> 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.
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.