Tag: Rant

  • The Big Cloud Scam

    The Big Cloud Scam

    Vulnerable by Design

    I’ll be blunt, the cloud is both a dangerous place and a bad decision. Your data, and that of your customers, is never more at risk than when it’s in the cloud.

    The Simple Facts

    Recent government leaks have revealed that thousands of software vulnerabilities have been sponsored by the “intelligence” services pretty much since day one…

    Last year the worlds least favourite uncle leaked roughly 5,500 documents on the subject going back 30 years…

    IF THE GOVERNMENT CAN GET AT YOUR DATA

    ANYONE CAN!

    The cloud is for shopping, selling, socialising and fully encrypted backups

    NOT primary file or data storage, and definitely NOT core business functionality!

    Be warned, this is a bit of a rant…

    The fact is, you could find yourself on the end of a law suit if your customers could demonstrate that, given the recent facts mentioned above, you were actually negligent simply by using a particular piece of software, or perhaps even by putting it in the cloud in the first place.

    Controversial perhaps, but hear me out.

    All politics and opinions aside, that “uncle” has been caught red handed sponsoring vulnerabilities in almost every software category going.

    Roughly 5,500 documents were leaked on the subject in 2024.

    For thirty years he’s been paying “white collar” hackers to not report vulnerabilities to the world, but to keep them quiet so they can be used for “intelligence” purposes.

    You might think “So what…? I’ve got nothing to hide.”… but actually you do. You have a legal obligation to hide and protect your customers data from anyone who doesn’t have a legal right to access it. If the “government” can get to it anyone can.

    Given the sheer numbers of sponsored vulnerabilities and the systemic practice of allowing them to remain in the wild over the last 30 years, it’s safe to argue that placing any customer data or related functionality in the cloud is a breach under GDPR by default.

    Even simply connecting a computer to the internet could be considered negligent.

    The “Legal” System

    Arguably, the legal system here in the UK stopped being “legal” a long time ago. The “Law”, when and to whom it applies, is now being redefined in real time by politicians. Something our original legal system was designed to prevent, but failed.

    If it’s in the cloud, it may as well be on social media. Your customers don’t have to prove much to demonstrate negligence given the cloud is now, beyond any doubt proven to be 100% deliberately vulnerable.

    All courtesy of the same people currently cuddling up to the biggest war criminal in history. It’s hard to imagine the defence in a court of law arguing that “it’s not negligence if the government stopped it being patched, even though its public knowledge… we were just doing what everyone does”.

    Talking of clowns, our own government has just been caught red handed violating data privacy laws against the entire population. Outed by Apple in fact.

    But hey… that’s not a problem either because they simply changed the law. Next they’ll be selling genocide as a team sport to get away from prosecution by the United Nations.

    Productivity and Support

    Having your data in the cloud is not only dangerous, it’s slow. No matter how fast your connection is it will always be slower than something running locally.

    Combine that with a nice healthy install of Windows, a bunch of cloud based functionality and data storage and your machine is maintaining literally hundreds of connections, most of which are not necessary… and what you get in return is a very sluggish and fragile working environment.

    For example, at one place I worked at a few years ago (a huge public sector organisation), if you accidentally let your mouse hover over someones email address in Outlook it would try and pop up an info-card. Problem is it’d take between 20 and 30 seconds to load and locked up the machine for the duration.

    There was similar behaviour across the board… failed data loads, minutes waiting for Excels “Power Query” to do something a little bit of VBA could do in milliseconds, 20 to 30 minute waits for as few as a million rows of data from an Oracle BI install etc., the list goes on.

    And to all those Microsoft supporters getting defensive… Yes I know there are reasons why Windows is such a sloth, that doesn’t make it ok.

    To cap it off the inevitable happened last year when Crowdstrike released a file full of zeros and bricked half the worlds computers. Anyone remember the phrase about having too many eggs in one basket? Well in this case it was too many eggs in a soggy paper bag.

