Recently, Richard Stallman called cloud computing 'worse than stupidity' His argument for this view is that, by giving your data away to the host of the web application you are using, you are essentially giving up all rights to that data. After all, they own it and there is little you can do to stop them from doing whatever they want with that data.

In the last two years, the term "cloud computing" has infiltrated the mainstream press (although the concept has existed for years). More and more businesses are embracing this way of thinking about information technology. And if the seminar circuit is any evidence, the legal world has awoken to the myriad challenges of cloud computing.

Everyone who surfs the Net is eminently trackable. Internet data packets include not only the actual data being sent, but also headers with routing information that is used to guide the packages to their destinations.

Watch a fun video based on 8 IT predictions of rPath. Everyone has their predictions for the new year but do they often prognosticate using an animated video? The folks over at rPath created a clever video animation depicting their reasonable and humorous predictions for 2010. rPath might be best known for its online virtual appliance builder. You can also download rBuilder.

Many public administrations already use open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to let citizens look at public geographic data trough dedicated Web sites. Others use the same software to partially open the data gathering process: they let citizens directly add geographic information to the official, high-quality GIS databases by drawing or clicking on digital maps.

One of the most volatile and yet needed industries is the data storage industry. As computing technologies become more cloud centric and rely upon the web for business, productivity, education to even recreation, there is a constant push to increase capacities but even more so increase I/O throughput. As a result of recent demands, our approach with these technologies need to be re-evaluated.

Clouds continue to dominate my life, as they do (or will) many of yours. While major corporations try to convince us to rent space or resources on their clouds, it doesn't have to be expensive, and some services like Ubuntu One, offer some amount of free cloud storage. But public institutions can get in on the act as well, and seed their own clouds.

Opponents of cloud computing cite data loss and vendor lock-in as a primary dangers of relying on such services. They're valid points, but since cloud computing isn't going away anytime soon, it's time to start finding solutions instead of simply sounding alarm bells.

Day 2 of Camp KDE kicked off with a bang when Frank Karlitschek announced the start of a significant new KDE project. The ownCloud initiative strives to combine the rich desktop interfaces made possible by the Qt and KDE libraries with the large amount of social information and data users are putting online.