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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

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electricity makes significant differences to quality of life and you’re talking about having 100 pictures of your kids instead of 10,000 being “a huge loss and emotional shock”. That’s frankly pathetic. There are many people I know alive today (including myself) that don’t obsess over a day by day photo chronology of their children that you will probably never look at 90% of. Yet we all use electricity significantly…

> Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity? It is not. Electricity is just an example, probably a bad one. I would take it over photos any day. But I am sure there are some modern conveniences that are really important to you while for others they are not as important. If you lose access to those conveniences, you will feel greatly emotional whether anger, sadness or some other em…

You’re basing it literally on a sample of people that overtly cared.

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

#682
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Startup idea: SaaS portal to trigger FBI raid on RAID disks, acting as a free replicated permanent archival storage. Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP.

> Retrieving the data is out of scope of the MVP. Perhaps you can eventually submit a FOIA request?

Support for retrieval is planned for year 2053.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems ludicrous that they can get a warrant to take everything if he really was just hitting URLs.

Worse than that- even if you are adjacent to a crime that took place and not the suspect, they can also invade your privacy - rifle through all of your private data online and so on. I had a friend who owns a PC repair shop who bought a laptop from another 'friend' that was sold to him illegally. (He did not know it was illegally stolen from the next state over) The state police came in (with FBI in tow) and seized a…

This sounds a bit far fetched.

Then again I remember a story about a tire storage facility in Norway that went bankrupt and no one could get their winter tires out. Doing a bit of research on this it actually looks like it happened at least two times once in 2019 [1] and previously in 2011 [2]. Looks like all the customers eventually got their tires back, but in Norway we have deadlines for when you need to change from summer tires to winter tires and if you have studded tires then you have to change back by a week or so after end of easter. So customers were in a bit of a pickle.

1: https://www.nrk.no/sorlandet/bilverksted-har-stengt-dorene-_... 2: https://www.rb.no/lokale-nyheter/kunder-fortviler-over-dekkh...

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

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taking advantage It was unlimited. If they didn't want it to be unlimited, it should have had a limit on it.

It was unlimited and they retained the right to exit the contract. If someone wants to pay for unlimited duration unlimited storage they should find a provider who does that.

They had it, it was Google.

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

#685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the object of discussion was google who /did/ have a Chuck-A-Rama like offering. Specific common sense amount is an unreasonable demand. How long should a customer be allowed to stay in a buffet? Is it an hour? 1:30? 3 hours? I don’t know. Maybe? Depends. Is it reasonable to come in, pay once, and stay for a month in the restaurant (if it was a 24/7 establishment)? Probably not.

My point is that it is easy to tell in the restaurant, and it is not easy to tell in a cloud storage context. We're not disagreeing about the former. I actually have cloud storage customers at my company. If you asked me what an unreasonable amount of cloud storage consumption was, I would have a really hard time coming up with a number. A petabyte, I guess? We have customers that store kilobytes, and others that sto…

But that’s precisely what drives the reasonableness decision. If you are paying for the product directly, do as you like. If you are paying for “unlimited”, expect an eventual harsh wake up call if your usage costs above and beyond what you are paying.

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aren't we referring to the ancestor comment of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38629510 if you're referring to something else, I missed that reference, so my apologies then. I do think google gave sufficient time to move off. I also don't think a "workspace" being in read only mode was ever meant to be a permanent position for that google workspace. i.e. it was meant that "we weren't going to suddenly delete you…

> I do think google gave sufficient time to move off. The account was given 60 days grace on May 11, 2023. It’s currently December 15, 2023. Google Enterprise (Unlimited) accounts are subject to the same 750GB/day limits (I have one of these accounts, my account has also gone RO). As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period. In 218 days, you can download (assum…

you can upload 750GB a day, you can download 10TB a day.

in about 2 months, I was able to get out over 100TB a data (using a 500mbps connection, wasn't downloading 24/7 but close to somewhere in the 25-50% of the time, and that math does check out).

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

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I call FUD here; Had a very similar experience with google, except with maybe 20tb rather than 200, and no data loss. They gave warnings at least a year in advance about the transition to google workspace from google for business or however it was called before. It was quite clear that this transition would eventually be mandatory and that it did not include unlimited space for a flat fee. I punted on the…

> Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. What are your thoughts on false advertising? What part of "unlimited" in the advertisement should be allowed, if the resource itself is not unlimited?

As a consumer of paid products (as well as simply human), Im against being lied to by those who sell them.

However, advertising is not contract, and I wouldn’t want to hear the legalese of a contract whenever someone tries to sell me something (actually perhaps I would, maybe it would reduce the amount of ads One has to endure, but that’s beside the point as it isn’t a norm outside, perhaps, the medical industry).

I don’t consider this to be such a case. Was he capped at how much he would be able to store (other than by allowed bandwidth/traffic)? Was he promised this would last forever? Was he not given a warning a year in advance that this is ending?

No resource in this universe is unlimited, so your choice is either to be a pedant about what that means and then raise an uproar when your deliberate misunderstanding of colloquial language breaks, or attempt to understand specifically what is implied by the promise.

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

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than that- even if you are adjacent to a crime that took place and not the suspect, they can also invade your privacy - rifle through all of your private data online and so on. I had a friend who owns a PC repair shop who bought a laptop from another 'friend' that was sold to him illegally. (He did not know it was illegally stolen from the next state over) The state police came in (with FBI in tow) and seized a…

This sounds a bit far fetched. Then again I remember a story about a tire storage facility in Norway that went bankrupt and no one could get their winter tires out. Doing a bit of research on this it actually looks like it happened at least two times once in 2019 [1] and previously in 2011 [2]. Looks like all the customers eventually got their tires back, but in Norway we have deadlines for when you need to change fr…

> This sounds a bit far fetched.

Wish it were. There's more to the story that I'm not permitted to discuss. But the brush strokes are there, and all true. Unfortunately.

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

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google sends multiple emails that are extremely clear about what is going to happen. If you ignore the emails or notifications, that is your fault, not on the service. Like I mentioned above, even the Google podcast service is giving users over a year to prepare for the shutdown, and provides a method to transfer any data you have out of the app. If they take much precaution with a podcast app that few people even us…

you seem the be extrapolating the actions in one service to what you think the actions are in another service, when direct evidence is saying that the other service has not in fact done what you are extrapolating. I don't really see why you think your extrapolation is more believable than the reported facts.

[deleted]

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

#690

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…

Thanks for providing your story. I hear about people having all their electronic devices seized for spurious CFAA charges but it doesn’t make the news when the devices are returned more than a decade later – by which time they’d be obsolete even if they hadn’t been broken. I also wasn’t aware of the other damages that are inflicted on the victims such as intimidation with the threat of firearms, having their home wrecked and potential loss of one’s home. Best wishes and thanks for sticking your neck above the parapet for the rest of us.
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