The most powerful "pornographic photo scandal" revelation in history: the terrible cloud

This Hollywood nude photo scandal is the biggest in history. Foreign hackers are suspected of using loopholes in Apple's iCloud cloud disk system to illegally steal nude photos of many popular female stars around the world. There are 101 female stars in this list, 17 of whom have been exposed, and 84 have not been exposed. Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and the latest one is Avril Lavigne.

Every time a nude photo scandal occurs, it triggers a wave of Internet traffic, but this time, Apple's iCloud service has become a popular buzzword, further popularizing cloud services.

I want to tell you a story about my own experience, which has nothing to do with pornographic photos.

Previously, on August 31, during my class with thousands of people, I lost a Redmi Note phone, but I didn't pay much attention to it. Recently, my Mi 4 phone suddenly had abnormal contacts. Simply put, thousands of contacts suddenly disappeared, and some unfamiliar phone numbers replaced them. I thought the phone was infected with a virus or hacked, but I didn't understand it until I remembered that I had enabled the cloud synchronization function on several of my phones, such as synchronizing contacts.

It turned out that my lost phone was quietly syncing, which was so weird. I went to the background of Xiaomi Cloud Service, which has a "find" function. When I searched, I was surprised that the location of this phone was near Longyuan Avenue in Longhua, Shenzhen. I can activate the "sound", which is to make the phone sound an alarm. Then I activated the "lock" function, which means that if you want to open this phone, you must enter a password. There is also an "erase" function that can delete all data, but of course you will lose control, but I didn't use it.

Anyway, I managed to brick the phone. Horrible cloud service.

This is also the revelation of the strongest "pornographic photo scandal" in history to enterprises:

1. For users, cloud service is a screaming user experience and the basis for making a living. Especially for traditional enterprises, it is a must. "Share and create any content at any time, anywhere, through any device." In the future, hardware without cloud service will be zombie hardware.

2. In the tide of mobile Internet, cloud services are becoming a new business model. In the past, people made money by selling hardware, but now they make money by selling services and value-added services. For example, a friend of mine is making a Wi-Fi cloud service that not only provides Internet access, but also provides a tool for watching American TV series.

3. Behind cloud services is big data. What is behind big data is not big, but data interrogation. How to interrogate data depends on the active data behind cloud services. Dead data is worthless.

The Cloud War has just begun, what do you think?

The Hollywood entertainment industry has been exposed to the biggest "porn photo scandal" in history. Our editor Huang's favorite Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and many other female stars are involved in it. Regarding this, the editor Huang is both excited and angry.

Back in 2008, Edison Chen's pornographic photos were leaked from his hard drive while he was repairing his computer. Editor Huang, who is as concerned about the technology industry as the entertainment industry, was very keen to discover the difference.

This time, the incident in Hollywood was mostly directed at Apple's iCloud service, and had nothing to do with computer repair. Times are changing, and even the way the nude photos are presented is keeping up with the times.

In the past, our photos were stored on computer hard drives and camera memory cards, but now, photos have been diverted to cloud services.

In fact, this is not the first time that iCloud has been related to gossip. There have been reports before that Sam Hall, a family law partner at MW Law Firm in the United States, believes that cloud synchronization services, including Apple iCloud, allow people to better understand whether their spouse is having an affair outside.

In recent months, he has received many similar cases when people discovered that their spouses were having an affair outside. The related cheating information and photos were kept synchronized because the couple used the same cloud account.

“Share and create anything, anytime, anywhere, on any device.”

Although it was negative news, editor Huang, who was browsing photos in front of his computer, realized with inner conflict that the negative news about his dream lover Jennifer Lawrence was an excellent endorsement of the development trajectory of cloud computing.

Every time we look back at Internet security incidents, we have never lost our concerns about the security of cloud computing. In fact, from the perspective of the overall technical architecture of cloud computing, its security is no worse than other network systems, if not better.

Some security experts also pointed out that the use of cloud computing is even a new direction for the development of some security technologies. As long as the Internet exists, the topic of security will always continue, and this is also true in the era of cloud and big data.

At the Meizu MX4 launch conference a few days ago, they highlighted two key points: the long-awaited large-capacity cloud storage, and the IoT-based smart hardware partners, which represented a stance on the future development trend of the industry.

The Accelerating Power of Cloud Computing

The intermediate nodes connecting devices and cloud computing are mobile Internet and individual applications. In turn, cloud services not only provide back-end support for applications, but also accelerate application development.

From an explicit perspective, cloud computing and cloud services have changed our data storage habits, but at an implicit level, the changes brought about by cloud computing are actually more profound. Mobile Internet and cloud computing have promoted the transformation of current corporate business models.

After leaving YouTube, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad started another business and founded AVOS. After a period of development, the AVOS US team was renamed Mixbit, and the Chinese team became independent and renamed AVOS Cloud, with former Googler and Yale University Ph.D. Jiang Hong as CEO.

AVOS launched a number of applications at the beginning of its establishment, and later focused on providing back-end cloud services for application development. Currently, CCTV, Huawei, Sinovation Ventures and other well-known enterprises and institutions are its users.

