Vincent Gable’s Blog

October 14, 2009

Misunderestimating the Cloud

Filed under: Programming,Quotes,Security | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on October 14, 2009

Recently, a Microsoft datacenter lost thousands of mobilephone user’s personal data.

A common response to this story is that this kind of danger is inherent in “cloud” computing services, where you rely on some service provider to take care of your data. But this misses the point, I think. Preserving data is difficult, and individual users tend to do a mediocre job of it. Admit it: You have lost your own data at some point. I know I have lost some of mine. A big, professionally run data center is much less likely to lose your data than you are.

Ed Felton

It’s easy to convince yourself of this anecdotally. Look around you, how many people people that you loosely know on Facebook have you seen complain about losing all their contacts when they lost their phone? I’ve seen at least a dozen such announcements. But nobody I actually know has been affected by this recent fiasco, or complained about losing contacts in any other “cloud” failure.

But people have a bias to overestimate risks they can’t control, and underestimate risks they can control. So we reinvent the wheel, and lose our own data ourselves.

Hey, I do it too. Actuarially, I really should be paying wordpress.com to manage this blog.

April 6, 2008

Yes

Filed under: Design,Programming,Research,Usability | , ,
― Vincent Gable on April 6, 2008

Just a curiosity, but it happens that in a yes-no binary response test, the reaction time to select “no” is longer than for “yes.”

Source

I haven’t taken the time to verify this, or see if anyone has quantified the difference in response times.

UPDATE 2009-12-18: The technical term for this is Acquiescence Response Bias — the tendency to agree with any assertion, regardless of its content.

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