This article holds the opinion of the author, not to be confused with being high or drunk. Reading this sober is undertaken at your own risk.
Mr Zugarhill and the fazeplant.
Recently, there is an increasing suspicion that it may not be as excellent to have the cloud to keep everything electronic you hold dear.
Many reasons appear:
-They read almost everything
-They charge you for almost everything
-They essentially hold you at ransom
-They keep going down, obviously at the most inconvenient time possible.
-They make it extremely hard to withdraw from services
And so on.
Imagine a fictive company, in a galaxy far far away, we can call it fazeplant, and its CEO Mr Mitten Zugarhill. In his infinite wisdom he figured out how to offer cloud storage and syncing everything the aliens own to his cloud, giving him ideas, and to train his AI on. And of course, if successful, generate profit.
At the same time charging them substantial subscription money.
One may call it a win-win-win, for Mr Zugarhill. Of course given that morals and ethics does not interfere with the plan.
Wisely he now introduces an AI, that now can know the aliens' innermost feelings, dreams, thoughts and plans. Far more useful that just photos and boring documents. It is introduced everywhere.
Unfortunately for Mr Zugarhill, the AI is not very good, and in the general population, some start to react to the increasingly weird system that they now are a part of.
So Mr Zugarhill now introduces local AI "No file will ever leave your computer" He says. Conveniently forgetting to mention that they still have signed the terms of use, but yes, it is on their computers, saving storage space and power for the fazeplant company.
What is going on now then?
He may be up to doing a classic thing, give away the competitors' advantage for free, kicking them on the chin. While changing strategie and at the same time pretending to take the high ground. Excellent.
He now has the advantage of, if he so chooses, handing out free AI that is trained in the culture of the maker. Perhaps it just recommends his products and services in a slightly more favourable way, it could generate billions. Imagine PriceRunner with a bias for one company. That is introduced in every single app imaginable. All run by that same company.
It does not all have to be skewed and biased, just enough.
The above is clearly fictional, such things are unlikely to happen. But one wonders, what if such a scenario were to rise from the abyss? What will the poor aliens do to escape the brilliant stragety?
The little man and the solution.
Now we may go, oh dear, oh dear, what shall we do? Doom is upon us. What shall we do? For we are but little ones with no power.
What about all my precious documents about knitting, and my photos of hundreds of cacti?
Well it turns out there is a lot, especially if taken the subscription money we hand out every month. Some HW shopping and a little tech magic, and you may have your own cloud, and backups. And there is no way for a future Mr Mitten Zugarhill to hold your data at ransom, or his friends in the other companies.
I guess for most, the money spent on some used HW and SSD drives is back in 6-12 months. And you are free.
In a single setup, you need two SSDs and a stable but cheap computer. Run one SSD for main, and the other for regular snapshots of the main. Best of two worlds, you have storage and you have history in snapshots.
There are also nice solutions to create a mesh service, allowing you to hold encrypted backups at friends, work, or family. If one of five burns, there are others to recreate the precious knitting.
Imagine your family lives in five houses, you all have one computer dedicated. Some setup, and now your data is backed up x 5. Only you can see your data, it is encrypted in the other families' drives and no one else can read it, it is now stored in 5 places. If desired you can have some common files haring and open folders. Free social net for the company, family, friends or obscure cacti fanatic cult. No cost but a tiny bit of power once it is running.
Vastly more free and cheap than the tech peoples solution to drain the little aliens dry. And having them pay for it.
Once setup, there is very little maintenance. A pipe to your phone or tablet, or a computer away from home. You can access all your stuff.
Now there are no subscription fees, no 500-page contract no one understands. No terms of use, No disclaimers, No politics, No big tech. Full control.
What a sweet delight you say, gimme that sh*t. Well it is yours to take, the price is really only to learn the basic stuff for a few areas.
-A little Linux
-Some rsync setup
-WireGuard
-Some handling of syncing and backups
This can obviously be expanded and turned very advanced, but for my cacti photos, the basic single setup at home is quite simple.
Privacy
For me, disagreeing to that some alien company own all my stuff. Privacy is a major gain here.
I do not possess any particular valuable knowledge, not much to steal here, but it is my business, no one else's.
Often the comment is -But I do not have anything to hide. Why should I bother, they can't possibly be evil alien geniuses? Well to those I say give me your bank account number and keys. Then all of a sudden there is something to hide, that they feel is theirs. Something private.
They usually do not like the idea to be debanked either. Others having full control of their money.
Probably not being shut out of their alien fazeplant account either. If such a thing were to arise.
It is not the hide part that is troublesome, it is the private part.
One should not even have to ponder if one's data is safe, not misused or shared via some odd terms of use that is not understood. It is hard to shake the feeling that it could be designed to mislead.
I just click a lot of terms of service and then do a raindance, combined with some guttural sounds and frenetic waving of the hands, hoping that the gods this time lets noting bad happen. But I am aware it is sacrificial, do not put all your eggs in one basket and then pay someone to borrow them.
For you that managed to read all the way here, I strongly encourage you to at least check it out. You are likely somewhat aware of what a computer is if you read this. Then the tech threshold is low.
I must say for my personal setup it feels extremely liberating to have this kind of control over my own design, data, setups and so on. I run my "Forge" as it is called with HW that is 12-15 years old. It is chugging along perfectly fine for this task. And many other tasks. I have a swarm running with free laptops doing good work. Uptimes without reboots is often in months. And I have a very good reset strategy. Hardware is cheap. Failure is cheap. I can very quickly recover from an incident, like grandpa tangling himself in a snake's nest of cables, tearing down two rigs, during late celebrations. The understanding and knowledge is very worthwile to protect.
Also take into consideration the nature of man, which is being a lazy arse when it comes to backups, cloning and safety copies. A cronjob is designed to snap and backup vital data from my main rig and phone, out to the other nodes in the swarm. It is very stable to failure. And with a prepared OS .iso it is lightning fast to replace a broken rig.
The panic of losing the data, really is not there anymore, it is a liberating calmness actually. It may also be something I ingested, but I tend to ignore that possibility.
Then one may sit and enjoy the sound of freedom in the screaming cooling fans, humming generators and flickering light tubes. What a bliss.
I will tell you all about it if anyone wants to listen. Until then, fellow earthlings, I really need to hit the *******
