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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

We knew this was coming we just didn’t know when.

If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it. Maybe three years ago, there was a post by someone using Amazon’s unlimited free storage to store camgirl streams and had amassed a petabyte or so. Cloud storage companies all eventually learn this lesson, but depending on the size of the company they can prop up the free storage options for a while.

https://boingboing.net/2017/08/25/person-tests-amazons-unlim...

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"If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it."

This is an obvious result but I think what really precipitates this move is the creation, and maturation, of tools like 'rclone'[1] that dramatically simplify inter-cloud data transfer and treating disparate cloud platforms as "dumb storage".

It's one thing to have some weird utility that nobody knows about and only runs on linux and stores your data as blobs in gmail[2] ... it's another to have a mature tool with a decent userbase and development community that you can point to actual storage ...

A reminder - there's only one cloud storage platform that has 'rclone' built into the platform.[3]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/

[3] ssh user@rsync.net rclone /local/file s3:bucket

My favorite example of "unlimited storage" was Twitch's original policy of permanently storing all past broadcast VODs. Completely for free!

When they changed that policy, they insisted it wasn't to save space, but I can't believe that. The mind boggles at the number of drives required (ballpark 1GB per hour, with a few million active streamers), especially with the popularity of Twitch exploding at the time.

What do they do now? Only store a certain number of hours?

What about their most popular / famous streamers?

Why isn't YouTube buckling under the same pressure?

>Extended VOD Storage: Partners have VODs stored for 60 days, vs only 14 days for Affiliates.

Youtube is riding the long tail with ads. Hardly anyone watches past VODs on Twitch.

So Twitch is 100% live content. If the technology were easy to replicate and the talent/streamers went elsewhere, Twitch would have nothing?

Twitch has the audience. For that reason the talent and streamers won't go elsewhere. Unless you offer them a sweetheart deal - which other streaming services have in the past - but none of those deals have worked out favorably for those streaming services.

Exactly this. A streamer's audience is only "their" audience the way that say the audience for Game of Thrones was "their" audience. It's a very, very long tail.

Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.

And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.

> And if your plan is "Aha, we'll kill Youtube too" well you'd better be loaded for bear 'cos that platform is not messing around and the people behind it aren't going to run out of money any time soon.

We'll see what happens after the impending antitrust litigation I suppose.

> Other outfits can probably injure Twitch by poaching key stars, but it's not a path to success for these rival services. The absolute most they can achieve is kill off Twitch, at which point it's as likely the piles of small creators just do Youtube, rather than figuring out tooling and financials for your new live service instead.

Microsoft tried with Mixer, they poached some Twitch stars and shutdown earlier this year. those stars just returned to Twitch.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-07/microsoft...

Yeah, and have the uploaders select what they want to save as a more permanent clip.

I believe (I'm not at home in this world at all) the streamers use Twitch for live streaming, then edit (or have employees edit) their sessions into 10-20 minute Youtube videos / series.

Basically, Twitch is losing a LOT of engagement to Youtube because of that.

Its more like 3GB/hour, Twitch maxes out at 6-8 Mbit 1080@60

This is not true anymore. One can stream up to 4k on Twitch.

Is that true for non-partners? I didn't think they allowed a high enough bitrate for 4K.

They don't, for anyone.

You can more or less do whatever resolution you want, but the bitrate limits mean that 1080p is as high as you should go for the vast majority of content.

I remember hearing that YouTube would store bit-for-bit copies of whatever you uploaded, allow you to download it, and wouldn’t check that it was a valid video file.

So we just need to encode our data files into a video format? Sure? There’ll be a lot of overhead due to redundancy to account for compression, but it’s free :)

There's a lot of projects that attempt/do this:

https://github.com/wau/YDrive

https://github.com/TheApeMachine/cloudtube

No—that’s the trick. It didn’t care if it was actually a video format.

The implication being they still save it permanently, but now they validate it's a video feed. So all you need to do is encode your data as valid video.

Then you just package it and resell it.

