[Scan-DC] "Geek" takes TV, FM radio, police scanner, cell phone to game

[Alan Henney]

PC Magazine.com

April 20, 2009 Monday 1:41 PM EST

The Case Against Cloud Computing

BYLINE: Tim Bajarin

SECTION: TIM BAJARIN

LENGTH: 920 words

HIGHLIGHT: The vandalism of fiber-optic lines in California has
revived fears about overdependence on cloud computing--for individuals
and essential public services. Can we rely on the Internet?

When the big earthquake of 1989 hit the San Francisco Bay Area, my
then 11-year-old son and I were at the World Series game at
Candlestick Park, waiting for the Giants and the A's to duke it out.
You may remember this game: The earthquake was telecast in real time
as it happened, just minutes before the contest was to start as we
waited for the opening ceremony to begin.

Geek that I am, I had taken my handheld TV, transistor radio, pocket
police scanner, and a cell phone the size of a brick to the game. My
family laughed at me for bringing all of these things to a live
game--and to be honest, I got some pretty odd looks from the people
around me as I sat there watching the game preliminaries on this tiny
screen and talking to my wife on the phone before the game started.

Then the earthquake struck, and Candlestick Park lunged forward and
rumbled for a good 60 seconds. All of a sudden I was a genius to my
family and the people around me. I immediately called my wife to see
if she and the house were okay, then called my mom and other family
members to check on them. They had been watching the game from home
and feared we had been hurt, but I assured them we were all right.
Good thing I acted as quickly as I did: Soon after I made my last
call, cell-phone service in the entire Bay Area went down. Minutes
later the landlines went down, too, as did most of the electricity. TV
and radio stations switched to backup generators and kept pumping out
the news.

But since I had my battery-powered TV and the police scanner, everyone
in my section at least had access to news of what was really going on.
Some 50 people were trying to watch my little TV and the first
televised pictures of the collapse of the Bay Bridge. And we were
listening to radio reports and police chatter with real-time news
about this tragedy. Ironically, it took the stadium officials about 20
minutes to figure out that the game had to be called and to ask people
to leave in an orderly manner.

Most people didn't learn of the severity of the situation until they
got into their cars and turned on their radios. But our little group
had the technology at hand to become well informed about the
situation. I even had my route home figured out before we left the
stadium.

The information and communication blackout surrounding us came to
memory last week when vandals cut fiber-optic cables at an underground
station 3 miles south of my home in San Jose. The cables were owned by
AT&T but also affected Verizon landline and cell phones, since Verizon
leases these lines from AT&T for the South Bay Area. Because I reside
north of this cable cut, my service wasn't affected, but my son and
his family live in Morgan Hill. All of his phone and Internet
connections were down for most of the day. Underground cables were
also cut in San Carlos, 20 miles south of San Francisco, and that
ended up affecting thousands of people. In fact, even some big
companies lost their Internet connections while AT&T and Verizon were
still looking into the problem.

If you've ever had your cell phone or Internet connection go down even
for a short time, you can relate to the frustration these businesses
and consumers felt. The dollar impact of this event has not yet been
calculated, but clearly businesses and consumers lost some
productivity. Even worse, the vandalism affected the local police,
fire, and ambulance services, as well as making it virtually
impossible for tens of thousands of people to call these services in
case of an emergency. (Local ham-radio operators jumped into action,
fortunately, becoming a key communications medium between
first-responder services and setting up way stations at strategic
locations for people who might be experiencing an emergency.)

This incident caused a lot of reflection in Silicon Valley about our
reliance on dedicated services such as cell phones and broadband
Internet connections. And it has revived fears about overdependence on
cloud computing. We're already dependent on the Internet for
information, communications, and commerce, and we're starting to rely
on it for real-time delivery of applications. And now we're putting
all of our digital bits in one Internet basket and becoming more
reliant on the cloud without even realizing it.

Although this was an isolated event, the fact that vandals were able
to pull this off rather easily should give everyone pause about making
the Internet the sole backbone for information and emergency services,
as well as our own personal digital storage vault. Add to that the
news that cyber criminals have infiltrated our power grid and the
constant attempts by nefarious forces to penetrate our network
infrastructure, and all of the sudden the concept of "everything in
the cloud" becomes a bit frightening, especially to consumers.

Consumers may be getting more comfortable with putting their pictures
online or even banking online, but I'm convinced that the need for
personal servers, storage, and localized computing in consumer markets
will be here for some time. At the business, financial, e-commerce,
and hosted-cloud service levels, I know redundant systems and backup
transformers keep services live 24/7. But that's viable only if
consumers have a wired or wireless connection to these services
working all the time (or should I say, when they really need it?).
Given this attack, and the constant reports that our networks are
being attacked, consumers will be inclined to keep a lot of their
digital stuff locally for years to come.