Jiang Hong described to me the changes in the form of cloud services under the background of mobile Internet:

"In the context of mobile Internet, the separation of front-end and back-end is more thorough, the industrial division of labor is more obvious, and the separation of different levels of cloud services is technically possible. In addition, due to the characteristics of mobile Internet, such as the rise of the O2O market with the development of mobile computing devices, more and more companies or teams that were originally engaged in traditional industries or have offline resource advantages have begun to enter the mobile Internet field. However, their advantages are not in technology, so they need a more powerful and high-level cloud service platform to support their business."

AVOS Cloud has also launched some high-quality applications. Eventually, their product development trajectory shifted from downstream applications to upstream cloud services, completing the transformation.

Jiang Hong said that the logic behind this transformation is that they had previously developed multiple mobile applications for end users, so they could personally experience the pain points of mobile development and the huge value that a universal and powerful backend service could bring.

In layman's terms, their feet have been in the shoes of users (application developers).

The fundamental reason why Jiang Hong and AVOS Cloud made this choice is their recognition of the huge potential of the cloud service market.

AVOS Cloud CTO Feng Junwen believes that although mobile Internet is so popular now, the server-side development process for making products for mobile Internet and PC Internet has not changed much over the years.

Even if you want to develop a simple app, you still need to apply for a domain name, rent a server, develop backend code, deploy the program, and maintain the system. This can only ensure that the product is online. After the product is released, in order to cope with the increase in the number of users and traffic, the backend architecture needs to be continuously reconstructed and optimized. All of this is a huge burden for small teams or teams whose strengths are not in technology.

Based on the accumulation of AVOS Cloud, they developed a complete mobile development platform, allowing all developers to quickly complete product development regardless of the server-side architecture implementation. And because they have more time to optimize the user experience, they can polish out better products.

Feng Junwen described it in detail:

“In fact, all network interactions between clients and servers are only for one thing: data. Through good abstraction and encapsulation, our platform can store any type of data independently of specific business, and our API returns it to the client as is when reading.

In addition to data storage, we also provide real-time messaging services, allowing you to add mobile IM functions to your application within 10 minutes. All of this can greatly speed up the application development process. "

A glimpse of the whole picture shows that AVOS Cloud is a very representative cloud service. From a macro perspective, we can quote a sentence from Intel's global vice president Yang Xu:

"One of the important reasons why cloud computing has become popular is the rapid development of mobile Internet. The two are actually complementary to each other. More and more people are starting to do cloud-related things, which may be a new impetus for the rapid development of mobile Internet. The two will continue to move forward in an intertwined manner."

How to accelerate big data

Academician Wu Hequan, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, summarized the future Internet ecology as the "big data, intelligence, mobile Internet and cloud" era. "Big data, intelligence, mobile Internet and cloud computing" refers to "big data, intelligence, mobile Internet and cloud computing."

It can be said that intelligence and mobility are trends, while cloud computing and big data are methods. In the pre-Internet era, the value of products lies in their functions, while the value of Internet products today lies in their data.

A McKinsey Global Institute report, "Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity," shows that companies in 15 of the 17 business sectors in the United States store more data than the Library of Congress.

Walmart is a typical example. This retail giant processes more than 1 million customer transactions per hour, and its database is estimated to contain more than 2.5PB of data, which is equivalent to 167 times the information contained in all the books in the Library of Congress.

Professor Eric Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business Research, conducted a survey of 179 large public companies and found that companies using "data-driven decision-making models" have productivity and profitability that are about 5% higher than their competitors.

Eric Brynjolfsson concluded that for companies that can make full use of big data, it will be easier to achieve their goals.

This shows that the "big" in big data is not the core value of big data. Only through analysis can we find the true value of data from the "big".

The ability to analyze and leverage big data has the potential to transform society by supporting and enabling new scientific discoveries, business models, and consumer experiences.

However, currently only a few people are able to benefit from this big data because the types of data that can be supported by existing technologies, methods and skills are too rigid or their deployment is too expensive.

Intel once conducted an experiment in which it replaced the Gigabit Ethernet server adapter with a 10 Gigabit one, the mechanical hard drive with a solid-state drive, and the processor from the old Xeon 5600 to the E52600 series. The time required to sort a 1TB data set was reduced from 4 hours to 12 minutes. After using Intel's big data analysis platform, the sorting and analysis time was further reduced from 12 minutes to 7 minutes.

That is to say, after upgrading the hardware, especially the hard disk and software equipment, the time for processing and analyzing big data has been greatly shortened. The significance of the reduction from 4 hours to 7 minutes is that the progress of big data technology indicates that we have taken a big step closer to the goal of near real-time data analysis, and the cost is much lower than that of real-time data analysis.

The cost of previous implementations using proprietary hardware and software.

The benefit of near real-time data analysis is that it will help companies respond to rapidly changing market demands in near real time and gain more value from their assets.

Now let’s look back at the survey results of MIT Professor Eric Brynjolfsson on 179 large listed companies: the productivity and profitability of companies using “data-driven decision-making models” are about 5% higher than their competitors. 5% is a life-or-death line for many large companies.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.