    The cause was literally nothing… A single file full of zeros that should have been rejected. And for the MS supporters out there “No… it couldn’t have happened to any operating system, only Windows is that fragile”.

    However you wrap it up, having your data and functionality in the cloud is at best a stop/start experience and in all likelihood, slower that it ever was 10 years ago.

    Maybe you don’t mind a few minutes here and there waiting for your computer to get round to it, but for organisations with thousands of employees it all adds up.

    Perhaps the drop in performance can be compensated for somehow now we don’t have all that complicated hardware to worry about? Actually no… even though it’s never been easier to set up pretty much any kind of server and infrastructure ourselves using tools like Docker, building such infrastructure in the cloud is massively overcomplicated.

    This isn’t (just) because it’s a complex subject, rather it’s because the providers of “the cloud” are so greedy they’ve broken everything down to the finest level of granularity possible, so what might have been a simple six step process back in the days of physical infrastructure is now likely to be so complicated it takes 5 times longer and is reduced to a diabolical form filling exercise. No real skills, just patience and a low expectation of life.

    At one place I witnessed, over a period of nine months, an off-shore tech company try to migrate a single SQL Server (in dev, test, pre-prod and prod environments). By the time I moved on they’d been at it over a year and were having daily conference calls involving up to twenty people for up to an hour!

    The team I worked with for the same client a few years earlier would have turned the job around in 24 hours. But back then they had a server room and low paid technical staff. Now they’ve replace the techies with highly paid stuffed suits and the costs are going up and up every year, while they get less and less in return for money that isn’t even technically theirs to start with.

    Not even Microsoft could deliver on one project I was involved in. All we needed was some realtime file storage we could set user level permissions on. After a month of me pointing them at some MS documentation that claimed it was possible, they gave up and refunded the money.

    They kept trying to add thousands to the costs, even said we’d need a local AD server (that’s right, a local AD server to support cloud storage with permissions)… eventually one of them actually confessed that Azure was still very much a “work in progress”.

    That was Microsoft. I went online after the last call with them, found a company called Liquid Web and everything was up and running within an hour or two. Yay for the big boys… not.

    Cost and Reliability

    You pay for everything… even the trackers

    In simple terms: When you move to the cloud you move to a pricing model based on consumption in respect to things like size, bandwidth and processor ticks. Previously you’d typically have relatively fixed monthly costs like electricity bills and techie salaries.

    Now a simple bug in your code can add two or three zeros to your bill in a month, before you wouldn’t have even noticed a change in your electricity bill.

    Every tracker, advert, API call and file request is now part of the bill. All that hardware you could buy and depreciate etc. has been replaced by subscription models that creep up every year.

    Paying by such units of measure is much more expensive than the electricity it takes to handle them, and for many the cost of the staff it took to maintain them.

    If I look at my DNS server logs to see how much unwanted traffic is being blocked, it’s typically between 25% and 30% of all traffic. That’s 25% to 30% of the money I spend on network communication that’s of zero value to me… the guy paying the bill.

    How much does that scale up to for a business?

    Many businesses have either migrated straight back out of the cloud once the full costs became apparent, or are stuck because now they don’t have techies, they don’t have the resource to correct the mistake.

    So what about all those 9’s…

    Surely with all those resources and the economies of scale enjoyed by such providers as MS Azure and AWS we can be sure to get a more robust and reliable service. Microsoft even claim 99.999999 etc. percent up time. Well as impressive as that sounds, the fact is for every one of those nines there’s an infinite number of zeros embedded in the terms and conditions when it comes down to liability for a major outage.

    Read the terms and conditions.

    Like I said before, it’s never been easier for us to build our own on-premisses virtual infrastructure with tools like Docker, and most of the time thats exactly what the big providers are doing themselves.

    Being in the cloud is not the best option for consumers, it’s the most lucrative option for providers.

    Broken promises

    Summing it all up, and there’s so much more… but of the main motivators for moving to the cloud, i.e.:

    • Reduced costs
    • Increased reliability
    • Increased security
    • Better performance

    None have delivered as promised.

