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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

#91

Post by nuker »

pjerem wrote: post #73
p0la wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true when each user is accessing its own encrypted data directly. But from what I read here in the comments, Apple is managing encryption on their own HW, which almost surely means that data is read and wrote from Apple’s machines. Such aggregation of read and write calls across users makes access traffic patterns analyses risk fairly minimal...

« Their own HW » is in fact « their users devices »

Nope, its Apple servers. User devices don’t connect directly to Google

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

#92

Post by jfrunyon »

malwarebytess wrote: post #62
SilverRed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't just buying dumb storage though. Its a whole service and tools to utilize the service. What Apple and Google are selling are different products. A fruit salad is different to what the fruit store sells and receives a higher price.

What does Apple sell wrt data storage that Google doesn't? The integration into apple's product line? Seems a bit mealy mouthed to me. Both companies sell storage to consumers.

You also pay more for Google's consumer storage than for Google's "Cloud Storage".

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

#93

Post by sellyme »

hanche wrote: post #85
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.

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. ;-)

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

Yeah, I mainly only use it in chats (where I can immediately explain it if needed) or in person (where the actual pronunciation of "megametres" makes it pretty obvious). "Mm" and "Gm" being somewhat difficult to google due to "mm" and "gm" being different SI units makes it untenable to just expect people to work it out on their own.

> 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. ;-)

To be clear, I don't mean that you'd answer "1 AU" if someone asked you how far away the sun was - obviously that's completely worthless information! The discussion was just on what units and prefixes are used for various magnitudes of measurement, and the AU is a fantastic unit to use for things that would otherwise be measured in hundreds of gigametres. For example, if you had a table containing the distances between various celestial bodies, it would be very convenient to have "Sun Earth: 1 AU" in there along with things like "Sun Mars: 1.5 AU".

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

#94

Post by Closi »

exitheone wrote: post #79
peter422 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This sentiment seems so weird to me. Can you point to a single enterprise offering where Google is collecting data and using it themselves? Or where it would even make sense to do so? Corporate customers pay a lot more per byte than the fleeting value of private data so Google has a strong incentive to never ever touch that data.

I don’t agree with the original point, but there is no doubt lots of telemetry in the cloud.

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

#96

Post by joshuamorton »

fulafel wrote: post #69
rapsey wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind has very little useful information.

Exact byte sizes of files in sets of files in a io pattern, combined with timestamps, with many occurrences (=chances at correlation), are very distinguishing.

Yeah, but the design you're assuming isn't the only way to build a storage system, and other approaches are both more secure and more performant!

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

#97

Post by rcarmo »

nuker wrote: post #87
fulafel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually, no. Or at least that wasn’t the case when I first started using Little Snitch five or so years ago.

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

#98

Post by tgragnato »

deeter72 wrote: post #57
fulafel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would Google even attempt to spy on those patterns? it serves no purpose and how do you justify employee time spent for such useless things? Not to mention apple proxies all requests through their servers rendering such analysis utterly useless to begin with.

On one occasion the traffic to google cloud is systematically not proxied: every time one sends an attachment in iMessage, the file (or the media) is encrypted on device and sent to gcs-{eu,us,asia}-00002(?).content-storage-upload.googleapis.com, received from gcs-{eu,us,asia}-00002(?).content-storage-download.googleapis.com

This should be pretty visible to Google, the rest of the traffic is handled better.

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

#99

Post by nuker »

rcarmo wrote: post #97
nuker wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually, no. Or at least that wasn’t the case when I first started using Little Snitch five or so years ago.

I’ll def check it for myself now, if you’re right thats big blunder on Apple

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

#100

Post by nl »

Closi wrote: post #94
exitheone wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sentiment seems so weird to me. Can you point to a single enterprise offering where Google is collecting data and using it themselves? Or where it would even make sense to do so? Corporate customers pay a lot more per byte than the fleeting value of private data so Google has a strong incentive to never ever touch that data.

I don’t agree with the original point, but there is no doubt lots of telemetry in the cloud.

Telemetry (ie usage data) is very very different the data being stored itself.
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