This may not be answering a particular question, but thought I'd share something of what I have learned about the Cloud, and why it has invaded our lives.
The first time I heard of the cloud it was in connection with DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in a paper called The Swarm at the Edge of the Cloud which was sponsored by this defense agency - http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bjoern/papers/lee-terraswarm-ieee2014.pdf
In it I found references that made my hair stand on end, but first a short description of what a terraswarm is and how it is connected, not just to icloud, but a greater Cloud technology system which icloud appears to be a part of:
“Abstract: Today, large numbers of sensors and actuators embedded into innovative devices are being introduced into our connected world at an accelerating rate. This
sensory swarm, or the swarm for short, presents an extension of the infosphere (today embodied in the cloud) into the physical world. The swarm gives the cloud eyes, ears, hands, and feet, enabling services that are directly embedded in the physical world rather than just in the cyber world.
Now for the scary stuff:
“These sensory swarms (as they were called by Jan Rabaey in a keynote talk at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference in 2008) can be wirelessly interconnected and interact with the cyber-cloud [meaning the cyber infosphere], and offer an unprecedented ability to monitor and act on a range of evolving physical quantities.” - This seems to be a euphamism for spying.
“Industry observers predict that by 2020 there will be thousands of smart sensing devices per person on the planet (yielding a ‘tera-swarm’); if so, we will be immersed in a sea of input and output devices that are embedded in the environment around us and on or in our bodies.”
So how do these thousands of smart sensing devices arrive in and on our bodies? Good question. So far what I’ve been able to determine:
Quotes from the DARPA Terraswarm paper cont:
“Mobile battery-powered personal devices with advanced capabilities will connect opportunistically to the cloud and to nearby swarm devices, which will sense and actuate in the physical world.”
“The TerraSwarm vision cannot be achieved by a single vendor providing the components as an integrated system. What is needed instead is the swarm equivalent of the common, general, ‘app’ framework that has recently enabled smartphones and similar devices to rapidly deploy and serve a vast range of often unanticipated applications by recruiting resources and composing services.”
“Swarm systems rely on vast numbers of heterogeneous sensors that are generating massive amounts of data. [SPYING]
“The cloud is not just a computation and memory resource; it is an information aggregator…”
Do your research - it's getting more and more difficult to get away from the Cloud for a reason.
Best wishes all...
