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

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131–140 of 229 posts

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

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the bucket is open to the world to write

No? https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/access-control

It just means Google may provide access to metadata outside of Apple’s control. Those metadata could be useful to do classification of anomalies on the basis of pattern of life analysis, or similar.

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

#132
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you saying there is no encryption guaranteed to be good for the next 50 years ?

Against a state-actor, perhaps not. Check out quantum cryptography. It is a serious business.

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

#133
I can't tell why this is on the front page of HN. Is the implication that Google would spy on Apple customer's data stored on Google Cloud? Google is evil/dumb/both at times but that's completely outlandish.

I do find it interesting that Apple could be one of Google's biggest Cloud clients though, that's very surprising.

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

#134
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying there is no encryption guaranteed to be good for the next 50 years ?

Against a state-actor, perhaps not. Check out quantum cryptography. It is a serious business.

The current academic consensus is that AES-256 is quantum resistant, as even with Grover's algorithm the attack would still require 2^128 bits of work. Generally symmetric encryption schemes are impacted to a much lesser extent than public key cryptosystems, with larger key sizes sufficing to ensure quantum resistance. I'd be quite surprised if Apple weren't using AES-256 already.

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

#137

Wow! It's amazing that with so much data yet Apple still finds it cheaper to store on public clouds instead of building its own storage.

Apple finally realized they weren’t very good at hosting stuff. They never were. Plus, it’s a no brainer leveraging Google and AWS. Their global footprint and expertise alone is worth it. Also, $300 million a year is a drop in the bucket to Apple’s bottom line. They probably make that alone from the millions of adapters they sell each year.

It's not just $300m. It's $300 for storage. I'm sure they spend more on the GCP platform.

They also use AWS, which is over $350m a year. That contract ends in a year or two.

Afaik, they don't run on azure anymore.

It's not hard to believe they're spending $1B+ on external cloud partners.

At $57B net revenue ($274B), a high margin space such as the cloud services could make sense. Although if they're not selling it to the public it would only account for 1-2% net revenue.

Apple likes to learn from companies.. Soon there will be an Apple cloud using low energy ARM (M1X) servers. Let's call it the "Digital Apple Tree". Maybe a small reference to the DAT recorder, as Apple likes music. Of course this last part is just made up ;-)

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

#139

I thought it was pretty well known that nothing stored on iCloud is encrypted. It’s encrypted on your iPhone, but once it leaves your iPhone it becomes unencrypted once stored in iCloud. This is also why they can comply with law enforcement requests. Now, someone may argue that “only Apple can unlock it” if indeed there is any protection at all. https://fortune.com/2020/01/21/apple-icloud-encryption-law-e... https://…

iCloud _is_ encrypted (see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303), but it's not End to End encrypted, meaning Apple holds the keys, not you.
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