Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by KaiserPro » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:09 PM UTC

bastard_op wrote: post #14

Barbarians at the gate, Google and Amazon slurp it all up eventually. How's those big ones feel inside your budget, Apple.

Managing 8 exabytes reliably is a massive pain in the arse. with no redundancy, and nothing but hardrives, 8 exabytes burns around a megawatt.

Its a million drives. given the failure rate that I had when I was looking after 5 pb,(about 8k hdds) you'd be looking at at least 100-400 failed drives a week

But how do you detect that, how do you schedule replacements? whats your hamming factor for redundancy, how do you optimise your storage? for speed, power, geospatial, or redundancy?

what about capacity management, the lead time on growth would be large.

I was a sys admin for a large VFX place, so did a lot of storage admin, but unless it was a core business function, I'd buy over build that shit, for that scale.

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

#192

Post by LadyCailin » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

Dah00n wrote: post #176

pmorici wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your model is "even encryption isn't good enough" then you might as well not care because there is nothing you can do to protect it.

That is a strawman. Apple could just not host at Google.

Is the assumption that google is going to store, then attempt to decrypt the data at some point in the future? Or is the claim that google's services are less secure than Apple's would be? If not, then I'm not sure that this is worse at all. Sure, if you believe google to be actually malicious, then this would be a problem, but I don't think there's a reasonable argument to say that google would go to this length of maliciousness.

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

#193

Post by tiffanyh » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:25 PM UTC

That equates to $1/month for 320 GB of storage.

Seems like a bargain, even at that scale.

Note: Apple charges $1/month for 50 GB of storage. That's ~84% margin Apple is making on their cloud storage service. Though granted they do give everyone 5 GB of storage for free, so the math will be lower (and they will still be generating a profit so long as 1 out of 5 are paying for iCloud storage).

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

#194

Post by lrvick » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:29 PM UTC

LadyCailin wrote: post #192

Dah00n wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a strawman. Apple could just not host at Google.

Is the assumption that google is going to store, then attempt to decrypt the data at some point in the future? Or is the claim that google's services are less secure than Apple's would be? If not, then I'm not sure that this is worse at all. Sure, if you believe google to be actually malicious, then this would be a problem, but I don't think there's a reasonable argument to say that google would go to this length of…

Google -is- a malicious and exploitative surveillance capitalism company preying on people that don't feel like they have a choice.

Inch by inch "don't be evil" has been replaced with "maximize profit".

I have no doubt that if in 20 years decrypting "historical" Apple user data for "training purposes" is legal and will make Google leadership more money, they will pressure ethically flexible engineers to do it for them.

Assume anything profitable that is legally defensible somewhere in the world will be done by every surveillance capitalism company at some point.

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

#195

Post by fulafel » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:34 PM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #80

fulafel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just sketching something, I'm not claiming to have developed a vulnerability research result here from my arm chair. But there's a lot of terrain between "it's encrypted so there are no attack" and "you haven't presented a fully developed attack" especially about a system we don't know much about. Anyway, there are many scenarios that come to mind for knowing their IO sizes. Apps probably have IO fingerprints. Or…

Basic batching or partitioning of data before offloading to storage would defeat this analysis, and that’s assuming you can access and query so much data regularly. I asked for practical examples. I don’t need an in-depth report to see that this doesn’t qualify. Most of this crypto stuff is completely impractical risk, especially compared to some phishing emails.

In security engineering we have the standard the other way around - the proponents of a design have the burden of responsibility to argue the system is secure beyond reasonable doubt, and address and elucidate any potential cracks in the security design. The subthread was about potential pitfalls even in presence of encryption.

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

#196

Post by curryst » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #175

gambiting wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>AES 256 will survive much longer than the next 50 years against brute force attacks. From what I understand it simply can't be broken by brute force because simply iterating through every possible value of a 256 bit key would require more energy than there is in the universe, and that's without actually trying any of the combinations, just simply having a computer do a i++ through all possible values. I'm not sure…

> iterating through every possible value of a 256 bit key It's my understanding that when encryption gets "broken", it usually refers to something other than a simple brute force attack. Like, something that would make it so you don't need to run as many iterations or whatever. I assume this because a brute force attack is something that is always possible from day 1, whereas an encryption scheme being broken is some…

My understanding is that encryption is "broken" any time it becomes feasible for someone to decrypt your data without the key. Brute force attacks are always hypothetically possible, but the encryption isn't broken unless such an attack is feasible.

As a counter-example, DES would count as "unbroken" under your definition. The EFF built a machine in 1998 for under $250,000 that could crack a DES key in under 24 hours. I don't know what that would cost today, but I wouldn't be surprised if a couple GPUs could get you the same thing today.

The difference is whether such an attack has even a vanishing chance of succeeding. For AES, the hardware just isn't anywhere close to that. Afaik, there isn't anything that could even hypothetically threaten to make brute force attacks on AES feasible on the table today.

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

#197

Post by gruez » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:08 PM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #174

wincy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are external drives so much cheaper anyway? Edit: I googled it an apparently it’s an economy of scale thing. People are more likely to buy external hard drives, much more mass market thing, Costco and Walmart sell externals, therefore downward pressure on prices compared to internal drives.

External drives are also spec'd for lower performance and longevity.

Do external drives even have performance/longevity specs? The specs I see on them are pretty basic (eg. capacity, interface, operating temperature), and considering that they're marketed to consumers that's not surprising. As for actual performance/longevity, my understanding is that they're just whatever drives the manufacturer has available. For low capacities they're going to be consumer drives and for higher capacities they'll usually be NAS/datacenter drives.

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

#198

Post by hinkley » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 3:46 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #61

hinkley wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m only here because I don’t understand why you would say 8 million terabytes instead of 8 exabytes.

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.

Them why is t my hard drive four million kilobytes? We already crossed this bridge with gigabytes, and the course was laid in with terabytes, which I first heard in a business setting over 20 years ago, when that was still a rack of hard disks. Cloud providers and the LHC brought us petabytes, and that was over ten years ago. The “oh by the way the next unit is ‘exabyte’” conversations started around the same time.

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

#199

Post by joezydeco » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

iJohnDoe wrote: post #115

hintymad wrote: post #75

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.

Everyone is acting like that $300MM expense is being paid by Apple.

I'm paying Apple $120/year for 2TB of iCloud storage. I might not be doing the math right but at $300 million/year for 8 million TB, that's $75/year in google expense for the $120 I'm paying Apple.

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

#200

Post by spookthesunset » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:11 PM UTC

suifbwish wrote: post #42

cadence- wrote: post #8

All the data is encrypted so it doesn’t matter where they are storing it. Using multiple service providers (Google, Amazon, their own servers, etc) might actually be beneficial because it eliminates one point of failure, especially if they replicate data in a smart way to take advantage of it. It might also speed up access to data.

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

I mean if modern encryption proves broken, the world has quite a bit larger problems than open access to the videos you took of that 2017 summer holiday to Tahiti or the password vault containing your keys to log into HN and your Target account.

Like, suddenly everything becomes plaintext.