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Blaming crypto for this change is absurd. They could easily detect and shut down those accounts if they wanted to.
by latchkey 3y ago
Blaming crypto for this change is absurd. They could easily detect and shut down those accounts if they wanted to.
- jeremyjh 3y agoBy easily, you mean fight them forever in an un-ending arms race like we see in every other form of online fraud? Sounds like a great plan.
- latchkey 3y agoAlas, the alternative appears to be to shut down their 'unlimited plan', and blame crypto. Sorry for those customers who bought into their failed product offering.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThey have to pay $72 at least once, and it'll take them a while to fill up significant space. Sounds like a good fight to me.
- sanderjd 3y agoWhy do you think it would take them awhile to fill up significant space? It most certainly would not.
- Dylan16807 3y agoBecause they only ingest so many megabytes per second.
- sanderjd 3y agoPer client.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThey don't have to allow multiple clients on the same license to all have fast upload speeds at the same time. If you mean per license, that scales with the amount of money and a reasonable limit on 3 licenses doesn't have to allow all that many terabytes all that fast.
- sanderjd 3y agoYes, but then you are implementing somewhat arbitrary restrictions on everybody, in order to work around an abusive subset of users. All else equal, you want to be able to advertise uploads that are as fast as possible (eg. to entice valuable customers to migrate from your competitor to you). But I do think that targeted throttling is a good way to deal with this problem. As I said elsewhere, detecting abuse is heuristic and false positives are horrible when the enforcement is to shut down accounts, but a false positive resulting in throttling is not so bad.
- Dylan16807 3y agoGoogle gives you 750GB of upload per day and I've seen very little fuss about that, none from normal customers.
- sanderjd 3y agoI'm not up on the rules, but that's per user, right? Not for the whole account?
- Dylan16807 3y agoYes, but does the difference matter? Either 750GB per day or 2.25TB per day would provide a good amount of time to find rule breakers before the costs approach $72. And the limit doesn't have to be exactly the same.
- sanderjd 3y ago
- chorsestudios 3y agoThey could also add a clause to the ToS prohibiting specific activities, but instead it appears they are just cancelling the service entirely.
- sanderjd 3y agoThey likely already have that clause, but have been unable to enforce it successfully. I would also pull the rip-cord in their shoes. Truly unlimited storage products are a very bad idea.
- latchkey 3y agohttps://www.dropbox.com/acceptable_use https://www.dropbox.com/acceptable_use use the Services to back up, or as infrastructure for, your own cloud services; use the storage space provided by the Services as the basis for cryptographic proof-of-space or proof-of-storage, or any similar proof system;
- sanderjd 3y agoI have some experience with this. It is, in fact, very hard to do this. It is possible, but certainly not easy. There are a few challenges that make this harder than you might think: - It's a never-ending arms race against adversaries working actively to evade detection. - It is necessary to find detection approaches that abide by security and privacy requirements. - Detection of this kind of behavior is inevitably heuristic and false positives are incredibly bad. To put a finer point on that last one: The flip side of "it's easy to detect and shut down abusive accounts" is every article or tweet or blog post like "look at all these normal people who had their accounts permanently disabled without explanation or recourse".
- latchkey 3y agoIn this case, the abuse is simple: 1. It is already in violation of the Acceptable Use ToS which implies they already have solutions in place to detect this behavior. https://www.dropbox.com/acceptable_use https://www.dropbox.com/acceptable_use 2. It is easy to detect large amounts of disk usage with a high number of read/writes across wide swaths of the storage.
- sanderjd 3y ago> It is already in violation of the Acceptable Use ToS which implies they already have solutions in place to detect this behavior. Putting it in the ToS is how they reserve the right to put in place solutions. But writing text in a ToS to ban some behavior does not magically create a working enforcement solution. I'm quite certain they have spent the last few years: 1. Putting that in the ToS in order to give themselves permission to do the enforcement, 2. Working really hard fighting an enforcement arms race with people not complying with the ToS, 3. Losing the battle and painstakingly deciding to throw in the towel. > It is easy to detect large amounts of disk usage with a high number of read/writes across wide swaths of the storage. Again, these are active adversaries. Their first attempt probably fit that pattern in a way that was discernible to the dropbox client or server code, but it is unlikely that their current usage looks like that. Again, false positives are extremely painful when doing account shutdowns for abuse. Other usage that is not crypto mining are free to exhibit "large amounts of disk usage with a high number of read/writes across wide swaths of the storage". And again, I'm not saying this is impossible, just that it is actually a very difficult problem. And I am saying that I don't think it is at all worth the effort, and is much better to do what this announcement is doing, and not attempt to provide "unlimited storage" as a product at all.
- soraminazuki 3y agoIt's a bogeyman. Blaming child porn would've created legal problems for Dropbox, so they went with the unpopular thing of the day, cryptocurrencies. They would've picked AI training data tomorrow. The only question I have is whether they rummaged through private customer data or just made things up.