Posted on 08/06/2012 1:57:22 PM PDT by aimhigh
What would you do if your entire digital life started evaporating before your eyes and there was virtually nothing you could do about it?
This is the nightmare scenario that greeted US technology journalist Mat Honan, who had all of the contents of his iPhone, iPad and Macbook Air wiped, and lost control of his Gmail and Twitter accounts, all in the span of just over 15 minutes.
(Excerpt) Read more at caseyweeklyberwick.com.au ...
Apple staff blew it but the cloud was not the issue. This guy had way to much ‘out there’ on himself. This could have just as easily happened without the cloud(and has). The truth is anything you have uploaded or use on the Internet is open to being hacked and stolen
When I buy tunes on Amazon, they always ask me if I want to save it to the cloud and I say no. When I got my new Droid Bionic, (I call her Ann), lo and behold, there were my tunes. What’s up with that?
Be hilarious if it was Woz or Mitnick.
Celebrate my liberation.
>> When I got my new Droid Bionic [strange stuff happened]. What’s up with that?
Resistance is futile. You and the Borg are now One. Learn to enjoy it.
Me, I’ve Looked At The Cloud From Both Sides Now, and I stay away from it. :-)
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I concede the convenience of backing up to the cloud. But I’ve seen businesses fold because their sole backup turned out to be worthless, after a hardware failure.
My life is on my own drives. And my own drives are backed up, daily. And offsite copies are kept, of the backups, whenever I remember to swap the backup drives and take one with me to work. (Which is every couple of weeks.)
The important thing is that I’m always running on a restored backup. If you’ve never done a full restore from a bare disk, you’re not really doing a backup. There’s no way, short of that, to know whether your backup process actually works.
So every time I set up a new system, and configure an automate backup method, I let the automated system do its thing, then the next day I pull the working drive, grab the backup and a bare drive, and do a restore.
And I’ll do it again, every year or to, just to make sure things are still working.
Untested procedures don’t work. And single points of failure will always fail.
As a "US technology journalist," perhaps Mat Honan should consider a new career.
Cloud?
Social network?
iPhone?
Nope, don’t use ANY of those.
No damn cell phone, no credit card.
Minimum balance in the debit account, so even when some one got my PIN it did them no good.
Happened once, without $800 in the account, or the ability to charge money not there, the thieves got not nothing!
I back up important files on CD, no stupid “Cloud” exposure.
I have actual work to do, so no silly social network, Twit-ter, texting, time waster, FR gets me all of that I can handle. ;-)
This guy needs to find some life in the actual world, if your whole life is “Virtual”, you virtually have no life!
Hard to have much sympathy.
What, are you kidding? I'll clean up.
I’m surprised the ambulance-chasing shysters of the plaintiff’s bar haven’t seen this development as a potential new cash cow.......
It's certainly not impossible for this bit of social engineering to have happened but it's best to take his version of events with a healthy dose of salt. What information would have to have been in the "hackers" possession? I've read AppleCare requires you to give product serial numbers. That isn't easy to come by for a random "hacker."
Given the history, I wouldn't be surprised if the "hacker" was a friend or colleague and this was a crass stunt like phony hate crimes.
He’s a “professional” “tech journalist” they’re up their with lawyers, pundits and politicians in the sympathy department.
It’s like that current internet scam where they call up and tell the rubes Obama will pay their utility bills, just need a SS number and bank account ID.
Since it’s so believable given the amount of govt largesse these days, they’re getting lots of action.
Apparently most of the bank accounts are minimal, but they open up credit cards with the numbers and charge away.
Ha!
I used to use MobileMe, didn’t need it, but a friend convinced me to get it. Then Apple shut down MobileMe, and started up iCloud. You have to be able to run at least Lion to even use iCloud. My Mac was built in 2006, and can’t run Lion, can’t use iCloud. So I didn’t sign up. Morning of July 1st, woke up to no email. It wouldn’t send, nor receive emails. My fault! I kept getting a window I’d never seen before, asking for my Macmail password. I started the account about 20 years ago, and had never been asked for my password. Can’t remember it, nor find where I wrote it down. Totally my fault!
So I go to the Mac site that lets you retrieve or change your password. No problem, except, they’ll only send the new/retrieved password to my mac mail account, which won’t freakin’ send or RECEIVE emails. Catch 22! I had to open a gmail account, and in comparison to macmail, gmail sucks, incredibly!
I just cannot understand why anyone would want to rely upon a cloud based service to store their data or even as their primary backup.
Hard drives are incredibly cheap (up to 2 TB for around $100) and much faster to access than even the fastest broadband internet connection. Data can be priceless.
I backup my entire network onto secondary hard drives throughout the day. Once a day I also backup everything to a removable hard drive, which I take home at night (I have several and rotate them). Finally, I also backup everything to a cloud based service.
If my network fails, I can immediately retrieve my data from one of the secondary hard drives, and only lose at most a few hours of data. If my office burns to the ground, I can retrieve everything from my removable hard drive and only lose at most one day's worth of data (all of which can be retrieved from the cloud service).
You chose... wisely.
I use Acronis True Image almost exclusively. It’s never let me down, and it’s saved my bacon more than once.
“Clouds” are nothing but a new name to Internet storage. That’s all. Consumers rejected Internet storage years ago, yet, they’ll buy it if it seems like something they call it a “cloud”.
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