Life in the clouds offers new benefits

Before the collapse of the Iron Curtain, some people, including a brilliant photographer I knew, prepared for a simpler time. They collected hand tools that would need no electricity, learned how to fish and hunt, and mapped out remote locations where competition for living off the land wouldn't be too fierce.

These Cold War survivalists believed that nuclear Armageddon was inevitable and that they needed to be ready for the day when all of the modern conveniences we counted on would no longer function, when there would be no gas for vehicles, electricity, food stores or indoor plumbing.

I was reminded of my friend, the survivalist, this week with Apple's announcement of the iCloud, its entry into the rapidly growing business of cloud computing.

Apple is hoping that it can do for cloud computing what it has already done with cellular telephones and personal music players, taking an existing concept, redesigning it in a way that makes sense for people who aren't computer geeks and giving it mass appeal.

For consumers, stepping into the cloud requires a leap of faith, similar to the one we took when our ancestors turned our gold and silver over to a bank in return for a slip of paper that promised their wealth would still be there when they came back later to get it.

With the cloud, we are encouraged to put our faith in a system over which we have no real understanding or control and trust that our personal information will be kept safe, that it will be there when we need it and that it won't be used against us.

Cloud computing has been around for several years or even longer, depending on how you define it. It is essentially a commercial service that offers storage and computing power at remote locations. Rather than maintain capacity that is only partly used most of the time, businesses rent computing services in the cloud, so-called because the physical location may not always be the same, depending on what capacity is available at any given time.

The physical heart of the cloud is anything but amorphous, however. It is the giant server factories like the one showcased by Apple on Monday that have row after row of unstaffed computers, quietly digesting whatever they are fed and regurgitating on command everything from suggestions for new friends on Facebook to schedules for delivering vegetables to market.

The cloud raises a number of personal privacy and security issues. Like a bank vault, putting all that data in one place - whether a single physical location or simply behind a single door - makes cloud servers a rich target for hackers.

Some observers have also warned that Apple's plan to offer a mirror site for individual music libraries might create an opportunity for users to be caught up in lawsuits looking for copyright violators, who on their own are not worth pursuing but aggregated through Apple might make an attractive target.

And I wonder what access the United States Department of Homeland Security has, either secretly or with search warrants.

In return for that risk, Apple's iCloud will offer the convenience of being able to access our music, photos and work files from almost any Apple product, anytime and anyplace with Web or phone access.

That convenience and utility for businesses that use the cloud as a productivity tool mean that we will inevitably come to lean on it for functions that will no longer be accomplished elsewhere and indeed may not have been possible without it.

All of which got me thinking about my old friend, whom I haven't seen or heard from since he headed off to Yukon more than 30 years ago.

We no longer require global nuclear war to end our civilization as we know it. All it would take is unplugging the cloud. Then again, the survivalists prepared for a war that never came.