Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose the biggest risk is failure-to-pay, as with all cloud backups/storage. If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. If I drop off the grid for an extended holiday, that could be a real risk. To my knowledge, Amazon offer no means of prepaying.
> If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. Business idea: cloud archive storage where you pay when you upload data and optionally pay a modest monthly fee for real-time access to stored data, but they'll guarantee to keep your data for you if you stop paying: you'll just need to pay to retrieve that data. As the long-term archival data wouldn't need to be stored in a…
Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
381–390 of 419 posts
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't think AWS does periodic offline backups of stuff stored in S3 so that they don't find themselves in this exact embarrassing scenario? Regardless of whether it's user-facing for AWS users, I'd hope they do, or certainly that they did before they got a good sense of the long-term reliability of S3 as a big system.
I think they do all sorts of backup stuff - and as a consumer of S3 you need to evaluate how resilient their backing up is. S3 is pretty murky about permanence guarantees so I'd always look at making sure there is a separately maintained replication script to some medium I have control over if that data is irreplaceable and the costs of losing it are significant to the business. Judging those costs and making that ca…
designed to provide 99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment reads as "This is normal; nothing to see here move along". Which is more of an indictment on the state of things than on the comment itself. If you can't protect people's shit, don't offer to hold onto it for money!
No, that comment sounds like the insurance job described in Fight Club[1] > Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A…
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose the biggest risk is failure-to-pay, as with all cloud backups/storage. If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. If I drop off the grid for an extended holiday, that could be a real risk. To my knowledge, Amazon offer no means of prepaying.
You get emails. Imho it's not a big risk.
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do any cloud providers create backups on top of replication though? Backing up databases (terabytes) is feasible, they're not that big. But an entire cloud storage for photo and video for millions, we're talking maybe exabytes. The notion of making "separate" backups seems cost-prohibitive. I am curious, though -- for services like Dropbox or Google Drive, how many replicas are there of your files? I know there must…
"Do any cloud providers create backups on top of replication though?" We do.[1] For exactly 1.75x our normal pricing, we will replicate your entire account, nightly, to a geo-redundant site which is not open for normal customer use (and, therefore, has a lower risk profile). This GR site is the he.net core datacenter, in Fremont. It's also worth pointing out that replication to rsync.net buys you malware/ransomware p…
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose the biggest risk is failure-to-pay, as with all cloud backups/storage. If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. If I drop off the grid for an extended holiday, that could be a real risk. To my knowledge, Amazon offer no means of prepaying.
> If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. Business idea: cloud archive storage where you pay when you upload data and optionally pay a modest monthly fee for real-time access to stored data, but they'll guarantee to keep your data for you if you stop paying: you'll just need to pay to retrieve that data. As the long-term archival data wouldn't need to be stored in a…
You'd also need to charge enough upfront that you can still turn a profit if they stop paying immediately. Asking for upfront payment of 40 years of data-storage fees, might be a problem.
> a commodity tape-library box in a basement in a farm somewhere near a freeway
I'm not a data-storage expert by any means, but that doesn't sound anywhere near good enough. You need to redundantly protect against flood, fire, crime, etc. You'll also need to be able to retrieve data at scale. You're essentially rolling your own Amazon Glacier.
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#387Japanese camera companies are really bad at cloud software - Sony Playmemories probably the worst offender. Also the in-camera "mini-apps" tend to be terrible. They make good hardware but horrible software. They should really buy a computational photography company that also knows how to make good web and native apps, like https://skylum.com/
This is particularly evident in videogames, where anything for PC is liable to be extremely weirdly built and feels like it was made for Windows XP. There's a strong tendency to use archaic cheat prevention tools like nProtect GameGuard, which is a rootkit, and a weird reluctance to run servers in sensible ways. Oddly this is all actually helpful when you want to run their games on Linux because even though they don't seem to know it exists, the games are so "old" that they're pretty easy to get running.
Sony is actually probably one of the better companies for software. But they still do utterly weird nonsense that I'd never even think of. The PS4 throttles your download speed based on your ping to the download server. It's...totally wrong and confusing. But easily bypassed by running a proxy on your local network.
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I allow my payment card to expire, Amazon aren't obligated to continue to store my data. Business idea: cloud archive storage where you pay when you upload data and optionally pay a modest monthly fee for real-time access to stored data, but they'll guarantee to keep your data for you if you stop paying: you'll just need to pay to retrieve that data. As the long-term archival data wouldn't need to be stored in a…
There was Permanent.org, three months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943620
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rights are a much broader concept than "natural rights". See: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/ I certainly recognise property rights (although in principle there's no reason why one couldn't believe in rights without that being one of them), but I also recognise a lot of other rights (including "positive" rights). And don't recognise negative rights as being more fundamental than positive rights. The positi…
It is not a matter of them being more "fundamental" There is no way for a government to provide you with healthcare (positive rights) with out infringment of my negative rights to my labor (i.e they must take a part of my labor via theft what you call taxation in order to provide you with the right to a service). The only other way for a government to provide a service would be indentured servitude where they require…
This is particularly obvious in the case of private ownership of land. Without private property rights I would be free to walk across and otherwise make use of that land it is your property rights which take that freedom away from me. And this isn't a theoretical issue either: prior to the enclosure of land in the 15th-19th centuries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure), most land here in the UK was common land that anybody had a right to make use of to graze animals and make a living. The expansion of private property directly took away that right and deprived many of their livelihoods. Even today we still have the Right To Roam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#United_Kingdom) and at least walk on private land which provides for significantly more freedom than is available in the US (there is close to zero danger of being shot just for walking somewhere in the UK).
For other property it's less obvious, but enforcing your property rights still requires encroaching on my liberty. For example, without property rights, I would be free to walk into a shop and take whatever I wanted to. Or rock up to your unlocked car and drive off with it. The only way that this is prevented is through active enforcement by the state. Ultimately, if I persist in doing these things then I will be physically imprisoned. And it takes significant resources to run the policing and justice systems, just like healthcare. Now obviously nobody thinks I should just be able to walk up and take your care. But other forms of private property are controversial. In particular the idea that you ought to be able to keep all of that wealth that people give you (without taxation). You are only able to hold onto that wealth in the first place because the state enforces your right to keep it. There is nothing a priori that says that the state (which ultimately represents its citizens) must always enforce that right.
To summarise, many "negative rights", including the right to private property, have exactly the same ethical problems as "positive rights". At which point it becomes a simple matter of what you consider moral and important. You're right that state-provided healthcare deprives you of wealth that you could otherwise have. But the reverse is also true. You having the wealth deprives others of healthcare that they could otherwise have. You just happen to think that property rights are more "natural" and important.
Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
We balance risks which have uncontrollable inputs. Not controllable ones for which we now have an answer. That's the difference. You note it right in your comment - that you in fact do take measures to be safe, and try to be specifically aware of elements of the dynamic situation which require attention. That's very different to say, if you planned on reversing a car and decided it took too much effort to look behind…
>Not controllable ones for which we now have an answer. We do it all the time? How far are you from the nearest fire extinguisher? Can't that number be reduced? That is but one example.
I as an individual can take the risks I choose to take with my life. I have no right to apply that to others though.
In fact the building I'm currently in was built to local standards which mandated all sorts of things in relation to providing adequate control of known risks related to the spread of fire, and has smoke detectors fitted for that purpose. Because the builder of the house might have been okay accepting that risk for themselves, but we don't let them just pass it on to others.