# let's get to the bottom of this.



## Beastie7 (Sep 29, 2022)

Where did all this "cloud", "bid data", "IoT" nonsense come from? I can't help but think it was just one giant psyop or marketing trap for mass data collection. I can only go as far back as early AWS/Rackspace days, from my own reading. It has to be deeper than that though.

Thoughts? the wheels are off for this one.


----------



## kpedersen (Sep 29, 2022)

There isn't much money for companies to earn by people using their own machines. By people using machines belonging to the company, they can charge subscription fees and obtain a continous stream of income.

As far as I am concerned, that is pretty much *all* there is to it. Any so called unique business case or innovation is really just the above with a cooler logo.


----------



## Crivens (Sep 29, 2022)

IIRC google got venture capital at startup from some philantropes called IN-Q-Tel. The wikipedia page of these fine specimen contain enough information to make one wonder. And wonder what is not widely known about them.


----------



## CuatroTorres (Sep 29, 2022)

Lisp is to blame.


----------



## eternal_noob (Sep 29, 2022)

The german word for "steals" is "klaut"  which sounds like "cloud".

The cloud klaut (steals) your data!


----------



## ralphbsz (Sep 29, 2022)

Beastie7 said:


> Where did all this "cloud", ...


Sharing computers that are installed in a centralized/efficient/shareable location is ancient. I just looked up when Service Bureau Corp and Tymshare started, and it was in 1957 and 1964. They took large IBM mainframes, and allowed small users to access them and run small jobs, using modems and dedicated data lines, both for RJE (remote job entry) and interactively via terminals. This makes perfect sense, since a small business can't afford a multi-million $ computer, nor the staffing required to operate and program such a beast. When I was a young programmer (in the late 70s and early 80s), we used to drive boxes of punched cards, and tape reels from data entry systems to a centralized data center location (about an hour on the German Autobahn), and come back a few hours later with invoices, orders, and printouts. The same is true today: With my account at EC2 and S3 I can use tens of thousands of computers, when I need them, without having to pay for owning them 24x365, and with the bulk of the management overhead shared efficiently with millions of other customers.

There may still be a place for having your own computer (today that's called "on-prem"), but that place is shrinking, as it becomes economically disadvantageous.



> "big data", ...


Decision support, data mining and business intelligence are also very old. Even in the mid-80s (when I was a student taking operating systems and database classes), the field of large databases (used for data mining) was already old. Just looked it up: The first VLDB conference (Very Large Data Bases) was in 1975.



> "IoT" ...


People have been using computers to collect data about natural or industrial processes, since roughly when computers existed. Today we call it IoT, and think it's really cool when there are weather stations on many houses, cars can check in with their manufacturer to get firmware updates, every step in a production process is monitored and controlled efficiently, and a little mapping device in your car shows you where the traffic jams are in real time. But all this was done (less, more slowly, and more expensively) already 50 or 70 years ago. As a reminder: The whole concept of "Digital Equipment" and its PDP line of "computers" started as inexpensive and easy-to-program machines for controlling/instrumenting laboratories and machines.



> ...just one giant psyop or marketing trap for mass data collection.


If you want to have privacy online, you are doing it wrong. Stop using the internet. Get rid of your cellphone.


----------



## eternal_noob (Sep 29, 2022)

They are watching you from space. Better yet, hide in a cave.


----------



## Beastie7 (Sep 29, 2022)

ralphbsz said:


> ...



We all know privacy hadn't been considered during the design of the TCP/IP stack. Because that's not what the military had intended it for originally. There's really no need for all the self stimulating wall of technical jargon.



Crivens said:


> IIRC google got venture capital at startup from some philantropes called IN-Q-Tel. The wikipedia page of these fine specimen contain enough information to make one wonder. And wonder what is not widely known about them.



manufactured consent comes to mind here. They are an interesting firm. It does make you wonder.


----------



## Crivens (Sep 30, 2022)

On another note, never attribute to malice that can be explained by incompetence.

An ex-CEO of our digital health infrastructure just now told an IT sec/privacy advocate during an event that he had been fiering guys like him at any opportunity. And he seemed proud of it. No wonder that place is as secure as it camln be, given that the architecture was prolly done by MBAs or web designers. Nuke from orbit and do again.


----------



## rootbert (Sep 30, 2022)

Beastie7 said:


> Where did all this "cloud", "bid data", "IoT" nonsense come from?...


well, I have worked almost exclusively on exactly those 3 topics for the last 7 years, and in my own head I always translate it like this:

cloud: the use of this term is probably from someone who does not exactly know what he/she wants, something like a service or infrastructure, but due to lack of knowledge cannot really say what is wanted. -> help the customer and do some requirements engineering regarding what services are needed
big data: aha! they want metrics/statistics/dashboards from the collected data. big just means they try to collect as many data as possible, I have clients with "big data" who actually do not even know that their AWS RDS (~ postgresql) is a small 500MB dump. -> help the customer and do some requirements engineering regarding data collected and output/visualization
IoT: customer has devices and want them to be connected to the phone and/or a platform. -> help the customer and do some requirements engineering regarding possible connectivity.


----------



## drhowarddrfine (Sep 30, 2022)

The cloud came, I believe, came from trying to explain how data is passed around on the internet to consumers. I remember watching a TV show, one time, where it was explained that the data from their system was sent "out into the clouds somewhere". In the old days of radio we used to say it was sent over the ether. 

Just like the term "hacker" is used wrongly by the general population and illegitimate television news reporters.

IoT, the Internet of Things, was coined by Mozilla to describe networking of devices together.


----------



## sukamu (Oct 2, 2022)

As a philosophy student, I know how much the language and the words used can modify the reality. The explanation is that "cloud computing" sounds better than "A computer in someone's datacenter", "big data" sounds better than "you're living in a capitalist dystopia"

These are only marketing words. Words used to sell more products without society thinking that maybe, just maybe, big technology corporations are doing more harm than good things.


----------



## msplsh (Oct 2, 2022)

cloud means "pay somebody else for an internet service."  This is appealing to business people because owning things is apparently terrible.

big data means "discover something useful in large amounts of seemingly meaningless junk."  You need a big computer for this, and since nobody wants to buy a big computer, they get one in the cloud.  See above.

IoT means "connect a useful thing to somebody else's service so they can mediate your access to it for profit."  It's not usually strictly necessary to require a third party server, but it's set up like this to generate "big data"


----------

