In the cloud computing model, data storage and location will eventually become disconnected. It will be soon be impossible to say exactly where your data is physically located.

  11. Linuxguru1968

    >> Canada … has a policy of not allowing

    >> public sector IT projects to use US-based

    >> hosting services….

    Kind of funny. Back in the day, the paranoid lunatic fringe was circulating rumors that NetZero was placed in Canada by the CIA(which is legally prohibited from operating INSIDE the US) so it could legally spy on the communications of US Citizens. LOL.

  12. Thomas

    I think offshore hosting will be with us for a long time. Banking is probably a better metaphor for internet than the power grid. (You don’t care if your power grid is connected to the next town over, let alone the world.) A network is inherently pointless if it does not connect its customers.

    A Visa card will work almost anywhere in the world. (A UK HSBC card will open a self-service branch door in Shanghai – I have seen this!) But the politics over how that happens and who sees what data :-o

  13. Ade McCormack

    Whilst Miasma Computing has a certain high tech marketing-friendly feel to it, I agree that it is unlikely to stick. Cloud computing has an innocence about it that as suggested could lull people into a false sense of security. Given the opaqueness of what is processed where, plus the dark figures that loom in the shadows (school-centric cyber bullies through to money siphoning crackers), I suggest Mist computing.

  14. fishtoprecords

    >>”In the cloud computing model, data storage and location will eventually become disconnected. It will be soon be impossible to say exactly where your data is physically located.”

    This is exactly the Cypherpunk data havens. First, you don’t know where it is physically, and if its mirrored to many locations around the planet, it may become impossible to know “where” it is. Second, if you can’t say where it is, what legal authority can regulate it?

    When you use strong crypto to keep even National Security grade agencies from reading your data, how can the agencies obtain a warrent?

    I expect that the “miasma” term won’t get picked up. Cloud is much better than data haven. But no matter the label, the concept is essentially the same.

  15. SteveCaughey

    I agree with Andrew Doble’s comment. The ability to ensure data security (to a sufficient degree depending on the user’s requirements) is one of the very many things which cloud users will need before THE cloud is practical. As I’ve discussed in (my blog) this won’t start with external clouds such as EC2, but with local clouds (department or enterprise-based) that support policy (visible to its users) and specific service agreements for issues (of direct relevance to its users) that are not covered by policy. I think these clouds ‘in the small’ will over time connect up to other clouds (perhaps in other departments within the enterprise, or other enterprises in the supply chain, and ultimately to external clouds) and there will be service agreements between those clouds. Local clouds will be the ‘on-ramp’ to THE cloud. The growing complexity will be invisible to the cloud user who will continue to be concerned only that the cloud supports his service agreements and local policy.

    Arjuna has built a technology demonstrator, (Agility), which supports this federated approach.

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