SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Into the cloud?

Will Windows 7 be the last out-of-the-box OS by Microsoft? Quite some observers and insiders say that that might be the case. The future, they say, lies in cloud-computing, with apllications naccessed directly from the web and data of users externally stored in the web as well. Google has focussed on this future trend from the very beginning of it's founding as a company, they say.

Companies storing their internal copany data on external hardware in centres run by Google? Am I the only one thinling this to be a very bad idea? This allows whole new forms of computer spionage. And a major security breach will have consequences that bypass all and everything that can be imagined right now. Plus: Google (or Microsoft or whoever the company is opffering the services) may intentionally access these foreign data libraries as well, they are known to be the greatest collectors in the history of mankind.

Somehow I cannot avoid to think of the future in terms of a spiral collapsing in it's centre. Intelligence agencies, police and data protection campaigners in Germany and, so I read, many other european countries, are seriously concerned, even more so since data protection laws in the US are rudimenatary only, compared to many European nations's laws (on paper).

I myself porbbaly will jump of this train sooner or later, when I cannot run my home system indepedant from mandatory internet access anymore. And certainly I will not store part of my private sphere in the must public space there is: the internet.

Matching this grim vision is that the young ones get fostered and influenced by thing slike Twitter, Facebook, social platform etc to live their intimate life most shamelessly in the public and to mislearn to think critical of these developements, instead they learn to take them as granted and without critically reflecting over it.

My problem is not the technology and possibility in themselves. My probolem is the unripe, premature cultural context in which these gimmicks are embedded. I thiunk our culture simply is not ripe for these options offered by technology, and we will abuse them very very massively and not for the best of man, but for the best of some at the cost of most. If I would want to write a Science Fiction novel dealing with trying to imagine how the world will be in let's say 30 or 50 years, it would become a dysutopia.