Rest In Peace, T-Mobile Sidekick

It wasn't my first Smartphone - the Kyocera 6035 running PalmOS was that - but the Sidekick may have been the best pre-iPhone smartphone. It provided the killer e-mail experience of a Blackberry at about 1/10th the cost, and also offered excellent texting, good-enough web surfing, and a real App Store years before Apple. It was the T-Mobile Sidekick. And it's best feature was full cloud integration - years before anyone else got it right - your contacts, e-mails, photos, everything was always available online from any computer. But that cloud service goes away starting today, relegating a titan of smartphone usability to being just another Android phone.

Rest in Peace, Sidekick. You will be missed.

"The Cloud" is convenient, but dangerous

The "Next Big Thing" in technology is "The Cloud". The idea is to keep your data on the internet - rather than on your PC, cell phone, etc. - so that you can access any information anywhere with a connected device. You're probably already in "the cloud" - NetFlix streaming, Hulu, Flickr photo sharing, even GMail are examples of "Cloud Technologies" - and if the major media companies have their way, you'll be spending more and more of your life there. After all, who wouldn't want access to every book, song, movie or TV show ever made, whenever they want it?

But it is time for us all to take note of Egypt and Libya, and to realize that putting our lives in the cloud really means putting our lives in the control of others. In these cases, hostile governments were able to eliminate "The Cloud" by flicking a switch. In other cases, companies have been able to suppress or eliminate speech by pulling media from "The Cloud". Perhaps the best example of a "Cloud Nightmare" was the T-Mobile Sidekick - a phone that stored everything "in the cloud" - whose users were horrified when a simple server migration error destroyed every photo, every e-mail, every text message, every address book in one horrible moment. It took weeks of work to bring some of that data back. And if the Sidekick had been owned a company with pockets less deep than Microsoft, who knows if it would ever have been done.

It is time to reevaluate our "cloudy" future, and consider making it a policy to return to hard copies for our most important data. Local backups are key to preserving our history, and ensuring we do not reach a point where one bad actor can deny us access to the things we need.

Cloud Computing = Careless Computing?

Every technological advance has its downside. The automobile made transportation easy and democratic, but it also have us car crashes. The telephone made communication effortless, but it also made it that much harder to maintain privacy. Nuclear power brought cheap energy, but also brought the nuclear bomb. The question is always, does the upside outweigh the downside.

The newest buzzword in computing is "cloud computing", where companies offer us services over the internet that reduce our dependence on our local machines. A good example is DropBox, a backup/sync service that saves files online and syncs them across any number of computers and your iPhone/iPad/Android device. Having every file you need everywhere you need it can be invaluable. Google has fully embraced the idea of cloud computing, and has recently released a new laptop with ChomeOS - an minimalist operating system which does everything in the cloud. (It is actually useless without an internet connection.)

Internet pioneer and information freedom advocate Richard Stallman has come out against "cloud computing" in general and the ChomeOS in particular because of the loss of freedom and privacy we give up by using these services.

But Stallman is unimpressed. "I think that marketers like "cloud computing" because it is devoid of substantive meaning. The term's meaning is not substance, it's an attitude: 'Let any Tom, Dick and Harry hold your data, let any Tom, Dick and Harry do your computing for you (and control it).' Perhaps the term 'careless computing' would suit it better."

He sees a creeping problem: "I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute. The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear."

Be cautious this upcoming year, because everyone is trying to embrace cloud computing. Decide early which companies you trust, and whether the loss of freedom is outweighed by the convenience offered by this new technology.