Wozniak Slams the Cloud as 'Horrendous'

Things are looking cloudy with a chance of doubt for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The engineering wizard spoke last week during the penultimate showing of Mike Daisey's controversial one-man monologue, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, regarding Apple's labor conditions in China, the AFP reported.

"I really worry about everything going to the cloud," Wozniak said after Daisey's two-hour expose. "I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years."

He continued, saying that cloud users don't actually own any of their data, but that it has instead been signed away.

It might seem odd that Woz is so opposed to cloud computing, since his own company has developed a cloud system, but since Wozniak retired from Apple in 1987, he played no part in the design, creation, or marketing of iCloud.

His concerns may be legitimate, as least to Wired writer Mat Honan, who that his iCloud account was hacked, and all data from his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air wiped via iCloud.

On his blog, Honan explained that someone gained access to his iCloud account, reset the password, then trashed the confirmation message. Within 10 minutes of the hack, Honan's iPhone was wiped, followed by his iPad a minute later, and then his laptop a few minutes after.

Honan's trouble played perfectly into Wozniak's arguments.

Daisey, meanwhile, was in the news earlier this year after the makers of the national radio show This American Life about Apple factories in China that featured Daisey's commentary. He basically fabricated a large chunk of what he told show hosts, but Daisey justified the decision by saying that his show is a theatrical piece not intended to be journalism.

It seems no one is safe from attack, including newswire service Reuters, which saw its blogging platform , when the perpetrator posted fake Syria war stories on the site.

Meanwhile, Former New York Times editor Bill Keller was the target of a hack in a recent Times opinion piece about Wikileaks, which used Keller's photo and byline to fool readers.

For more, see PCMag's , as well as .

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