Balance

Good vs. Evil

Cloud computing has changed our world, but has it been in our best interest? Is it good or bad for society? We know cloud computing can save energy, extend product offerings, and allow companies to reach the massive Internet user base. Google uses it every day to serve millions of customers. Facebook provides a social network reaching across the globe. Flickr uses a distributed network to be fast and efficient. How good is cloud computing? Do the benefits outweigh the bad?

Cloud computing can also be used for evil. If Amazon EC2 virtual machines have vulnerabilities that allow them to be hijacked for a bot-network, a massive denial of service (DoS) attack could be launched against entire countries or companies (Shachtman). EC2 can already be used to host bit-torrent servers that leach software from people on the Internet (O'Connor).