The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account.
It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
Correct. 7 days is not enough time to stream >200TB of data, let alone find a place to stream it to. This puts a human being in a crisis position.
He doesn't need to just find someone willing to store his data. He need to get his data out. Trying to get my data out of Google, I've gotten ~1TB out in ~1 week. This is about a year's worth of time to not lose it.
The facts are not "even less inflammatory."
A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.
He had ~6 months to download his data, not 7 days: they told him on the 11th of May 2023 (or thereabouts they gave him a 60 day period ending on the 10th of July 2023) that he had exceeded his quota.
They should, of course, have given a clear timeline for deletion at that point, but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using?
I'm no fan of Google, and I agree with you that a good service would have offered an at-or-slightly-above-cost data export for that volume of data... but he's deliberately misrepresenting the situation here (either that or is painfully naive)
Edit: as somebody else pointed out downthread, he also would have received numerous e-mails throughout 2022 telling him that the unlimited service was being shuttered
The six-month grace period notice pretty clearly states his data would be read-only, while the seven-day notice seems to be the first time destruction is even mentioned. I think we can both agree that there's a world of difference between data being read-only and being destroyed. I think it's completely reasonable to say he has 7 days to download it.
"If I cancel my additional storage, will all the files/documents that took up the additional space, be deleted? Or will I still have access to them?"
"You will still have access to all your files but, if you have used all storage you won't be able to add or create NEW files until you have space available."
Which sounds like you're right, unless the Product Expert was wrong.
The fact that this comment chain is about 7 deep trying to figure out whether the customer was given enough notice or not I think is also evidence that Google has a terrible UX for this anyway.
If your data is going to be deleted, it should be painfully obvious well in advance.
I don't think the depth of this comment chain has anything to do with the UX design. The words on that warning are unequivocally interpretable as "the data will not be deleted."
At the end of the day, it doesn't even matter if hidden in the terms of service or somewhere if it is made clear that the data will be deleted. It doesn't even matter if it is clear to @andrewmutz and @garblegarble that the data will be deleted[0]. What matters is if not thinking the data would be deleted is a reasonable interpretation. Full stop. It also matters that when explicit communication (unequivocally interpreted as slated for deletion) that the user was given 7 days, which was not even enough time, especially considering Google's egress rates.
There's a lot of this on HN lately and I'm not sure why. Communication is fuzzy people, I'm not sure why that's surprising. But when there's disagreement don't ask yourself which is right or wrong, but if a reasonable interpretation was made. Because communication is like an autoencoder: there's what's in your head (input), what you say (lossy compressed intermediate latent), and what is received (decompressed information with imputation). There's too many attempts to defend a believed objective reality which just is absurd (ironically making the view less objective).
And, importantly, RTFA
[0] Obviously these two are reading between the lines. It is not a bad interpretation and we often should practice this, especially to be on the safe side, but it's clear that there is inference, so what's wrong with the comments is their strong assertions that the communication was obvious. One may also make the argument that Techdirt isn't telling the full story or timeline, but that's also a different issue and inferential.
"google product experts" aren't generally google employees and aren't speaking for google.
i.e. that support site is mostly user to user help, which is perhaps an indictment on google in general, but sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".
> sadly in this case can't be used for saying "where google says".
I think we're looking at very different things.... there's a screenshot of a literal official email from Google, under the Google Workspace Team. Not sure where you're getting "Google product experts". Did you mean to reply to a different comment?
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 data if you were over quota, but its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".
though if you can point to the official email from google (I'd have to find the ones they sent me, unsure if I kept or deleted them).
I apologize, I forgot that was in a comment above. Personally I'm not concerned with what the product experts said but rather the official from Google emails I'm talking about are in the screenshot of the article where it doesn't say anything about removing or deleting data. I'm also not concerned if you have to click links for more information or Google to figure out Google's policy. What matters is what's in the direct email.
> i.e. it was meant that "...its your responsibility to get under quota or your account will be at risk".
In person to person language I think we can rely on inference because there's good feedback mechanisms to resolve (like was done here). But in corporate communication I don't think you have the same luxury. Especially when you're a corporation that has no person to talk to to resolve misunderstandings. Instructions must be explicit and to such a degree that no reasonable person could misinterpret. It's why they hire all those lawyers and that's what a court of law would hold them to. I think given the emails shown that there's reason to believe his data would not be deleted until the explicit 7 day notice.
> 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 (assuming 100% efficiency) 163TB.
The user has >200TB stored in their drive.
The math doesn’t check out.
EDIT: > As of today, it’s been 218 days since the notice that the account was over quota and in grace period.
Up until that point, the user was still contracted to, and paying for, an unlimited storage solution. Any suggestions that the onus is on the user to be migrating their data out while still paying for a working solution is insane. The onus is on the provider to give the user time to migrate after the terms have changed. Unless we consider Google to be the Sith, in which case, yes, pray they don’t change the terms of the deal any more.
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).
>> In what world would it be reasonable to expect Google to pay thousands of dollars per year indefinitely to store your data for free?
Expect condescending comments when if you state things that are outrageous. Especially after responding to a comment that actively demonstrated that they did not read the article. If you disagree that this is a reasonable interpretation maybe clarify that. But this is also all you said, so I'm not sure what you expect me to read it as.
I think there is also sufficient reason to believe you did not read the chain of comments either. This is kinda like jumping into the middle of a conversation while having been zoned out. Sufficient evidence because you are revisiting something already discussed. If you would like to argue that his interpretation was unreasonable you should have provided reasoning to it. Don't play the victim here. You gave a low quality, emotional, and exaggeratory comment. No matter how good the argument is in your head, you can't expect a high quality response nor be upset when someone makes a quip remark. (idk why I'm even responding this one tbh)
__There was no ad hominem attack.__ I responded to your claim, and by quoting the article. I have not dismissed your claim based on your character nor even attacked your character. But I'll concede that I made a slight and my comment was condescending (see above for reasons). Additionally, my slights are not subverting the argument nor detracting from it. If you need clarification, an ad hominem attack is "you should ignore anything [insert user] has to say because they are dumb and voted for [insert political enemy]". See how it doesn't respond to what you said, moves the conversation away, and now places a new standard which must be rebutted which is not actually related to the subject matter? That's what makes it a logical fallacy. We have none of those qualities. Yet now here we are, not talking about the article or the contents...
You, on the other hand, did in fact make a logical fallacy. But that's already been addressed and we need not be more explicit nor derail the conversation further.
> This is not mentioned in the article but it is mentioned in other comments
Pro tip: do not assume the person you are replying to has read every comment under a post. You may assume they have read the direct chain of comments leading to the current point, but no more. If you are tired of saying the same thing maybe instead of saying "as I've already commented" maybe link your comment. Or chill, because frankly this isn't an issue of high importance and you don't have to really defend either situation because none of have a real horse in the race so idk why emotion is high. You should also only assume the context of the direct thread. If you want to claim that the author is hiding truth and that there was in fact clearer explicit ample warnings given, do so here, or provide a reference to your other comment. You cannot assume I am going to read through or search all >500 comments or search your username. Because frankly, I'm responding to what you said, not who you are. If your context is everything you said, including other comments unrelated to this direct chain, the contextual issue is with you not me.
tldr: low quality replies don't get high quality responses and I'm not going to search for every comment you made
I respectfully disagree. They were clearly given enough notice - from personal experience as I’ve commented already, as well as from sibling comments.
If you are still “figuring this out”, I daresay it is simply because you haven’t used the paid service and seen the frequent nagging emails about the transition.
Which is entirely likely, given that Google's "Product Experts" aren't employees with access to internal communication channels, they're just volunteers working for internet points.
No, I agree. Sorry, my phrasing there was poor. I meant: it is completely reasonable to say that "he has seven days to download it", not that it is completely reasonable for him to only have seven days.
'to say that...' is discussing which of the statements in the article is a better interpretation, 7 vs 60. It is not making any claims about the reasonableness of the 7 days to download the soon to be deleted data.
> but does he seriously expect other people to believe he was naive enough to think Google would continue to store his data forever after they withdrew the unlimited service he was using?
I doubt he expected Google to store his data forever, and I don’t see anything indicating that this is what he expects. Forever is a straw man.
It would be reasonable to expect some kind of migration / off-boarding plan, and it’s Google’s responsibility to facilitate that after pulling the plug on services they previously committed to providing.
Why are we carrying water for Google here and blaming the user?
Google stated that it would remain in read-only mode and that’s the end of it. It’s bad enough they reneged on their agreement to store unlimited data for x amount of money, but according to you people need to be soothsayers to figure out that a company will reneg on their promise to maintain the data?
And none of that even takes into account that even 60 days wouldn’t be enough to download all that data.
Just stop it. Google is in the wrong and to add insult to injury they don’t provide any means of reaching a customer support representative to mitigate issues caused by their own incompetence.
The mendacity in your comment coupled with the glee you express in it is disturbing.
> Even for Google Podcasts which is being terminated, users who don't pay have gotten notifications for well over a year that the service was going to shutdown
Uh, no. It hasn't even been 3 months since the shutdown was announced—and I personally only learned about it a few days after the announcement by a chance conversation with someone who mentioned it in person. (This was thankfully well after I had already gotten what personal data of mine I could out of the app and migrated to another player precisely due to the lackadaisical approach user data handling by whomever is responsible for Google Podcasts. It was notable for being one of the Google services that doesn't make user data available through Google Takeout.)
Recently we announced that Google Podcasts will be discontinued next year. We wanted to reach out directly with more information on what to expect.
For now, nothing is changing, and you can continue to use Google Podcasts as normal. Over the coming months, podcasts in YouTube Music will be made available globally and we will start rolling out tools that will enable you to transfer your podcast show subscriptions from Google Podcasts. In YouTube Music, you will be able to listen to your podcasts just like you did on Google Podcasts, no paid subscription required. If YouTube Music isn’t for you, there will also be an option to download a file of your show subscriptions, which you can upload to an app that supports their import.
We acknowledge that this is a big change and want to thank you for being a loyal Google Podcasts user. We’ll reach out directly with more details over the coming months. In the meantime, if you have questions, please check out our Help Community here.
Sincerely,
The Google Podcasts team
The podcast app on my phone also has a nag text that mentions that it will be shutting down.
I was trying to say that we have well over a year in advance to prepare for the google podcast service to terminate.
If you ignore emails that is on you, not the service.
> There is no way this person wasn't aware of what was going to happen,
Sure. That's what it is. He's a grifter, grifting Google to try to shame them into giving him a quarter of a petabyte of storage for free. He knew all along that his data would be deleted, and waited to the last second because he figures this is a sure thing and he'll get to keep it forever. You caught him. I can't believe we all fell for it.
It's not as if non-technical people (and technical ones too!) can't be confused or overwhelmed, and he should have been able to telepathically read Google's collective hivemind that "goes into read-only mode" means "we'll delete all the shit you don't have room or time to put anywhere else".
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 use, I guarantee they sent multiple emails to this person urging them to prepare for this.
If you don't check your email or just ignore it, that is not the service providers fault. Expecting a free service to bend over backwards for you even when they told you repeatedly to prepare for this is silly.
>I can't believe we all fell for it.
You fell for clickbait and exaggerated or fabricated stories from someone who either ignored their mail or waited til last minute and are now whining.
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.
He had all his computers confiscated by the FBI and then realized that his backups were also being destroyed by Google. Calling this a grift is incredibly insulting.
> A decent company would drop $2000 on HDD, or a bit less on optical / tape media, and ship (rather than delete) the data to the customer they fired, at their own cost, or at the very least, at customer cost. A company which provides literally no way to get data out and offloads expenses is a POS company.
Please, be realistic. This is nuts and you must know it.
A small business likely would - at least at the customers expense. A medium size business might if you could talk to a reasonable person in the right department and they had the time to do it. Its beyond the ability of a large company.
This is what people are actually angry about. As a company gets more and more successful (size/revenue) it becomes less capable at going above and beyond for the majority of their customers. And we live in a world of increasingly large hyper consolidated companies. It feels like its only going to get worse from here. IMO thats where the legitimate angst is. Its going to get worse.
You're right, and it's paradoxical. Companies with poor customer service should be taking hits in the stock market and in the public eye, but Comcast is still around...
The guy in TFA should be a warning to others: you cannot trust other machines to handle your data responsibly. They'll turn on you and demand a ransom when it's convenient. Self-host, and own your infrastructure.
You nailed it. People don't necessarily hate capitalism, companies or business owners. However, this late stage capitalism with huge faceless companies that are unable to care for people, seem to be above the law and are just profit-extraction machines is quite a trip.
>Not for a freeloader who was in the top 0.1% of usage without paying a dime.
This is a very unfair characterisation. He paid for an enterprise plan that was specifically targeted at enterprises with exceptionally high storage needs.
We don't know how much storage other enterprises in that target group were using. Comparing it with typical storage requirements of consumers makes absolutely no sense.
Also, it's not very interesting if he was in the top 0.1% because someone always is. That doesn't make it freeloading.
I haven't seen any buffet advertize itself as offering "unlimited" food, but rather they say "all-you-can-eat" and then typically clearly clarify on the door and the front desk something like "on our premises, in under 2 hours".
Google should have been smart enough to not say "unlimited" if they don't mean it.
The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat. It's a poor analogy. There are cloud storage users in every order-of-magnitude bracket from 10^0 to 10^15 bytes used. S3 is not like Chuck-a-Rama. A businessperson that attempts to treat them like they are similar will be forced to make a U-turn and lose some face in the process.
These types of businesspeople should be fired urgently and with prejudice.
In all free anything people who over-consume threaten the model for everyone. I hate that the end result is that nobody should have it. We're all subsidizing the extreme users and we should desire that those customers are fired.
All those rules at a buffet are just codifying ethics because the business has learned that it's stupid to trust people.
You are blaming the users for taking "unlimited" literally, while it was the company who said the plan was "unlimited" in the first place. Nobody forced them to market it that way. If they know 99.9% of users are fine with 1Tb, then they should sell them that and not lie in their marketing.
They did have such a plan. In fact, to get unlimited storage, an individual had to buy 3 (And I think later, 5) seats. And it was indeed not limited, at least as far as I could tell.
Until these got abused, my guess by pirate crowd to store huge media collections (eg search “plex gdrive”), and the plan went away. Did google promise they would keep this plan up forever?
Unlimited does not mean infinite and does not mean forever. It means you are getting access/capacity as you need, without “needing to worry about details” /presuming reasonable usage/. They were not fired as a customer. No limits were imposed. Until google decided to end it for everyone, likely specifically due to customers as above.
What if someone stored 200PB on their “unlimited” account? Would you expect google to give a 5 year warning to make sure someone had enough time to download their data to their laptop?
Yes, I'm blaming the kinds of users who persuade buffets to make up hostile and unpleasant rules for people. If firing a small % of users changes the equation for everyone then customers should be all for it.
When customers exploit any concept of free, even the bathroom in a fast food restaurant, that starts a culture where businesses give you a code so you can pee. You can call this being up-front or honest, but I call it the depletion of goodwill.
Stay on track: Cloud storage. Not a buffet. Cloud storage.
Lots of business need gigabytes. Lots of business need terabytes. That's a 1000x difference. That ratio is not very buffet-like!
People who need terabytes of cloud storage are not like people who try to scam buffets by taking home food in their pants. They are not like people who do unspeakable things to the free bathroom. They are just people with lots of data. There are business that have lots of data. It is a common business problem in today's world.
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 store many terabytes. Frankly we'd love a petabyte customer, because we actually charge people for storage, like any sane B2B storage offering. Some things are not meant to be unlimited.
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.
> The implication your analogy is sneaking in is that there is a common-sense amount of cloud storage a user might use, in the same way that there is a common-sense amount for somebody to eat.
