401–410 of 427 posts
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I used to work on a certain Google product and I remember thinking a petabyte was big when our raw content store crossed that milestone. Now Linus Tech Tips can put that much storage in a single box.
I remember about ten years ago when 40TB of usable storage was a mid sized five five figure investment. That’s nas territory now.
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such as prison
I had more in mind things like "Cast Away" or poor souls who were held in captivity in a remote foreign country by the government there or local pirates or terrorists. When you return to "normal" life you even loose your email, photos and everything just because you could not log in for 2 years :(
So I guess that's a way to enforce that users have only one account (or a small number).
I have a dozen accounts. I don't really use most of them a whole lot. And all but 2 of them have very small amount of data stored. I created them mostly to isolate them in their tracking, not to get a huge amount of free storage.
No idea what the conditions say about multiple accounts. I don't waste my time reading them. I understand that their lawyers have spent a lot of time to reserve all rights to them and leave nothing to me. That's the price of free services.
It can be worse. I got a letter recently from a mutual fund saying I'd done nothing with my account for years, and if they didn't hear from me soon, they were going to hand it over to the government. (I'm a buy and hold, hold, hold, hold, investor.)
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Part of the reason everyone switched to GMail is because, unlike the other free online mail providers, they didn't do this kind of bullshit.
People switched because in a time when mail providers were giving you 5-10MB of space, Google offered 1GB. And the spam filtering was way better than other offerings.
And I distinctly remember Google emphasizing the storage / never-delete part of it in their ads and outreach. I very much doubt it would be actionable in any legal sense, but it's certainly a change of paradigm for them to do this.
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How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature. Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plen…
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Email is the tightest grip Google has on me. Maybe YouTube. But their Google music fail, their rising phone prices, their bait and switch photo storage, and low quality search results have caused me to change. Any alternatives to Chrome, Firefox on both Android and Desktop are buggy, I want a different company?
If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave...
When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)
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In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature. Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plen…
Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
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This is reasonable. Delete some filter emails won't take you 10 minutes
It's not that easy. I have 15 years of emails, including deeply personal stuff. I've deleted all the unread mailing lists. I've deleted the big files. I've gone through numerous social and advertising emails and mass-deleted. Yet I'm stuck on like 14.98 Gb and every time I hit the threshold, Gmail starts bugging me to do more. How can I even tell if I have that much email? They could just be saying "oh, you have 14.9…
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If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
Sadly, Vivaldi was sold a few years ago and no longer seems the ideal choice if you're focused on privacy and security. https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/iq33nv/brave... When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which ar…
Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.
Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.