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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 They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google.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
by oefrha 3y ago
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 They rescinded that offer and deleted people’s data way before Google.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.)
- Former ACD customer who got burned.
- hedora 3y agoThey also banned encrypted files, effectively kicking off everyone using it for backup. I assume this means they look at your photos and other data.
- jeremyjh 3y agoProbably it means they want to compress and dedupe and you cannot compress data after it has been encrypted.
- MetaWhirledPeas 3y agoWait 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.)
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago>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.
- DiskoHexyl 3y agoEncrypted 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
- MetaWhirledPeas 3y agoOK gotcha. Close to, but not exactly 1 because patterns appear even in randomness.
- eichin 3y agoBecause compression implementations generally have overhead, the output can actually be larger (similar to how compressing already-compressed data can produce a larger result.)
- cesarb 3y agoYes, 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.
- cesarb 3y ago> 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).
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- ivalm 3y agoBig part is deduping. If they have a million images that are identical they can just store one and symlink the others.
- rkagerer 3y agoWhat? How can they tell the difference between an encrypted file vs. some binary format they simply don't understand?
- underdeserver 3y agoThere aren't really all that many common unknown binary formats, in terms of GBs in people's drives. Mostly it's photos, pdfs, word documents, executables, videos, etc. Aside from that there are mathematical tools you can use to detect whether a binary blob is compressed/encrypted or not, like entropy calculation.
- NavinF 3y agoIncompressible files that don't use a standard compression format (like a video codec) are usually encrypted
- codedokode 3y agoLet 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.
- rkagerer 3y agoSounds like a cat and mouse game - hasn't someone tweaked an encryption algorithm yet to produce a less even distribution?
- ajb 3y agoThat also applies to any good compression though.
- freedomben 3y agoTrue, 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.
- katbyte 3y agoThey did? I have a bunch of encrypted files on gdrive
- briffle 3y agoThe person your replying to was referring to Amazon Cloud Drive
- freedomben 3y agoAmazon 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.