Google Promises Unlimited Storage; Cancels; Tells Journalist Life's Work Deleted • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by cldellow » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:35 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #314

cldellow wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk about loopholes three times in this comment. > Because they are using 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers. I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone t…

You should question the story a bit more. You think Google only gave 7 days? That seems super suss.

Yes, why wouldn't I think that? As I said, I trust Mike Masnick.

I also have past professional experience that leads me to believe Google does what's easiest for Google, not what's best for their customers.

In one case, Google suspended a Google Certified Publishing Partner's GAM account for several hours with no notice. The partner had several years of history with Google, did $100M/year of revenue with them, and had an assigned Google rep who did weekly calls with them.

Google reactivated the account, but only after significant disruption to the partner.

I agree that it's good to be a critical consumer of news, but eh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably Google being blissfully ignorant of the impact they have on their users.

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

#352

Post by diogenescynic » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

I can't believe Google with a trillion+ dollar market cap gets away with all this. They have zero human customer support and basically enable account takeovers and identity theft. I hope someday Google gets some comeuppance for how abusive/hostile they've been to their customers forever.

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

#353

Post by shkkmo » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

racl101 wrote: post #346

I don't wanna victim blame, but I don't understand how people could put their entire body of work on a cloud service and not make the effort to get several external drives to have some redundancy. All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud. It's like self preservation instinct is missing. 3rd party services are fallible, even when they don't make business decisions t…

Multiple backups are significantly easier with 50gb that with 250tb. Additionally, any external drives he had were seized by the FBI so he would have needed two cloud backups.

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

#354

Post by precommunicator » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:37 PM UTC

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

I feel like this isn't the best example, such restaurant can say that its only unlimited if you drink it in-house, in plain view. You almost never can take out food or drinks in all-you-can eat restaurants.

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

#355

Post by Almondsetat » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

alacode wrote: post #271

I'm no great defender of Google but point some fallacies the article pushes: "regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem" If a 7 year old found a parent's gun, walked into the street and shot a neighbor to death accidentally; the parent i…

The fallacy you push is that the legal process in case your child shoots someone is the same as the private and inscrutable process that Google follows to ban people, which it isn't

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

#356

Post by ajb » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #300

ajb wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That also applies to any good compression though.

True, but since very, very few files are compressed with unique or unknown compression algorithms, you can read the metadata in the file and see if it's really compressed or if the whole thing is just seemingly random. That gives me an idea. Might be fun to write a tool that will encrypt a file but make it look like a valid .zip file that just unpacks to meaningless noise. There's gotta be something like that already…

Makes sense.

There are some academic papers (I think one by Ross Anderson) which state that steganography relies on there being some randomness in the data you are hiding the message inside. So, to make the bandwidth available for for steganographic data hiding as large as possible, those needing to conceal data need incentives for innocents to publish files constructed using as large as possible quantities of random bits. It looks like Stable Diffusion is providing this incentive!

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

#357

Post by specto » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:38 PM UTC

jonnycomputer wrote: post #11

draugadrotten wrote: post #4

Remember, the cloud is just somebody else's computer. This is what happens when you store 250 TB video on somebody else's computer and expect it to be free forever.

He was paying, it was just an unlimited storage plan. Not free.

I think their point still stands, you can't trust the cloud companies for anything important.

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

#358

Post by wvenable » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

boringg wrote: post #137

Nicksil wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system Why do you think this?

[flagged]

He's not even "abusing" the service like many people would think (storing movies and TV shows, etc). This is all his own data. Yes he has a lot of data. This is why one would pay for an unlimited plan.

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

#359

Post by therealmarv » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

Shocked by this and having a Workspace account in same condition (read-only state, not in deletion yet) I've deleted some terrabytes of my (redundand) backups on Google Drive with many thousands files.

But the emptying the trash/bin is horrible UX wise. You can only trash the files visible there. It seems the easiest way to empty the trash completely is to configure rclone and run this command (so emptying trash with API):

https://rclone.org/drive/#emptying-trash

Hope this is helpful for anybody else here.

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

#360

Post by ivalm » Wed, Dec 13, 2023, 4:39 PM UTC

sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote: post #330

pdonis wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. Normally the response to this is, yes, it sucks, but you're not paying Google to host your data. However, it looks like this journalist did pay Google to host his data. So this immediately puts it in a worse category.

> but you're not paying Google to host your data. Funny, because they never seen to have problems hosting the advertising/surveillance data they collect on me. They never went "sorry we can't track you any more for free, will you type in you card number so we can keep surveilling you?"

They don’t track you for free. Advertisers pay. They don’t have to store data if no one pays. This of course in no way justifies the journalist losing his data.