Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

alexblom.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#11

Post by ceejayoz »

tomp wrote: post #7
bgeorgescu wrote: post #3

How about using some common sense? Megaupload was primarily focused on enabling, and even incentivizing, piracy. Although bashing on the government is popular in our community, I don't think there is very much precedent that would indicate they would close something like Dropbox out of the blue.

How about being innocent unless proved guilty? Megaupload went down without any trial, and even though the site was obviously used for piracy (was it really?), that should still be proven in court and then only the illegal section of the website should be removed from web.

There's really nothing unique about that. If you were accused of selling drugs via a restaurant front, it'd be shutdown while you're standing trial too.

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#12

Post by literalusername »

The Megaupload indictment reads that they removed links to the illegal file, but did not remove the actual file. To those blissfully unaware of how the internet works, this makes sense.

It has nothing to do with the Internet. In the context of file-systems, the word "remove" actually means to "unlink". Doesn't this technicality invalidate the indictment?

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#13

Post by AlexBlom »

literalusername wrote: post #12

The Megaupload indictment reads that they removed links to the illegal file, but did not remove the actual file. To those blissfully unaware of how the internet works, this makes sense. It has nothing to do with the Internet. In the context of file-systems, the word "remove" actually means to "unlink". Doesn't this technicality invalidate the indictment?

Internet was a general statement on my part, since corrected. It will be interesting to see how the "unlink" plays out in the indictment.

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#14

Post by kijin »

hemancuso wrote: post #5

The author, like many other commenters in the past week or so, is wasting words by saying "this is scary - what if it happened to Dropbox and I lost access to all those files!" Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. I don't see anyone legitimately worried about that, because it's quite obviously a ver…

Dropbox is just a replica of local storage.

It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, no thanks.

Dropbox is also an apt comparison because part of the MegaUpload indictment has to do with their deduplication system. Dropbox is also very good at deduplication, which means that a single court order can cause all copies of an offending file to be remotely deleted from everyone's Dropbox folder.

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#15

Post by hemancuso »

kijin wrote: post #14
hemancuso wrote: post #5

The author, like many other commenters in the past week or so, is wasting words by saying "this is scary - what if it happened to Dropbox and I lost access to all those files!" Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. I don't see anyone legitimately worried about that, because it's quite obviously a ver…

Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, n…

The primary difference with your 1984 example is in that case the content originated at Amazon. In the Dropbox model you provided it to start.

If mozy was taken down do you think that it's possible they would wipe the drives of all users? I don't.

Amazon also quite clearly keeps hashes of all keys in S3, which Dropbox rides on. Would you expect the government to be able to issue hash based takedowns to amazon across all buckets?

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#16

Post by furyofantares »

codesuela wrote: post #6
newhouseb wrote: post #4

Does anyone know if all Megaupload content was defaulted to being publicly available? This seems to me the most obvious signal for suspicious behavior. I'm aware that with Dropbox, you can publicly post things, but in this case it's the individual user which is "choosing" to distribute the content and thus it would make sense that the user would be the one held liable. I'm not a lawyer, just exploring what might appe…

once you uploaded something you got a link with a unique ID which you could share. Other people could not access your file without knowledge of this unique link as you could not search for specific files (unlike Youtube). As far as I know there was also a list of Top Downloaded files but those didn't resemble the truth as they were carefully selected by Megaupload (to make sure that only legal content would be listed…

Youtube supports unlisted videos that behave the same as you're describing.

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#17

Post by nitrogen »

hemancuso wrote: post #15
kijin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, n…

The primary difference with your 1984 example is in that case the content originated at Amazon. In the Dropbox model you provided it to start. If mozy was taken down do you think that it's possible they would wipe the drives of all users? I don't. Amazon also quite clearly keeps hashes of all keys in S3, which Dropbox rides on. Would you expect the government to be able to issue hash based takedowns to amazon across…

Amazon also quite clearly keeps hashes of all keys in S3, which Dropbox rides on. Would you expect the government to be able to issue hash based takedowns to amazon across all buckets?

I was under the impression that Dropbox, while having the ability to decrypt your files, encrypts them before they hit S3. If so, a hash-based takedown sent to Amazon would at best be able to take down a single encrypted instance of a piece of data.

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#18

Post by Travis »

kijin wrote: post #14
hemancuso wrote: post #5

The author, like many other commenters in the past week or so, is wasting words by saying "this is scary - what if it happened to Dropbox and I lost access to all those files!" Let's not forget Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. That's the whole model. It's more meaningful to discuss whether or not this could happen to S3. I don't see anyone legitimately worried about that, because it's quite obviously a ver…

Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, n…

With all threat assessments I like to know (appox. to an order of magnitude) the likelihood of any downside. With the M.U. -> dropbox/s3 analogy, I have no guess for an estimate.

I'm honestly curious -- what is the likelihood that you estimate your files being deleted from dropbox? It was always very clear to me that M.U. was shady, and I feel probably deserving of shutdown. Given a 5 year timelines, what is the probability that you guess dropbox suffers a similar fate (total annihilation, server seizure, etc.)?

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#19

Post by kijin »

Travis wrote: post #18
kijin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox is just a replica of local storage. It gets scary when the operators of the "replica" has the ability to delete files from your local storage as well. Amazon did this with Kindle & 1984, which caused a sizable controversy at the time. Next thing you know, somebody sends a DMCA notice to Dropbox, they delete your remote copy, and your local Dropbox folder is automatically updated to reflect the change. Whoa, n…

With all threat assessments I like to know (appox. to an order of magnitude) the likelihood of any downside. With the M.U. -> dropbox/s3 analogy, I have no guess for an estimate. I'm honestly curious -- what is the likelihood that you estimate your files being deleted from dropbox? It was always very clear to me that M.U. was shady, and I feel probably deserving of shutdown. Given a 5 year timelines, what is the prob…

I don't think Dropbox will suffer anything as drastic as the MegaUpload shutdown. Unlike Dropbox, MegaUpload was shady to begin with, and with a lot more emphasis on public file sharing. But the possibility of individual files being taken down is pretty real. Dropbox probably does it all the time already, otherwise they'd be in trouble with DMCA.

Now, whether they will only delete your online copy, or whether they will let the deletion propagate to your local copy, is totally up to Dropbox. I don't agree with @hemancuso's claim that your local copy will be safe, because there's no guarantee whatsoever. A court order might even specially say that Dropbox should delete local copies too (if possible).

Re: Megaupload Implications are plain scary for Cloud Storage

#20

Post by __s3 »

They were not trying to stop storage f copyrighted material. They were trying to stop transfer of it. "Links" to a file, provided to the public, were the method of transfer.

Dropbox is used as a method of transferring files. Thus is it is very similar to Megaupload.

If Dropbox (or, say, YouTube) has many customers who may not be transferring copyrighted material, how relevant is this?

If that is the distinguishing factor, then perhaps all future pirates should upload copius amounts of noncopyrighted material to their services, and encourage others to do so. As long as they have a good ratio of "legtimiate content" to "illegimate content", then they will have a "Dropbox" defense.

Post reply on HN