MP4 is a VERY flexible container format....

I was on this team at the time. We did it because we had the videos stored on our own JBODs and were running out of space. We could also accidentally and permanently lose some VODs because of the lack of redundancy.

>If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it.

There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb

Aye, but the problem is the PBs, not the TBs, from what I can tell.

One thing nobody really says is that backblaze actually requires everything you've backed up to be accessible to the computer at least once a month, so you can't actually delete something you've backed up unless you're willing to lose it in a month, or pay extra for the 1 year retention tier. Essentially you need to own the physical drive space to store anything on backblaze, so there's not much reason to abuse it.

Wonder how difficult it would be to patch the client or just make some sort of fake FUSE filesystem to bypass this.

IIRC their client detects FUSE and friends. People have used iSCSI or ATAoE to bypass this, but that comes with it's own limitations. Most people don't bother.

I doubt $2/month is a disincentive to a hoarder whose only alternative would be to pay per GB for the storage space they are using.

That only allows them to delete things for less than a year, they would still have to develop some sort of system for redownloading all their data, putting it in a backed up drive, and leaving that drive plugged in for about 2 days for backblaze to actually notice it

This is literally the Dropbox business model—at least per the Harvard Business School case!

Backblaze charge for egress so it makes no sense to abuse it with constant 500GiB/hour of urandom.txt or porn or Blu-ray rips or TV recordings. It’s only useful/usable for backups(as should be!)

The post was about the Backblaze backup service, not B2. You can't abuse B2 by putting too much data on it!

And B2 is more or less fine for streaming. The bandwidth bill will be significantly less than the storage bill.

Egress is more expensive than storage: 1c/GB vs 0.5c/GB-month (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html).

Those are different units. You're making an assumption that the user watches every video in their library once per month. I doubt it. My bet is that someone with a big video library will watch significantly less than half the content each month (including repeats).

Or in other words, look at it more like 1c/GB vs. 6c/GB-year.

I thought you can combine B2 and CloudFlare to get egress for free?

"There was a post about it from BackBaze. They know some people abuse it and put several Tbs on there, but they still make money on average as most people have 100s of Mb ..."

... and this is a mistake.

The issue is not whether you will tolerate loss-leaders or not. The issue is that you create an antagonistic relationship between provider and consumer.

It doesn't matter how nice you are (and the backblaze folks seem very, very nice) - this is a structural reality that will produce predictable bad outcomes.

Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but if your organization creates opposing interests - antagonistic relationships between the consumer and the provider - someone is going to lose:

"... paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions."[1]

[1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...

The relationship is only antagonistic if the provider isn't willing to actually commit to the product they're selling.

If you sell unlimited, you're selling unlimited. It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's only antagonistic when they decide that "Unlimited" needs some asterisks behind it.

The business of selling truly unlimited might not be feasible or viable, but this is more a transparency issue than anything. If you're not willing to actually provide unlimited, don't say that you are. It's that simple.

It's hard for me to feel sympathetic to Google/Amazon for having to store someones 1.8 Petabyte porn collection because that's what they sold them. Clearly they've decided that selling unlimited doesn't make business sense, and that's okay. They're probably right!

But if you offer a product, you should be delivering that product. Anything less is gross.

> The relationship is only antagonistic if the provider isn't willing to actually commit to the product they're selling.

I don’t think the capacity exists to continue serving “unlimited” storage long-term. Over time, the amount of free storage people use increases until you can’t sustain the practice. It’s just a matter of time.

The good bed is that paid storage is ridiculously cheap.

I don't think that's rsync's point. The point is that when someone offers you unlimited storage for a flat rate, your incentives aren't aligned, no matter how good the other party's intentions are. I recommend reading the linked article. It's short and succinct.

> If you sell unlimited, you're selling unlimited. It's not an antagonistic relationship. It's only antagonistic when they decide that "Unlimited" needs some asterisks behind it.

If the business sells unlimited because it does not want the general consumer to feel constricted with online storage, then it is a benefit for the general consumer. When abusers of business products test the business' abilities, they ruin the business' chance of offering a great product that the consumer can find convenience with.

