Mr. Davidson meshes together brand information overload or, if you prefer, signaling on one hand and product information/review overload on the other. He thinks that we, as consumers, are better off in an information-rich world. I would go the extra mile and call it an information-obese one.
At one point he quotes a business professor from the University of California, Davis: “If there is a critical-enough mass of informed buyers, that is sufficient” to pressure manufacturers to make better-quality goods, Bhargava says. “That group of informed consumers creates a force. It doesn’t have to be everybody.”
There are two problems here. First, what is a critical-enough mass? 100, 200, 1000 buyers? More?
Second, how do you know that you are dealing with informed buyers and not a company’s employees or software comment bots? And what’s an informed buyer? Somebody who has been using the product for two days and claiming it’s a sturdy, very solid unit or one who has been using it for 2 years?
Some solid, peer-verified scientific ground is more than welcome to back this kind of marketoid statement. I would have preferred it if Mr. Davidson interviewed a psychologist/sociologist instead of a business professor.
The Cloud™ is everywhere to be seen in the current Information Technology landscape and many oracles (with vested interests) such as Microsoft predict that it is not going away anytime soon.
It certainly offers many useful features that make our digital lives easier. There are hidden costs however that users should know about before trusting their data (or their employer’s) with the Cloud™.
Take Dropbox as an example. It’s one of the most visible Cloud-based services on planet Silicon. It allows you to synchronize your files across all sorts of devices. It is extremely easy to open an account and install the client and join their 70 million+ users, frolicking in a cozy cloud. But how many of those users took the time to carefully read the Terms of Service or care about twomajor security incidents the service had in 2011?
Issue 60 of MISC Magazine features an article from yours truly about Dropbox ; in French though. Leveraging some business intelligence, OSINT, careful reading of the ToS and observation of the Dropbox client behavior, the article aims at rising the public’s awareness of some important issues before they trust anything into the hands of Dropbox. I also knock on a few doors that might be worth exploring by other members of the Information Security community.
Is Dropbox secure enough? Is the company behind it trustworthy? Well, there are no easy answers to these questions. It largely depends on your trust scale and the type of data you share on their cloud (and Amazon’s since they heavily rely on AWS). But I certainly wouldn’t upload my employer’s or any sensitive data on their “cloud”. Security has been, is and will remain a trade-off.
If you have the opportunity to read the article, let me know what you think.
"Much more so than the human body, capitalism is marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into new business opportunities: diet pills, heart bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But though fast food may be good business for the health care industry, the cost to society -an estimated $250 billion a year in diet-related health care costs and rising rapidly- cannot be sustained indefinitely."
