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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

#461

Post by jbverschoor »

lwhi wrote: post #452
frognumber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data.…

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

Backblaze does this

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

#462

Post by tmpz22 »

lwhi wrote: post #452
frognumber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data.…

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company.

This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.

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

#463

Post by ajross »

layer8 wrote: post #429
ajross wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah usually the thing about deadlines is that you should communicate them as harshly as possible, then let them slip when they do arrive. Is this not exactly what has happened? He was clearly threatened harshly, and... the data isn't yet deleted?

He wasn’t threatened harshly. He was told his data would become read-only, which he took at face value and assumed his data would remain safe. Then suddenly he was told the data would be deleted within seven days.

> He wasn’t threatened harshly. [...] he was told the data would be deleted within seven days

How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.

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

#464

Post by croutonwagon »

plorkyeran wrote: post #397
croutonwagon wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited does. And it should. But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out. Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move m…

If you read the article you will learn that he did have a backup, but it is currently in the FBI’s hands. He wasn’t relying solely on google.

Thats not really what the article says.

>We’ve written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News.

It just says his electronic devices were seized. Not that backups were included here, though it is implied.

Event still the FBI raid occured in July [1]. Backups are N-1. So he was down to nill back in July and didnt seem to act from there.

Also based on the dates in the screenshots provided, he went into grace period on the Google Drive data ALSO in July..

So I say again....its his lifes work. Its invaluable to him but its just data to anyone else. Its incumbent on him to make sure this doesnt occur some how, some way. Even on backblaze that would be 20k/year. I would be having that on multiple disks at multiple sites that I control. But that is just me.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/27/journalist-tells-fbi-to-...

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

#465

Post by RajT88 »

x0x0 wrote: post #420
RajT88 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 5k you could build a box to store that kind of data. Throw in a case of beer, and maid services to clean up your living room afterward, and you'd still make budget. ETA: OK maybe more like 10-12k it would be.

Because I was curious what drives cost today -- 20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis. Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.

So I found 20tb drives as low as 270 (which is what I used for my own pricing out of a hypothetical build), but if you feel lucky you can get large capacity refurb drives for a lot less than brand new (I did this recently for scratch space on my NAS). A refurb 20tb can be had as low as 200, which gets you down to 4200.

But yes - I realized my mistake in tossing off that comment offhand.

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

#466

Post by ethbr1 »

superkuh wrote: post #144
Anthony-G wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost get the impression that the act of gathering of evidence for the supposed CFAA violation is intended as a form of extrajudicial punishment.

Yes, CFAA raids are definitely done as a form of extrajudicial punishment. When the FBI raided me at 6am with guns drawn in ~2010 they never indicted me, never charged me with anything. But they did steal all my computers and electronics, and all my flatmate's computers and electronics, and got me kicked out of my apartment (which they trashed). That morning they raided ~100 people across the US as part of a giant wa…

I.e. "Guilty until proven innocent" in the eyes of the enforcement branch.

You're a guilty criminal, so why wouldn't they trash your stuff just for being who you are?

And who is with them who's going to tell them not to do that?

It's also especially ridiculous behavior in the context of CFAA raids (compared to drug or armed robbery), where the most lethal thing on the premises is likely to be old pizza.

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

#467

Post by roboyoshi »

petee wrote: post #147
dspillett wrote: post #103

A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent). For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in…

And I'm assuming you'd get blocked before even finishing the download. I've gotten rate-limited in gmail just for deleting messages too fast

you can generate serviceAccounts in google cloud that act as clients for your google workspace with no additional cost. It's a neat hidden trick to circumvent the google quotas, but you need to write your own clients/wrappers to utilize that properly.

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

#468

Post by squidbeak »

lwhi wrote: post #452
frognumber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data.…

> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company. Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.

Offering it as an option at the customer's expense seems like a fair way of avoiding burning a user.

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

#469

Post by rurp »

boringg wrote: post #117
frognumber wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data" Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position. He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data.…

Crisis (!?) is a bit dramatic. Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.

Wait, so Google lied about selling an unlimited storage plan and the response is to punish a person for believing them? Sounds to me like the wrong party is being punished here.

Trust in Google might be near zero on HN these days but they still have a pretty good reputation with the general public. Expecting every non-technical user to see through the BS feels pretty wrong to me. I mean, what's the point of consumer protection laws if they don't push companies to be honest?

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

#470

Post by JohnMakin »

charcircuit wrote: post #336

Keep in mind this person was paying $100 per month to host >250 TiB (which anywhere else will cost >$1000 per month). The moral of the story is that if your usage of an unlimited plan costs the company more than what you are paying, then you shouldn't be surprised when you get kicked off.

Then they shouldn't advertise it as "unlimited" if it actually isn't. This is an absurd statement on its face.
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