All-you-can eat buffet should be treated as such. But when a bunch of big college guys decide to hang out at an all-you-can eat from 8 am to 8 pm studying and eating, it defeats the product. It defeats the offering for others. And it takes away the experience of going to a place never having to worry about ordering more food than you can eat.

This ain't about feeling sorry for the business. This is about feeling sorry for the consumer. It is one abuser that hurts consumer. And that is bad economics for all people.

I'm somewhat more sympathetic to this position in this case as Google was truly providing Unlimited (until now), essentially.

My issue is more that many things are labelled "Unlimited" but they aren't. They aren't even close. Cell Data plans are Unlimited* (Up to 15GB tethered, Up to 25GB at 4G speed, Video limited to 720P)

The thrust of my point is that if you say Unlimited, you should mean it. If that means nobody says it, I'm okay with that. They have a business to run and they should do what they need to to make it work.

But I don't think they should be able to get away with selling it as "Unlimited" when there are several fine print details to define what that means that are as hidden as possible so that you don't know what they are until you've been parted with your money and run up against the limits.

The amount of people who will stay from 8 am to 8pm will be small and should be taken into account when deciding to offer something without limits.

You cannot have the cake(advertisement of unlimited offer) and eat the cake(limit the unlimited).

It depends on what drives value. Backblaze’s value proposition isn’t bits. It’s just a different business model than yours — and I think rsync.net is awesome for different reasons.

Backblaze kind of limits this by requiring their backup client to have seen a given file in the last 30 days. Beyond that the file is eligible to be pruned. So in practice people dumping data into Backblaze can only keep it there for 30 days, or must have an equivalent amount of storage space locally.

And they deliberately don't provide a Linux client, to deter people from backing up the entire contents of their NAS.

Still some people found ways to trick the macOS client with remote block storage (iSCSI, ATA over Ethernet, USB target mode).

Incorrect. For an additional $2/month Backblaze will keep one year of version history.

They also have a "Forever history" offering, which is essentially a plug-and-play integration with B2, priced at $2/month + $.005/GB/month for versions deleted more than 1 year ago.

30 days vs. 1 year doesn't make a big difference unless you're hardcore about cycling data around as if kiting credit cards.

And the files dumped off to B2 are basically irrelevant to the "unlimited backup for $6" portion of the product.

Sure, you can up the window to a year, or pay the normal rate for B2 on top of your subscription (albeit you don't pay transfer costs).

However, you still need to rotate the data and Backblaze doesn't exactly make that process easy for this use-case. You need to go into the UI and manually select the data you want, wait for it to be packaged up, and then download and restore them to the proper locations. If the files were deleted you also need to mess around with the timeframe in the UI.

This sounds like a poor UI, but for their normal backup/restore users it's fine since you generally want to restore an entire device or you're picking out a particular file you need. This really only breaks down if the size of the device backup exceeds the actual storage capacity of the device, which is probably a rare-ish occurrence. But also, restoring from backup is something that should rarely have to be done anyway.

My point still stands: Backblaze is able to offer "unlimited" storage by making the backup/restore use-case easy, but making the "additional cloud storage" use-case tedious. This generally puts an upper bound on that "unlimited" amount based on how much local storage users actually have.

If it's possible to abuse it then it's not unlimited. Unlimited can't be abused. If usage above certain level is not allowed, then it's not unlimited.

The fault is entirely on company side that do false advertising, not on the people that actually use whatever is promised to them.

You know, in real life, if my shop offers free samples of the great homemade cookies my mom makes, and you come and take ALL of them, you're a sociopath.

It's obviously a marketing ploy, but the people who use so much stuff that they have to be cut off explicitly basically don't have any human decency, in this regard.

That is because your shop is offering free samples of your moms cookies and not an unlimited amount of her cookies for free.