I'm not "sneaking" it in - I'm saying it outright. When Google (or anyone else competent in the art) is designing and provisioning a service, they have a numbers they use to estimate user resource-usage percentiles: unlike journalists, infra engineers don't have the luxury to pretend storage space is free or infinite.
When you win too much at a casino, or eat too much at a buffet, or stay too long at a McDonald's, or stay too long at the gas pump, they will all ask you to leave. There are common-sense limits to most services. Free-service tiers on internet services are not exempt. Extreme usage threatens the business model.
Right, and not all commodities have workable "unlimited" business models. The fact that somebody wants it to be a business model doesn't mean it should be one.
It's possible to offer honest unlimited plans. The all-you-can-eat buffet is one example. Just write it down somewhere that there's a time limit and that each individual person has to pay, and just like that you've imposed a practical limit without imposing a literal one.
Google Fiber competes with Comcast in my area, and they're happily able to advertise "unlimited gigabit Internet". Which is awesome. It's good marketing, and not dishonest: Their competitor imposes a type of limit which they do not impose (a monthly consumption limit of 1 TB). Of course, we know that there is still an effective limit in place: You can still only consume at the rate of 1 GiB/s. It's right there in the name of the plan.
But "unlimited storage" is just dishonest, especially when you're selling to businesses. Some businesses need cloud storage for documents, others need it for storing RAW video. There's nothing unreasonable about a few hundred TB unless you're just totally oblivious to the cloud storage business.
Essentially I think you're defending a somewhat dishonest marketing technique. What is lost by putting a 10 TB limit on the plan? I guess it wouldn't sell as well? Because it's not a lie? Maybe it's less "flexible" (i.e. Google can't just go change it whenever they feel like it). It's not like I can't see why that's good for Google, I just can't see why it's good for their customers. If there's a limit, just say it. Your customers would certainly appreciate knowing. And for crying out loud I do not care that being just a little bit dishonest about it makes customers excited and gets more sales.
It may be nuts, but many companies offer this option.
It's not clear what Google is doing here is even legal. If a company is holding my property, they're usually required to make reasonable efforts to return it.
A former employer will usually ship your things back to you, for example, or find other ways to return them. Simply tossing things you had in your office in the trash is illegal.
A lost-and-found is where there's little or no business relationship and you didn't ask for the stuff.
If we have a formal relationship where you're holding on to my stuff or vice-versa as part of that relationship, you are generally required to return my stuff and I am required to return yours when the relationship ends. If I am working for you, and you have my tools at the office, you need to return them to me. If it's impractical for me to pick them up (e.g. I left them in an office in Alaska), that means you need to ship them to me at your cost. If a contractor has your data, and you don't renew the contract, they need to reasonably provide it back to you. If you are leaving a relationship and your ex has a bunch of stuff at your house, you need to return it. Etc.
That's very different from someone losing something on your property.
I suspect, in this case, if both sides had equal legal budgets, Google would lose a court case. Now, testing that is very impractical since legal budgets aren't equal, but from a pure justice perspective, that's how it works out.
I had a business account that was told they were cancelling the service. We were given 3 months or so notice.
What I believe happened (as happened to many other people as can see from rclone forum) is that some people decided that they were going to simply go into "overage" mode, as that assumed that google would keep their data around when over quota, just it be locked into read only mode (so the data would remain, but just be readable, they couldn't add anything to it).
Google decided that this wasn't something they were going to support, so people who went into read only mode, have now been getting the letters that their data is going to be deleted.
i.e. they have been for months paying google for an account that they knew is over quota.
200TB is fairly easily extractable over 3 months from google drive if one plans correctly. You have a 10TB download quota a day, which one would need a gigabit/s connection to hit. If you have only 250megabit connection, it will take 80 days. Bumping up on the 3 month warning I had, but still doable especially if one filters out unnecessary things.
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 transition for as long as possible, and when it finally arrived I temporarily added some accounts until I removed the excess data (mainly old backups I did not need anymore).
Nothing in life is unlimited and taking such a promise at face value appears to me as being willfully naive. Relying on such an offer as your main storage is begging for trouble. Expecting this to happen is precisely why I only stored backups there.
You don’t need to be an expert to do the math, consider that just to store the data, without any redundancy and without it being constantly spinning would have retailed at at ~ $4K using the cheapest drives (~25 8tb drives), and would have cost them ~$1/h or ~$700 to constantly run at CA electricity prices (~8W idle per drive). And this before redundancy, backups, bandwidth, etc. This is obviously unsustainable and will eventually end.
Same goes eg for dropbox, who offered “unlimited” storage for their business plan until fairly recently but now have the same limit of 5tb/acct as Google.
Who in their right mind would rely on such an obvious abuse of what was meant by “unlimited” to store the only copy of their life’s work?
Well... they could transition the data to tape with a delay for recovering it, instead of outright deleting it.
At that point, storing it would be pretty much free no?
Regardless, they promised something, then reneged, with little to no time to handle it.
The way they handled it in terms of getting rid of the service is pretty terrible.
Also apparently it wasn't his only copy - his others were taken, and now he's about to lose the last one.
As I and others mentioned elsewhere in this discussion, there was at least a year of warning. At least I was aware of this for about a year out.
Tape is cheaper but not free. A quick search[0] quotes it at ~few $ /TB/Yr. Even if we take it at $1 due to G scale, that’s still ~$250/Y to store the archives, roughly what the customer likely paid when it was stored on immediate access media.
I agree it would have been nicer of them to store an archive after they stop paying. I disagree that they reneged on their offer - despite being disappointed that the deal ended, would I expect it to be offered forever, especially given the potential for abuse? Of course not. Frankly I’m surprised it lasted this long.
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.
Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.
> Google response isn't correct but everyone here has there hands a bit dirty. Storing 237 Tb on an unlimited server - the individual clearly knew they were taking advantage of a system and probably should have been ready for some kind of remedy.
Google clearly made a mistake in offering an "unlimited plan" so it makes perfect sense that they're going to discontinue it, and offer 60 days before the data becomes read only. If it was just that, there wouldn't be any article.
The fact that they regret offering an unlimited plan doesn't, however, give them the right to tell him that they're going to give him 60 days before the data becomes read only but it won't be deleted and then suddenly tell him that actually his data is going to be deleted in 7 days, which isn't sufficient time to transfer it elsewhere.
Perhaps it was a mistake, but offering unlimited was a competitive advantage. Others working with the economies of storage had limits or priced based on usage; having unlimited would be a great way to draw in customers. I'm highly skeptical of tech companies effectively price dumping, harming competition, and then coming out and saying "Oops, that wasn't sustainable. Here are the new terms." I'm of the mindset that if you offered an unlimited plan you should have to grandfather in customers that bought into that plan.
It's also naive to think a big tech company wouldn't be aware of power distributions (see Pareto) when offering anything unlimited. Which Google does continue to offer unlimited data on Google Fi, but throttles (even though they also discontinued the unlimited photo upload with Pixels and many times offers expansion of drive space but if you upgrade to a paid plan you don't get the additional storage, you just get get expanded to that size...)
I also very much agree that the monopolistic behavior you're mentioning is not a think we should just go accepting and even more, not be victim blaming. It feels really weird to me that people are blaming the reporter. You know, a 1.6 trillion dollar company vs well... nearly anyone else.
I don't feel at all bad about throttling mobile data.
For reference, the standard scam before was to offer $40/month for e.g. 1GB of data. At that point, you'd pay a crazy amount for each additional MB of data. This was horrible with very fast data, where you could accidentally burn through the whole quota with a misclick e.g. grabbing a large download.
Unlimited with throttle is super-friendly in comparison. I need data in case of an emergency -- enough to send and get emails and have GPS. I don't need 4k video streaming in an emergency. I don't want a $1000 bill for that. It keeps me in a sensible position, without requiring unlimited liability for the carrier.
Oh, I actually appreciate unlimited with throttle. They've always had data caps too but I wouldn't be surprised if the average user knew about them. But maybe the overage plan manager did because Fi is niche? And sorry, I was just bringing up Fi as an example of something being unlimited since so many people were acting like nothing is.
Well, no. Fi is not unlimited. This is how it works.
My cell network (not Fi) has crazy fast internet (I'd throttle it if I could, t avoid overusing it).
If I go over some amount, it goes to 3G speeds (probably 200kbps or similar).
If I were to run at 3G speeds -- continuously, peak speed -- for a month, I couldn't e.g. hit a terabit of data. Ergo, there is a cap, and it's short of 100GB. You cannot get to 100GB be because of the throttle.
I think this is very good behavior, but it is capped.
Yeah usually the thing about deadlines is that you should communicate them as harshly as possible, then let them slip when they do arrive. I.e. they want people off the service voluntarily and deal with the tiny fraction that refuses.
In this case, the initial notification (reproduced in the article) didn’t threaten to delete the files. Instead of communicating the threat harshly, it said that after 60 days his account would be placed in “read-only” mode.
It sounds like he (I think reasonably) believed that would be the new reality after the grace period: that he couldn’t write new files, but that his existing data would be accessible indefinitely in read-only form.
Sure, it’s clear from the context that Google vaguely wants him to stop being a headache for them. But planning for a read-only future is very different from planning for your data to be vaporized. As GP points out, Google could get eviction done in the same timeframe but save considerable face if the initial correspondence had said “you’re using way too much, it’s against our TOS, and we’re deleting your data in 30 days,” then given him a 30-day “reprieve” when the deadline drew near.
He wasn’t threatened harshly. He was told his data would become read-only, which he took at face value and assumed his data would remain safe. Then suddenly he was told the data would be deleted within seven days.
> He wasn’t threatened harshly. [...] he was told the data would be deleted within seven days
How exactly is that not a harsh threat? Sounds like a harsh threat to me. They were nice before, he didn't comply, now they're jerks. But it remains just a threat unless they actually wipe the data. Which they won't, because he's surely downloading it right now while we yell about it on HN.
And there’s no practical way to download that amount of data within seven days, just based on the bandwidth this would require. The situation would be totally different if they gave him six months notice for the deletion.
I think you're misunderstanding the contention upthread and confusing the threat ("we'll delete all your stuff in 7 days") with the actual enforcement of that threat (deleting said data, which hasn't happened, and I'm betting almost certainly won't as the guy will find some way to comply).
The poster upthread was trying (vainly, I guess) to make a distinction between the two.
Google initially told him that there was no hard deadline for getting the data off—just that his drive would be read-only as long as it was over the limit.
Then, 6 months later, they told him he had 7 days to get it off or it would be wiped.
Right, exactly. "He has 7 days or it would be wiped" is a threat, not a punishment. Was the data wiped or not? What are you willing to bet that we'll actually see a followup claiming the data was wiped? Almost certainly he's going to download the thing onto $3k of SSDs and get off the service, which is what everyone wants.
Moving 237.22 TB in 7 days requires ~3.14 Gbps of bandwidth, assuming that the clock starts ticking the moment that he actually starts moving data. In practice, the requirements would be even higher (subtracting out the time between notice being sent and read, plus time to actually set up alternative storage). Does Google even provide that level of read throughput to Google Drive customers?
I have to repeat the question: do you genuinely believe this data is going to be inevitably deleted, or maybe do you think that the threat will work and the guy will get his stuff downloaded somehow?
Do you similarly think it's perfectly ok for a loanshark to "threaten" to smash the customer's knees if they don't pay up in 7 days? Because obviously they wouldn't really do that?
No. 100% wrong. If you advertise and sell "unlimited" then you should deliver unlimited. If you don't build in acceptable use limits into the contract, then that's your fault, not the customer's.
I challenge you to go to any restaurant that has "unlimited refills", back up a tanker trunk and fill your truck. I don't think any court would enforce "unlimited" for that situation. I'm not sure this storage one is all that different
But restaurants explicitly ban doing that. Even all you can eat restaurants don't let you take out food. Google never hinted at having a maximum limit. Theres no reason to believe or expect that unlimited actually means some arbitrary limit that google just came up with after you signed up. Your analogy would've been better if the journo tried hosting a file share service using his drive account as a back end or something but that's not what happened
Not a great comparison. It was an _enterprise_ plan with unlimited storage. What kind of enterprise did Google aim their "unlimited" message at if it excludes a small company (an individual journalist) with lots of video footage?
I think the answer is that Google did in fact target companies with exceptionally high storage needs. They were just assuming that everyone who had lots of data would also spend a lot on other services and that didn't pan out.
A better comparison is probably a restaurant promising unlimited coffee refills for life, forgetting to make it conditional on ordering food as well. Then some office worker who never eats breakfast turns up every morning for three double espresso refills.
I feel like this isn't the best example, such restaurant can say that its only unlimited if you drink it in-house, in plain view. You almost never can take out food or drinks in all-you-can eat restaurants.
Generating/collecting 200TB of data is however entirely normal in some professions. Something Google should be and almost certainly is aware of.
In your analogy it would be Amazon setting up an S3 front on their corporate unlimited Google account. That didn't happen, it was just someone with more data than average. Google knows very well what the distribution looks like.
A lot of restaurants place a limit on the size of the container you're allowed to use, and there's a cultural expectation that you won't loiter just to fill more soda. Assuming you bought food and are continuing to buy food, the unlimited soda is more of a hook to keep you there and has clearly outlined terms. Your bladder will also give way before your stomach does.
An all-you-can eat might ban you for getting more food but they won't pump your stomach to undo all the food they already gave you. Google already let him store that data, if they regret that they should ban him from storing more. Deleting his data after permitting him to store it is completely over the line. No buffet in the world runs like that, not even those owned by literal gangsters.
I really disagree with this type of literalism. Everybody knows nothing is really unlimited. It's marketing aimed at the naive.
I have no problem with banging on Google for offering "unlimited" things without telling you what the limits actually are. But at some point, you have to expect some level of knowledge and sophistication from the users. I think accumulating 237Tb of data is well past the point where you should not just take "unlimited" at face value, ask hard questions about exactly what the limits of what they're offering are, and move to a better supported service, even if it costs some money.
It's probably also time to re-think - do you really need 237Tb? That's a huge amount of data. Is this like raw 4k HD video of every interview you've ever done, uncut? Maybe it's time to cut down on things a bit.
In HN people have low expectations for google so a limit seems reasonable to us. Google behaving shitty doesn't surprise anybody here. But what about with the normies? Google has deliberately cultivated an image of extreme technical capability with the normies. Google have deliberately convinced the general public that Google are basically internet gods who can do things no other company can, using their computer wizard magic. A normie can therefore reasonably believe that google could store a petabyte for them, when more technical people should reasonably know that google has limits. These aren't contradictory.
If Joe Blow's computer shop down the street offered "unlimited storage" then normies would understand that to be bullshit. But when Google gives that offer, it's taken literally because Google. And this is Google's own damn fault, their PR teams built Google's reputation to impossible heights deliberately.
Content Delivery Network (Free, Pro, or Business)
Cloudflare’s content delivery network (the “CDN”) Service can be used to cache and serve web pages and websites. Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN. Cloudflare reserves the right to disable or limit your access to or use of the CDN, or to limit your End Users’ access to certain of your resources through the CDN, if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files. We will use reasonable efforts to provide you with notice of such action.
In other words, if you serve HTML / CSS / JS you'll be fine. Too much of anything else and at some point they will ask you to pay.
I've experienced this first-hand and they're pretty fair about it. I believe they asked me to upgrade to Enterprise once I was serving something like >10-20TB per month of images / audio files (this was several years ago though!)
> if you use or are suspected of using the CDN without such Paid Services to serve video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files
Lots of sites have images. When exactly can I start to expect paying? Will this unspoken limit change in the future? Will I be notified when it is? As-written, it doesn't seem that way since it's opaque.
