Oh I thought they were talking about SHaaS as a "solution" that doesn't really solve the problems, because you're either trusting the hosts not to decrypt and use your data, or you're encrypting it, which has all the drawbacks of key management.
I hope we'll eventually be able to use some of the key storage/backup solutions being developed mostly in the cryptocurrency sphere. Like, multiparty computation (MPC) is agnostic to the type of key being created, and some of the social recovery methods being tested could be applied to parts of the key. Being able to protect your key from loss but also from theft is a hard problem they're highly incentivized to solve (and other people are highly incentivized to test/break).
These concerns are overblown. Unless you're a criminal, nobody's looking inside your VM. Heck, AWS can't access VMs (of course it's Internet cool to not believe this).
I wonder what it would be like to hold no opinions that you could ever imagine becoming controversial enough to get you flagged for investigation of some kind. I live in an intensely polarized country (U.S.), so it's actually hard for me to imagine caring about anything with any level of passion that one party or the other (heck, or both) wouldn't eventually want to put me on a watchlist for.
What's it like to have that much trust in the ongoing goodwill of other people?
Exactly. Anyone who can't imagine a failure case where they suddenly become a "criminal" because people who disagree with them obtain control of the legislative apparatus haven't read enough history (or have extremely boring opinions).
> You rent a VM in a data center, where servers belong, to host your stuff.
If you rent from an actual data center, you pay for a ton of stuff you don't really need for personal backups. If your home internet goes out and you can't access your personal cloud for a bit, it's likely not a big deal, so you don't need the level of redundancy that a data center gives you. On the flip side, the premium you pay for professionally hosted storage is enormous compared to buying a hard drive.
I priced this out somewhat recently, and the lowest price I could get renting a server with >=2TB of storage is $11/month using the OVH Eco line, and that's without ECC (which I consider to be non-negotiable), FS-level compression (IIRC you can't change file systems with OVH), or redundancy in case the server/disk fails. I'm currently working on a DIY setup with two nodes equipped with 8GB ECC memory, 2TB of storage (with Btrfs compression to get even more storage out of it), and considerably more processing power than the OVH servers. My total up front cost is going to be about $400, with an estimated $25/year in electricity. The most comparable OVH offering would cost $403 in the first year (with RAID but without a second node), so my DIY solution basically pays for itself after that, and I can upgrade the hardware anytime I want.
Of course, there is an obvious argument to be made that my time is worth more than the cost savings, but I've been learning a lot so I instead consider it a free education. :)
Backups also seem like a mostly solved problem; there's plenty of software that can back up a server to your own cloud storage account.