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Google Drive could soon start locking your files

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Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#112
post #6

I will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no explanation was presented.

That eliminate both options for journalists and lawyers. There are professions which could have legitimate reasons for having the material and as terrible as it is, is it actually illegal?

From the legal standpoint, using those sort of services for storing sensitive case data like that is a bad call. too much media in those situations violate the terms and services of most platforms paid or not, and too many of those platforms have too many liberties with the usage policies on the media.

If you are dealing with case data, you should be have those policies reviewed carefully, and should likely be encrypting before storing anywhere anyway.

I say should because I almost never see case data stored to standard.

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#113
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear weapons aren't all that complicated, it's the enrichment that is hard. It's a large scale industrial process that requires a well equiped specialized facility. We can detect these activities from space, that's how big we are talking. You can get a rough idea of what is needed from Wikipedia. They are simpler machines than a automobile engine, at least in the sense that there are fewer parts involved.

It's kind of a tough trick to get them to detonate properly.

A analogy, you can probably find full schematics of a Tesla, or close to it, but that isn't the problem. The car factory is the problem. How do you get one of those? If you have the resources to obtain one, you also have the resources to hire engineers to design a car for you.

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#114

Just a shout out for @cperciva's https://www.tarsnap.com/ > Encryption: your data can only be accessed with your personal keys. We can't access your data even if we wanted to!

Backups and sharing are rather different use cases. There's no mention of deleting the file (though it is something Google has done before) in this announcement.

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#116
post #53
post #6

I will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no explanation was presented.

I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.

They are way ahead of you, with stuff like neuralhash.

Does it work? Mostly. Can it be tricked? Yes.

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#117
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scraping content that doesn’t belong to you Oh the irony, Google. It doesn't belong to you either.

Given that a search engine needs to scrape the whole web to exist, I can't understand how they can stand against a user scraping unrelated third-parties, like it's some sort of grand evil they need to stand up against. Talk about a pot calling the kettle black. I can't believe they put that in their terms. For future reference: https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en#suspending-access

Scraping is one, publishing scraped content for SEO is another.

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#118
post #8
post #2

So.. Drive will automatically un-share our files based on their own algorithms. I've got a feeling this will be mostly an automatic DMCA takedown tool.

Is there a legal requirement to do a DMCA take down of something the copyright holder doesn't know about? If you put something on Twitter mentioning certain cryptocurrency keywords (e.g. MetaMask), you'll get reply tweets from bots in a few seconds with fake support documents hosted on Google drive. My sense is that this is what they are trying to stop.

I feel a big push behind this new policy is to remove the large amounts of commercially-broadcast TV content that is shoved into Google Drive and openly shared to 0.0.0.0/0 (e.g. via TV subreddits). Google has had fairly aggressive rate-limiting on viewing/downloading fully-open shared-to-all videos hosted within Drive for a long time, but there have generally always been ways around these limits. In the last few months, I have noticed several fairly large TV subreddits that used Drive for video distribution being closed due to too many DMCA takedowns, as such I feel that this policy change is G formalising their intentions to stanch this avenue of piracy, more than it may be a move to chase off malware/phishing ne'er-do-wells.

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#119
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed it after they began using GIFCT to ‘prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.’ All hashed versions of that video was removed from user accounts. Page 16 : https://www.oecd.org/officialdocuments/publicdisplaydocument...

I haven't had my coffee yet, but I'm having trouble understanding your claims (about Google Drive deleting TVEC content) and how they relate to the OECD document you linked. That document does not state that Google (except YouTube) is a member of GIFCT. Further, on page 124 (in "Policies") of the document it states that Google Drive will prevent sharing of files it finds violating, or maybe ban an entire account in s…

The policy going back to at least 2014 does mention not being allowed to "store" violence and gore. They even say that if it's shocking enough, then no artistic, scientific, educational, or documentary exceptions will allow it to remain on their platforms. I assume that means deletion. It's a different Internet than what many of us grew up with. https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505

Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An owncloud droplet or owncloud on a VPS. Or an owncloud paid instance. All depends on your budget and your needs and your time. I totally switched off Dropbox when they limited the number of devices. Self host owncloud on a VPS, am very happy. From time to time I have to occ:upgrade something et voilà. Used for syncing, not backing up. It helps that I can install and maintain it though, wouldn't recommend it to anyo…

Just installed nextcloud, an owncloud fork today. Be warned, while server side encryption works, e2e is completely broken and has been for non brand new accounts for quite a while judging by the github issues. I'm not sure how much should I trust a vps host. I can mess around with encryption all day long but they can compromise my mail server without me ever knowing.

> I'm not sure how much should I trust a vps host. I can mess around with encryption all day long but they can compromise my mail server without me ever knowing.

Basically, you can't. It all depends on your threat model.

edit: https://owncloud.com/features/end-to-end-encryption-2/ owncloud community and standard edition don't have e2e

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