Why do you think CF owe you an explanation of when you start paying? You're not paying them; they don't owe you anything.
I imagine it pretty much comes down to "did this one thing that an individual is free hosting suddenly become popular or are they constantly taking the piss/running a biz off free".
R2 has similarly misaligned pricing, and I don't think it comes with comparable ToS limitations: You pay per request, and not proportional to data egress. So theoretically you could use it to distribute huge files very cheaply. Assuming there is no maximum request duration, it could even be used with a long running connection to download a video as it's being watched.
Yes. They will flip on their customers sooner or later. It might be years. And so long as you are prepared to bail when the time comes, you may as well keep taking advantage. But if it's critical infrastructure, make sure you have a failover plan ready.
It has just seemed like people are big fans of the "free, unlimited" plans here. I use a provider that is pay-per-usage personally, which seems more sustainable.
Support is part of the cost that is rolled into that pay-per-usage fee IMO.
I've worked at multiple places that unfortunately paid for CF services (and support), and have consistently had trouble with them. And that doesn't include just general CF service instability for end users.
Ditto. We got locked into a long-term Cloudflare contract and regretted it immensely. So much stuff that’s beta quality, broken promises, terrible support. Looks great on the surface, until you need to actually rely upon it.
Contrast this "unlimited" with how gmail was rolled out – gmail didn't offer unlimited email storage, it just offered a number orders of magnitude greater than everyone thought was realistic at the time.
Sounds like you just made Google's case for them. They provided the service. They cancelled it. Not their problem what happens with customer data afterwards.
I hardly think it's fair to say that they were 'taking advantage'. If Google says unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away? That's a really bad look for Google. "If we offer something that's good value to you, expect it to be taken away suddenly in the future." Those are not the actions of a company I would want to rely on.
With modern connected devices, I absolutely do expect for features (or even total functionality) to be removed on a whim by the manufacturer. Cloud services are no different.
Lesson being: do not rely on devices or services that rely on a third party. They absolutely will screw you; it’s only a matter of time.
If you do not believe this, then I would say that you have not been around this industry long enough. There may be rare exceptions, but this should be your rule if you care about the longevity of your software and data.
Of course it is not acceptable. But I imagine every company out there that has skin in this game would boldly taunt in reply: “whachha gunna do ‘bout it?”
Sure, we could boycott. How often is that ever effective in this modern age? Is it ever, because I don’t think I ever heard of such outside of history books?
Our lawmakers are corrupt and wholly in the pocket of those who would stand to benefit from perpetuating this shameful status quo. From my perspective, there ain’t damn thing we can do to fix it (or a thousand other problems), unless we are ready to start holding them accountable. I think that will take putting some of their heads on pikes.
Most unlimited services operate like all you can eat buffets. There is some secondary constraint that keeps usage bounded. I.e. the person's ability to eat food.
> unlimited, should the typical person really expect that to be taken away?
Absolutely. The word "unlimited" has been misused by so many companies (especially ISP and mobile) that anyone who has their eyes open should expect it to mean limited.
Also if there is a deal that is exceeding better than other options, don't be surprised when the rules change later.
Wait, so Google lied about selling an unlimited storage plan and the response is to punish a person for believing them? Sounds to me like the wrong party is being punished here.
Trust in Google might be near zero on HN these days but they still have a pretty good reputation with the general public. Expecting every non-technical user to see through the BS feels pretty wrong to me. I mean, what's the point of consumer protection laws if they don't push companies to be honest?
It was Google who set the price and service limit, not him, so I don’t think there’s any room here to argue that the price he was paying was unfairly low.
He probably wouldn’t have been able to even if he wanted (barring using multiple accounts, which comes with its own problems, including an increased risk of Google taking it as a reason to shut the accounts down).
You do see but you're choosing to make an argument for the sake of "sticking it to MegaCorp" or something similar.
Every single person who had these 100+ TB plans knew it was unsustainable. When you have that much data you know how much it costs for hard drives to store that much data.
If the article had actually stated the amount the guy paid per month (what,$20-$60?) everyone would know that he should've known this was coming.
It's not at all unreasonable to think a company might offer a service where they make a profit on the average customer, but make a loss in some edge-cases. It's not such an uncommon model.
It's completely unreasonable to expect it to be sustainable. Why wouldn't Google eventually crack down on completely negative value customers?
When you use the actual numbers instead of a theoretical argument it falls apart even quicker. These are message board arguments, not ones you'd make with a straight face in person.
Highly recommend reading the article again, slowly, until you fully understand the situation.
This was a paid service until Google changed the terms; afterwards, Google claimed that the files would merely be read only (indefinitely), not deleted. After THAT, they then gave the user 1 week to deal with 250 terabytes.
It's the only reasonable way to construe what Google said.
If Google unilaterally changed its TOS and updated those terms by saying the account would go 'into a read only state' without any further details (both of which in fact happened), the user is entitled to assume that such a read only state will be the new status quo. Google should have specified a time limit or specified that the read only state would be revocable on with no or short notice, at the company's discretion. By staying silent on that matter, Google's communications were misleading or deceptive or likely to mislead or deceive the user of the product.
I did. I use the term free but it should "incredibly low cost". I accept the blame for my inaccuracy but my position doesn't change. 20$/month for unlimited data that works out to about 0.07$/TB for storage thats pretty damn close to free in my books.
I can only speak for myself in this thread, but my issue was your referring to something that was cheap as free, as if the customer was freeloading. Google is able to leverage probably the greatest economy of scale in the cloud industry (maybe Amazon is better, but that's it) and so its cost per gigabyte of storage is either the lowest or 2nd lowest on the planet. It can and does provide storage services at a very low cost to itself (hence its margins).
It is able to provide services very cheaply and it is for that very reason that paying customers are attracted to it - and of course, even if a service is cheap, paying for a service creates a different relationship between the service provider and the customer than does a relationship where the customer freeloads. In my view, if this had been a free service the terms of which had changed, there wouldn't be the same scope for outrage. But this was a paying customer, even if he didn't pay as much as you think would have been reasonable - or would have been obtained - elsewhere in the market. Google voluntarily chose those prices for its unlimited plan for competitive reasons and in its own corporate interests. That's on Google, as was Google's subsequent unconscionable behaviour.
In Australia, I suspect this sort of behaviour would provoke very close scrutiny by our antitrust and consumer protection regular, the ACCC. We don't seem to have the same problem with regulatory capture that the US does currently. At the very least here the consumer would have arguable claims under the Australian Consumer Law relating to consumer guarantees and misleading and deceptive conduct in trade or commerce.
The offer was unlimited storage at 5+ seats, but in any case, the subject is quoted in the article writing 'I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan,' so it was absolutely not viewed as 'free' to them.
Are you seriously asking this question or are you completely disconnected from the dictionary? What does "unlimited" mean? No limits. If you don't intend for a customer to make use of unlimited storage, with no limits, then use the proper English word.
I hate the 'unlimited' marketing too, but as a user it pays to engage your brain in these situations. Selling a service for significantly less than it costs to run is a risky business strategy, so best case you keep getting great value for some period of time and worst case it's going to change and you'll need to get outta there.
He's not even "abusing" the service like many people would think (storing movies and TV shows, etc). This is all his own data. Yes he has a lot of data. This is why one would pay for an unlimited plan.
Yeah Google made a mistake, being online so long, having a huge legal team. They should know there is 0.1 - 1% users to will conciously or unconciously misuse your system and drive your cost up. Better to have fair use limits from the start.
Also they've been giving out these warnings for months. I'm sympathetic to the guy with the seemingly abusive legal actions from Fox but this storage problem did not just spring from nothing into the final crisis stage.
We had to move a bunch of data off gdrive too, which did little for our opinion of Google's business customer support and was a PITA I didn't need, but the first warnings were in 2002 some time and we were nowhere near as egregious in usage as some of the/r/datahoarder crowd that had multiple petabytes hiding in the lowest cost Gsuite legacy pricing.
>>Also they've been giving out these warnings for months.
That's not true though. They've been telling him that his account is in read-only state. Literally no mention anywhere is made about deletion of the account or data in it, until that very last email which gives him 7 days to move his data(which is unreasonable).
If they said 6 months ago "your account is entering a read only state, if you don't go below your quota it will get deleted in 180 days" I'd consider this entire post to be a waste of space - but that's not what happened, and I'm very sympathetic to his situation.
There are dated messages in the article showing this going back to at least July 2023. So yes, your second case is closer to what appears to have been the sequence of events.
The deleted part doesn't come up until you have seven days.
otherwise it says, verbatim:
Hello,
Your account was previously placed in a 14 day grace period because you exceeded your pooled storage limit.
The pooled storage grace period expired on May 25, 2023 and your account is now in a “read-only” state. In this state services are impacted, including users not being able to upload new files or create new Google Docs, Sheets, Slides or Forms. Learn more about the features that are currently impacted.
To prevent any further disruption to services, you can free up or get more storage.
Sincerely,
The Google Workspace Team
If you just read that there is nothing mentioning it will ever be deleted.
No unfair advantage: if you say “unlimited” then you MUST expect and allow the occasional statistical outlier that uploads 237TB of data.
Otherwise its false advertising.
Edit: the real mistake here is trusting google, a company with a track record in messing up with their customers (from retired products to accounts frozen without any hope of appeal).
I can't even find that they're a tech reporter given that:
> The footage Burke obtained and shared with other journalists was obviously embarassing for the Fox brand. And that’s saying something, considering what Fox is willing to publish and air of its own free will and volition. A pair of videos featuring unreleased footage of a Kanye West interview allegedly illegally obtained by Tim Burke featured the rap star saying things even more abhorrent than his usual blend of sexism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories.
They certainly don't seem like someone with an expert's understanding of cloud storage costs, do you have evidence to the contrary?
Which means ... for either the price of (zero) or (minimum rsync.net) you can move that data at (whatever speeds google <--> aws are capable of).
I am, admittedly, hand-waving away the actual configuration of those "remotes" as they are called, which involve your login and/or API keys, etc. - here is an example of what that config might look like:
I wasn't aware that rclone could create a direct connections and had a quick skim through the documentation where I found this in the FAQ (https://rclone.org/faq/)
----
Can rclone sync directly from drive to s3
Rclone can sync between two remote cloud storage systems just fine.
Note that it effectively downloads the file and uploads it again, so the node running rclone would need to have lots of bandwidth.
----
Oh! That’s very cool, I definitely did misunderstand.
That seems like incredible value for that kind of connectivity. Thank you for broadening my toolset. I can immediately think of a few little projects where such a technique will be useful.
Perhaps they ought to invest in tape drives and (encrypted) offsite backups at friends' homes. If they want convenience of always-available data, they have to pay for that
This still requires Google Drive be able to serve your 237 TB at over 3 gbps for the full 7 days. In my experience this is not the case with cloud storage offerings.
This guy realistically had plenty of time to figure it out without a fancy transfer method though. The real problem is they don't want to pay $$$ for somewhere else to host the files and have now reached the point it has become a problem.
The bad part is that Google announced 60+ days before the change took effect that the account would become read-only. Nowhere did they state the account would be terminated, or could not indefinitely remain in a read-only state. Then, they suddenly spring a 7 day deadline to download all your data, with no previous mention.
I'd assume it couldn't remain in read only forever. But yeah since it's data loss Google should be very loud about that eventuality. I was getting weekly emails from dropbox about my inactive account before they nuked it.
S3 is not where this belongs. Backblaze B2 would be better and cheaper (~$1428/month) and no egress fees due to Cloudflare bandwidth alliance, the Internet Archive also has a private offering [3].
If the journalist in question sees this, or someone knows them, I am happy to assist in a migration at no cost. If someone from Google sees this (HN Google support), it would be swell if the delete lifecycle could be paused while this migration is facilitated.
Rsync.net works out essentially the same ($6/month cheaper) on a monthly basis, but offers 10% and 15% discounts for 12 and 24 month options.
B2 does mention a "capacity bundle", saying 250TB/year is $19.5K - but that's $1.5K more than the monthly pricing for the same capacity so it doesn't seem like they have any meaningful long-term pricing discounts.
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state.
You make it sound like he could have chosen to keep paying Google under a different plan, but I can't find any way for him to pay Google to keep the data for him short of creating 100+ dummy "users" in his workspace to get their 2TB each (which I'm sure Google would totally be okay with) [0].
Google is firing him as a customer, which is their prerogative, but they're doing it on a timeframe that means he can't actually get the data out in time. That's what the (actual) headline says, and those are the facts.
He might actually have 5 people on his team. Adding 100+ more just for the 2TB each would almost certainly get his account flagged for suspicious activity.
Google gave him 60 days after they fired him to continue using his account for free. After that they gave him another 5 months in read only mode to find a solution.
The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem.
Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.
Assuming that the read only state was permanent would be naive. Assuming that they would give him 60 days notice again before actually deleting his data isn't, except insofar as Google is a terrible company and he clearly didn't realize that.
Google held onto his data for him for over half a year after his plan was cancelled. Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time.
Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data.
Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.
> Google clearly communicated that he needed to address the issue and he chose to do nothing during that time.
That's not clear at all.
> If he continues to do nothing
What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.
> What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.
At this point, all he can probably do is start deleting files to avoid account cancellation. If he wanted to move all the data elsewhere, he had over half a year to do that.
How can you possibly think that over half a year of free service isn't enough of an accommodation? In what world does it make sense to assume that having your subscription terminated and you storage put into read only mode means it is OK to just leave it there and do nothing if you want to keep it?
He took full advantage of an amazingly good deal on a unlimited storage plan, then when it was cancelled, continued to assume he could just leave the data there for free. Google could legally just have pulled the plug on him for continuing to abuse a service he wasn't paying for.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that
The standard S3 tier, sure, but Deep Glacier would be about $250/month. Retrieval can be up to 12 hours but that shouldn't really be a problem for long term archiving. As with anything AWS, egress can kill you, but you can sidestep that with something like Snowball, and really that's only an issue if you need to egress everything to migrate the archive.
Anyone contemplating Snowball or Snowmobile needs to be aware that they always charge the per-GB price for data egress, on top of the hardware rental and shipping.
Ah damn, you're right. Looks like it's cheaper than the internet egress fee (looks like $0.02/GB versus $0.09/GB if I'm interpreting the pricing table correctly?). Azure's glacier equivalent might be worth a look in that case, since their egress is usually a lot cheaper.
You cannot export 240TB in 7 days. And a journalist can be forgiven for not knowing what the market value of cloud storage is. Besides, Google offers many services for free (or below cost) in order to maintain their dominant market position. I don't think your take is fair to the journalist.
I think everyone is also burying the HUGE wrench in the whole idea of storage preservation:
>And, yes, some people have asked why Tim doesn’t have other backups around, but (again) the FBI took all of his shit. And finding (and paying for) multiple backup services that can handle 250 TBs of data is likely pretty cost prohibitive.
though the names in that URL probably gives the real reason behind this "investigation". Rich people got caught with their pants down and we know laws don't apply to them
> The actual headline is slightly less inflammatory: "Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data"
You just expanded it. It's still basically the same.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.
230TB is a lot of data to store in the cloud. There is a very high chance it's been flagged with this deletion because it's so much data. A quick check on Amazon for external drives it would cost him $4000 just to buy hard disks to be able to store it locally. The guy's data is expensive to store no matter what. He's probably one of the main reasons they don't have unlimited storage anymore.
Really, this is a massive edge case. Very few individuals will have 30TB of data they store anywhere nevermind 230TB.
Unlimited means unlimited. Too often what gets lost in the phrase "edge case" is that there's a human being on the other end. They should do the decent thing and work with him and anyone else storing more data than can be practically downloaded to come up with a workaround or extension. Imagine if your bank closed your account and forfeited your money because they couldn't dole it out to you fast enough.
