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Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

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Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#301

Post by boringg »

bakugo wrote: post #152
boringg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.

> The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who unde…

They offered the service for 10 years and then sunset it.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#302

Post by boringg »

nox100 wrote: post #281
terminous wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking advantage No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.

I challenge you to go to any restaurant that has "unlimited refills", back up a tanker trunk and fill your truck. I don't think any court would enforce "unlimited" for that situation. I'm not sure this storage one is all that different

In fact all you can eat buffets ban people from showing up after they completely break the system.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#303

Post by charcircuit »

ziddoap wrote: post #221
duxup wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual text in the story doesn't match the title. It's pretty obvious if you read it.

I'm dumb. Where and what is obviously not matching?

Deleted is past tense, but in reality a 7 day advanced notice was sent. The title makes you think that the user lost the data where in reality he needs to host the data somewhere else.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#304

Post by ollien »

haswell wrote: post #284
ollien wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.

> I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it. 7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.

No, I agree. Sorry, my phrasing there was poor. I meant: it is completely reasonable to say that "he has seven days to download it", not that it is completely reasonable for him to only have seven days.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#305

Post by pton_xd »

licomo wrote: post #194
terminous wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking advantage No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.

OT, but this is why I am skeptical of Cloudflare right now. Am I right to be concerned?

Cloudflare covers this in their terms of service:

    Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)

    Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
In other words, if you serve HTML / CSS / JS you'll be fine. Too much of anything else and at some point they will ask you to pay.

I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#306

Post by alacode »

ollien wrote: post #264
garblegarble wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota. They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they…

The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.

I was curious what the context of "grace period" is for Google Drive and found this:

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/13321050/what-will-h...

"If I cancel my additional storage, will all the files/documents that took up the additional space, be deleted? Or will I still have access to them?"

"You will still have access to all your files but, if you have used all storage you won't be able to add or create NEW files until you have space available."

Which sounds like you're right, unless the Product Expert was wrong.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#307

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #294
jeremyjh wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.

Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)

>Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it.

You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed.

If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#308

Post by wgjordan »

boringg wrote: post #285
avazhi wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Highly recommend reading the article again, slowly, until you fully understand the situation. This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes. Read it again you understand that properly.

I did. I use the term free but it should "incredibly low cost". I accept the blame for my inaccuracy but my position doesn't change. 20$/month for unlimited data that works out to about 0.07$/TB for storage thats pretty damn close to free in my books. How much would a TB cost on S3?

The offer was unlimited storage at 5+ seats, but in any case, the subject is quoted in the article writing 'I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan,' so it was absolutely not viewed as 'free' to them.

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#309

Post by freedomben »

haswell wrote: post #284
ollien wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.

> I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it. 7 days to download 200TB+ does not seem reasonable.

based on the rest of the comment, I'm guessing GP missed a negative like "don't", or "isn't", or "not", etc

Re: Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted

#310

Post by Sanzig »

LoganDark wrote: post #234
Sanzig wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress every…

> you can sidestep that with something like Snowball Going by AWS's website[0], a 50 TB Snowball is $200, so you'd need to drop $1000 for five Snowballs to hold that data. [0]: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/projects/migrate-peta...

It's about $20k to egress 250 TB from AWS, so you still come out way ahead.
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