Amazon recently disabled acd-cli and rclone from accessing their services "for security reasons." I see that acd-cli is back while rclone remains effectively banned. Acd-cli and rclone truly had poor implementations. Though, the timing is suspicious for them not to allow rclone again if they implemented the service securely again.
My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users and so the low-volume users didn't outweigh or pay for the heavy users like they originally estimated when they set the price for the service. It was good while it lasted.
> My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users
I would further speculate that plex users were the largest single group of offenders. seemed like a cat and mouse game for a while -- amazon started comparing hashes of files to known bootlegs and banning accounts, so everyone started using encfs, and later migrated to the unlimited plan from google apps. I guess google's the only game in town, now.
this is incorrect, plex works fine with amazon.[1][2][more on request]
the issues being described in the link you posted may refer to early-release bugs, users who were getting throttled or nuked due to the anti-piracy efforts I referred to earlier, or any number of things (certain kinds of transcoding, maybe?) -- it's a pretty vague article! but plex and amazon can definitely be integrated.
Those links are from a while ago. You linked to a FUSE solution, which isn't first-class and you need a computer for it. You're right, it probably would "work" with that, but I would say that's an outlier solution.
It doesn't work with plex's cloud feature: https://www.plex.tv/features/cloud/ - they removed it from the list there. This would have gotten a lot more users
that is correct, plex cloud is not the preferred solution for data hoarders using plex. plex cloud only supported amazon drive until jan 1st of this year[1] and all existing accounts were grandfathered in. that was a pretty short period of time but probably enough to create a problem. plex cloud is beside the point, though, because it isn't what people use for this. they used amazon cloud drive with fuse.
regarding fuse:
> you need a computer for it
well, not really, only to the extent that a VPS is a computer.
> I would say that's an outlier solution
an outlier solution for an outlier problem (can we agree to call that people storing 100+ TB of files?). except the problem was seemingly large enough that they had to get rid of it, so maybe it's not fair to call it an outlier. I don't think "first class" is a concern for people with such ridiculous amounts of data. plex cloud just makes things simpler, but running plex on a VPS takes two commands and there are some pretty detailed guides out there for people who don't know what ssh or digitalocean is. it's at a point now where there's even a platform for automating this stuff, complete with fancy dashboard etc.[2] needing to use things like fuse and encfs is hardly a barrier.
people talk about this stuff a lot more publicly than I would have thought, in places like /r/datahoarders, /r/plex, as well as the lowendbox, quickbox, and torrent tracker forums.
Yeah VPS ia computer, plex cloud doesn't require that. But that doesn't matter, I think we're both correct, although I don't think as many people run VPS's as you seem to think for this. Not saying it's not easy, it' s just not the usual way I've seen people use plex. But it doesn't matter, really.
Thanks for the links, quickbox does look neat. I've been looking to get a media server for my plex stuff and it seems to support a lot.
Interesting. I wonder if this indirectly expedited the price hike? Encryption would make it (practically) impossible for Amazon to deduplicate people's data and store it more cost efficiently.
As anectodal information: I know a community of people who share movies. In the past few months, abusing ACD to move their personal, encrypted movie collections (which go up to many terabytes) was definitely a fad. There was automation written to allow for streaming movies directly from ACD. A popular resource point was https://www.reddit.com/r/PlexACD/comments/6bmt9s/a_framework...
As long as Amazon's API could allow for accessing the storage space in a drive-like manner, they were open for abuse. For me the writing was on the wall.
What they were doing is using a server in the middle for auth. But oh god the server started handing out the wrong keys so you might end up having total control of another acd_cli users account.
And when acd_cli got banned they (not acd_cli themself but users that modified the source) just used rclones app ID and keys to trick Amazon into thinking acd_cli was rclone. Then rclone got banned.
They (amazon) did say the problem with rclone was the keys were public since it is open source.
Yea it's been great for my family. We've been backing up family photos and movies to it with acdcli. Close to 1TB of all that content there, so we're fine for now but I'm probably going to end up doing something else for the longer term.
My guess is that Amazon had more datahoarders than average-joe users and so the low-volume users didn't outweigh or pay for the heavy users like they originally estimated when they set the price for the service. It was good while it lasted.