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Hey everybody, what do you think about the pro's/con's to cloud computing?
From my perspective, the main con is that they're extremely vulnerable to DDoS attacks. I mean, one person with a 10,000 large botnet could completely stop access to an entire server!

The main con is that the government will be able to spy on everything you do and all of your computing will be controlled by some massive, money hungry corporation. Sounds like a great idea, right?

It sure does. I'm pretty sure the government spies on us all already. I'm not worried, the most exciting stuff I save is lesson plans. Whoever reads them might learn something!

I suppose it also depends on who your government is...

Not trying to get into that whole so and so country is better than the other thing, but it seems here in America the government has been passing laws that are far more strict than in most countries, and these are laws that make everyday activities federal felonies. For example, watching a music video on Youtube uploaded by some random Billy Joe. Watching DVDs on Linux is also a federal felony. Jailbreaking a tablet or a console is a federal felony. So many things that affect really nobody but the overly greedy corporations are illegal and are things that many people do quite frequently. Also, the US government's new found ability to search personal emails without any warrant whatsoever also concerns me.

Basically what I'm saying is that cloud computing would be a massive breach of security, privacy, and would be giving so much control to the corporations. Wanna play a game? Ah, be wise, you might get charged by the billions of instructions executed.

Try not to forget how much money the electronics industry might lose if the need to produce electrical components to do the computations for a personal device goes away. Excuse the sarcasm, that won't affect the economy at all.

One thing that really concerns me about the States is how little privacy you have - it's actually something which is making me think hard about moving there when I graduate. It really gets to me when the average person takes the view that "If you've got nothing to hide, then why should it matter?" - I've not yet been able to successfully explain to them why it's so important. I can almost guarantee that every one in say ten of those people will have had their account details leaked in one of the recent security breaches in the past couple of years (Anonymous, LulzSec etc.).

Anywho, rant aside, I think cloud computing is pretty neat from a consumer standpoint. I personally do not like the loss of control though and appreciate that Dropbox stores all of your files locally as well as in the cloud. I actually use Dropbox for all of my personal files, including my static blog - something which newer accounts unfortunately can't do due to the lack of Public folder!

It's highly possible in the next decade or so that most consumer services (which haven't already) will move to the cloud. There really isn't any reason for the average person to own a desktop computer, laptops and tablets are the future. Desktops will be the sole property of geeks, just like in the 80s.

Cloud infrastructures, due to their nature, are also a lot harder to take down. The frontend load balancers are extremely resilient, and the rest of the network is purely for computation - if one node goes down, another one pops up.