John MankoSome coding, politics, beer, art, and music. :)

There is a great article at Salon.com about freedom of information in the world of clouds. I highly recommend it.

http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/12/03/the_net_s_soft_underbelly

Here is an excerpt:

The WikiLeaks affair is highlighting the Internet’s soft underbelly: the intermediaries on which we all rely to store our information and make it available. We are learning, to our dismay, that we cannot trust them. Combine that with increasing government intervention, we’re also learning that the Internet is somewhat easier to censor than we’d assumed.

This should worry anyone who believes that we’re going to move our data and online lives into the fabled “cloud” — the diffused online array of hardware and services where, proponents say, we can do our online work, play and commerce without the need for storing data on our own personal computers. Trusting the cloud is becoming an act of faith, and it’s time to question that faith.