Unlimited did mean unlimited though. There was probably some sort of limit but this guy never in fact hit it. But Google stopped offering unlimited storage (probably because of people like this who would store 100s of TB). They notified him of this months before discontinuing the service and he apparently made no effort to find a different storage solution, maybe because it would be really expensive to store that much data in the cloud anywhere else. Did he think they would just continue to store the data indefinitely? That doesn't strike me as a reasonable assumption to make.
He was told that after the grace period ends, his account would become "read-only". Interpreting "read-only" as "I will still have read access to the data" is not unreasonable. I'm guessing that neither of us would have trusted it, but HN readers are not representative of the population as a whole. Google should have provided explicit notice of their intention to delete the data a reasonable amount of time in advance, accounting for the amount of data involved. I don't think that a week is reasonable in any case, but it is especially unreasonable when hundreds of TB of data need to be moved.
Sure, I agree that they should have been more explicit when they discontinued the service and said that they would delete data over the new limit at some point. But I don't think you have to be an HN reader to understand that if you stop paying for a service eventually the service provider will stop providing it. Like did this guy really think that the data would just stay in "read-only" mode forever?
But if its your "lifes work" i would assume the value there is more than just the cost of storage. That the person storing it would have thought about ownership and egress options a bit further out.
Like i use workspace for all sorts of stuff. But its google, they can and may just axe your account for any reason. So i have backups of all things at all times and worst case, i just move my email/drive whatever to another service along with the domain, which I own (and he appears to as well)
Im not excusing google at all. But at some point you have to take some accountability. Not having a backup plan and just trusting google or ANY company to faithfully keep your lifes work for you seems slightly....naive.
>We’ve written a few times about independent journalist Tim Burke. Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News.
It just says his electronic devices were seized. Not that backups were included here, though it is implied.
Event still the FBI raid occured in July [1]. Backups are N-1. So he was down to nill back in July and didnt seem to act from there.
Also based on the dates in the screenshots provided, he went into grace period on the Google Drive data ALSO in July..
So I say again....its his lifes work. Its invaluable to him but its just data to anyone else. Its incumbent on him to make sure this doesnt occur some how, some way. Even on backblaze that would be 20k/year. I would be having that on multiple disks at multiple sites that I control. But that is just me.
While they had unlimited they didn’t have a problem. But at a certain point someone is going to do the maths and realise the 1% who fully take advantage and go massive in an unlimited offer cost more than you make from the others.
The GP comment didn't "just expand it". There is a huge difference in the English language between "Life's Work Deleted" and "Life's Work Will Be Deleted." Past tense and future tense are very different things.
So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.
Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.
>So you're saying the morale of the story is: if your situation is not an edge case, you're fine with using google. We won't tell you ahead of time what is an edge case though, as google finds new ones all the time.
No, the morale of my story is not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people.
> Like that father during covid that took pictures of his child to send to the doctor...banned for CP.
> not to get wound up by massive edge cases that impact 1-2 people
But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.
> That isn't an edge case thought, was it?
If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.
> But you never know who those 2-3 people are (2-3 people out of how many? surely there are more screwed by google). You might be one next time they decide to cancel accounts for new reasons and leave people without their stuff, there is no way to know when you're suddenly in breach of google's made up rules. And when you are, there is no recourse.
I might be, but I am not going to be flaming the shit out of Google about it. I've been the edge case many times in scenarios just like this and I knew I was taking full advantage and eventually it would have to stop. And there was plenty of notice about the rule change.
> If taking medical pictures of your child, with no intent of distributing them on the internet is not an edge case, then I don't know what to say. Maybe you work for google.
Lots of people were in roughly the same boat during COVID. There would have been thousands of people taking pictures of their child to send to doctors every day. People need non-urgent medical attention every day, that is not an edge case. Taking pics to send to your doctor during covid was not an edge case.
He was definitely pushing it, but google is being extremely aggressive with timelines just to get resources freed up.
For instance, suddenly out of nowhere they are only telling people with a 7 day heads up that they will reclaim google voice numbers, and only with a single email.
I've used the service for over a decade and they never bothered to "monitor usage" or anything like this.
Thankfully I think due to US law they can't immediately re-issue them, but you have to claim them under a new phone number or such.
Yup. Youtubers have, are, and continue to be subjected to this. Can be booted out at a whim at anytime due to automation, with no hopes of getting any actual human to interact with unless they have dedicated line to staff (i.e. you're one of the huge 1M+ subscriber channels) or you make a big enough ruckus on social media. Your potential livelihood can be terminated by the whims of bots.
Ofc you can argue that a Youtuber goes into such a contract willingly. This case is much more egregious as a series of "I have altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
> "Earlier this year, the FBI raided his house and seized all of his electronic devices after he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News. As we noted, this seemed like a pretty big 1st Amendment issue. Burke is also facing bogus CFAA charges because he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content."
Even if Burke had built a box, the maid service and beer would be the most helpful (but would not solve his actual issue).
Earlier this year, becuase of some legal issues, his 'business critical' data was now only stored in one place, that was telling him it was locked, and over quota.
20 TB drives on newegg seems to be available for $310 to $360. If you use erasure coding w/ 30% overhead that's 18 +3 drives or $7.5k in drives alone, pre chassis.
Having a DR replica living somewhere outside your house probably gets this well over $12k, even if that replica is glacier or similar.
So I found 20tb drives as low as 270 (which is what I used for my own pricing out of a hypothetical build), but if you feel lucky you can get large capacity refurb drives for a lot less than brand new (I did this recently for scratch space on my NAS). A refurb 20tb can be had as low as 200, which gets you down to 4200.
But yes - I realized my mistake in tossing off that comment offhand.
A few days ago I bought an 18TB enterprise grade hard drive from a hardware refurbishing company for 170 bucks. I assume he can find a home for his data for around $3500 (if he chooses to not have any redundancy)
The fault here still lies with Google. Why advertise the plan as "unlimited" if it is not actually unlimited.
I was in a similar boat a few years ago. Had about 70 TB of archives and backups on Google Drive and was forced to scramble to move these somewhere else when they terminated the unlimited plan.
Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it.
I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.
It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.
I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this.
Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.
Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
Idk if that’s always the case. I still have unlimited data plan from my mobile provider, from 2008ish. $50 for unlimited data (no it’s not rate limited either).
Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched.
Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me.
I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse.
Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it.
It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.
I don't think this "my fault" / their fault is a useful way of thinking for enterprise decisions. For my part, I was and am in charge of cloud (and on-prem) purchasing decisions and I don't like to consider these things binary. Counterparty risk is just an additional cost to consider.
We use Alibaba Cloud, GCP, and most of all AWS. About December last year, Alibaba Cloud had a full zone outage as their datacenter provider had complete air-conditioning failure. One of the first things to go were the switches plugged into Express Connect (their feature to allow you to have direct links to their cloud through your network provider) and we had backup access set. We didn't get all of our stuff shut down but it helped.
But developing and maintaining backup access costs something. When we egress from S3 to our on-prem cluster, that's a cost. Vendor continuity and substitutability is just a cost like that. It's up to the guy managing this to model each of these risks and no enterprise vendor will sign an unlimited liability contract so you're going to have to land somewhere reasonable here. I always make sure to have exit clauses for us, and I try to ensure vendor exit clauses are what I'm comfortable with and appropriately priced.
Ultimately, you'll just have to read what you sign and have good counsel. But that's just what's worked for me. If you find the blacklist model more successful, more power to you.
I make it a point to downvote people who think they are tone moderators. You could have submitted it yourself if you found it first.
I don't see how it's less of a concern that he has 200+ TB of video. Perhaps don't advertise a limited resource as unlimited; then you won't get people like this guy.
He deserves the ability to get the data off his account. Google acting like their hands are tied are simply being malicious.
assuming it all goes into frequent access tier, which this shouldn't as this is an archive. just by enabling the automatic tiering is going to be more like 1000/month
and if it's would instead end up organized into glacier as it should it's gonna be more like 300$/m
which is not dirt cheap, but still. it start giving the prospect of maintaining a home archive with manual disk rotation and scheduled data verification some second thought.
For readers' reference, a "Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS 22 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive" costs $399.99.
You would need at least 11 or 12 of these, running you $4,799.88 for the latter, plus tax and shipping, or one month of S3 storage in storage hardware alone.
> When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan
Sure, but you're missing the main point of the story, which is the seven days they gave him to download everything.
> It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3
According to the S3 Glacier pricing I see, it would be less than $900/month. It would cost less than a $5000 one-time payment to buy enough USB storage for the full 237 TB.
I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data. The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation. Google is in the wrong on their response but, come on, let's be reasonable human beings and stop saying 'victim blaming'.
> I mean 237 TB of data is an excessive amount of data.
If it's excessive, then Google shouldn't have offered an unlimited data plan. They could have called it a 100 TB plan, but they chose to call it unlimited to make it sound better and then canceled it once people took them up on the offer. Regardless of whether that kind of action is legal, it's a shady business practice.
For that matter, there's nothing wrong with Google discontinuing the plan going forward, but they had plenty of options for making the transition more fair and building consumer trust without hurting their bottom line too much. For example, they could have converted his account to a 250TB account and tripled its price, at which point he wouldn't be in immediate danger of losing his files but would be pressured into gradually moving to a more cost effective solution.
They offered it for 10 years and then probably realized that people were taking advantage of the position and then tried to phase it out. Most likely with a lot of warning beforehand.
I have a tough time believe that they didn't give any warning and then kicked them off the service.
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.
Google offered unlimited storage, no? It’s reasonable to believe that they can do that since it averages out to a small amount per user, meaning most users overpay and the power users get peace of mind. Of course nothing is unlimited but a company like Google is perhaps best positioned in the world to offer that. And sure, if someone writes /dev/urandom at 1Gbit/s you could claim abuse, but for people working with video TBs of data is normal. 200+ is a lot but again averages out among users. In either case it’s extremely easy to avoid the word “unlimited” if you don’t intend to honor it for legitimate customers.
It’s also reasonable that companies products change. And maybe it doesn’t last forever, fair enough. But if your product is backup, and you pull the rug with a 7 day grace period, of course people are going to be upset and warn others not to trust you.
> The 'victim' here clearly knows they are taking advantage of a situation
The victim is "taking advantage" of an advertised feature of the service they paid for, and has done nothing wrong. The fault lies entirely with Google for advertising unlimited storage, knowing full well that no such thing exists. Same with every other cloud storage service that once advertised unlimited storage. Just because someone who understands how computer storage works could probably figure out that it wasn't really unlimited doesn't make it not false advertising.
Because they are using 237 Tb in an "unlimited" service from Google. And based on the mechanism they are using to pay for it (enterprise account with one seat) - they knew they had found a loop hole in google policy. (r/datahoarders)
Seriously I'm all on board with giving Google the much grief that they deserve - but I also would expect someone claiming victim here to have more of a claim than abusing a "unlimited" account and getting mad about it. Yes 100% Google should be holding onto their data or offering them the ability to pay for the larger data tier - that part is BS.
Get mad at the FBI for raiding you, get mad that you didn't think of another cloud service to store with or pay for an appropriate service (0.07$/TB [my rough calc] is dirt cheap to the point of suspect). I also have to assume that the individual, former anonymous hacker has some wherewithal to be suspect of 'unlimited' packages from large corporations.
There's gotta be more to this story -- it smells off.
You talk about loopholes three times in this comment.
> Because they are using 237 Tb in an unlimited service from Google
Google's a trillion dollar company. A popular saying amongst Googlers is "I don't know how to count that low". They're used to big numbers.
I work at a much smaller company. We are not a trillion dollar company. Even we, when offering an unlimited service, ask ourselves: "What happens if someone takes us up on this offer?"
It's not a loophole, it's what he paid for.
It's fine to stop offering an unlimited service. We did! My only beef with Google's conduct here is the 7 days of notice prior to deletion.
I've followed Mike Masnick's reporting in other cases. He seems like an even-handed, fair journalist. I trust that he's not hiding the ball, nor letting the other journalist mislead him about the situation.
Yes, why wouldn't I think that? As I said, I trust Mike Masnick.
I also have past professional experience that leads me to believe Google does what's easiest for Google, not what's best for their customers.
In one case, Google suspended a Google Certified Publishing Partner's GAM account for several hours with no notice. The partner had several years of history with Google, did $100M/year of revenue with them, and had an assigned Google rep who did weekly calls with them.
Google reactivated the account, but only after significant disruption to the partner.
I agree that it's good to be a critical consumer of news, but eh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably Google being blissfully ignorant of the impact they have on their users.
I don't understand why people are stuck on the term unlimited here. It wasn't like he still had an unlimited plan but Google said "you are using too much data so we're going to delete it". They discontinued the plan so as of now he does not have an unlimited storage plan. I don't understand why this is complicated. Seems like he can either pay whatever it costs to store 237TB in Google Drive (probably a lot) or he can migrate to another storage provider. If he wasn't willing to pay whatever the cost for Google Drive is he should have started migrating his data when they discontinued the service.
They didn't; there were many emails throughout 2022 discussing "Important changes to your subscription" from the Google Workspace Team stating that unlimited storage plans were going away and that people were being moved to pooled storage across the entire account.
They were moved to a new storage subscription in mid-2022 and while they were over the limits, Google ignored it up to this point.
He says he believed the data would remain read-only. Did the emails make clear that the data was going to be deleted? If Google had already made that decision then they could have sent him the final warning two months ago.
My previous comment was not as informed as it should have been (because I opined after only read the title... a mistake, to be sure). I've edited it and will leave it at this being a very unfortunate situation to be in.
> He can buy his own drives, with redundancy, for less than 2 months of that.
He did do that. The FBI raided his house and took all the drives. In the middle of trying to get them back (it’s unclear if he’ll be able to), Google terminated his storage. If this had happened at a different time he could’ve just backed up to a different (likely more expensive) service. But that’s not an option that’s open at the moment or possibly ever.
>free tier storage is 100% not the place to put it.
It's curious how hard you keep pushing in this flagrant lie in this thread when the article explicitly and repeatedly makes clear that he was paying Google for Enterprise level storage and on top of that did indeed have local first, except all that got taken from him by the FBI. Yet for some reason you insist on claiming he wasn't paying and was somehow abusing cloud-only. Why?
Sorry correction. 20$ a month for an enterprise account formerly unlimited - (which is pretty much free considering how much data is being used ~ 7 cents a TB if my calcs are correct). Now that account is a 100$ / 25 TB. for 273 == 1000 $/month.
It required at least 5 users to unlock unlimited storage from what I see online. $20 * 5 = $100. Not that it makes what he's getting any less than a steal.
> Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
Google deserves some hate here, but this problem is bigger than just them, and I think by being too narrowly focused on G we're missing a systemic problem. G is one of the worst offenders, but this is a cultural attitude/approach in most of tech. The idea is to acquire users by giving stuff away or making your service cheap, lock them in, then squeeze by ratcheting up the price. It's a playbook that has worked fantastically well and made a lot of people very rich, so it's not going to change overnight and/or without some pain.
I've started refusing business with these types of companies, and I tell them why. I'm sure none of it matters, but if I do it then I know that at least somebody is saying something.
An example: I would be one of the biggest buyer of Kindle books on the planet if they were DRM free. I'd still buy some things if I could use software to read it that wasn't invasively spying on me. It's nice that they make stuff cheaper by putting some of the data revenue into it (and even subsidizing it in some cases), but I'd much rather pay for something like Remarkable more but get a respectful product.
