Do you trust the owners of The Cloud?

Open letter to David Einstein:
[ einstein.dave [at] gmail.com ]

"Streaming makes CDs go way of dinosaurs",
says the headline over your column
in the San Francisco CHRONICLE [21 July 2014, section D].

Sure, you don't need a CD to hear music TODAY,
so long as companies will make an MP3 available in the cloud.

But what happens to the cloud,
and to all data sent through air or through metal wires,
when electromagnetic radiations are interfered with
-- accidentally or by design?
Think of the interference caused naturally by sunspots.
Then imagine an e-weapon which detonates in near-Earth space,
blasting out electromagnetic radiation
designed to "fry" servers and satellites.

After servers go silent, a CD may survive,
perhaps thru a Dark Age,
to be re-discovered in a future Renaissance.

So the CD may have gone the way of railways, and real food --
to be discarded foolishly, and revived later.

[ Sure, if your CD contains only commercially-published stuff,
you may not care.
But a CD might preserve home-made art, private info, confessions to be read only after death,
or subversive/heretical ideas banned by totalitarian regimes. ]

Of course, if we had not been misled by the Ruling One Percent,
Americans could already have built
a less-vulnerable underground network of glass-fiber cables,
carrying signals based on photons rather than electrons.

But that would have required long-term thinking,
which our rulers disdain.


-- Drumming Differently,
G.C. Vanya
.....

c/o SUN, PO Box 426937-SUN, SF, CA 94142-6937
.........................