[selykg]

I think you're conflating "cloud" to mean any computer on the internet. I think that's generally a fine thing to do most of the time. But, cloud used to mean something a little different and it's been lost to weird arguments it seems.

I look at the cloud as something I can spin up a new service or VM very quickly. Think AWS, or Azure or whatever other service lets you quickly and easily deploy something.

We've now gotten to the point where people are saying any computer on the internet is "the cloud" and I don't think that's right or wrong necessarily, but for the sake of Hacker News, I do wish we were a little more specific.

That said, I think this argument from Proton is bordering on funny word play to make it seem different.

[gregmac]

> I think you're conflating "cloud" to mean any computer on the internet.

If you read "cloud" as "somebody else's computer" it entirely depends on perspective.

If you're running a service on your own hardware in your own datacenter, you're clearly not cloud.

However, if you're a user of that same service, and your data lives on some computers that are running in someone else's data center, then for all intents and purposes your data is "in the cloud". It's indistinguishable if the service you're using is using AWS/Azure/etc, running their own hardware, and/or storing data on something like S3.

There's of course a mix of in between stuff that makes this 10x more complicated: if it's a rented server in somebody else's datacenter, are you "cloud" or not? What if it's your hardware, but somebody else's datacenter? What if you store backups on S3?

[RajT88]

This is a fine use case for using "cloud" to mean, "somewhere, not here".

I don't feel like my passwords should be stored "somewhere, not here". They should be stored "here" - where I choose to store them, and nowhere else.

I purchased a hardware password manager a while back, which seemed really neat:

https://www.beamu.io/

But, sure enough, bulk import uploads all of your passwords to their servers, even though there's just no rational reason why a server "somewhere, not here" needs to play man-in-the-middle to all your logins. To avoid it, you have to go one by one (even then there's no assurance, but the official docs do not say it's sent up to their servers).