Along these same lines - I'm looking to leave Dropbox. Has anyone used Tresorit or SpiderOak? I use it basically for cold storage - just a place to store images, files, etc. that I only access very, very rarely. I generally use iCloud for accessing images taken on my phone. The files I keep on Dropbox are just there as a redundant backup.
Google Drive could soon start locking your files
141–150 of 193 posts
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps I'm sensitive as a NZer, but would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon etc? Though while giving a warning is clearly inappropriate, they should certainly have explained what they did.
It is a very slippery slope. Would you feel the same if it was a genomic sequence of a novel respiratory virus? Would you say it is a plan for a bioweapon and hence must be forbidden?
And the slope keeps slipping, what if new virology startups are gatekept by having their research materials flagged as bioweapon precursors?
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are other kinds of hashes besides cryptographic hashes, which tolerate differences, e.g. you can change things around and still get the same hash. This is what Apple does (or rather did) for their cloud scanner. Then there are other non-hash methods, similar to how Shazam determines a song in a noisy room. Poles, zeros, FFTs, there are many other strategies that are fault-tolerant.
Sure, but just compress and encrypt. It won't play in place, but otherwise it's nondetectable (other than by out of band timing/metadata or very rough size estimates).
Came here to say this. Only an idiot (should say people without knowledge) would upload any personal data to the "Cloud" without encrypting it first. That includes pictures.
As for size, you can always tar/encrypt its dir and include dummy files to modify its size.
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#144I have, uh, mp3 backups of all the music I have owned from my, um, ludicrously massive CD collection. Is it worth the risk that google might one day decide I am a pirate and block my account?
It is not worth the risk. Encrypt those - you don't have to choose a particularly secure key or encryption scheme, just one that's good enough that it's computational infeasible for Google to brute-force that scheme+key size for every one of its users. Actually, it might be a good idea to encrypt everything on Google Drive - I wouldn't be surprised if they analyze your files and use the results to augment their inter…
And tar/pad them, encryption if not done carefully when combined with compression suffers from the same kinds of problems as ECB.
AKA, it wouldn't surprise me at all, if given a disk with 100 folders, each with 8-15 encrypted files each, that someone couldn't figure out which albums comprise a good number of those directories simply from the resulting file lengths.
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#145I have, uh, mp3 backups of all the music I have owned from my, um, ludicrously massive CD collection. Is it worth the risk that google might one day decide I am a pirate and block my account?
It's a lot more expensive but a nice little synology NAS may be a good investment.
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#146I will never forget that the Christchurch shooting video was automatically deleted from users' PRIVATE Google Drive and Dropbox - no warnings were given and no explanation was presented.
I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.
To battle the Cloud storage paradigm with uniqueness is always going to be a cat and mouse game.
I wish the future is a NAS that is simple, fault tolerant ( Bit-Flip protection, Error Correction, Drive Redundancy ) and extremely affordable. That is something the Apple Time Capsule should have been.
Right now I cant even get a 2x 2.5" 2TB HDD and a NAS enclosure for under $200 RSP. I was hoping Kobol would be it someday. But chip shortage and many other things had them canceled the project.
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if in the future we'll need a "unique-inize" app that will make trivial changes to pictures and videos that change their hash and their size by a few bytes to defeat this kind of nonsense. Changing even one pixel's hue on one frame by a small amount should make the whole thing encode (depending on codec) to a different size and hash.
As long as Google is willing to serve binaries, encryption solves this.
Base64 would like to put in a word too.
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps I'm sensitive as a NZer, but would you feel the same if the deleted document was a plan for a nuclear weapon etc? Though while giving a warning is clearly inappropriate, they should certainly have explained what they did.
It is a very slippery slope. Would you feel the same if it was a genomic sequence of a novel respiratory virus? Would you say it is a plan for a bioweapon and hence must be forbidden?
Thankfully those are even more "mutually destructive" than nuclear weapons.
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#149So... which cloud storage providers do NOT scan your files and propose to remove things which violate their own sense of what data is "appropriate"? Obviously, I could encrypt my data before putting on such a service, but that makes access less convenient.
Your own cloud storage..
such as a Synology NAS
Re: Google Drive could soon start locking your files
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
tldr: s/first amendment/free speech principles obligatory mention that the first amendment doesn't apply to private companies, only governments. Then reply and say, "I mean the spirit of the first amendment" and then I'll agree with you. better to just say "free speech principles" rather than "first amendment"
The first amendment does apply to companies. As in they have the right to not associate with you for any reason. However, there are plenty of cases where that right has been taken from them when their services have been deemed so necessary that they must do business with the general public. e.g. the electric company can't cut you off if they don't like your politics. And until recently we had net neutrality. There is…
Net Neutrality was very shortlived in the USA though, like, a few years only ?