What is bad about the situation exactly? You get a service for below cost for some amount of time at which point you have to start paying what it actually costs. I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost, but cloud storage is still an extremely competitive market and generally quite a bit cheaper than the cost of storing an equivalent amount of data on your own hardware (with the same availability)
It is literally anti-competitive, bad for consumers and competitor startups. How can an average startup compete if a rich company or VC backed startup has a business model of selling below cost to get market share? The fact that the big players are doing it makes it an oligopoly not a monopoly, but that's still bad.
This is a 100+ year old problem and has already been solved in other industries, but tech likes to think it is unique. It's a bad pattern to sell below cost to gain market share. Oil and steel companies were selling below cost to undercut competing startups in the 1900s, then raised prices when those competitors folded. It wasn't good for anyone other than the robber barons then either.
This part only works if you don't have other large competitors. But this obviously not the case for cloud storage. It is an extremely competitive commodity product.
> bad for consumers
How exactly is it bad for consumers to get products below cost?
That argument that GP is making isn't that low prices are bad for consumers.
The argument is that amortized over the lifetime of the business, the prices are actually significantly higher because they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business, and then immediately break the low-priced agreements with their customers.
Sure, they may be a commodity product now. That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
It's also bad for consumers because they then have to migrate existing data to some new service (which is far from trivial for most consumers who don't know how to use rclone), and potentially face steep egress fees. Remember we're talking about the industry not just G. G doesn't charge egress fees for Drive, but many cloud storage providers do.
The strategy is "lock-in" and it's a primary part of the "go cheap or free to get customers" part, and it's bad for consumers. I'd much rather pay more in the short-term for cloud storage and not have to migrate later. Thank God for Back Blaze
> That shouldn't exempt them from holding up their agreements from when they were still competing for market space.
What agreement? They offered a service with no guarantees that it would be provided in perpetuity. If they offered "free unlimited storage for life" and then backed out of that based on some legalese on page 75 of their EULA then I agree that would be slimy. But that is not what happened here.
> they are able to momentarily drive their prices down, eat the losses long enough to run their competition out of business
This can happen and when it does it is anti-competitive. But that is not what happened in this case. Do you really think that Google thought they could drive AWS and Microsoft out of business with below cost storage on Google Drive? Seems unlikely. And even if they somehow managed to do that, they would immediately have competitors undercutting them on price again as soon as they raised prices enough.
What seems much more likely to me is they offered unlimited storage as a competitive feature of Google Workspace thinking it would still be profitable even with some customers using much more storage. But because we can't have nice things a bunch of people realized they could essentially use the unlimited plan as an ultra-cheap object storage service and were storing 100s of TB of data. Rather than raise everyone's prices to subsidize bad actors, it seems much more reasonable to just discontinue unlimited storage.
> What seems much more likely to me is they offered unlimited storage as a competitive feature of Google Workspace thinking it would still be profitable even with some customers using much more storage. But because we can't have nice things a bunch of people realized they could essentially use the unlimited plan as an ultra-cheap object storage service and were storing 100s of TB of data. Rather than raise everyone's prices to subsidize bad actors, it seems much more reasonable to just discontinue unlimited storage.
This is the internet. Google has been around since the dawn of the popular internet. At this point, no one should be naive to the abuses that internet-facing services regularly encounter.
The correct thing to do here is not offer a fantasy service to customers. Now that they've offered a fantasy service, they should be on the hook for actually assisting the customers that have been locked into their service.
Admittedly, there's naiveté on both sides here. There difference is that the company is the one with the money and power, and they instigated this relationship by offering the service in the first place. They should shoulder the burden of fixing the problems they have created by attempting to undercut the market when it was beneficial to them.
> How exactly is it bad for consumers to get products below cost?
Because it is necessarily a short term strategy, and when the subsidy ends, it is incredibly disruptive (in the bad way).
It is good in the short term for those consumers who get in early and get their consumption subsided by VC funds or FAANG profits from another subsector. But it is bad in the long term for everyone when firms try to compete by selling below cost. Consumers usually win when companies have to compete with each other. But selling below cost is a strategy that only very rich or entrenched players can do. It means you have to play the VC unicorn game as a startup. It sets unrealistic price expectations for consumers. It leads to situations like this when the rug is pulled.
Look what has happened with ride sharing and delivery apps. A few rich VC backed firms took over the market and subsidized cheap rides. Entire industries were transformed, and most restaurants stopped offering delivery themselves. Now, it is becoming clear that those $5-7 rides actually cost 2-3x that, and that's not what people are willing to pay.
>I can understand if the company manages to corner the market by selling below cost and then jacks up the price way above cost,
That's usually what happens. And Google is no stranger to it given Youtube and to some extent Chrome (which is "free" but also being molded to more or less have DRM on the browser level).
Cloud is fortunatly still competitive, but I can't say the same for many other tech markets.
I would have strongly preferred if my reMarkable didn't come with a mandatory subscription. It's mandatory because you completely lose warranty service if you ever cancel it. The reason? I had been saving up to afford the device for five years and missed the introduction of their subscription by one. single. month. I'm stuck paying forever because I don't count as a "grandfathered" customer.
What's worse is that their customer service told me I'm eligible for unlimited free service, got me to cancel (and lose my warranty), then backpedaled and told me that I'm not actually eligible and on top of that I just lost my warranty.
I managed to get them to un-cancel it but that entire ordeal is just even fucking worse. I never want to deal with that company again, and will not be recommending their products.
unfortunately, the established players that got huge by offering free services and then raised the price would love for us to do something about this problem. it would help them widen their moat.
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.
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 all of his equipment. Every last computer (all of his own, as well as customers that had their pc in for repair) in the shop was checked over.
They held onto his equipment (along with 3 other customers) for 6 months, and he had to make do with a laptop to keep his business running. Fortunately, he had backed up his PC repair software to another location. Or he would have been out of business.
All because the FBI wanted to be thorough. Not because he was on suspicion of a crime.
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.
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 warrant to try to quash dissent and make people think twice about supporting wikileaks. It ruined my life despite no crimes being involved.
I didn't receive my computer equipment back until literally last year: 2022. And they shipped them back in two large thin cardboard box with computer parts sliding around freely inside. Literally it arrived at my house with a video card poking half out through the box side. Obviously non-functional. One last "fuck you" from the FBI for doing nothing but being politically active.
I.e. "Guilty until proven innocent" in the eyes of the enforcement branch.
You're a guilty criminal, so why wouldn't they trash your stuff just for being who you are?
And who is with them who's going to tell them not to do that?
It's also especially ridiculous behavior in the context of CFAA raids (compared to drug or armed robbery), where the most lethal thing on the premises is likely to be old pizza.
Can the government be sued for compensation for data loss and broken hardware?
Also, isn't there a legal duration for how long the FBI could keep the evidence/equipment they gathered in the investigation? Ten years seems to be too long for that.
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.
And yet I see everyone here blaming Google and not the FBI. Until the day comes when Google is raiding your house and confiscating your data, it seems like the FBI is the bigger baddie here.
It appears that he had a Workspace account which offered “unlimited” storage for a time, predicated on the account type being multiuser businesses or education, with a per-seat fee. Google phased out the unlimited storage awhile ago (over a year) after people discovered a loophole where paying for one account still provided unlimited storage. Predictable abuse followed (see /r/datahoarders).
While I’m sympathetic to the user and skeptical of Google’s commitment to their customers, this doesn’t appear to be a straightforward case of someone getting Scroogled. If he were paying for the consumed storage as a standard Drive customer, this wouldn’t be happening.
Google offered "as much storage as you need" for the Workspace account, without attaching a condition on a required number of seats. It's not a loophole if a customer takes them up on the offer.
I'm usually sympathetic with businesses who failed to appreciate how much power very few power users really have, but this is Google we're talking about. Their sales and legal department is larger than 90% of tech companies. This was their mistake and their mistake only.
The difference here is that Google was the one who fired him as a customer, and did so on a timeframe tight enough to make it functionally impossible to actually get all his data back.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the "firing of the customer" (i.e. the cancellation of the subscription by Google) occurred >6 months before any actual deletion of the data. The alert that data would be deleted occurred 7 days before. It's difficult to argue that he couldn't have seen this coming.
>It's difficult to argue that he couldn't have seen this coming.
around the same time the FBI raided him. I imagine he was quite busy as is.
And there's a difference between "he should have seen this coming" and "he should have seen his data being deleted coming a week after the grace period with no wrning until the week before."
In your analogy, the person was ordering the "fries with as much ketchup as you need", which McDonalds was specifically advertising for people who need a lot of ketchup. Also we would live in a world where eating a few hundred ketchup packets wouldn't be very unusual.
Go to the Internet Archive and look at the Workspace pricing page of two years ago. They put it front and center that you would get "as much storage as you need". They also made you go through sales, so if they only intended to sell the product to people buying hundreds of seats, that would have been totally possible. They didn't.
Life would be miserable if every restaurant had to parcel out individual sugar packets just because 1/100 people decided to abuse it and take them all home.
Why do you want everything to be financialized? The world works better when people can use small conveniences non-abusively.
>Life would be miserable if every restaurant had to parcel out individual sugar packets just because 1/100 people decided to abuse it and take them all home.
OK
>Why do you want everything to be financialized?
Where did I say this?
>The world works better when people can use small conveniences non-abusively.
OK
Did you just not want to address anything in the comment you replied to?
Not if they were explicitly offering unlimited fries.
In that case they would be indisputably unreasonable, in its dictionary definition of “having no basis in reason or fact”, where reason and fact are that they offered unlimited — not 5 pounds — but unlimited fries with any hamburger.
As far as I can tell, they did not pay for an "unlimited storage forever" service. They paid for an "unlimited storage this month for $X" service. Eventually Google stopped offering that deal, and he continued storing his data as if the payments for data storage in the past would entitle him to store the data indefinitely into the future as well.
Because he stopped paying for the service of unlimited storage for this month (as that service was no longer offered), didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal, and expected for it to be retained indefinitely?
I think you need context. Google stopped offering unlimted storage, the journalists was raided by the FBI some 7 months ago, and during that legal dispute he was occupied until Google gave a 7 day ultimatim.
He already did have data backed up, and it was seized by the government because Fox News or Kayne West really didn't want that news page (live on a URL already) "leaked" or whatever.
>didn't migrate the data to somebody offering a better deal
Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
> Why would this be considered? What if he didn't want to migrate 200+ TB of data and just decided to stay where he's at, continuing to pay Google a lot of money?
Because whatever he was paying Google wasn't enough, so they removed the "unlimited storage for $12/month or officially $60/month" offering.
There was another option - pay for enough Business Plus seats to reach the pooled storage requirement. At 240tb that means he needs 48 seats, and at $18/month that's $864/month. Not bad for cloud storage geo-replicated on at least 2 continents at any time.
As per the article, he hasn't been paying for the service for like six months.
And he was never paying "a lot of money" for this. He was paying like 1% the going rate, and for every month that he paid that he did get the promised unlimited storage.
And in this case, that amount is an order of magnitude lower that what the service cost to provide.
It seems odd that after underpaying by a lot for a long time, that the user would complain that they were given 2 months of free service and then 5 more months of read-only access to get their stuff off. Sure, Google should have communicated more clearly but Burke's expectations here are also entirely unreasonable.
The real villain of this story is the FBI and how computer seizures are handled. The FBI still hasn't charged Tim Burke with anything and are holding his MFA devices hostage trying to get him to unlock his phone for them.
I think the point is Google could have communicated more clearly, and we shouldn't understate that. You don't give a business (since this was an enterprise account) a week to take action. That's unacceptable. A large business may need a week just to get the paperwork ready for the employee to start the migration.
This is a common problem and it has screwed over many other people. we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.
> I think the point is Google could have communicated more clearly
Agreed. It's always better to make things as clear as possible for the slow and deliberately obtuse. However, that doesn't excuse the user here from having completely unreasonable expectations.
> You don't give a business (since this was an enterprise account) a week to take action. That's unacceptable.
They were given over half a year and did nothing.
> we can't just leave livlihoods to the whimsy of automated bots without some human to contact.
I agree and support a law that creates a standardized dispute/appeal process for customers of large companies. I don't think that would have directly helped in this case as no such system should force a company to continue offer a product at a loss or offer more than 6 months of migration time. Perhaps the threat of appeals through such a system would have incentivized clearer communication though
Google is wrong for ever offering unlimited storage. However if everybody is charging $20,000+ per year and Google is charging $1000, you gotta know that you’re living on borrowed time. Even backblaze, with their low margins and commodity hard drives charges $18k.
A week of notice to move ~250TByte out is definitely unreasonable. 250TiB in 7 full days is an average of over 3.6Gbit/s, assuming no transfer interruptions and that he started immediately (i.e. already had other storage options lined up, and started transferring the second the notification email was sent).
For a company like Google several Gbit/s constantly over a week, or even the tens of Gbit/s needed to finish in one day, is not troublesome, but for most other people/entities it is completely unrealistic. Getting that much storage with that much bandwidth to it is far from impossible, but it won't be cheap, especially given he'd need it right this second.
you can generate serviceAccounts in google cloud that act as clients for your google workspace with no additional cost. It's a neat hidden trick to circumvent the google quotas, but you need to write your own clients/wrappers to utilize that properly.
the unlimited plan was phased 7 months ago [0] so got few notices, with the final one 7 days before termination. so the guy with 250tb of data neglected that for half a year and now is surprised.
TFA suggests that the previous communication on the matter stated that the account would go read-only, not that any data would be lost. Do you have any evidence that suggests other notifications were sent between?
The thread you link to above says “People using anywhere from 5.??TB all the way to 152TB … got the email” but I assume that email is the one already mentioned which states large accounts are going read-only.
The FBI seized his computers back in August. He should have bought new hard drives and made a backup of his cloud storage starting back then, if that was so important.
They've skated by with this sort of completely insensitive handling of customers for years and my (completely anecdotal) recent experience is that less technical people are starting to take note. I have friends who have never cared about investing their entire digital lives in Google who are suddenly asking about de-Googling. I hope it prompts a change, but in the meantime I never recommend to friends or family they put anything solely in Google they can't afford to lose.
I don't know how many times this has to be repeated in the comments section: Don't depend on Google in production for anything.
The problem stems around that their culture is to break all existing backwards compatibility at any moments notice (You know, ""innovating""), their politics is to rapidly cancel projects and products due to infighting and power struggles, software development leadership is make things as expensive to maintain as possible by using the most impractical of languages and frameworks, and budgets are rarely given until a project gains executive attention, which is usually too late.
I find the actions of Google here are as troubling as every other commenter. However, I cannot fathom managing 200TB on Google Drive. It's just such a terrible cloud platform experience for managing that much data. It is clearly design for "typical" consumers who have a few gigabytes at most; moving, modifying, downloading, and uploading files is all bottlenecked.
Personal anecdote: Once I was using Google Collab to process a few thousand images. I needed to move the photos (less than one GB) to a new folder. It took over an hour, and appeared to process the moves in JavaScript in my web browser.
Shocked by this and having a Workspace account in same condition (read-only state, not in deletion yet) I've deleted some terrabytes of my (redundand) backups on Google Drive with many thousands files.
But the emptying the trash/bin is horrible UX wise. You can only trash the files visible there. It seems the easiest way to empty the trash completely is to configure rclone and run this command (so emptying trash with API):
There's a dedicated "empty trash" button at the top of the web interface. I've successfully emptied the trash of many thousands of files using it -- it doesn't have anything to do with visibility.
A couple times I had to use it twice to fully empty, but it still deleted way more than anything visible. Massive bulk operations just sometimes seem to get killed (timeouts?), same as producing massive zip archives of thousands of files for download.