Quoting the Big Lebowski: "you're right, but you're still a jerk" :-)

Almost every time a "free plan" or an "unlimited plan" is cut off (BTW, in life there is no "unlimited" anything, just use common sense), it's not because some random person uses 10-50-100% more than what the person offering it thought everyone would use.

It's more like 1000%-10000%. And that's definitely being a sociopath/jerk.

Data hoarders are jerks, for example, no way around that. There's almost no rational way to explain it, it's just an addiction.

Exactly. There is no unlimited anything, so use common sense and stop offering it. I don't pay for what you think I'll use, I pay for the thing you said you sold me. If you make an offer, it's not my job to second-guess you and evaluate if that offer makes business sense to you.

It's not sociopathic to have no empathy towards a for-profit corporation. Amazon is not a person.

> Almost every time a "free plan" or an "unlimited plan" is cut off (BTW, in life there is no "unlimited" anything, just use common sense)

Corporations offering "unlimited" plans with limits are lying, plan and simple. They should use a word that doesn't imply they're offering something that they're not.

No, I'm not going to come up with an alternative, that's not my job.

Such a weird take on the situation.

Why do you think it's ok for company to offer unlimited services knowing that it's not really unlimited?

Shouldn't you be advocating for companies to be more truthful in their marketing?

Yes, but why cant companies stop doing business with these jerks just to keep everyone else happy? Or limit their speed of uploading or downloading or whatever limitation to the point it is not useable?

It is the same with Mobile plan's Unlimited Data. 20-30GB are fine. Carrier even put up with 100-200GB per month. Because that is the average Data used for Home Broadband. But when carrier said they stop providing services to said customers because they were using 500 or even 1000+GB per month you really cant feel sympathetic to those people.

Some argue why not just but an arbitrary number instead of unlimited. But consumer wants unlimited so they dont feel they are limited. I know that sounds stupid but it is the default consumer behaviour.

If your shop advertises "Eat all the cookies you want', and then stops me when you think I've eaten enough, then you are, essentially, scamming people.

They had published storage quotas, they just never turned on enforcement until now.

> If you have unlimited storage, the data hoarders will find out about it and abuse it.

That reminds me of:

Linus Tech Tips: I Hope Google Doesn’t Ban Us... - Abusing Unlimited Google Drive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2F0wjoKEhg

I immediately thought of the same thing.

I dig their channel but if they tried this out for anything more than the views they're crazy.

There's no cheap way to back up a Petabyte of data. If you find a loophole to do it, you can consider yourself one of the reasons it'll shortly be closed.

Why is storing a limited amount of data on a service selling you unlimited storage finding a loophole?

because nothing is this world is truly unlimited - not even the universe

read "unlimited" as "cover 99.999% of typical client storage needs".

Then advertise your service correctly and honestly. Please do not implicitly redefine perfectly fine dictionary words.

One needs to do this because - should one say, for example, "100Tb" - this means very little for "regular people". If far easier to say "so much that you don't have to worry about it" " as long as you are decent about it".

And then a small minority of users take to the literal dictionary definition - which one is allowed to, which gave birth to vast amounts on legalese on the wrapping bags of sandwiches - and start to scream "you're not truly >UNLIMITED< you owe me".

And then the provider - which assumed common sense - sees that the common sense is not to be taken for granted, and starts to spell more legalese and then starts enforcing limits which are now laid out but perhaps not enforced from the start, because it assumed that people would know how to read between the lines. But said minority doesn't know how to read through the lines and then starts to search for workarounds around the limits, forcing the provider to drop in even harder limits, which affects EVERYBODY because some people need to go through life with a fine tooth comb that exploits each little thing that they can.

So this is the difference between a high trust society and a low trust society - the level of hard enforcement of rules because people will try to exploit even the smallest thing.

Implicitly redefining words is a dishonest way to solve your marketing challenges. Spinning this into trust is hilarious; I think I'd be wasting my time explaining the hypocrisy in your post.

If you treat your customers as morons maybe you should expect to attract morons?

"Typical" is doing a lot of work there. How do I know what you think is typical? What if it's only 1TB?

