6 ms·

I'm not even mad. /r/datahoarders brought this on themselves. Who in their right mind expects to upload 100s of TBs of data, encrypted and pay 59.99?

ghughes 9y ago
People who understand the literal meaning of the word "unlimited"?
- vitalysh 9y ago
  Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service. At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.
  - cf 9y ago
    I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.
    - chc 9y ago
      Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.
  - unixhero 9y ago
    Because it isn't linux iso's.
    - nimchimpsky 9y ago
      were they being serious, I can't tell.
- oridecon 9y ago
  I hope this (and the many more examples) put a stop to this "unlimited" bs. You can't say people were abusing a service that throws that keyword for marketing reasons.
- tgjsrkghruksd 9y ago
  @vitalysh > At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy. Because if you are a self-proclaimed data hoarder, do you have the time to sort through and selectively classify your hoard to "encrypt this ISO don't encrypt that tarball" on a file-by-file basis across many terabytes? How much would be saved by deduping anyway? If they're not deliberately making it easy/redundant, even if you got 300TB down to 100TB or such, a single order-of-magnitude reduction doesn't fundamentally change the economics of "unlimited." Blame data hoarders, but don't blame encryption.
  - vitalysh 9y ago
    I store a bit of data at home (only ~20TB). Really easy to sort. There are plenty of apps that do it for you. This extension with those keywords in filename goes to this directory. Others to another dirs. I only have my pictures and personal data in AWS cloud, encrypted. They way I set it up? Point rclone to relevant directories and skip the rest.
    - theshrike79 9y ago
      Except Amazon revoked rcloud's key a while back. Any recommendations on the "plenty of apps" that sort your data for easy searching?
      - awirth 9y ago
        As someone completely unfamiliar with this space, this prompted me to do some reading into this rclone issue. I'll record it here for anyone else similarly curious. It seems that as of a few months ago, two popular (unofficial) command line clients for ACD (Amazon Cloud drive) were acd-cli[1] and rclone[2], both of which are open source. Importantly the ACD API is OAuth based, and these two programs took different approaches to managing their OAuth app credentials. acd-cli's author provided an app on GCE that managed the app credentials and performed the auth. rclone on the other hand embedded the credentials into their source, and did the oauth dance through a local server. On April 15th someone reported an issue on acd-cli titled "Not my file"[3] in a user alleged that they had received someone else's file from using the tool. The author refered them to amazon support. The issue was updated again on May 13th with another user that had the same problem - this time with better documentation. The user reached out to security@amazon.com to report the issue. Amazon's security team determined that their system was not at fault, but pointed out a race condition in the source for the acd-cli auth server (sharing the auth state in a global variable between requests...) and disabled the acd-cli app access to protect customers.[4] In response to this banning, one user suggested that a workaround to get acd-cli working again would be to use the developer option for local oauth dance, and use rclone's credentials (from the public rclone source).[5] This got rclone's credentials banned as well,[6] presumably when the amazon team noticed that they were publicly available. To top this all off, the ACD team also closed down API registration for new apps around this time (which seems to have already been a strenuous process). I suppose the moral of the story is that OAuth is hard. [1]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli [2]: https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone [3]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 [4]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301816928 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [5]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301697542 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [6]: https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazon-drive/2314 https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazo...
- brandon272 9y ago
  That is very selective of them. While their marketing materials said "unlimited", people chose to ignore the ToS which stated that they wouldn't tolerate abuse and that abuse was basically whatever they determined it to be.
dawnerd 9y ago
Looks like it's really the plex people to blame. They were hosting tons of TBs of pirated movies/tv shows.
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  And why is that a problem? Copyright is theft.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Corporations see "complicity in an illegal act" as a negative utility far larger than the ultimate lifetime value of any single customer. So, when you do something illegal (even if for dumb reasons) and use a corporate service to do so, you've got to expect that said corporation will immediately try to distance themselves from complicity in that act by terminating your account with them. This is one of those "inherent in the structure of the free market" things.
    - thanksgiving 9y ago
      Why? Isn't this like a private storage? Unless people are sharing the files, why should Amazon care what's in the files?
      - richmarr 9y ago
        So, first of all I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The whole point of an unlimited tier is to attract large numbers of outsiders who don't want the cognitive burden of figuring out $/GB/month and estimating how many GB photos they'll need to store. What we're talking about here is that they got some customers like that, but they also got a small number of customers taking them for a ride, call them 'power users' the kind of customers who (as we see elsewhere in these comments) won't stick around if the price changes. There's nothing wrong with these power users storing huge amounts of data at subsidised price, just like there's nothing wrong with Amazon changing the pricing. They just decided to stop subsidising that behaviour and probably take a slight hit on a conversion rate somewhere. As for your question about 'private' storage, it's a grey area. Privacy isn't absolute, especially in cases where a company is by inaction helping you breaking the law (whether you agree with the law or not). Companies work very hard to distance themselves from responsibility for their customers actions and don't want to jeopardise that by letting it get out of hand
Kocrachon 9y ago
One guy in particular admitted to having 1PB stored. People like him fucked the rest of us over.
- PKop 9y ago
  Yes.. but them not having an upper limit doomed "the rest of you" from the beginning. Is anyone surprised some would do that? Is Amazon? Should they be? Of course not..
- awirth 9y ago
  Source on the 1PB guy for the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...
  - chrisan 9y ago
    Ouch, reading those comments, even by the OP... the writing was on the wall then even
  - FireBeyond 9y ago
    Who is now at 1.5PB, while someone else replies to him who has a 1.4PB flair, and another has a 1.1PB flair...