But I can imagine rclone might work more consistently by performing tons of individual delete operations instead of Drive performing a single massive operation.
well, maybe the "empty trash" button works as intended (not sure because I see new files showing up in trash). It can be I was not patient enough. The rclone command finishes after a second but also only queues files internally at Google Drive to be fully deleted (so maybe it works the same as empty trash button)
Yeah it's weird that it doesn't have a progress indicator or anything. But if you keep reloading the trash page in your browser, you'll see that files keep disappearing over the course of minutes.
the problem is that many people dont use it as a backup. In a backup scenario, you are immune to these things, because you still have your primary copy. It's annoying yes, but in a backup you can always afford to lose the backup with no problem.
But many people treat these solutions as an extension of their hard drive. A physical analogy is putting your books into a Shurguard/self storage. Thats not a backup, that's just storage. You should make a photocopy instead
Putting your files in a different provider is technically not a backup, it's a copy. A backup means data durability minimum requirements that most cloud file hosting does not provide without a business-level subscription. Even then it may not be replicated outside a region and not use cold storage.
The distinction is important if you want to rely on more than luck to keep your data safe.
.....no. a backup requires durability guarantees, as well as regular testing.
If you just keep your second copy on some hard drive collecting dust next to your wireless router, eventually that drive is going to die. But you might not realize it until the next time you try to retrieve your "backup", or power off/on the drive. then you don't have the backup when you need it.
People just assume anything in "the cloud" is redundant or has high durability, but it's not. When you finally need that second copy, it might be gone.
I use cloud for everything, but that’s because I did some reflection and realized that I don’t actually have any digital data that would be catastrophic to lose. Annoying, sure. But whatever. I can’t think of a single digital artifact that would be so terrible to lose that it’s worth maintaining highly redundant storage at multiple locations myself.
Catastrophic? People managed to have kids long before computers and cheap photos. They were happy with the tens of good pictures a year they managed to get on film.
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 every day.
Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?
I don't want the 10,000 photos, just the 30 good ones like my parents had. If all my digital photos disappeared, I'd be left with the random selection I happen to have printed, which is not as select as the photos my parents took of me.
> 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 emotion. And most people will sympathize with you and a few people will think that it is pathetic to obsess over whatever it is. And they will repeat same old cliche, "back in the days".
Just because it is not important to you, it does not mean it is "pathetic" if it is important to someone else.
I used to work in consumer-facing tech support shop where we mostly troubleshoot computers. I saw too many people crying in public because they lost all their data including photos of their kids. And only thing they cared about was for us to recover the photos. And if we recovered photos even if only a few, people would cry with joy. They brought us cakes, cookies, and other things as gifts. And if we failed, some people had almost mental breakdown.
Based on while probably small sample size, I do think feeling distress over loss of photos would be a normal reaction for majority of humans.
$20, a half hour of your time, and a Walgreens coupon will give you a hard copy backup of a large stack of photos not much larger than a hard drive that can live in a drawer or shelf for years without worrying about capacitors leaking or any of the other rot that mostly immortal electronics catastrophically suffer.
An annual “print-a-thon” is a good way to capture those things that still matter after a year onto a more robust, albeit less flexible, medium.
Oh I have a lot. All my photos for example. I have moved around so much I don't have all the hard copies anymore. And of the last 20 years there just are no hard copies.
I store them on ZFS shares at various sites and S3 glacier (not Amazon's own though).
I have started to just create physical photo books a few years ago.
It started as a gift to my girlfriend, but now every year we take our best pictures of the year and put it in a photobook. Cant be deleted that way. All the other photos are less important indeed.
I store about 20gig of important photos on my laptop (weddings, events, ... the really important stuff) and everything else is just dumped into google photos. We'll see how that works out in 20 years. But I feel at ease
I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models.
You can store data on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure and pay per GB per month. They price it at a level that's profitable to them, and I pay for it.
"Unlimited, at fixed (or no) cost, forever" is not a sustainable business model. If you're one of the outliers, you risk issues like in OP. If enough people are outliers, then they'll eventually have to pull the rug out.
> I trust cloud just fine--I just don't trust unsustainable business models.
You never know what some beancounter at a megacorp thinks is "sustainable". Putting your data in the hands of a third party is certainly convenient, but shouldn't be relied on if you care about the data sticking around.
What is essential is to have important data stored in more than one place, something this journalist failed to do. Just storing it at home would also be a mistake--in case your house burns down.
Given that, the reason he doesn't have local copies are the FBI going after him and seizing all of his stuff. Even if you have them in a safe deposit in a bank, they will get it.
When will a regulatory entity step in and stop large corps to run services at a net loss. In essence, the whole tech industry relies heavily on venture capital supported bait&switch.
Giving services away for free or selling under value is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
Yes. This approach kneecaps any startups/small businesses that try to run profitably from day 1 (i.e. without taking tons of VC money). The net effect is that VC firms get to pick winners before the market ever gets involved.
Hopefully there will be more pushback on this practice now that Bork's ideas[1] about antitrust are falling out of favour.
Unicorn tech founder here.
Google — if you are reading, it’s stories like this and examples where you c.10x the price of products overnight like Google Maps that I would never let our team use GCP. Your reputation is losing you business here.
I don't wanna victim blame, but I don't understand how people could put their entire body of work on a cloud service and not make the effort to get several external drives to have some redundancy.
All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud.
It's like self preservation instinct is missing. 3rd party services are fallible, even when they don't make business decisions that screw with you, and nobody is gonna care about your livelihood more than yourself.
> All my work is probably like 50GB, but I have it backed up on an external drive AND the cloud.
> It's like self preservation instinct is missing.
And if, as happened in TFA, you are raided by the FBI and all your local computer hardware (which includes your external drive) is confiscated as evidence and hauled away to an FBI warehouse somewhere, you will have only that cloud backup left. This is where the journalist found themselves.
And then, after the FBI raid, if the cloud then says they are dropping you and deleting your cloud data, what backups do you now have (remember, your external drive is still in the FBI warehouse somewhere as "evidence")?
Multiple backups are significantly easier with 50gb that with 250tb. Additionally, any external drives he had were seized by the FBI so he would have needed two cloud backups.
Because storing 240TB is expensive even locally. From https://diskprices.com/, if he gets a good deal of $8/tb, it's going to cost $2,000 just for the storage of his data, and getting the data onto it would require a setup that can address and power 20 drives (assuming 12TB drives), unless they use a few USB HDD Sata adapters to archive it all.
a lesson I learned long before Google tried to “worm” itself the daily fabric of our lives: don’t trust cloud services
personally, during college had work stored on cloud storage provided by uni. All is fine until one day I can’t access or find my docs I have been working on. Turns out the idiot sys admin purged the wrong data as part of some clean up effort and cost reduction.
I never keep anything of importance on these cloud services. Everything is duplicated/replicated to servers I own. Nightly backups taken.
Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive?
And, did the author forget that Microsoft had done the same couple of times already?
Yes we can be that naive, people learn from what they see. And they see companies being investor funded for a decade without breaking even, offering services for free. It's not just the users who have lost the connection to reality I think.
> Do people really believe that almost $10.000 worth of cloud storage per year and any amount of egress network traffic for viewing that is given them for free FOREVER? Can you be that naive?
Do companies really believe they can promise untenable amounts of free stuff indefinitely and not have upset customers when they take it away? Can they be that naive? Google isn’t the victim here.
> It's easy and trendy to bitch on Google.
Maybe they should stop screwing people all the time if they don’t want to be constantly criticised.
The Google drive unlimited policy has been predictably abused by some of the datahoarding and piracy communities. Those groups have been paranoid for[1] a[2] while[3] that this could and was likely to go away, including tracking changes in the way Google marketed this to users.
People with pirated movie collections took this risk more seriously than a guy whose livelihood appears to be inexorably linked with the policy.
It's not abuse to store the data in an unlimited plan to begin with. But once the unlimited plan is discontinued, continuing to store the data there without paying for it does seem like abuse to me.
"Unlimited" anything needs to be retired as an offering since we know genuinely unlimited storage would be impossible to deliver. I assume it's easier to legally weasel out of a service offering if you say "Unlimited" (but really mean 5TB) rather than say 6TB (but really mean 5TB).
The one I hate is “unlimited bandwidth” by ISPs that then throttle and then aregue it’s unlimited because they throttled not cut off - no it’s not it’s data caps in a round about way
It's very hard for me not to initially reinterpret headlines such as these as "person stupidly doesn't take care with important personal property and loses it."
That doesn't mean the other party in these stories isn't at fault in some way, but we're about a decade past the point where anyone should consider a single online copy of something, regardless of where it is, as safe from problems (of which there are many possible).
That probably marks me as jaded. I know it's just the journalist reframing the story in a way to draw the interest of the average reader and the underlying problem is still relevant, but I think it actually does the opposite for me. I wonder how many others feel the same?
I think Google is in the wrong in some ways here, but someone with over 200TB of data should know what they are doing and should have a more professional solution for such an unusually large amount of data.
This isn't at the level of "I backed up my 8TB consumer-grade hard drive to Google Drive," this is "I used a low cost small business service to store data center scale amounts of information."
Storing this amount of data on raw drives alone before even buying the server and paying the electric bill costs over $2,000, and that's before you add any redundancy. This person thought that it was realistic for them to pay $30/month and expect Google to be fine losing money forever? They can't even theoretically break even before factoring in other costs besides raw hard drives given the limited lifespan of disks in a data center.
Like the person who got an unlimited food/drink annual pass to Six Flags and went there for lunch every day, it should be common sense that any time you are getting a deal that's way better than it should be that it won't last. You should be ready with a backup plan.
As soon as this person's storage was placed in read-only mode they should have been downloading a copy, but they just sort of trusted Google to never want to clean house, and as a result ended up with an impossible 7 day deadline.
That deadline isn't impossible if you were using it as a small business service like Google intended. It's unfortunate that "Unlimited" was used to market the service but I think someone with 200TB of stuff should know what Google Drive is designed to be.
Stories like these have led me to come to the conclusion that Google has literally become downright evil. Our company does basically everything in the Google cloud and if Google decides to shut us down, we're gone. Our reliance is, imho, an existential threat.
I have brought this up with management several times and they are not concerned... after all, we pay Google a lot of money every month and we're doing nothing wrong. Yeah, tell that to those dumb algorithms, and when (not if) they misfire, try to get to talk to an actual human being with any influence and willing to help in a thoroughly evil company?
They're not downright evil, if they were downright evil they'd be doing everything they can to make money. Instead they're stupid evil: deliberately losing money and customers because they can't bring themselves to treat their customers with respect.
No, Google flat out lying by calling something that is limited as “unlimited” is why we can’t have nice things. I don’t understand why anyone would go out of their way to defend blatant liars.
Just looking at the cheap 20TB disk drives available here in Austria, the disks alone add just over 4000 Euros to that, and then you still need a machine to host 12 drives, I see one QNAP for 12 disk for only 1500 Euros. But it has only a 2x10Gb connection.
Slimming down the data sounds like the first thing to do here.
He's really at the point where owning (much less renting) a tape drive would make sense. LTO-9 is eighteen terabytes uncompressed, which I would leave it at because hey, this is video. Rent a tape drive and get a few boxes of tapes. One copy at home for the FBI to take and one copy over at a friend's place in a shoebox ...
Egress charges probably don't apply (or not directly; you might have to pay them anyway if the only way to download fast enough is to run your script in GCP), but if they did there are services which do the migration for you and take the hit on the egress.
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/features/cloud-migra...
Relying on a cloud account, free or otherwise, to store the only copy of your life's work is asking for disaster. If you rely on data being archived, you need to know enough to do it yourself, on redundant portable hard disks, whatever. The cloud copy may be a working copy, but it has to be backed up.
As for Google accounts being nuked for inappropriate pictures: Whoa. You buy a cheap Android tablet, never really use it for photography. Then one day you grab some quick pix with it, not even realizing the default installed Google Photos app is going to upload them to the cloud by default. And then see them pop up on your other devices! This happened. Of course I instantly vaporized the Google Photos app on all my devices and installed Gallery Go instead. No cloud! And of course an alternate scheme for backing up the camera roll on my phone (I already remembered to set it not to sync photos to the cloud - I just forgot to check the tablet).
I think that "the cloud" should not be considered to be a safe long-term storage. It can be used as redundancy backup, but if you really need to keep your data, you should take care of that yourself.
This is not a technical issue, but an ownership issue. Google is mostly an ad company and as such they don't really treat you as users but as a product.
Sooner or later, people have to realize that the cloud and subscription are not in their best interests. On the front end, perhaps, it made sense. The company from which I retired, went all in on the cloud, pointing to all the money they were saving on infrastructure. Their hosting charges have nearly doubled in less than 3 years. Further, when hosting companies are routinely scanning your private data for various reasons, ranging child porn to their own AI projects, e.g., GitHub & Microsoft, you have surrendered the keys to the kingdom with no control over anything. Google canceling the unlimited plan is a perfect example. Frankly, consumers and companies are naive to think this will benefit them in the long run.
From a solution perspective, if you want to move 240TB of data out of google drive, spin up a bunch of VMs in us-central1 and copy it into GCS buckets (keep bandwidth to each bucket under 500Gbps). From there, one could copy it out to Backblaze or Cloudflare R2.
Comments on being an enterprise provider, and on the particular examples the article used...
> plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers [...] phased out [...] since he’s using too much storage, they’re going to delete his entire account in seven days (later this week).
First, an enterprise service provider who disrupts your operations in any way should probably be penalized, such as when evaluating future spending.
But an enterprise service provider who gives you seven days before they willfully delete your data... I guess you'd activate the lawyers immediately, to give the incompetent provider's bureaucracy enough time to halt the deletion... before it gets dramatically more expensive for both companies.
(And in parallel, throw money at the problem of racing to migrate to a different vendor, or at least get backups. You can try to recover the cost from the incompetent 'enterprise' vendor later.)
That said (and also acknowledging the HN memes that Google doesn't do customer service, and that Google will probably shut down most services of theirs upon which you might depend)... there's an obvious pattern in the 3 examples that the article gave.
In each example, the account had come under US law enforcement scrutiny. HN has heard other anecdata, but someone reading only this article would reasonably suspect that law enforcement action was a factor: maybe the company simply doesn't want to deal with that headache, either specifically or as a general policy; or it's conceivable that in some cases they might be asked to cripple/disrupt a user. Neither would be great, for a massive sometimes-monopoly for often crucial services, in a country with a legal standard of innocent unless&until proven guilty.
There are some interesting questions around those few examples of how customers under LE scrutiny are treated, but also questions around the various other examples HN hears of from time to time. And the article using only examples of the former might make the reader not as sympathetic as they should be, to a more general problem.
(Though occasionally some of the latter "Dear HN, company ___ cut me off!" examples sound like they could conceivably belong to the former category, without the complainer mentioning that factor. Even when a company makes it clear they're too big to care about a small percentage of users/customers, that's not necessarily the only reason a particular one gets stomped.)
This is what, at least $7500 or so of hardware, to keep it local? (And without much redundancy.) Worse, Newegg has been out of stock on the 20tb golds for weeks.
I figure 14 x 20tb = 280tb or so for $5600. Then you could get the 8 bay from Synology for $1000ish, and another $600 or so for the expansion bay. Is there a cheaper setup than this? You can get a better price-per-terabyte sometimes, but it's bay-prohibitive. And oh god... the time to silver that, I don't even want to know.
I don't know how to transfer that either... if it were on Amazon, didn't they have a service where they'll 1-day ship you all the data on a suitcase full of drives?
This article convinced me to get a real backup HDD setup. Google has pretty much my entire life history in photos, documents, excel sheets, etc, and storage is dirt cheap now.
In regards to the amount of storage he was using though, 250TB of information seems insane.
