Apple staff blew it but the cloud was not the issue. This guy had way to much ‘out there’ on himself. This could have just as easily happened without the cloud(and has). The truth is anything you have uploaded or use on the Internet is open to being hacked and stolen
Be hilarious if it was Woz or Mitnick.
Celebrate my liberation.
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I concede the convenience of backing up to the cloud. But I’ve seen businesses fold because their sole backup turned out to be worthless, after a hardware failure.
My life is on my own drives. And my own drives are backed up, daily. And offsite copies are kept, of the backups, whenever I remember to swap the backup drives and take one with me to work. (Which is every couple of weeks.)
The important thing is that I’m always running on a restored backup. If you’ve never done a full restore from a bare disk, you’re not really doing a backup. There’s no way, short of that, to know whether your backup process actually works.
So every time I set up a new system, and configure an automate backup method, I let the automated system do its thing, then the next day I pull the working drive, grab the backup and a bare drive, and do a restore.
And I’ll do it again, every year or to, just to make sure things are still working.
Untested procedures don’t work. And single points of failure will always fail.
As a "US technology journalist," perhaps Mat Honan should consider a new career.
Cloud?
Social network?
iPhone?
Nope, don’t use ANY of those.
No damn cell phone, no credit card.
Minimum balance in the debit account, so even when some one got my PIN it did them no good.
Happened once, without $800 in the account, or the ability to charge money not there, the thieves got not nothing!
I back up important files on CD, no stupid “Cloud” exposure.
I have actual work to do, so no silly social network, Twit-ter, texting, time waster, FR gets me all of that I can handle. ;-)
This guy needs to find some life in the actual world, if your whole life is “Virtual”, you virtually have no life!
Hard to have much sympathy.
What, are you kidding? I'll clean up.
I’m surprised the ambulance-chasing shysters of the plaintiff’s bar haven’t seen this development as a potential new cash cow.......
It's certainly not impossible for this bit of social engineering to have happened but it's best to take his version of events with a healthy dose of salt. What information would have to have been in the "hackers" possession? I've read AppleCare requires you to give product serial numbers. That isn't easy to come by for a random "hacker."
Given the history, I wouldn't be surprised if the "hacker" was a friend or colleague and this was a crass stunt like phony hate crimes.
“Clouds” are nothing but a new name to Internet storage. That’s all. Consumers rejected Internet storage years ago, yet, they’ll buy it if it seems like something they call it a “cloud”.
There's no such thing as a "secure" seven-character password. Even when you mix different kinds of characters, seven characters is still way too short.