Email

As you know from previous blog entries, it is my opinion that using the cloud (some server out there in cyberspace) for MES (Manufacturing Execution Systems) data is not a good idea.  I am currently re-reading The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman’s 2005 treatise about how the convergence of technology, politics, business practice, and logistics has created what is essentially a worldwide competitive economy.

It is really interesting to read predictive texts during period being predicted.  Although I may disagree with some of the underlying macroeconomic assumptions, (that will be another rant) Friedman is spot on in many areas.  Perhaps I should re-read Toffler’s Future Shock… but I digress.

What I wanted to share with you is a sad but interesting anecdote on page 255 (any significance to the page number…?)  This is yet another consideration if you are putting your data in the cloud – the legal ownership issue.  I will essentially re tweet:

“ sort this one out as well.  On November 13, 2004, Lance Corporal Justin M. Ellsworth, twenty, was killed by a roadside bomb during a foot patrol in Iraq…. His family was demanding that Yahoo! give them the password for their deceased son’s e-mail account …  ‘I want to be able to remember him in his words.  I know he thought he was doing what he needed to do.  I want to have that for the future,’ John Ellsworth, Justin’s father, told the <Associated Press>.  ‘It’s the last thing I have of my son.’  We are moving into a world where more and more communication is in the form of bits traveling through cyberspace and stored on servers located all over the world.  No government controls this cyberrealm.  So the question is:  Who owns your bits when you die?  The AP reported that Yahoo! denied the Ellsworth family their son’s password, citing the fact that Yahoo! policy calls for erasing all accounts that are inactive for ninety days and the fact that all Yahoo! users agree at sign-up that rights to a member’s ID or account contents terminate upon death.  ‘While we sympathize with any grieving family, Yahoo! accounts and any contents therein are nontransferable’ even after death, Karen Mahon, a Yahoo! spokeswoman told the AP….  This is very real.  I stored many chapters of this book in my AOL account, feeling it would be safest in cyberspace.  If something had happened to me during my writing, my family and publisher would have had to sue AOL to try to get this text.  Somebody, please sort this all out.”

As Arsenio Hall was occasionally heard to say “Hmmmm”