So, google invented unlimited storage so it is easier to convince managers of small companies to use their gsuite. Once conversion is finished, they can raise prices. Cool. Making a notice 7 days before the data removal is bad. It is really bad. Next time when someone asks me: "Should we host on AWS or on Google Cloud?" I could say "Google looks marginally cheaper now, but it is not reliable partner, so they could change pricing anytime".
People who say "oh, but it is a loophole". Not really. Google saved a lot of money on marketing by making storage unlimited, comparing to onsite hosting, which was still popular 10 years ago.
I'd love to store all my years of photos in the cloud and have someone else responsible for backups, but I just don't trust them for this sort of reason.
What if I failed to make cloud storage payments due to sickness or credit card being denied/whatever .. how long will they keep stuff before just deleting it?
This is just another possible cloud failure mode - the unreachable/unreasonable cloud provider just deciding to delete your account due to some error on their part.
So, it's multiple hard drives for me. I guess I should really put one in a fire-proof safe or something ... It really would be convenient to be able to trust Google/whoever with them!
No, it's really not. "Never trust your data to the cloud!" They never did. They used the cloud as a backup. They trusted the data to their computer with a cloud backup, which is usually better than not having any cloud backup at all. The problem is that their computers were then seized and they couldn't make another copy of their data in time.
> BTW, one can go directly to a store and buy a new computer and start downloading.
Not two hundred terabytes in a week. A week is 168 hours, and a gigabit network connection can only theoretically transfer 450 gigabytes per hour, or 75,600 gigabytes in 168 hours, still a far cry from over 200,000 gigabytes of content to download. Try getting more than a gigabit from anything other than custom fiber installations from a very limited selection of ISPs from a very limited subset of countries.
That's even assuming they're able to just buy a new computer with over 200 terabytes of storage, set it up with a gigabit network connection, and somehow convince google to use a gigabit of upload bandwidth for a week straight, which they definitely will not do for a single customer, considering they already just got cut off for using too much resources.
And that's also assuming the FBI didn't bar them from buying more computers somehow, and that computers are easily available / affordable in their country (including the said over 200 terabytes of storage).
The lowest price-per-gigabyte listed on PC Part Picker (which doesn't have every product ever made, but is still useful) is $0.012, or 6 TB for $71.45[0]. You'd need about 40 of them to hold this data (237.22 TB), which works out to about $2,858 for just the drives.
Hmmm. You'd be able to store that qty of data across 2x storage servers on Hetzner.
Grabbing ones already available from Hetzner's "server auction" means they'd be fairly cheap (comparatively) compared to ordering brand new ones.
Something like the ones with 10 x 16TB drives for €260/mo.
Not sure if Hetzner would upgrade the network interface to 10GbE though, as that would be a requirement.
That's just the hardware too. He'd need someone technical enough to set it up for him (and keep it running), and there'd need to be some way to download the data to it from Google.
If this is how they are going to treat customers, it is probably not a good strategy to build a business around any of their products including their new AI stuff.
This is tough, one could argue life's work deserved to be backed up but there was a reasonable expectation that the cloud wouldn't lose the data and that Google would be more fair when it wasn't cost effective anymore. Also, the cost of keeping 200TB on the cloud is quite a bill to maintain for rest of your life, buying the HDD space yourself is more attractive.
250TB is a lot of data, there is a good chance a lot of that will never even be seen more than once if at all. It’s at least 15 years of straight video runtime.
Apparently the guy has some kind of video production company. It is possible that these are raw video files which will take up way more space. Even though this is his business, there's a decent chance that most of it will never be needed again.
He should have started backups back in August when the FBI seized his computers, instead of waiting until the last minute (week).
I do feel for someone in this scenario (whatever the specifics of it are) but this should serve as a strong reminder to anyone:
"Cloud sync" services ARE NOT A BACKUP.
You want to use cloud sync for convenience? Great. It works well (mileage may vary by provider). Just don't expect it to be any safer than just having a single copy of those files on your PC or thumb drive or iPad or whatever.
That headline is kinda funny because in any other context it says "A promised B the world, A lied."
Everyone in society needs basic IT training, everyone, from journalists to doctors. Among other things they need to understand that there is no such thing as unlimited.
And of course, lesson #2, it's always just someone's computer.
Last lesson for today, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
In another universe Google's head of crisis PR grabs the red phone and calls the Wolf. Mr Wolf becomes point for this crisis, two hours later they get Tim Burke a beta account on the new 20 Gbps internet service, a decommissioned GCP storage pod with 300 TB on RAID 10, as well as the option to keep his data on his original plan if he so wishes.
I can't believe Google with a trillion+ dollar market cap gets away with all this. They have zero human customer support and basically enable account takeovers and identity theft. I hope someday Google gets some comeuppance for how abusive/hostile they've been to their customers forever.
Keep in mind this person was paying $100 per month to host >250 TiB (which anywhere else will cost >$1000 per month).
The moral of the story is that if your usage of an unlimited plan costs the company more than what you are paying, then you shouldn't be surprised when you get kicked off.
Can anybody recommend a good solution for automated synching of photos and files between my Google Drive and my Pi NAS? Something that makes mirroring a deletion possible but not accidental, so that if the Drive loses data it won't get mirrored to my NAS?
That was about how much data Murfie had. Surprise Google cloud storage and egress costs were the final straw that broke the company 4 years ago. It wasn't economical to save the data when I took over, and Murfie still hasn't fully recovered (for multiple reasons).
I heralded this warning to many people before - doing business with Google is a liability.
Every company I've ever had any pull in, using Gsuite or GCP was marked as a risk in the risk register, and mitigations were put in place to manage that risk.
I’m not following how this is a google problem, and not a feds problem. It sounds like the the used their power to render his account unusable, and as a secondary effect all data was lost.
What company would preserve your data in light of finding CP?
People are genuinely breaking their backs trying to carry water for Google here, making comparisons with looting ketchup packets from McDonald’s and other stupid stuff.
None of it changes the simple facts of this matter:
Google sold an unlimited storage plan, not unlimited with a big asterisk but unlimited with terminology such as “as much storage as you need.”
Google then decided they didn’t like that anymore, so they retired that plan and told people that they needed to either free up storage or upgrade within 60 days or else it would switch to read-only mode.
Two things are essential here: 1) 60 days was not enough to download all the data this person had stored, and 2) it said nothing explicitly about deleting data; instead, the heavy implication was that the data would remain stored with the caveat that nothing could be added or edited.
Then suddenly, Google informed the user that they’d delete his data within seven days.
That’s it, no “loophole,” no “ketchup packets,” no nothing.
A promise to be able to use as much storage as you needed in exchange for payment, an implicit promise that the data would be safe, and then a rug pull.
No amount of Olympic levels of mental gymnastics will change these facts.
If Google wanted to renege on its promises, it should’ve provided ample time to download the data. In a general sense, Google, one of the wealthiest companies in the world, needs to stop being a cheapskate and stop refusing to provide basic customer service on their consumer services.
The fact that their “Contact Us” option keeps sending people to a forum for most of their products, which customer service agents don’t regularly frequent, is pathetic.
Will people ever learn NOT to trust any cloud provider for storing their data? Especially when they have those “unlimited” and “lifetime “ deals?! Make your home NAS setup, it’s not even expensive.
Why the rush? Given the growth in hard drive space, putting off making a home NAS for as long as possible seems more economically efficient. If I'd setup a home NAS with three drives for raid5 in 2012 when Google drive was first released, I'd have on the order of 8TB + 4TB parity, assuming I bought the biggest drives available then, which wouldn't have been cheap. Instead, by waiting until this announcement, that money didn't go to depreciating hardware that's ancient by this point and instead could go into an index fund or other investment. By waiting until this year (2023), the home NAS I bought drives for this year is comprised of 18 TB drives.
We (as in us geeks) really need to be vocal about telling people that if they're storing things on someone else's server, they 100% need to keep their own local copies of that data as well.
Google spent all of their goodwill a few years ago. As more examples like this come to light, it will become much harder for Google to release new products since no one trusts them anymore
What is it about telecoms that grandfathers in customers to cell plans. Certainly it isn't the cellular provider that does it in the name of "great service".
HN comment from eight years ago: snickers serves them right for relying on some cloud company. And for relying on digital data. I have made a thrice-redundant backup system that uses a fire-etching leather-printer[1][2]. Of course there is a Python program to read it back as well. It just took me three weekends. Why didn’t they do something like that?
Not sure how well my setup works with binary files. My files are mostly org and source code. YMMV.
Deleted is past tense, but in reality a 7 day advanced notice was sent. The title makes you think that the user lost the data where in reality he needs to host the data somewhere else.
I can recommend Fastmail for email, they’ll even pull in all your gmail data. I use iCloud for my calendars which works well but I guess you’d need to be an Apple user.
I can also recommend Kagi as a Google Search replacement.
I don’t understand how tech companies aren’t being sued for reneging on their promises, it seems like an announcement like “unlimited storage forever” is a unilateral contract that has been broken.
If someone puts up a reward sign for a lost dog and a stranger finds and returns your dog, you can’t just say “actually the terms have changed”.
After the recent google drive data loss, that's twice in a row. It's a long stream of Google failing users over the years it corroded all the appreciation and trust I had in anything they do. Surprising.
Google Bard has interesting information when asked what happens to my data if a plan is restructured and my existing data exceeds the new plan's allowance. It seems the answer is "it depends".
The days of looking up to SV unicorns is over. The sooner we start thinking small, building small, and ignoring the religion of hyper-growth the better.
Yeah you might only be a decamillionaire instead of a billionaire but that's okay, you can die happy with the respect of your peers and family.
And did that happen in December? If it is truly important data I would expect process of new backups to be started immediately. After finding new device to order some disks online when the agents left.
People really need to understand that Google is a garbage company that can't be relied on for anything. I've spent years as a consultant, and several more in the startup world, and I'd rather host all my content in us-east-1 than rely on google.
* I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error,
* I've seen people who use Google for advertising pay thousands of dollars and suddenly stop getting their ads shown,
* I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen,
* I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview.
One of my more recent startups was actually funded by a Google based venture firm, and they wanted to know why we refused to use GCP. My answer is that I wanted the startup to actually succeed, and it wasn't worth the risk of dealing with Google's horrible support.
That whole "you're not paying"'thing is really a straw man at this point too. When Google was young and eager to be a good netizen I'd have agreed with that and said it was all part of helping to make the web better.
But they've been entrenched for years now, completely dominate so many aspects of the web and get plenty of value out of even their free users.
Given their size and stranglehold on just about everything, pulling an "oops, sorry, I guess you get what you pay for" is just ludicrous at this point.
And sorry if it seems like I'm arguing directly with you, that's not my intention. But I see this a lot and have gone from saying it myself to vehemently disagreeing with it over the last decade or so.
Of course Google gets value out of free users--that's a huge piece of their business model. And of course if Google had actually kept to their original "don't be evil" model, they wouldn't routinely screw over users the way they do.
However, as you note, they have been entrenched for years now, and it has been obvious for that same amount of time that they have long since dropped "don't be evil". So while it certainly sucks that they do the things they do, acting surprised when it happens is not a reasonable position at this point. Anyone who expects Google to honor any kind of commitment is simply asking for trouble. I don't trust them for anything.
And if widespread realization of that fact gets people to stop using Google services, so much the better: maybe that would actually get their attention.
The average non-tech savvy person doesn't really have an option than to get screwed over then. Assuming you have an Android phone, it's practically required to have a Google account; many apps just flat out do not work without Google Play Services or without signing in with your Gmail account.
Yes, I know about microG, Graphene, F-Droid and the like, but the average person is not going to flash their phone. They will inevitably hit a wall that says "you need to login with Google," create a Google account, and won't ask questions.
Just as an example, my mother-in-law couldn't find her contacts when she bought a new phone. Why? Because she was unknowingly saving her contacts to a Google account she forgot she made.
You can use apps from F-Droid without flashing your phone. The only apps I have from the playstore are apps for a few financial institutions, otherwise it's all F-Droid.
And you don't need to be hackerman to do this, I told my retired parents "you should check out F-Droid" and they did. Now they recommend F-Droid apps to me.
But you and I (and perhaps your retired parents) are the exception. Most people want to have their bank app on their phone. They can't get that on F-Droid, so they go to Google Play Store.
Last I checked a bank is a financial institution, which the GP said they still get from Google Play. But that doesn't mean you have to get all your apps from Google Play, which was the GP's point.
Good point. I have never considered this argument before, but I agree. In a healthy case, the sphere of responsibility (of a company, individual) should approximately match their sphere influence. And with a sphere of influence this large, this goes far beyond the "contract" between individual parties only.
In some cases this kind of relationship auto-regulates itself (e.g., taking a small vs large credit in a bank): at larger scale, both parties are invested into maintaining a good relationship. The problem in this case is, any individual investment into any relationship with Google is just a drop in the ocean.
I looked into that myself years ago, and honestly can't remember now why I made that decision back then :) Should probably document such stuff somewhere.
> If someone is offering free food, and it gives you food poisoning
That's not a suitable analogy for users of Google's free services. A suitable analogy would be, someone is offering free food, but (a) its quality sucks, and (b) they arbitrarily withdraw it from a significant number of people for no good reason. Yes, that's unpleasant, but "well it was free" is a suitable response in that case.
The issue in this particular case, though, is that the journalist was using paid Google services--which is a very different situation.
Funny, because they never seen to have problems hosting the advertising/surveillance data they collect on me. They never went "sorry we can't track you any more for free, will you type in you card number so we can keep surveilling you?"
They don’t track you for free. Advertisers pay. They don’t have to store data if no one pays. This of course in no way justifies the journalist losing his data.
The advertisers don't pay for google storing my data. The advertisers pay for ads displayed and ads clicked. How google does that is an implementation detail.
Google does that by storing my data, many kinds of my data. You making the distinction between data that "the user knows and understands" versus data that "is obscure to the user but advertisers care about" is a matter of marketing, in that as the former is easier to charge the user for.
My point is that the argument of "you're not paying for storing data X therefore fuck you" is a silly one, because you're also not paying for storing data Y, and neither are the advertisers.
> The advertisers don't pay for google storing my data. The advertisers pay for ads displayed and ads clicked.
That's like saying you don't pay the restaurant for the chef, you pay the restaurant for the food. It's a level of semantics that rises to being simply disingenuous. It's a restaurant, not a grocery.
You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore. It's certainly not the only thing Google is selling.
Unless you're making the claim that the data storage that Google uses for their data tracking isn't paid for by the targeted ad service? That if Google suddenly couldn't use that data for targeted advertising anymore that they'd still keep it around, or that none of their other services would raise in price?
> You can, but that's not really what Google is selling anymore.
Wrong again. Google's thing is search ads. Those target keywords, not user data. User data is a side-gig for Google, mostly thru youtube, maps, and gmail.
Competition for what? Here we're talking about data hosting. There are plenty of companies that will host huge amounts of data for reasonable prices. And unlike Google, they actually have reasonable terms of service and customer support.
And you are not paying them, not even the reasonable price, because Google flips giving it away for "free" - so the competition doesn't get any money and Google doesn't have any liability whatsoever... Win-win for Google
> * I personally ran a website with Google Ads, and the first time I tried to cash out was accused of click fraud and had all the earned money stolen,
I've heard of this happening to a lot of people. I hate using Adsense, and have mainly disabled it in the past, but it seems when I do, I get super heavy traffic and always think, "darn, I should have kept Adsense running".
I'm wondering if it's worth slowing down my sites and annoying users to eventually get to $100 to see if I'll be able to cash it out. It's getting close to $100, so it's hard to deactivate.
No, the opposite. When they're inactive, traffic reaches all time highs. When they're active, traffic is still decent, but nowhere near as high when they're off. Google ranks your site based on speed (as well as a few other factors), and their product (adsense) slows everything down, so that's potentially a reason.
