The biggest grief here is how extremely counterintuitive some of these concepts are, especially when they are not stated clearly and have to be kind of "extrapolated" from different bits of crunch and fluff.
The new Matrix is, obviously, very cloud-like (it also has some will on its own, and from what Iīve heard,
Kill Code has some actually pretty cool fluff on this). Cloud Storage is a familiar concept to most of us: the technology is there for a couple of years and ever growing. However, what is not familiar to us - and therefore should be strongly highlighted is a key difference between the Matrix and our current Internet! - is the fact that using the Cloud is,
as it seems, almost mandatory. Up to the point where you need illlegal(!) programs or Augmentations (Data Locks are still a thing) to actually move things out of the Cloud. Up to the point where you canīt hack without a connection to the Matrix because your Deck needs ressources from the Matrix to work (thatīs the best explanation I can find for this).
Before
Data Trails and the Cloudless Program, no player would have ever assumed that you need a special program to store Data offline. Everyone would have assumed that you can store a File on your Commlink and when you turn the Commlink off, the File disappears from the Matrix (Itīs already pretty hard to swallow that everyone can readily see the File without having to, letīs say, Mark the Commlink first).
Cloudless, however, leads to the assumption that this is something that you are not actually supposed to do at all - Despite the Terrabytes of storage space every device is supposed to have. Thereīs another huge suspension of disbelief at work here: After all, the new Matrix is a corporate product. If I were a Matrix security consultant and someone pitched to me a worldwide accessible, no-alternatives, 100%-online, wireless-only digital infrastructure from which I canīt safely remove my precious secrets, Iīd be laughing my ass off! There would be dozens of rivaling systems with other protocols - most likely, less efficient, but more secure.
And again, nothing of this is actually stated RAW in a clear and unmistakeable way, everything is just loosely implied by different bits of information. Which leads to the question: Is this really RAI or is it just an oversight?
From what Iīve heard,
Kill Code offers some insight on things like offline Hosts and systems, so thereīs hope that we get some much needed clarification here