Most of the climate benefits from “tree-planting” really derive from reforestation. Forest ecologies are complex and take decades-centuries to develop to the point where they can function as meaningful carbon sinks. The cycle was covered in my biology 101 class in college, can’t find a graphic covering the overall cycle at the moment, but the point is it’s not just lots of trees = carbon sink, it’s the enormous community of life that develops around (and also often precedes) the trees that makes forests – not just “groups of trees” or even “a rather large group of trees” – function as carbon sinks.
It’s a fantastic idea for the long-term considering all the other problems we’re running into with global deforestation anyways, but businesses whittled the concept down to plant tree = good because that’s easier than dealing with the causes of global deforestation (hint: businesses)
[citation needed] because that’s not in the article. According to the article, attackers used automated scanning software, which strongly implies they brute-forced cameras connected to the Internet with default or weak credentials. That has nothing to do with whether or not the service is based in the cloud.
As a matter of fact, it’s known that the leading cloud-based surveillance system, Ring, has been subject to employee abuse and user accounts have been widely compromised via credential stuffing. In fact, Amazon is currently facing a proposed order from the FTC over the fact that they allowed abuse by employees and more or less knew for years that their lax security practices were placing their customers in danger from cybercriminals. Hell, it’s 2023 and all you have to do to pre-empt most credential stuffing attacks is enforce 2FA, and this was optional in a HOME SECURITY PRODUCT from a LEADING cloud provider. “In general cloud providers have better security” my ass.
Cloud based security only gets better when regulators force cloud providers to improve security, after cloud providers allow hackers to harm thousands to millions of customers.
I’m just gonna say it again: the cloud is just someone else’s computer.