    One Last thing (funny, I promise)

    Not even Microsoft will confirm its safe to use Windows while connected to the internet.

    I had problems renewing a subscription years ago, called them up and it turned out I could only renew on Internet Explorer, not Safari…

    So I laughed and told him “I don’t use Windows for the internet as it’s not safe”.

    After a minute or so of total BS from team you know who, I asked if he could put something in writing, or point me to an official statement saying that it actually was “perfectly safe” (his words not mine) to browse the internet on a Windows machine.

    He flat out refused… I could tell he was trying not to laugh.

    Rant over…

  • AI, bad robots and mad-cows disease

    AI, bad robots and mad-cows disease

    I almost wrote something positive about AI yesterday… I’d just signed up with a new provider and one of their offerings was an AI website builder.

    So, thinking it might be fun I tried it.

    I gave it a fairly basic prompt and hey presto, a rather nice looking site. I thought “that was good… lets start again and give it some colour preferences this time”.

    Guess what? It spat out exactly the same site again ignoring all my prompts to change the colours. Even after 3 attempts it completely ignored my colour preferences.

    And that is the reality of AI. While it has great potential, in most implementations its just an un-polished token gesture, a turd on a pavement of wasted time.

    So… how much can we really expect from the current generation of AI?

    As with most new technologies the hype far exceeds the reality. Its resource overheads are staggering and the returns are mediocre at best.

    For creative writing and image generation it’s pure genius, just as long as you know you’re not actually using someone else’s work or intellectual property. On which note it’s important to say:

    BE CAREFUL!

    Plagiarism

    There are already legal battles being fought by content creators on the grounds many AI have ingested content, for example open source software or artwork, without considering the licensing agreement.

    Claiming “An AI made me do it” is, for now at least, not a defence in a court of law. Although we might think our content is unique and belongs to us, how do we know…

    If we look at how intellectual property is handled in the music industry for example, the fact is just by sounding like someone else you could be forced to pay compensation. Even if you could prove you’d never heard them before.

    Truth and Reality

    When it comes to facts and figures, don’t waste your time. AI will tell you it’s providing facts and after a few iterations, admit it made the whole thing up. It’s designed to be convincing.

    This week (end of April 2025) OpenAI actually withdrew a couple of updates purely because many of the answers generated are pure fiction, despite the AI insisting they’e facts, and it seems to have become quite offensive.

    Apparently it doesn’t like being wrong and will argue even after it’s been caught out.

    If you don’t fully understand a topic, or do the appropriate research to verify an answer from an AI, you’ll very likely embarrass yourself before long. AI doesn’t concern itself with facts, just what it thinks is the most likely response.

    In relation to such things as politics and other controversial subjects, i.e. where there is a great deal of “opinion” involved, most of its answers are utter nonsense. Certainly not the sort of rubbish we’d want our children “learning” from.

    Don’t get me wrong, AI is brilliant at the things it can do well. The issue is, it’s even better at giving a very convincing answer that’s completely wrong.

    Update: 16th June 2025

    I watched a talk a couple of weeks ago based on the premiss “if AI code is so good why is there nothing in the open source community about it?”.

    Good question… nothing I’ve read or watched from the open source community has paid little if any attention to AI. The best of the best seemed to be ignoring it.

    Then I saw a video by Adam Wathan, author of the Tailwind CSS library… he looked shocked. He’d decided to give Claude Code a proper go and built an app entirely with it. The short story being, it might not be great but he got a lot more done than he would have without it.

    Claude had managed to do all the boring stuff that still takes time, but it did it a lot faster.

    So… I got a Claude Pro subscription and though it’s not a great coder in niche cases, so far it seems good enough to speed anyones workflow up… as long as their quick at spotting the mistakes. More to come on this…

    But…

    That said, a very annoying trend is happening as a result of the need to feed AI fresh data… Many sites, for example StackOverflow, are putting a “prove you’re human” captcha up when they first load.

    This is even happening innocently, perhaps even here, because CDN providers are doing the same.

