The Ars Technicast

The enticing promise of cloud computing is one plays on our human desire for convenience. Your data, which can include photos, music, health records –– in essence, your digital life ––  is hosted in the cloud, synced to all your devices, backed up in case things fail in your physical backups. This kind of computing would make the George Jetson scream with envy. But what happens when hackers can take away your digital life in the blink of an eye? This is what happened to Mat Honan, Senior Writer at Wired, when a hacker infiltrated his life, stole and deleted his data. This hack required a few steps in succession that exploited authentication methods used in popular services like Amazon, Google, Twitter and Apple’s iCloud service. Mat wrote about this act of vandalism against him, and he is still dealing with the effects of losing his information.  Mat Honan visits the Ars Technicast in this episode to talk in detail about the fallout after the theft and wiping (yes, they wiped his devices), and what should do