And if you say "99.999% of client storage needs", that's probably a bigger number than you think and it's hard for me to figure out what the number is.

why do you need to figure out what that number is?

Just use the storage as intended - for your daily needs.

Daily needs do not include a content mirror for pirate bay, or archiving every twitch stream in existence.

Use it in good faith, and if people think you're using too much they will send in a salesman, not the enforcing agents.

Zoolz just killed their lifetime plan some days ago. Limited space for lifetime access that, well, ended not living that long (just 1.5 years in my case).

Now I learnt that it doesn't matter if you do a fair use, strictly following the rules: some companies won't keep their word even when they charge what they thought was good.

And, of course, take a look at what the CEO is up next. It might be indistinguishable from a scam.

A lighter version: I remember a lot of MMOs that offered lifetime subscriptions launching back when everyone was still trying to make the next WoW. I wonder how many of those games are even still online.

How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they called it unlimited.

Tragedy of the Commons.

it isn't a commons if it's owned by a corporation. there is no tragedy of the commons here, because google bears the consequences of these rules. if people try to exploit it then google will either resolve the issue or go bankrupt. either way the problem solves itself.

Just because it’s owned by a private entity doesn’t automatically exclude it from being a common.

yes it does

“commons - land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community.“

It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp

>A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to.

Google owns their hard drive space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

>The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.

Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.

By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios.

The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system.

The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective.

> Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource.

No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.

> By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios.

> The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government.

That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.

It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Even in Native American tribes they made rules about how to use different areas.

The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.

> It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared.

Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted.

The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.

If you have unlimited access to said disk space for a nominal fee, that’s commons.

Similarly, if you rent a hotel room, you have free access to common areas like the pool or lounge. Normally this works wonderfully, until a big party takes over the common space.

I'm not a fan of products that pretend to be unlimited (because nothing is infinite, so no one can actually offer you unlimited anything), but it's kinda obvious that there's gonna be a long tail of users who's usage is orders of magnitude higher than average which make the offering unviable.

Exactly. The people paying $12/month and storing petabytes on their servers is just punishment for hyperbolic advertising. If you offer "unlimited videogame streaming" you can't act surprised when some people decide to play World of Warcraft in 8K for 22 hours a day.

I’m sure the terms of use reserves the right to discontinue service to anyone for any reason. You can do that but you’ll likely be cut off and have no recourse.

Fair enough, as far as that goes. But at some point isn't that just false advertising? Where's the punishment for that, or if you don't think there punishment, isn't it at least a pretty poor way to start a business relationship?

I don't think it can be construed as false advertising as long as the contract is carried out (i.e. if you sign up for unlimited for a year, they offer you that until the year ends). Perhaps Google doesn't see it as a good business relationship either if you're in the 99.999th percentile of usage.

> at some point isn't that just false advertising?

You want one term interpreted literally and the other figuratively? No.

No? Both terms are interpreted literally.

If you offer something that you never intended to deliver is that not false advertising? It really doesn't matter how you go about denying the delivery. It doesn't matter that any given termination is legally in the clear. All that matters (IMO) is that you offered something when you knew up front that you were never going to deliver it.

And yes, the above would mean that marketing almost any service as "unlimited" would be false advertising. I do actually think that practice should be actively disallowed by regulators. I really don't think that having slick marketing terms is more important that having offerings that are truthfully and accurately advertised. A functional marketplace absolutely depends on the ability of participants to readily understand the services being offered.

The data hoarders sub is full of people who brag about breaking storage services, so I'd call that abuse.

The entitlement is quite staggering, as evidenced by the comment you replied to. This is like Cocal Cola putting a free refill station on the street and a bunch of people rolling up with tanker trucks, then getting upset when it's taken away.

Except that it's not free, and Coke doesn't have to promise infinity if it isn't offering it.

Google didn't offer Unlimited either. It's limited to 1Tb but they never enforced it.

In the US it is common for businesses to offer unlimited free refills on soda.