ghughes 9y ago

People who understand the literal meaning of the word "unlimited"?

vitalysh 9y ago
Yes, Amazon is to blame here as well. They shouldn't have offered unlimited service. At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy.
- cf 9y ago
  I don't get why if they don't mean unlimited just say up to 20TB/mo.
  - chc 9y ago
    Possibly because there actually wasn't any limit. Maybe if a handful people were exceeding $LOTS TB, they don't care, but if 60% of users exceed $LOTS TB, the service becomes unsustainable. In this case, the service really is unlimited (there genuinely is no limit that you're not allowed to go over), and if you wanted that effect, advertising a limit would be net negative — a high limit would encourage the "too many users use a lot" case and lead to the same result we get now where the plan has to be canceled for unsustainability, and a low limit would defeat the purpose.
- unixhero 9y ago
  Because it isn't linux iso's.
  - nimchimpsky 9y ago
    were they being serious, I can't tell.
oridecon 9y ago
I hope this (and the many more examples) put a stop to this "unlimited" bs. You can't say people were abusing a service that throws that keyword for marketing reasons.
tgjsrkghruksd 9y ago
@vitalysh > At the same time, I don't get, why would you encrypt your "Linux ISO's"? Let the AWS dedup do its job, don't abuse it, and everyone is happy. Because if you are a self-proclaimed data hoarder, do you have the time to sort through and selectively classify your hoard to "encrypt this ISO don't encrypt that tarball" on a file-by-file basis across many terabytes? How much would be saved by deduping anyway? If they're not deliberately making it easy/redundant, even if you got 300TB down to 100TB or such, a single order-of-magnitude reduction doesn't fundamentally change the economics of "unlimited." Blame data hoarders, but don't blame encryption.
- vitalysh 9y ago
  I store a bit of data at home (only ~20TB). Really easy to sort. There are plenty of apps that do it for you. This extension with those keywords in filename goes to this directory. Others to another dirs. I only have my pictures and personal data in AWS cloud, encrypted. They way I set it up? Point rclone to relevant directories and skip the rest.
  - theshrike79 9y ago
    Except Amazon revoked rcloud's key a while back. Any recommendations on the "plenty of apps" that sort your data for easy searching?
    - awirth 9y ago
      As someone completely unfamiliar with this space, this prompted me to do some reading into this rclone issue. I'll record it here for anyone else similarly curious. It seems that as of a few months ago, two popular (unofficial) command line clients for ACD (Amazon Cloud drive) were acd-cli[1] and rclone[2], both of which are open source. Importantly the ACD API is OAuth based, and these two programs took different approaches to managing their OAuth app credentials. acd-cli's author provided an app on GCE that managed the app credentials and performed the auth. rclone on the other hand embedded the credentials into their source, and did the oauth dance through a local server. On April 15th someone reported an issue on acd-cli titled "Not my file"[3] in a user alleged that they had received someone else's file from using the tool. The author refered them to amazon support. The issue was updated again on May 13th with another user that had the same problem - this time with better documentation. The user reached out to security@amazon.com to report the issue. Amazon's security team determined that their system was not at fault, but pointed out a race condition in the source for the acd-cli auth server (sharing the auth state in a global variable between requests...) and disabled the acd-cli app access to protect customers.[4] In response to this banning, one user suggested that a workaround to get acd-cli working again would be to use the developer option for local oauth dance, and use rclone's credentials (from the public rclone source).[5] This got rclone's credentials banned as well,[6] presumably when the amazon team noticed that they were publicly available. To top this all off, the ACD team also closed down API registration for new apps around this time (which seems to have already been a strenuous process). I suppose the moral of the story is that OAuth is hard. [1]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli [2]: https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone [3]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/issues/549 [4]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301816928 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [5]: https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-301697542 https://github.com/yadayada/acd_cli/pull/562#issuecomment-30... [6]: https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazon-drive/2314 https://forum.rclone.org/t/rclone-has-been-banned-from-amazo...
brandon272 9y ago
That is very selective of them. While their marketing materials said "unlimited", people chose to ignore the ToS which stated that they wouldn't tolerate abuse and that abuse was basically whatever they determined it to be.

