Previously: Part Zero, Part I, Part II.

 

Part III: The Cloud

 

In Parts I and II, we looked at desktop and mobile operating systems. Regardless of which OS you are running, you will need some software and online services to make it useful. We will now look at some free and open source alternatives to more mainstream software and services, which are more respectful of user privacy, beginning with “the cloud”.

“There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.” It’s cliche to say, and tech journalists have made a cottage industry out of writing lengthy articles explaining why it’s not technically accurate. Yes, it’s an oversimplification, but the underlying meaning is true: anything “in the cloud”, whether it is software or data, is outside of your control, and you must rely on the trust you have in the provider of the service. My personal preference is to use local software and storage as much as possible and to use cloud services as little as possible. But particularly in a business environment, cloud services are unavoidable. “Cloud” is a very broad term encompassing a huge variety of software-as-a-service solutions outside the scope of this article, so we will look at just a couple of the most common cloud services used by home users: storage and office productivity software.

When most individual web users, think of “the cloud”, they are thinking of cloud storage services like DropBox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive – a big hard drive in the sky where you can put your files and access them from anywhere. The 2014 iCloud breach that gifted the English language with the term “The Fappening” should be sufficient to demonstrate why storing sensitive information on a publicly-accessible computer is not always a great idea, despite the convenience it offers. If you are going to use a cloud storage service, regardless of which provider you choose, it is highly recommended to encrypt your files prior to uploading using a program like Cryptomator or Duplicati, so that even if your files are retrieved by a malicious actor – or scanned by the service provider itself, for the children, of course – they still must be decrypted in order to be read or displayed. When you sign up for a cloud storage service, read the terms and conditions so that you know how your data will be handled and stored, how requests to access your data by governments and law enforcement agencies will be handled, and how your data will be shared with third parties. While I have not used it personally, I have heard good things about pCloud, and their client software encrypts your files prior to uploading as previously recommended. It is also entirely possible to roll your own “personal cloud” storage solution. In the past I have used the free and open source NextCloudinstalled on a home/small office NAS for this purpose, and can recommend it. This is an option best suited to someone with at least a little bit of technical experience, as you will need to expose your NAS to the public internet and take the appropriate security measures accordinglyif you want to access your files from outside your local network. NextCloud can also be used with a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or other third-party hosting provider, although that leaves you with the same caveats and drawbacks as using any cloud storage provider, you just have more control over the actual infrastructure. A related option which accomplishes a similar goal without actually using either a public or private cloud is to use a program like Syncthing to sync files from one computer or device to another. Syncthing is a peer-to-peer (P2P) program that allows you to connect two computers over a local network or the internet and synchronize files from one location to another. This is obviously more limited in functionality than a big data pool in the sky that anyone can access, but if you just want to, say, share files between your phone and PC, or between your office computer and your home computer, it’s a very good option with a simpler security model than cloud storage.

Another common use of cloud services for individual home users is office productivity software. Google and Microsoft’s cloud-based office suites are the most widely used and allow for easy online collaboration, creation, editing, and sharing of common office documents. While my preference is to use the LibreOffice suite installed on a local machine, if you need online collaboration and editing capabilities, there are other alternatives as well. LibreOffice itself has an experimental browser-based version using WebAssembly which looks quite promising, but it is not yet production-ready. Until then, OnlyOffice provides similar collaboration and online editing capabilities as Google and Microsoft’s offerings in a free and open source package that integrates with a number of different cloud solutions, including the aforementioned NextCloud. A less sophisticated alternative if you can live without real-time collaboration and online editing is to use the aforementioned Syncthing to simply sync locally-created and locally-edited office documents across different computers over a local network or the internet.

If you are interested in other types of alternative services you can host on your own private cloud, check out the Awesome-Selfhosted index.

TL:DR; Consider self-hosting your own cloud storage using a software solution like NextCloud, or using Syncthing to synchronize files between computers. Failing that, be sure to encrypt your files before uploading them to any cloud storage hosting provider using software like Cryptomator or Duplicati. Consider using OnlyOffice or a local office suite like LibreOffice instead of Google or Microsoft cloud office suites. Feel free to explore other self-hosted options from the Awesome-Selfhosted index.

Next, “Part IV: Web Browsers.”