The entitlement here comes from companies that lie about providing 'unlimited' services but whine about being taken advantage of when people actually use these 'unlimited' services.

Advertising a service that a supplier has no intention of providing is called fraud.

Yeah, just like the fraud millions of married couple run when they say "...Till death do us apart" and then proceed to divorce in few years.

And divorce tends to be an expensive and painful process when both sides cannot come to an agreement.

Given all the talk about how scalable some of these services are, they end up being pretty easy to break. I'm not on data hoarders, but I personally "broke" my crashplan account a year or two ago. All it took was having 3TB of data, mostly a bunch of family pictures, some home movies, a half dozen cloned git repos with a crapton of small .c files in them and having an account for >5 years. My client got wedged in some kind of server reindex operation (or whatever was happening on the server side in the datacenter) that took longer than the 24 hour window to complete. After they told me to reduce my retention window because I had to many "objects" it mysteriously fixed itself a week or two later after basically being offline for a couple months.

Similarly some software I wrote a couple years ago, that wrote a bunch of small files into a single S3 bucket caused a lot of grief at a 3rd party S3 like service because they never imagined someone would write a couple TB of data into a single bucket (actually it used multiple buckets but each one was a TB or two of <1k files).

> I personally "broke" my crashplan account a year or two ago.

CrashPlan lost some of my data some time in 2012/13, blaming it on how they work with Windows's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

I should have stopped my subscription there and then, but I continued subscribing for another 2 years, probably because I was anxious about needing something else that was in the file retention history.

It wasn't a very good service anyway — slow to upload, often stopping mysteriously, and requiring 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up.

I effectively disabled their deduper early on. That solved a large part of the slow uploads, and as a bonus it also reduced the memory footprint. The latter of which is still a problem, but checking my machine at the moment. I see its consuming 10G of address space, but only about 600M are actually resident. I think the 10G number is something I tossed into the config at one point too.

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Unsupport...

That means I've probably got a bit of duplication @ crashplan, but given the bulk of the data is a .jpg/mpeg dump from my cameras I don't care about the 5-10% of the archive which isn't compressed and likely has some duplication (the .git repos).

OTOH, crashplan isn't my only backup plan, so if they explode tomorrow I don't think it will cause me any grief outside of having to find another offsite/cloud backup solution.

(also as a further note, looking at my config log, it seems I need /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches bumped pretty hard just to keep it running).

There's two things at stake here:

1. The letter of the service being offered

2. The spirit of the service being offered

Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here...

Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction.

But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.

I wouldn't agree that that's abuse. I'd say that it's a bad business model, and I'd be wary of a scam, but it's not abuse.

A: "We'll store all your data, no limit!"

B: "Ok, here's all my data."

A: "Abuse!"

Doesn't really make sense to me.

Think of it less of legalese and more in terms of human speech and it becomes a bit more understandable why there some people consider this fine.

"help yourself to the drinks" carts your entire refrigerator and larder's supply home

Number 2 doesn't really exist. It simply means lying about the service you're offering when you really intend to offer a lesser service. All so you don't have to say "practically unlimited" or "virtually unlimited" in your marketing copy.

It's not abuse, they can't get the goodwill advertising value from unlimited and then call foul when people take them up on it, that's absurd. If Google doesn't think it can make money with unlimited storage for 12$ then they shouldn't offer it, not offer it then complain about customers using it too much.

Unhelpful perspective, honestly. Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite. This is a distinction that adults don’t have to make except when they are perhaps talking to small children. And besides, it’s not like Google ever promised anyone “unlimited” anything. The contract says “unlimited, unless we decide to change something”. Getting up in arms about the literal wording while ignoring the fact that only the literal wording of the contract matters is also unhelpful.

Google disconnecting unprofitable users is not the issue. They of course have that right, as stipulated in the terms of service. The point of contention is whether it's fair to call abnormally high use "abuse" when the service is marketed as unlimited.

If we don’t use “abuse” then the word becomes less useful and we have to find a new one to cover this scenario. This is the same usage of “abuse” as appears in the expression “abuse of process”.

