stevenyoung

Think Online When You’re Offline
Your desktop can be your connection to the Internet on your behalf, downloading, backing up, and securing your home while you’re enjoying life offline in countries around the world. There are about multiple ways to perform the tasks above and several other ways to put your desktop (and Internet connection bill) to creative use. It’s certainly better than letting both computer and connection go idle; that time away from the Internet is reserved for you, not your desktop.

DMSFCA

I'm always curious about what people do for a living when they complain about Dropbox or Amazon AWS not being "secure" and "someone else has my data".

I guess I just keep presentation files and boring stuff on my DropBox, but are people really keeping military secrets and the like where they are concerned that Amazon's AWS service would get compromised and national security at risk?

Or is it just more of a case of having the company sales presentation in draft form (internal use only!) or sales figures? Is there really a legitimate belief that someone inside Amazon's hosting service is going to seek out your data and expose it to competitors? That risk seems incredibly obscure and are you just splitting hairs arguing between 3DES and AES encryption for this kind of stuff?

I mean, I use a full-disk encryption on my laptop and I always backup to an external hard drive before I leave home on a trip, but I think the risk of someone breaking in my house and stealing the data is much higher than someone breaking into a reputable cloud-based hosting service and taking my data or breaking the transport encryption. I guess I also don't work with military secrets and it sounds like some of you do.

When I read some of this I always wonder if there is a certain "fun" or "hobby" in making your environment incredibly secure, and I get that, rather than really worried that someone at Dropbox is going to see your unfinished manuscript of the Great American Novel...

boberonicus

To asses risk, you must determine the magnitude of the potential loss and the probability that the loss will occur. So you can't just say "what's the problem with the cloud?" Let's assume that the chances of your Amazon data being stolen/read/etc. are low. But if you could lose your job or your income due to a security breach, you'd probably wonder if the low risk was worthwhile.

piper28

I work at a research university, and a large number of grants have some pretty explicit requirements for data access. Quite honestly, in general most of the cloud computing licenses are at best grey in whether they're adequate for some of the stuff we store. There's enough money at stake that it's just not worth it.

Obviously there's stuff that it's no big deal to have on services like this, but there's definitely things we don't want on these types of services.

(Sometimes the requirements that some of these places have don't necessarily make a lot of sense either, but even then, we generally have to follow them.)

DMSFCA

You guys make good points I didn't consider - sometimes your clients or customers put down strict requirements on you and the way you store their data or projects of theirs - makes more sense now.

pittpanther

I think you're absolutely correct.

If the data which people on these threads are worried about is really so important and so private, wouldn't your company have rules in place that you shouldn't even be downloading that stuff to your laptops?

I work in the healthcare arena, and have access to some patient health information. It is a fireable offense to download that info to my laptop. Any work I need to perform using that data is to be done on our servers, or preferably on the clients own servers.

cbkcc1

i use LogMeIn Free for Remote
Spideroak for backup/share rooms(dropbox)/sync
Privoxy and Chrome with Hamachi for VPN surfing when needed (http://lifehacker.com/#!5763170/how-...hi-and-privoxy)
you could also use Neorouter with an Android device