Woz Foresees “Horrendous” Problems with Apple’s iCloud

Steve Wozniak, Apple Co-Founder, predicted over the weekend that Apple customers trusting iCloud with their digital lives are in for some “horrible problems.”

As cloud-based computing takes off, Apple and its iCloud are going to encounter some serious issues over the next few years, Steve Wozniak opined in Washington at the penultimate performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by monologist Mike Daisey.

The Woz, as Apple fans call him, specifically noted, “I really worry about everything going to the cloud. 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.”

Wozniak believes that, “With the cloud, you don't own anything. You already signed it away ... a lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything on to the web, on to the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

And the first piece of evidence that Wozniak may be right comes from Mat Honan, a former Gizmodo employee whose social life got hacked starting with his iCloud account.

Honan relayed on his blog, “At 4:50 PM, someone got into my iCloud account, reset the password and sent the confirmation message about the reset to the trash. My password was a 7 digit alphanumeric that I didn’t use elsewhere.”

The tech journalist said the backup email address on his Gmail account was that same .mac email address so, “at 4:52 PM, they sent a Gmail password recovery email to the .mac account. Two minutes later, an email arrived notifying me that my Google Account password had changed.”

Over the next five minutes, all his Apple devices had been remotely wiped.

“A few minutes after that, they took over my Twitter. Because, a long time ago, I had linked my Twitter to Gizmodo’s they were then able to gain entry to that as well,” explained Honan

Get the full scoop here.