Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#141

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

cadence- wrote: post #8

All the data is encrypted so it doesn’t matter where they are storing it. Using multiple service providers (Google, Amazon, their own servers, etc) might actually be beneficial because it eliminates one point of failure, especially if they replicate data in a smart way to take advantage of it. It might also speed up access to data.

What if the user encrypted and stored the data on their own storage media. It might actually be beneficial because it eliminates dependence on a third party, i.e., a point of failure. "It might also speed up access to data."

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#142

Post by jhgb » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

azalemeth wrote: post #107

hanche wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Petagrams (Pg) is commonly used in climate science. I always wondered why they don’t write it as Gt instead. But gigalitre? Surely, calling them cubic kilometres (edit: should be hm³, see followup comments) would be preferable?

One of my favourite SI units that is used in climate science is the Sverdrup, often used to describe oceanic or river flows, which is a million cubic metres per second, or one cubic hectometer per second. (1) (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup

> symbol: Sv

Oh my... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#143

Post by jhgb » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:19 AM UTC

panarky wrote: post #68

karmasimida wrote: post #9

How much would you pay to store such amount data? 8TB hard drive is about 200 dollars nowadays, so this amount of data is about 200m dollars worthy of retail hard drives. Ofc the calculation is super inaccurate, which doesn't take redundancies into consideration, and discounted prices for someone like Google to purchase hardware, plus the discount for Apple as a big customer. But had the scale be comparable, in which…

Plus bandwidth

And locations, surely? To minimize latencies.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#144

Post by NorwegianDude » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

qeternity wrote: post #109

nuker wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, its Apple servers. User devices don’t connect directly to Google

This is not entirely true. Additionally Apple proxies traffic to GCP but key management still resides on user devices.

If backup is enabled(which I guess it is as things are backed up), then the key is also shared with apple.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#145

Post by ahmedfromtunis » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #130

remus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the argument, does it matter whether it is Apple or Google who is holding the physical data? Apple and Google are both based in the US and beholden to the US government, so from the government's perspective it's just a change of address when they send out a warrant.

> does it matter whether it is Apple or Google who is holding the physical data? It might matter, yes. A company run by a guy like Eric Schmidt is a lot more likely to play nice with the US government when it comes to privacy compared to a company run by a guy like Cook, who from the outside seems obsessed with user-privacy (as long as China isn't directly involved).

Didn't Schmidt retire as CEO 10 years ago (and 3 years ago as chairman)? Isn't now a Pichai-run company?

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#146

Post by 8fingerlouie » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

dnh44 wrote: post #111

ACAVJW4H wrote: post #4

Apple and Google need to give people a chance to manage their own data.

iCloud is a tool that lets my parents just that. This means I don't have to do it for them and no one has to worry about losing years of photographs due to a device failure. edit: I guess my point is that different people have different computer skills and I think it's great that the tools now exist so people on the lower end of that spectrum can sort this out themselves without having to ask for help.

It's not just your parents.

I've moved everything to the cloud. I have nothing running at home except networking gear, and a small "server" that pulls nightly backups from the clouds to a local USB drive.

In theory i could probably do without the local server if looking at Apple/Microsoft/Google data redundancy (Microsoft is multi geo, i can't figure out what Apple is).

Sadly i need to guarantee that some random account closure doesn't remove all my data, so the backup server stays for now. The way cloud prices are going, it will only be a question of months/years before it's cheaper/easier to just utilize two cloud services, one for main storage and one for backup storage, and with projects like the data transfer project [1], you don't even need to download them first.

[1] https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#147

Post by occamrazor » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:29 AM UTC

fouc wrote: post #128

suifbwish wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have encryption that is guaranteed to never be obsolete it ALWAYS matters where you store the data.

Are you saying there is no encryption guaranteed to be good for the next 50 years ?

Of course there is no guarantee: AES256 could be broken tomorrow, or maybe it has already been. What we know is that, extrapolating compute speed from the past decades and even assuming quantum computers become useable in practice, the best algorithms we currently have cannot be brute-forced within the next 50 years.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#148

Post by bluenose69 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

azalemeth wrote: post #107

hanche wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Petagrams (Pg) is commonly used in climate science. I always wondered why they don’t write it as Gt instead. But gigalitre? Surely, calling them cubic kilometres (edit: should be hm³, see followup comments) would be preferable?

One of my favourite SI units that is used in climate science is the Sverdrup, often used to describe oceanic or river flows, which is a million cubic metres per second, or one cubic hectometer per second. (1) (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup

The Sverdrup unit is tolerated because Harald Sverdrup made many key contributions to the science of Oceanography.

He was also a high-level administrator who had a super-power that few administrators have: he understood science as well as people.

And, to top it all off, the book he coauthored with Johnson and Fleming is widely regarded as the foundational document in the field of modern Oceanography.

There is so much to say about Harald Sverdrup that students quickly become comfortable with the occasional use of "Sv" as an abbreviation for 10^6m^3/s.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#149

Post by VortexDream » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:43 AM UTC

remus wrote: post #119

VortexDream wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why people are are thinking in such a limited fashion. Google is effectively holding onto the data for the US government or whoever else has the capability to access all that data in the future. This is the kind of stuff authoritarian governments dream about. And I'm not saying Google is doing it intentionally, just that they're holding onto the data at all and at some point there will be somebody who wi…

If that is the argument, does it matter whether it is Apple or Google who is holding the physical data? Apple and Google are both based in the US and beholden to the US government, so from the government's perspective it's just a change of address when they send out a warrant.

It doesn't. I'm not sure why you think I think there's a difference. Any corporation that stores our data long-term is a threat to our privacy and our rights.

Re: Apple Reportedly Storing over 8M Terabytes of iCloud Data on Google Servers

#150

Post by tinus_hn » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #40

adt2bt wrote: post #10

It’s a bit of an open secret among big tech that Apple is a huge user of storage on all major clouds. They manage encryption on their hardware and in return get cheap storage, higher availability and competition from their suppliers. Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service.

> Highly doubt Google has access to any iCloud data other than an estimate of the immense size of the service. They do of course have access to the ciphertext and access to traffic patterns, in crypto threat models traffic analysis tells the adversary a wealth of information.

If Apple is anywhere near competent the traffic patterns are useless, all Google can see is ‘data stored on that day was accessed on another day’. All traffic flows through Apple servers and Google has no way of even correlating it to a user.