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Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

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Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#81

Post by kergonath »

sellyme wrote: post #64
pmontra wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm, or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm. Some units are usual in some contexts, some are not. In one word, habits.

> Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm Speak for yourself, I've been trying to popularise "1Mm" for years. Admittedly not with a huge amount of success. > or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.

> Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.

Everybody knows it’s 4.848×10^12 attoprsecs.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#82

Post by purplecats »

snypher wrote: post #77
sellyme wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm Speak for yourself, I've been trying to popularise "1Mm" for years. Admittedly not with a huge amount of success. > or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.

If someone was to ask me how far is was from sun to earth, and I answered 1AU, and they asked what an AU was? The point would be to put it in a familiar unit, even though '150 million' isn't easy to visualize.

pretty sure it was a joke

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#83

Post by sellyme »

snypher wrote: post #77
sellyme wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm Speak for yourself, I've been trying to popularise "1Mm" for years. Admittedly not with a huge amount of success. > or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.

If someone was to ask me how far is was from sun to earth, and I answered 1AU, and they asked what an AU was? The point would be to put it in a familiar unit, even though '150 million' isn't easy to visualize.

> If someone was to ask me how far is was from sun to earth, and I answered 1AU, and they asked what an AU was?

You'd probably do the same thing that you would do if they asked what a km was: keep changing the units until you get one that they recognise, and then now they can understand the original unit you used.

(Although in this specific case given that they're asking about the definition of the unit you'd probably provide that context without needing further prompting in the first place, similar to if they asked about the circumference of the earth and you gave an answer in metres)

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#84

Post by sellyme »

purplecats wrote: post #82
snypher wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone was to ask me how far is was from sun to earth, and I answered 1AU, and they asked what an AU was? The point would be to put it in a familiar unit, even though '150 million' isn't easy to visualize.

pretty sure it was a joke

Not a joke, the AU is a pretty common unit of measurement when talking about distances too large for metres and too small for light-years, especially since it's based on one of the most widely understood astronomical distances. Of course using it to describe the distance it's derived from is more than a little tautological, but that wasn't too important in the context of discussing magnitude prefixes.

It's roughly the same thing as describing a distant potentially-habitable planet as being "1.5 times the size of Earth" instead of giving its radius in metres. It's just that AUs wrap that "n times the distance between the sun and the earth" into a nice standardised unit.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#85

Post by hanche »

sellyme wrote: post #64
pmontra wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm, or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm. Some units are usual in some contexts, some are not. In one word, habits.

> Same reason for we say 1000 km instead of 1 Mm Speak for yourself, I've been trying to popularise "1Mm" for years. Admittedly not with a huge amount of success. > or Sun to Earth 150 M km instead of 150 Gm Surely "1 AU" is the preferred form for this one.

I’ve been using Mm too, but only when I have a reasonable expectation that it will be understood. IOW, rarely.

But also, I still have the Earth–Moon distance internalized as 385000 km, not 385 Mm, since that is what I learned as a kid.

But stating the Sun–Earth distance as 1 AU is just a tautology, restating the definition, and hence void of information. I suspect you’re jesting. ;-)

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#86

Post by remus »

peter422 wrote: post #45
suifbwish wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have encryption that is guaranteed to never be obsolete it ALWAYS matters where you store the data.

It does seem likely that Google will pay to store every bit of encrypted customer data that is currently stored forever because potentially decades from now it could be cracked and they could access all that amazing ancient private information.

I don't think that is really the point that was being made. As you say the practical chances of google storing this data for x years, then committing corporate suicide by decrypting it is are miniscule (and presumably apple agrees).

The point is that there are layers of security, and by moving the data outside of their physical control apple has given up one of those layers of security.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#87

Post by nuker »

fulafel wrote: post #40
adt2bt wrote: post #10

It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

> and access to traffic patterns

I would think Apple is smart enough to mix storage blobs, so one blob is not one user. Plus all requests come from Apple datacenters, not user devices.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#88

Post by hanche »

SilverRed wrote: post #37
SilasX wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People use "terabytes" a lot (on the order of the size of a desktop hard drive), they don't use petabytes or exabytes.

Petabytes is a common unit for company scale data but I guess people reading random tech news aren't familiar with it yet. It's also way beyond what we use in other units. Gigalitre is the biggest SI prefix I have seen outside of bytes.

Petagrams (Pg) is commonly used in climate science. I always wondered why they don’t write it as Gt instead.

But gigalitre? Surely, calling them cubic kilometres (edit: should be hm³, see followup comments) would be preferable?

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#89

Post by helsinkiandrew »

peter422 wrote: post #45
suifbwish wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have encryption that is guaranteed to never be obsolete it ALWAYS matters where you store the data.

It does seem likely that Google will pay to store every bit of encrypted customer data that is currently stored forever because potentially decades from now it could be cracked and they could access all that amazing ancient private information.

It still puzzles me that people just can't understand the the huge chasm between storing and using peoples data from their own products and stealing data from other companies thats stored on your systems in the hope that one day it can be decrypted and used to improve ads.

Google is a huge company, the idea that it would set out to do something that everyone involved in would know is directly breaking the law (rather than doing something thats a grey area, or they know is legal but 'unethical' or could become a PR issue, or destroy trust in them and destroy their product) is fairly unbelievable.

This comes up again and again with stories about Google and (particularly) AWS cloud computing. I hope for better on HN!

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#90

Post by jfrunyon »

mlyle wrote: post #74
DenseComet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article claims that Apple is on track to spend around $300 million on GCP storage services this year. With redundancies, server costs, and DC costs, the upfront price could easily touch 3 to 6 billion, or 10 to 20 years of GCP storage costs.

> With redundancies, server costs, and DC costs, the upfront price could easily touch 3 to 6 billion, or 10 to 20 years of GCP storage costs. Surely it didn't cost GOOG $6B upfront worth of infrastructure to get $300M of annual revenue from Apple. Yes, there's economies of scale, but I think you overstate the case.

Google already has a lot of the infrastructure and labor needed.
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