So, it's like... wow, I should have kept adsense on (although I probably wouldn't have the same traffic if it was).
As long as you don't turn on auto-ads, you can control Adsense to take up a limited amount of space as small as you'd like. Most of the users that would be offended by ads are already blocking.
Not only that but they actually provide real support.
I once complained on Twitter that I was having trouble with an EKS issue, and the product manager for EKS reached out to me directly, put me in contact with one of their engineers, and then they discovered an issue and rolled out a fix for it that day.
In a separate incident, I couldn't get GCP to read the verification data for a domain from their webmaster tools so I was unable to use the domain with GCP Cloud Run. I mentioned this on Twitter, and the product manager reached out to lecture me about how I shouldn't be using Cloud Run with domain mapping because that's in "preview". He then pointed me to another method to point a domain at cloud run, which it turned out was also in preview. All of this was because Google Webmaster Tools validated the domain but GCP wasn't able to get that information. I ended up cancelling the GCP project and just using AWS (as I should have from the start).
It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.
There was that time in 2013, that I leaked my AWS key and a "hacker" ran up a $3500 bill running Litecoin mining[0]. Not only was the support excellent and forgave the debt, Werner Vogel (AWS CTO) popped into the HN thread[1] and offered to help -- I got to email him and tell him his people were already on top of it.
And yes, they have made their money back off me in the 10 years since (average $100-200 a month).
Would you mind sharing how (in broad terms) your key got leaked? I'm always interested in stories like that as a point of comparison to my own (not great) security practices just so I know how reasonable I'm being.
> companies which take support seriously do monitor all sorts of channels as well.
Very much this. At my company we have many other means of support readily available, but some people instinctively reach for Twitter for peer support. Being active on Twitter means our support team can help even those people who don't think to use our official channels, which is good for the customer and good for our image.
Twitter probably isn't official but some companies have official social media support channels. Azure has an issues-only GitHub repo for Kubernetes (AKS) and you generally get a project team member instead of fighting through layers of support.
> It's embedded deeply in Google's culture that they not only don't provide support, but they'll insult and gaslight the people asking for it.
This feels like the crux of the difference between Google and Microsoft/Amazon.
Google product culture seems to assume they built everything correctly, so if there's an issue, you're questioning their competency.
Microsoft/Amazon product culture seems to start with "weird things will constantly go wrong", so support is viewed as an opportunity to figure out how things can be made better, based on real world experience.
For most Google products, what seems to be missing is a link between customer support and SRE. I.e. "We're Google, we can't do customer support at our scale. SRE is a superior way of keeping services reliable."
Fair... but SRE doesn't handle "the real world is messy, and here's a situation a product manager never thought of."
Amazon Cloud Drive used to be “unlimited”. They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google. Before Microsoft’s OneDrive too IIRC.
Out of the big three, Google Drive had an insanely good run as unlimited. (Even non-enterprise business plans with caps in theory were unlimited in practice until this year.)
Wait what? I'm a confessed ignoramus but this does not make sense to me. Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
> Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it. (Maybe not as well as unencrypted text, but still.)
Due to the pigeonhole principle, to be able to make some inputs shorter you have to make some inputs longer. The way compression works is by making more likely inputs shorter, while making unlikely inputs longer. But for encrypted data, if your encryption method is good (that is, not ECB mode), all possible values are equally likely (unless you known the secret key).
>Encrypted data is bits and bytes like everything else. You can compress it.
You can "compress" anything, if one of the modes of your compressor is simply to store the data "as is", but generally speaking encrypted data is indistinguishable from a random bit stream and cannot be compressed.
If you think about it, one of the ways that compressors and attacks on encryption work is by looking for structure in the data. If you still have that after encryption, you don't have a good algorithm.
Encrypted data is highly random, and a compression ratio would be close to 1.
So yeah- technically you can run a compression algorithm over it, but it won't help much
Because compression implementations generally have overhead, the output can actually be larger (similar to how compressing already-compressed data can produce a larger result.)
Yes, but the times when you found these patterns (and managed to get a smaller output) will be matched by the times you found no patterns (and therefore the output was larger), such that the average compression ratio over a large enough amount of inputs will tend to 1.
Amazon did? (ban encrypted files). I'm guessing so, just want to make sure.
I used to use Amazon stuff but it has really become such insane spyware. There is no data collection/analytics that goes too far for Amazon. It's really appalling, no less so that they use their near monopoly on using Kindles to deeply mine for data on exactly what people are reading, how long on each page, etc. Really gross.
Let me share a Chinese Firewall (according to rumours) algorithm for detecting cryptography: count number of 0 and 1 bits. If the number is almost equal, it is likely encrypted content.
True, but since very, very few files are compressed with unique or unknown compression algorithms, you can read the metadata in the file and see if it's really compressed or if the whole thing is just seemingly random.
That gives me an idea. Might be fun to write a tool that will encrypt a file but make it look like a valid .zip file that just unpacks to meaningless noise. There's gotta be something like that already out there... Although you could recursively unpack/evaluate and eventually you should get to the point where it's non-random data. If you never do, then it's encrypted.
There are some academic papers (I think one by Ross Anderson) which state that steganography relies on there being some randomness in the data you are hiding the message inside. So, to make the bandwidth available for for steganographic data hiding as large as possible, those needing to conceal data need incentives for innocents to publish files constructed using as large as possible quantities of random bits. It looks like Stable Diffusion is providing this incentive!
What I can say about AWS pricing is that my monthly personal bill is just over $10 for all I want to do personally, and my employer's bill is... higher, but cheap compared to the cost of my time.
If I had to lose one bit of data or port one platform due to Google's !@#$%^&, it would more than pay my lifetime personal Google expenses many times over, as well as of the lifetime expenses of my current employer.
Former employer bubbled up to millions of dollars, and it was still worth it. Former employer got screwed over by Google to a greater tune, despite having a dedicated engineering support team at Google.
The math starts to work out differently for some of the PaaS providers, where costs are several times higher than AWS, and my time is cheaper despite the (rather impressive) time savings. However, having a reliable cloud provider pays for itself many times over.
I've lost had serious unexpected expenses literally every time I've been in any business setting which did business with Google. That's quite a few times. Literally the only time I'll do business with Google is:
- Free tier, quick one-off hack
- Legacy
- Literally no other options
Even the legacy, I'm working to port away since it's cheaper to do on my timeline than Google's.
>I've had customers get their cloud accounts shut down for a literal three cent billing error
I once just stopped paying an AWS bill on a small website I abandoned (few USD/month), came back to check after a long while and I was surprised to find out how long does it take for AWS to actually shut you down.
Also on AWS, on two different occasions I screwed up and got a high ticket bill:
* Got a lot of data out of Glacier and bill spiked to a couple thousand $$$ (this one'e explicitly mentioned several times in their docs but my mind just didn't register it).
* Forgot to turn off some expensive spot instances and left them running for ~2 days (where it should've been minutes). Again, some thousand $$$.
Both times I opened tickets, told them it was an honest mistake and they just wrote them off, :O.
During covid the company I worked at had their Series A fall through- we had a signed term sheet and everything, but the venture company lost their shit and pulled out of the deal. We only had a few months runway left at this point.
I reached out to our account rep at AWS and asked if we could delay our bills for three months. They laughed and said that if we didn't pay our bill for three months their system would just send us a bunch of emails, but that they wouldn't even start the process of closing the account until at least three months had passed- and even then they'd delay it further for us.
We got a new funding round and paid all of our bills, but we would not have been able to make payroll if AWS wasn't so lenient about it. That was 2020, so almost three years ago, and that company is still regularly featured at AWS talks and product announcements.
I've always wanted to ask, how do engineers who work at Google think about this? I want to work at a company where I feel like I'm making the lives of our users better. I'm sure this is true for lots of users of Google products, but there are also thousands or tens of thousands of people who have had serious real life impacts because of it. You can see many of them in this thread: AdSense businesses getting shut down, Youtube content creators getting banned for mysterious reasons. I try to work at companies that believe these problems to be unacceptable to even 1 person. While that goal may not always be possible, I would not be comfortable with anything less than an immediate resolution and a postmortem to prevent it from happening again. Is this also true at Google? I don't know anyone at Google to ask.
I think it's the same for everyone company: as long as the pay is good with perks and benefits you don't really care what you code on. And if you drink the company kool-aid, you believe you're doing people a favor.
Google decided it is time to sell GA for enterprises with 3rd parties involved. One client of mine (1B+ revenue, Xth largest website in Europe where x < 10) did not sort out the 3rd party agreement on time. Google's answer: we are going delete all of your data. Have a nice day!
It’s ~18 years since my blogpost blog caught click fraud, I still can’t do many things related to ads because of it. That credit card is still on their record and that address on which I lived total 2 months one and half decades back, is where I live in their record. Stupid stupid company.
I assume he/she meant scale == grows (mostly independently) of human hours. Support can never scale; only fixing your software so that it doesn't trigger support needs scales.
Otherwise, each support request linearly requires human time.
Damn, I've had a great time using GCP at my last job, especially coming from AWS. This disappoints me a lot but I can't say I'm surprised, I've stopped using Google services almost everywhere (I'm slowly migrating away from Gmail, and I'm still stuck with YouTube) for this very reason.
I'm very aware that cloud vendor lock-in should be avoided (or mitigated) at all cost, but PubSub was actually pretty nice.
I've had product managers for GCP lecture me that I shouldn't be using "preview" services (despite services being in preview for years), and then tell my I should have used a different service . . . that was also in preview.
If anyone’s ever been curious what working at Google is like, this sums it up perfectly…
External to Google, I think we have little data, but we've heard that much internal behavior is based on individuals making data-backed cases for positive contributions to the company.
Which prompts the idea: does Google have a data-backed adversarial operation, as a check on all that activity and biased analysis?
For example, when someone says "I did X, which resulted in a Y% positive impact to Z, so pls gimme dat sweet promo yo"... there's another function of the company that can say, "It was actually only 0.2 that positive impact, in that isolated regard; but more importantly, it had costs to A and B, which our current strategy model suggests resulted in substantial net harm to the company. Please tell all your colleagues that disregarding A and B is not the way to get a promotion."
It seems safer to not have any financial ties with google at all. Not paying for services and not being paid for services. Not publishing apps, not using ads.
-just a free user of gmail who hopes to be undisturbed.
Any cloud service can't be relied on for anything. There is no law for mandatory backing up cloud content and no guarantees your data will not be lost. Buy HDDs while they still are available and do the back up yourself.
The journalist had nearly 500 TB of data to store.. getting that much local storage could be prohibitively expensive. That's sort of the whole selling point of cloud services.
Is it really better with other cloud providers? Genuine question. I personally never faced terrible issues like the one described, it’s always difficult to understand if it is really a GCP problem and not a general cloud problem.
Can anyone recommend any good ways of migrating tons of data from Google Drive to an alternative and what alternatives do people recommend?
I can't stand OneDrive, I find it is a complete shitshow. I am a heavy Apple user so wondering if iCloud is maybe a worthwhile option or shall I use DropBox?
Maybe someone who like losing work, like losing money, like his account being terminated for whatever puerile reason, likes being tracked and likes to see lots of ads.
Wait, I don't think such a person exists. Wrong market fit, Google!
Just buy 48 seats of Google Workspace Business Plus to get 240 TB pooled storage.
237 TB is a lot of storage, 864 USD/month is actually pretty cheap to store it all in the cloud. For comparizon, Backblaze B2 costs 6 USD/TB which works out to 1422 USD/month.
As much as I despise Google, this is simply a case of RTFM.
The first email shown in the article ends with the call to action of "get more storage" and a link. Pretty obviously that would be buying additional space, not getting it for free.
(But it would cost something like $5k-10k/month, not the ~$10/month that he seems willing to pay.)
>> Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over.
This is what happens when you don't read the article:
> Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
Where does it say he expected it to be free? In the article, there's a tweet that says "So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage"
To me, the bigger problem is that companies are allowed to offer "unlimited" anything in their marketing copy.
Yep, it's pretty clear that unlimited is going to have limits (250 TB is a lot of data, that'd be $1500 a month in Backblaze). However, Google should have been required to be up front about their definition of unlimited (eg: up to 10 TB), rather than leaving it as a nebulous ToS term they can arbitrarily decide upon in the future.
This is actually a good use case for something like AWS Deep Glacier or Azure Archive Storage: data that needs to be saved and accessed infrequently if at all. It'd be around $250/mo, but as a business expense for a professional journalist that seems reasonable. Amazon or Microsoft could of course turf those services in the future, but considering the number of large companies that use them for long-term archiving I would expect that there would be a lot of notice before taking that step.
Burke said he paid Google “a lot of money for a long time” for an “unlimited” cloud storage account. This was a plan that was offered to Google “Enterprise” Workspace customers for a while.
So he wasn't expecting it to be free forever at all.
1) Physical Media that YOU physically own & control.
2) Off-Site Backups
Regardless of the threat, whether it is just bad media, house fire, ordinary thieves, or the FBI, relying on some cloud service as your only backup is a plan to fail.
If it is a threat if someone reads the backups, encrypt.
Sure, as a supplemental convenience, use Google or something. But as the only backup of your life's work? I feel really bad for them, they're obviously gutted. But at the same time, Google has been so publicly unreliable and high-handed for so many years (decades, really), that it's hard not to also feel some, 'whelp, what did you expect, doing something like leaving your valuables out on the sidewalk?'.
I didn't see that, but if so, then clearly more steps (i.e., more locations, hidden) were needed in that risk scenario. Plus, he had 60 days, then 7 days notice form Google.
I'm not saying I don't feel bad for the guy, but can you really say that it was smart to rely on even a paid Google account, considering how often Google randomly drop entire product lines, or nuke individual accounts for random reasons with zero recourse (e.g., the screw-up of a 7-year-old kid described in the same article)?
Storing 250 TB in a public cloud isn't going to be cheap either. Even aws glacier is going to be close to $1k/month for that amount of storage. And god help you if you actually want your files back (around $25k for retrieving the whole thing!).
This video data isn't even his to have any right to keep. He took it from another company's insecure website. Even if Google kept it for him, the government could and probably should make them delete it.
As for the parts of it that really are his, he'll probably get that back from the FBI when they eventually return his equipment so I don't think his life's work is lost.
I'm no great defender of Google but point some fallacies the article pushes:
"regarding a woman losing her entire Google account after one of her 7 year old sons, messing around with a camera and uploading the videos to YouTube, published a video of himself naked. For obvious reasons, that’s a problem"
If a 7 year old found a parent's gun, walked into the street and shot a neighbor to death accidentally; the parent is also still responsible and accountable.
"he had obtained and published some leaked video footage from Fox News." and "he was able to access the footage by using publicly accessible URLs to obtain the content."
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/website-permissions/websites/
"As a general rule, it is wise to operate under the assumption that all works are protected by either copyright or trademark law unless conclusive information indicates otherwise. A work is not in the public domain simply because it has been posted on the Internet (a popular fallacy) or because it lacks a copyright notice (another myth). For information on these and other public domain issues, see the section, “The Public Domain.”"
Related, search for "OpenAI lawsuits over copyrighted materials it uses to train ChatGPT".
The fallacy you push is that the legal process in case your child shoots someone is the same as the private and inscrutable process that Google follows to ban people, which it isn't
The facts of the article are even less inflammatory. The journalist uploaded 237.22 TB of video to his google drive when the "unlimited" plan existed. When google phased out the unlimited plan, he's not paying for a non-unlimited plan, and his account entered a read-only state. Now, the account is scheduled for termination since he's not paying for a valid current account.
It would cost the guy $5000 a month to store his data on S3 and he doesn't want to pay that, so he now needs to find someone to bear the cost of storing his video files before his account terminates.