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Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

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Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#21

Post by slg »

ritikm wrote: post #18
slg wrote: post #14

Does anyone actually have experience with this? It sounds like one of those "there has to be a catch" type services. Any limits on filetypes? Is there a max size per file? How is the network speed? Do they fire any customers who use too much storage space and/or bandwidth? What is stopping my company from encrypting our database backups and uploading them to Streem nightly for permanent storage at a fraction of the p…

We're limiting filetypes to media files (videos, photos, music, docs), so you can't pipe in petabytes of garbage dumps of random data. So in your case, we wouldn't be able to accept your database backup, but would be fine for your media files. No max file size limit. We have CDNs around the world to help with network speeds. Of course, that's a vague answer for now, but we're gathering more data on upload/download sp…

Thanks for responding. I am just spitting out questions and hypotheticals that jump to mind when a see a service like this offered.

How do you guys limit by file type? I imagine that is is something more advanced than simply looking at the the file extension. But if there is any advanced analysis, how does encryption come into play? Lifehacker suggests users should encrypt their sensitive data before uploading, but will you accept encrypted files? Seems like it would be difficult to impossible to tell the difference between encrypted home video and encrypted database backup.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#22

Post by ritikm »

steven2012 wrote: post #20

Is there anything from preventing people from encrypting their hard drive and uploading it as 10 10GB avi files?

We have a few advanced techniques that inspect the file data and ensure that the file is valid. So even if you rename your encrypted backup to to My_Home_Video.avi, it wouldn't pass our check and would fail to upload.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#23

Post by tluthra »

slg wrote: post #21
ritikm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're limiting filetypes to media files (videos, photos, music, docs), so you can't pipe in petabytes of garbage dumps of random data. So in your case, we wouldn't be able to accept your database backup, but would be fine for your media files. No max file size limit. We have CDNs around the world to help with network speeds. Of course, that's a vague answer for now, but we're gathering more data on upload/download sp…

Thanks for responding. I am just spitting out questions and hypotheticals that jump to mind when a see a service like this offered. How do you guys limit by file type? I imagine that is is something more advanced than simply looking at the the file extension. But if there is any advanced analysis, how does encryption come into play? Lifehacker suggests users should encrypt their sensitive data before uploading, but w…

You're right -- we have an advanced way to actually inspect the file to ensure that it's a valid file. The encryption happens post-check.

Unfortunately, we don't have a way to let you encrypt your data and then upload it up yet (but have a few ideas on how to make this work for the future). Besides, if you did encrypt all your stuff, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of all our media features like video/audio streaming, photo/doc viewer, etc. :).

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#26

Post by slg »

tluthra wrote: post #23
slg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for responding. I am just spitting out questions and hypotheticals that jump to mind when a see a service like this offered. How do you guys limit by file type? I imagine that is is something more advanced than simply looking at the the file extension. But if there is any advanced analysis, how does encryption come into play? Lifehacker suggests users should encrypt their sensitive data before uploading, but w…

You're right -- we have an advanced way to actually inspect the file to ensure that it's a valid file. The encryption happens post-check. Unfortunately, we don't have a way to let you encrypt your data and then upload it up yet (but have a few ideas on how to make this work for the future). Besides, if you did encrypt all your stuff, you wouldn't be able to take advantage of all our media features like video/audio st…

>we don't have a way to let you encrypt your data

Fair enough. But you should probably reach out to Lifehacker with a correction to their article. While you guys might not be responsible for what they write, that post is basically an advertisement for your service. Any customer who make a purchase assuming the service is as described by Lifehacker will end up disappointed.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#27

Post by mrmondo »

ritikm wrote: post #16
mrmondo wrote: post #8

How can it de-dupe properly if it is truly encrypted? Also, it's not unlimited storage for $20/month, it's only 200GB for $20/month. Not nearly cheap enough for use with movies / music IMO

Encryption is done through convergent encryption (example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7601277 ). We do offer unlimited storage for $20/month, the 200GB for $20 is what Dropbox offers -- sorry if that was unclear.

Oh right!

Thank you for the clarification, it might be worth re-wording it slightly on your site? (or maybe I'm just blind!)

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#29

Post by ghshephard »

The instant I see the word "Unlimited" - I don't even bother to investigate further, as the project is either (A) Lying, (B) Unsustainable, (C) Rate limiting or otherwise bottlenecking you so you can't really use the service effectively.

I've seen dozens (maybe more) references to the "Unlimited" service, and with only a few exceptions, they always fall into one of those categories.

I'm wondering when other people come around to my perspective, such that companies just put what those limits are, or clarify what the bottlenecks are.

I.E. Flickr doesn't say, "Unlimited Photos" for free, they say one Terabyte. One Terabyte of photos is much, much more interesting to me than "unlimited". And, when it does say "Unlimited Uploads" - it notes that you are limited to 200 MByte/photo.

Re: Streem (YC S12) Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage and Streaming for $20/Month

#30

Post by fletchowns »

ritikm wrote: post #13
ecesena wrote: post #9

I have some concerns on the 2 sentences (from their website): - "We've developed proprietary de-duplication and compression technology to be able to give you unlimited storage" - "Your files are encrypted with AES-256 bit encryption" I'd prefer to know that my data is not encrypted, rather than reading marketing sentences that have none or obscure meaning when read together.

Happy to clarify. We use convergent encryption ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_encryption ), which works with our de-duplication. Example: You and I both have a file A. Our software encrypts that file A with a unique key generated from the file (say, the MD5 hash of the file), which makes E(A). Every user that uploads file A will generate the same encrypted version E(A) because the encryption key will be th…

Does the de-duplication aspect of it have any impact on DMCA/copyright issues?

For example, lets say somebody from HBO downloads Game of Thrones from The Pirate Bay and then uploads it to Streem. We could assume that many other people on Streem also have that same copy of the episode uploaded. HBO then issues a DMCA takedown (could they?), would Streem delete the file for everybody? And does Streem then have to prevent anybody from re-uploading it?

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