311–320 of 514 posts
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That's certainly noble, but it doesn't send the message that you're unhappy with DRM. You're ultimately engaging in piracy and at the same time not voting with your wallet. I don't see any alternative, but just wanted to make that point.
Eh, not really trying to make a point personally. Just want to read books on my reMarkable or whatever I want, really.
> The added grievance to this is that my drive also included my own personal family photos and my current book on the subject I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out…
How’s Synology NAS? Safe local storage or can they back door in and fuck with your data?
You spend less on a used computer with Ubuntu or FreeNAS or some other distro, have way more flexibility, but a lot more to maintain.
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Hmm, Isn't this moving the overton window? Should we accept that they were viewing his data in the first place?
So much this. Host locally, and push encrypted backups to a cloud service. Doing this will screw Google’s ability to optimize storage for identical files, which may drive up costs, but it’s the best way to ensure your data stays private.
Google Takeout is good insurance. I backup my full google dataset every 6 months or so. When Google AI blocks an account, why don't they offer a window of using Google Takeout to get a .zip of all their stuff?
It’s unlikely they’d want to let someone accused of “terrorist activity” download their data, since if it was actually a terrorist some future investigation would probably blame them for materially supporting terrorism which is illegal.
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How’s Synology NAS? Safe local storage or can they back door in and fuck with your data?
Synology is great if you want to stick to using their GUI, which is very capable. If you are more of a DIY/CLI person, I would avoid Synology and similar products. They have everything set up in a very particular way, and you can’t mess around in the backend too much without risking corruption of some kind. You spend less on a used computer with Ubuntu or FreeNAS or some other distro, have way more flexibility, but a…
Symnology supports rsync, ssh, scp, custom docker images, etc. you can probably run Borg server on it, although I have not looked into that.
So I don’t know what you’re talking about. I own one. Do you?
> The added grievance to this is that my drive also included my own personal family photos and my current book on the subject I mean, how many times does this need to come up for people to learn the lesson? If you are storing your data with a third party, and you do not have an iron legal contract with this third party, then that third party can and will do whatever it wants with your data, including locking you out…
Sorry, but you've got the wrong take here. Google is presenting this service as a reliable place to store and share files. They have a responsibility to provide adequate human customer service. Sure, people shouldn't trust them, but not everyone follows Hacker News to know how common this sort of thing is. Regardless of whether the next person should trust Google, the right thing to happen here is for Google to resto…
A moral or ethical responsibility, maybe. A legal or financial one? Not under our current system, unfortunately. And corporations are not ethical actors.
Just to be clear, I'm not victim-blaming here. It is abhorrent what has happened to this person and to many like them. This is why education about avoiding snake oil I believe is essential in the school system. Economics courses should devote a full module to identifying snake-oil claims and inherent risks of "something for nothing" swindles, which Google Drive is a classic modern example of.
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I agree. But I'm not sure what the solution is. A lot of people will say "Hey, it's a private company", and as a libertarian minded person I tend to agree. But increasingly these private companies have more power of my life than my own government does, and it's accelerating further it seems.
They only gain as much power as you allow them to have. You can still use your own domain. You can still back up to external drives in your house. You can still leave encrypted copies of those drives at a friend's house.
I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, purchased movies and tv shows, Fitbit, Nest, sites where he used federated login (DoorDash, Uber, etc). I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the link…
Another reason to not use Google/Facebook or similar identities to login to a service. You lose access to your Google account, you lose access to all those other services.
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It’s unlikely they’d want to let someone accused of “terrorist activity” download their data, since if it was actually a terrorist some future investigation would probably blame them for materially supporting terrorism which is illegal.
Where is the due process or do we outsource this to private companies too?
How many times does that have to happen before people realize there is no cloud, only other people's computers. The data that is stored there is no longer yours, just as thanks to Apple and Co. your hardware no longer really belongs to you, but you only enjoy a temporary right of use. It will be interesting to see when hardly anything remains of an entire generation because everything comes from the cloud: Photos, vi…
This is why I've stopped buying books on kindle. It gives Amazon the power to censor your book library, and it would not surprise me at all if we see them exercise that power soon.