Jon Johansen Quotes

Digital data are more fragile than printed material.

Data is fungible. You can make as many copies of it as you want.

As much as we can, we want to prevent people from having to think about how to keep and share their stuff.

Information imposes certain criteria on how it can be stored.

Dropbox sweats the user experience details as commendably as it masters the considerable engineering challenges required to reliably sync files everywhere a user may need them.

You think about who needs Dropbox, and it's just about anybody with a pulse.

I think most organizations have an interest in key recovery, at least with respect to stored data.

I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.

Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.

You can experience a download, but you can't download an experience.

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

When burned on a CD, the human genome is smaller than Microsoft Office.

Second, we're spending a huge amount of money on technology so that everyone can check out laptops and portable phones. We're spending more money to write our existing information into databases or onto CD-ROM.

Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.

One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails.

Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use - not only text or media but processing power too - will be located remotely.

I favor pocket-sized hard drives that travel between home and office, syncing with computers on both ends.

When you live in a networked environment, it's possible to separate data from applications.

You can't talk about big data without talking about things like privacy and ownership.

Soon it's all going to be digital anyway. It's all going to be saved on a little coin somewhere.

I've always shied away from online data storage. I don't even use my employers' network drives for anything sensitive. I want to control access myself.

It would be better for everyone if we deleted everything by default and saved the things that are important to us.

We have persistant objects, they're called files.

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.

No one has any faith in the tape anymore - everyone just relies on computers and considers the hardrive to be the safest option, and I don't. I think an analog tape is something you can hold.