Published at LXer:

Despite the numerous advantages presented by cloud computing, security is still the biggest factor holding back more widespread adoption by businesses. A recent survey by AlienVault found that an overwhelming 90 percent of organisations are still concerned about cloud security.

Read More...

Cloud computing should be called what it really is and that is
"Sanctioned Man In The Middle". SMITM for TLA lovers. Much of your SSL/HTTPS traffic transits the cloud.

Nothing more and nothing less...

And with "services" like CloudFlare becoming ubiquitous and "the way things are done", even self-hosting sites can now enjoy the full benefits of SMITM!

It makes web traffic encryption a laughing stock... probably what this model was designed to do.

And the rest of us now wither under sustained and growing attack traffic which "originates" largely from cloud platforms and leaves us little option other than to pass our own traffic through an SMITM service for our "protection" - or shut it down.

If it sounds like a protection racket, and works like a protection racket, it probably is a protection racket... how stupid can human beings be?

And it also allows for censorship on a wide scale. They just throw up an error message to perplex people, but the site's up and working.

There's another linux forum made famous by the guy's youtube videos. That forum routinely blocks just based on the user-agent string. It is quite funny but also sad. I don't use that site due to their use of the cloud.

Another gaming site did something similar but I could not tell why. It puts up a banner saying "Banned". I don't participate in malicious behavior so I cannot tell what triggered that "ban". But yes people are essentially brain-washed and their ignorance is used against them. Along with fear of course.