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Top-level
 The cloud is many things, but most of all, it's a trap. When software is delivered as a service, when your data and the programs you use to read and write it live on computers that you don't control, your switching costs skyrocket. Think of Adobe, which no longer lets you buy programs at all, but instead insists that you run its software via the cloud. Adobe used the fact that you no longer own the tools you rely upon to cancel its Pantone color-matching license. 37/ 6 comments
They are designed to shift power away from users to software companies. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it. A cloud app is some Javascript wrapped in enough terms of service clickthroughs to make it a felony to restore old features that the company now wants to upcharge you for. 39/ Google's defenstration of K Renee, Mark and Cassio may have been accidental, but Google's *capacity* to defenstrate *all of us*, and the enormous cost we all bear if Google does so, has been carefully engineered into the system. Same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Adobe and anyone else who traps us in their silos. 40/ The lesson of the Crowdstrike catastrophe isn't merely that our IT systems are brittle and riddled with single points of failure: it's that these failure-points can be tripped *deliberately*, and that doing so could be in a company's best interests, no matter how devastating it would be to you or me. 41/ Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! https://clarionwriteathon.com/members/profile.php?writerid=293388 42/ Image: CC BY 3.0 eof/ |
Gregory's Server
One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to unilaterally alter their functioning and cost. Like mobile apps - which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability - cloud apps are built for enshittification.
38/
One day, every Adobe customer in the world woke up to discover the colors in their career-spanning file collections had all turned black, and would remain black until they paid an upcharge:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
The cloud allows the companies whose products you rely on to unilaterally alter their functioning and cost. Like mobile apps - which can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking legal liability - cloud apps are built for enshittification.