There is no cloud: it's just someone else's computer t-shirt

If you don't get the joke we've got another t-shirt for you, but basically the meaning of the t-shirt is that surrendering control of your data via the use of cloud services puts you and potentially others in danger.

Many "cloud" companies are scanning for what they think is illicit content, but all the while endangering a mostly innocent customer base. There are different potential technologies at play here, but one of the core technologies that have been utilized is based around something called hashing. At a basic level hashing is taking a file as input and outputting a unique string or number called a hash. A hash in theory can be thought of as equivalent to a fingerprint. It's a number or string that can be used to verify that a file is what you've examined on a prior occasion and that no changes have been made. Each file has a different hash and no two files should have the same hash. Unfortunately companies and governments around the world have created hashes of content they have deemed to be illegal- or potentially useful for industrial espionage and other purposes. Cloud companies have begun utilizing these lists of hashes to scan for what they believe to be illegal content stored on their cloud services. In other words- your private data.

Now you might be thinking you've got nothing to worry about as you don't store anything illicit in the cloud. However this isn't the case at all. While in theory two files should never have the same hash the practical reality of it is that two files can have the same hash. This is what is called a collision and with enough data such as is the case with cloud hosting platforms you are guaranteed to end up with false positives. That is more false positives than not. While this isn't the only technology to be concerned about it's one of the big ones. These collisions are resulting in innocent people being raided and accused of hideous crimes that never happened. Depending on the technology there have been false positive rates as high as 85% meaning that potentially as many as 85% of the accused are completely innocent.

The non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation has reported on at least one example of this or a similar technology being utilized that has wrongly endangered a completely innocent man and his family.

Product details:

Gildan - Ultra Cotton™ T-Shirt
Color: Dark Heather
100% cotton