# There is no "cloud".

"There is no cloud, it's just other people's computers"

Hey y'all! Welcome to another ramble of mine where I yell at cloud computing.

Don't worry, I don't:

• Hate cloud providers like Linode or Vultr specifically. There are great usecases for VPSes.
• Hate on your if you use something which I don't.
• Want you to change using what you use. It's not my computer, and I shouldn't have any control over it, except when it's on my network.

1: There is no real 'cloud', it's just other people's computers. 2: If you put your images on something like OneDrive, they're not YOUR files anymore. 3: It's hugely inefficient for you to stream movies, as you basically download the movie as you watch it, and if you ever want to watch the movie again, you'll have to download it again. 4: If you use something like OneDrive, it's on their computers. If they dislike you, they'll be able to remove your data. 5: Do you know which (maybe)botnet like behaviour i.e. Microsoft Word may have? No, you don't since it is proprietary mal/software. 6: You can get two 1TB drives and mirror/back them up for less than 100 euro's total. You can also put them into an old PC or laptop and share them using something like Nextcloud, for normies, or scp or rsync over ssh for FAST secure file transfers. You won't get any faster speeds than 'SSD hosting' since usually your internet speed isn't going to be faster than 1 Gbit, so you might as well take it all locally and be able to access your files if your internet provider isn't fast, and still profit from 1Gbit which is in a lot of homes right now. 7: GitHub i.e. can completely remove all of your code if you have i.e. a slur in your repository name.

Don't get me wrong, I use my phone (iPhone 11 Pro, 256GB). I use some services, such as Discord and other things, but I don't like apps as Instagram - which constantly snoop at everything and take data for mister Zuckerberg - and I would much rather use some selfhosted service, but everyone I know is on Discord, Instagram, WhatsApp and others.

Now you might ask, how to take matters into your own hands. I'll answer the above points:

• Please, if you need some storage, host it yourself. Own hardware, and use it. Please please please don't use something like Windows 365 Cloud PC.
• Please don't use something like Google Drive or OneDrive. Rather use an actual privacy friendly provider if you really need cloud storage, i.e. ProtonDrive (I am not exactly sure how good they are with privacy, but they at least are better than Google or Microsoft).
• Download your movies, and use something like Jellyfin for them or keep them on your PC.
• Nothing to say here
• Use LibreOffice, it's not too different and will work fine.
• Nothing to say here
• Use something like Gitea for more features, or Cgit for more lightweight Git usage. And please learn Git, not GitHub.

Please, always, keep your stuff locally and/or use a trusted service.

This list will probably grow in the future.