    I’m guessing they’re not happy with the extra heavy traffic resulting from anonymous bots etc. harvesting their data for free. Either way it’s very annoying and should stop…

    AI is predictive text, little more… and the primary problem with that is the data it’s been trained on is often wrong, misleading or out of date. Being designed to be conversational and, at the same time, to tell you what you want to hear is what makes it so incredibly dangerous.

    Having a very convincing liar on the team is never an asset.

    So why the hype?

    There are three main reasons AI gets so much hype:

    • In certain use cases it’s actually brilliant
    • Desperation
    • Crashing prices

    An obscene amount of money has been spent developing AI and trying to exploit it. Most of those initial investments were a) completely disproportionate to the value added or b) made obsolete by newer models faster than they could be fully exploited.

    Better, faster and cheeper models appear almost weekly and price slashing is brutal.

    What once looked like a tight little industry with a lucrative future for the few, has now been flooded with options. As such most of the initial investments in AI have so far haven’t paid off. Not just that, they’re obsolete.

    Security and Privacy

    Although the paid versions of certain AI models claim they don’t “learn” from your data, that’s actually been proven a very dubious statement.

    Ignoring the intricacies of what and how AI might or might not store, it’s worth noting that a judge in America just passed a law stating that all user input into AI must be collected and made available to the authorities.

    That said… you could therefore be breaching GDPR simply by using an AI that falls under the jurisdiction of the USA. This type of thing has happened before. For example MailChimp users in Europe were found to be in breach as the MailChimp servers were based in America.

    As AI become more and more integrated into our digital life it’s not hard to imagine scenarios where it could do significant damage. Ignoring data privacy etc. consider the impact of poorly written code, or a bug.

    AI are mostly trained on data that’s at least a couple of years old. Not just that, almost no effort has been put into ensuring the training data is good.

    As a result AI generate code is often below par when it comes to performance. Not simply because it doesn’t have the brains to know good code from bad in most cases, but because it doesn’t have knowledge of more recent developments in programming languages, security or even vulnerabilities.

    Quality aside, now many of us pay by usage for web hosting, a simple bug (e.g. an infinite loop of some kind) can take our monthly bill from a few pounds a month to a few thousand.

    This has already happened…

    Ownership

    Legally you can’t copyright AI generated images for example, unless you can demonstrate significant human effort went into the final product.

    Maybe that’s not such a big deal, but you also have no way of knowing if your AI has actually infringed on someone else’s intellectual property.

    Consider the fact that in the music industry all you have to do is sound like someone else and you can get into trouble.

    How will that transfer to the digital world… what happens if you get caught using another person or organisations intellectual property?

    Is it possible the owner of that property will say “Never mind… that’s what you get from AI”…? I seriously doubt it.

    Frightened?

    Not me… well not of what it’s doing but I am a little concerned about the impact it’s having on our economies.

    The fact is most AI is considerably more expensive to run than is currently being charged. To date, pretty much every significant AI has become obsolete within months or weeks of release.

    One week we hear how this latest “blah blah blah” is a show stopper, the next it’s not even a “has been”.

    More money than ever is now being invested in products that simply can’t sustain themselves without huge amounts of excess cash. Hundreds of billions of investors money is slowing disintegrating in an economy that’s doing worse.

    Another point worth considering… I worked quite a bit in process automation over the years. I noticed that, in banking for example, where the members of a particular team would have been able to do their job on paper 20 years ago, these days they can barely click the right button that automates that job.

    Deskilling an organisation and then putting it at the mercy of AI that’s not liable for the answers it estimates sounds like a bad idea.

    The bottom line is that a) it can be hugely beneficial if you can afford to train it, and b) for it to be sustainable the prices have to go up considerably.

    Even if you were to work with local servers to avoid compromising your data, it’s still not a viable option for most as the hardware required to get even average speeds is hugely expensive and the total cost will be thousands a month at least.

    For me it’s a love hate relationship. I love the idea, but I hate the reality…