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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

#201

Post by spookthesunset »

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 mean google is full of employees who threatened to walk out when their employer wanted government defense contracts. Pretty sure google would get a ton of internal pushback if a team wanted to do what you describe.

Google employs the same standard issue tech person you see here on HN.

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

#202

Post by spookthesunset »

mda wrote: post #127
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 think it was a satirical comment.

When it comes to posts about Google, Poe’s law operates in full force.

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

#203

Post by harringtonjones »

jtdev wrote: post #189
Dah00n wrote: post #178

I'm amazed any HN readers could believe Google would want to know what is stored if they could actually read it. That is completely useless to them. What is interesting and useful is who is connecting from where, when, with what. Yet again it feels like Snowden is forgotten. Metadata is what matters in high volume data, not content.

So why does Google engage in automated reading of Gmail email contents?

they haven't done that (allegedly) in years right

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

#204

Post by spookthesunset »

tgragnato wrote: post #98
deeter72 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do both parties determine the keys used during a conversation?

Are they making heavy use of public key cryptography? If so how? When I send a message to you, do I encrypt it using your public key? What about group messages? Does each conversation get its own key pair?

Also it’s interesting they decided to directly hit up google cloud… you’d think they would wrap it so at minimum they could tweak the underlying infrastructure without requiring every client to update.

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

#205

Post by brianwawok »

swiley wrote: post #163
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.

>All the data is encrypted Where are the keys though? If they ever end up on the same platform it doesn't matter.

On your physical device presumably

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

#206

Post by spookthesunset »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #144
qeternity wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not entirely true. Additionally Apple proxies traffic to GCP but key management still resides on user devices.

If backup is enabled(which I guess it is as things are backed up), then the key is also shared with apple.

Wonder if they delegate the keystore to third party cloud services or that is one of those things they store in-house?

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

#207

Post by spookthesunset »

karmasimida wrote: post #9

How much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which…

Is that stuff even stored on spinning rust these days? I mean solid state might be more expensive upfront but I imagine at scale the energy consumption required to power and cool millions of mechanical devices becomes a big issue.

Not to mention the random access performance of spiny disks ain’t too great either.

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

#208

Post by spookthesunset »

gruez wrote: post #17
karmasimida wrote: post #9

How much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which…

>8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 1.6B dollars worthy of retail hard drives. External hard drives can be obtained on sale for $15-16/TB. They can then be shucked to get internal drives. I suspect bulk buyers can get pricing equal or cheaper than this, rather than the retail of $25/TB

At the scale these data centers operate at, I would imagine that google / FB / AWS gets these storage devices custom built to whatever spec and tolerances they need.

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

#209

Post by zepto »

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.

The traffic patterns they have access to are apple’s backend usage, not users.

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

#210

Post by jsnell »

joezydeco wrote: post #199
iJohnDoe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The average user with 2TB of quota probably isn't using anywhere near that much. It is more likely to be closer to the previous smallest level of quota.
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