dawnerd 9y ago

Looks like it's really the plex people to blame. They were hosting tons of TBs of pirated movies/tv shows.

thanksgiving 9y ago
And why is that a problem? Copyright is theft.
- derefr 9y ago
  Corporations see "complicity in an illegal act" as a negative utility far larger than the ultimate lifetime value of any single customer. So, when you do something illegal (even if for dumb reasons) and use a corporate service to do so, you've got to expect that said corporation will immediately try to distance themselves from complicity in that act by terminating your account with them. This is one of those "inherent in the structure of the free market" things.
  - thanksgiving 9y ago
    Why? Isn't this like a private storage? Unless people are sharing the files, why should Amazon care what's in the files?
    - richmarr 9y ago
      So, first of all I think you're focusing on the wrong thing. The whole point of an unlimited tier is to attract large numbers of outsiders who don't want the cognitive burden of figuring out $/GB/month and estimating how many GB photos they'll need to store. What we're talking about here is that they got some customers like that, but they also got a small number of customers taking them for a ride, call them 'power users' the kind of customers who (as we see elsewhere in these comments) won't stick around if the price changes. There's nothing wrong with these power users storing huge amounts of data at subsidised price, just like there's nothing wrong with Amazon changing the pricing. They just decided to stop subsidising that behaviour and probably take a slight hit on a conversion rate somewhere. As for your question about 'private' storage, it's a grey area. Privacy isn't absolute, especially in cases where a company is by inaction helping you breaking the law (whether you agree with the law or not). Companies work very hard to distance themselves from responsibility for their customers actions and don't want to jeopardise that by letting it get out of hand

Kocrachon 9y ago

One guy in particular admitted to having 1PB stored. People like him fucked the rest of us over.

PKop 9y ago
Yes.. but them not having an upper limit doomed "the rest of you" from the beginning. Is anyone surprised some would do that? Is Amazon? Should they be? Of course not..
awirth 9y ago
Source on the 1PB guy for the curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a_bit_of_a_milestone_today/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/5s7q04/i_hit_a...
- chrisan 9y ago
  Ouch, reading those comments, even by the OP... the writing was on the wall then even
- FireBeyond 9y ago
  Who is now at 1.5PB, while someone else replies to him who has a 1.4PB flair, and another has a 1.1PB flair...