Catholic deacon William Steven Albaugh was arrested for storing child porn on his Verizon Online Backup and Sharing account. Verizon identified the offending material during some kind of content sweep and notified the authorities.
Verizon detected the pornographic images stored in Albaugh's Verizon Online Backup and Sharing account. The company reported his account to Center for Missing and Exploited Children, who in turn passed the information to Baltimore County law enforcement. Police investigating the case found files both on his Verizon account and on a flash drive, and authorities seized two PCs and an iPad. Albaugh said he used the iPad to view "nudist websites that include pictures of children," The Baltimore Sun reports.
Source: Verizon turns in Baltimore church deacon for storing child porn in cloud
I'm conflicted. I'm happy with that another Catholic pervert was captured. I'm unhappy the privacy aspects of the story. Is somebody watching what YOU load up in that happy place called the cloud? What do you keep in the cloud?
Logging you in...
gtpooh 1p · 633 weeks ago
The Vicar · 633 weeks ago
Furthermore, the people providing cloud services are exactly the last ones who should be trusted: large corporations. I would propose the following as a test: if you actually trust any of the companies providing cloud services to host your data, then you are insufficiently tech-savvy to be permitted to make your own decisions.
(Then again, the fact that a lot of people -- even in the tech press -- seriously berate Apple for being insufficiently open and then use an OS which Google designed to help them collect personal data to mine shows that there are an awful lot of people out there who do not have very good critical thinking skills when it comes to technology.)
Cullen Athey · 633 weeks ago
What's this not trusting the providers? A reference to Reagan's "government is the problem"? Are there a few bad actors out there, yes, but, ultimately, who are we willing to trust? I think it's "follow the rules and take what you get", or opt out.
While I'm at it, thanks, Joe, for sharing your experience of your dear aunt's death. The angst you express in how to participate and make your own difference from a non-theological point of view will inform my future expression of sadness when either patients or close family members depart from my real life experience of them.
I think the real "afterlife" is simply the memories others have of us and whether we made a difference for them. I aspire to be remembered--to heck with a nirvana-like post life experience, it can't compare to the ups and downs of real life, eh?
You are good!
Mojoey 107p · 633 weeks ago
Thanks for the kinds words regarding the death of my aunt. I believe that being of service to other in their time of need is the greatest expression of love that I can offer. Love is what my life is about.
Joe
The Vicar · 633 weeks ago
No, quite the opposite. Reagan would have been ecstatic to have large corporations take vast and intrusive roles, and have the opportunity to rob individuals blind.
Let's look at Google, for example: they've demonstrated a willingness to steal from people -- they're certainly willing to try and cheat other companies (like Apple -- Google was caught deliberately overcharging Apple for use of FRAND patents held by their acquisition Motorola, and was ordered to stop, but months after the order they're still doing it) but they're absolutely thrilled to rip off individuals who don't have batteries of lawyers like companies do (such as, for example, in Google Books, where they pay nothing for offering works to the public -- they pay no royalties to the authors).
Meanwhile, while all the hoopla about Apple storing location data in iPhones -- which appears to have been a genuine error, since they never actually accessed any of it -- was trumpeted in the press, even prompting a Congressional hearing via Senator Franken, Google was quietly doing the same thing in Android -- except that they were actually collecting the data, along with per-user IDs to keep straight who was going where. For some reason, this never became news. That's right: Apple was accidentally letting your phone write down where you had been, and they got reamed in the press, but Google was actively spying on you, and nobody ever said a word. The history of the tech press suggests that Google's control of advertising data and money probably helped muzzle the that particular story; Microsoft used to do the same thing back in the '80s and '90s. (Or, at least, a similar thing: Microsoft would heavily subsidize advertising for products which used Windows -- but not in publications which published viewpoints of Microsoft. That meant that most PC software and hardware companies would stop advertising in any magazine which dared to criticize Windows.)
Not scared? You should be. Google is getting very, very friendly with the U.S. government. The company spends more on lobbying than any other tech company as of 2012 by a factor of more than 2. (The three runner-ups were Microsoft at $8.09 million, HP at $7.22, and Oracle at $6.72. Apple, who Google fans love to portray as some kind of shadowy evil presence engaging in bribery -- in fact, they like to project onto Apple the things which Google ACTUALLY does -- spent $1.97 million, which doesn't even put them in the top 10.)
Not that Apple is any better as a cloud host, but historically Apple's problems mainly stem from wanting to change direction every few years. They're unlikely to steal your data, but they're extremely likely to suddenly announce that they're discontinuing the service you've been using, just as you reach the point where you are reliant on it, and replacing it with something which has lots of new features but doesn't do everything you need. (That's the real reason Apple lost so much ground in academia and never made many inroads into corporate IT: every few years they announce some new thing which is totally incompatible with the old one, and doesn't actually work as a drop-in replacement. Their forays into what has become known as "the cloud" started all the way back in 1999 with iTools -- which got changed around repeatedly and eventually was discontinued in favor of ".Mac", which also got changed around repeatedly and eventually was discontinued in favor of "MobileMe", which also got changed around repeatedly and eventually was discontinued in favor of "iCloud", which is the current offering. None of those four services actually had all the features of the previous one.)
The Vicar · 633 weeks ago
Bet anything you like that Google is acting as consultants (if not direct contractors) for the super-creepy and intrusive NSA stuff going on right now...