On the contrary, if we reserve the word "abuse" for situations where the ToS is actually violated then the word becomes more useful.

Similarly, if we reserve the word "unlimited" for things that are actually, y'know, unlimited, then the word again becomes more useful.

Flagrant disregard for commonly understood definitions of words when it's convenient to one's cause is a concrete example of a tragedy of the commons that makes a language less useful overall.

The word abuse also covers scenarios where someone technically or legally has the capability or entitlement to do something, but a convention exists that they will not. This is the usage when someone is said to have “abused their privileges”, or to have engaged in “abuse of process”.

It sounds like you object to the standard usage of these words, which doesn’t seem like a productive position. Olive Garden isn’t actually going to give you unlimited breadsticks either.

Eesh.

Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.

Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.

I left a reply to another comment on this topic. To recap that here though, advertising is a non-technical medium generally not bound to literal correctness, especially when the claim is understood by any reasonable person to be an approximation, given that taken literally the claim is obviously impossible.

Double eesh.

I'm not talking about literal or pedantic correctness here.

The antonym of unlimited is limited. You're using some impressive mental gymnastics to justify advertising a product with one word while providing the opposite.

If the literal interpretation of whatever hogwash the marketing dept is spewing is obviously impossible then I posit that the companies who do so are deliberately misleading consumers for profit. That seems to me to be an open shut textbook example of false advertising. But then neither my job depends on not understanding this distinction, nor am I overpaid lawyer employed to a company engaging in these patently fraudulent activities.

Bringing up false advertising demonstrates a clear misconception that I think is central to your misunderstanding. A claim of false advertising is predicated on the foundation that a reasonable person could have been mislead. But no reasonable person could be mislead into thinking that Google was offering actually unlimited storage, since it is clear to any reasonable person that such a thing is impossible. “Unlimited” is a perfectly acceptable shorthand for “unlimited as far as nearly all users can tell, interested users are welcome to read the full text of the legal contract agreement for more information”.

Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.

> Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite.

So it's false advertising?

No, because again, adults generally don’t have to clarify this sort of thing in their communications. False advertising laws are predicated on the idea that a reasonable person could misunderstand the advertised claim. It would be a burden on society if all communication was required to be as exact as legal or technical communication. If a person wants the legal or technical details they can read the relevant controlling legal documents, which a company must provide before selling a product that has such documents. And which, in this case, made clear that the plan was not “unlimited”.

It's not abuse any more than using your $500/month insurance plan to cover a $12,000/month chemotherapy treatment is abuse. Advertising unlimited storage for $12 is Google saying "We bet the vast majority of our users don't need twelve dollars' worth of storage but will pay it anyway because they want one less thing to have to think about".

On the other hand, your insurance company would have strictly (and wisely, IMHO) defined how many millions worth of chemo your $500/month plan will buy you, or specifically what kinds of treatments will it pay for, and at what rates.

So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.

If you got to a store that has "unlimited" refills for drinks and you go and bring in a set of 40L drums to fill up, thats abusing the service. You know this is a gross overuse of the service which was intended for normal users to fill a drink a few times.

I think its a little less clear for ISPs where large amounts of data usage is normal for average users but in the case of storage, people dumping petabytes of data they don't even care about is clearly misuse. If the drink place stepped in to stop you after 5 drinks that would probably be false advertising.

Yes maybe Google was wrong about calling it unlimited and now they are fixing that by making it not unlimited. That doesn't change the fact that people were actually misusing it

Can't up-vote this hard enough!

> You know this is a gross overuse of the service

How do you know that?

Turn the tables; say that as a customer you agree to a company charging you an unlimited fee each month for a service. Do you think they'd charge just $1 because they 'know' you didn't mean all of your salary?

Filling 40L drums is not covered by the offer since it's free refills, not free fills. You can only refill the container they give you already filled.

If you want to get technical, it's getting a glass and repeatedly pouring it in the drum for - you know, office party, next year of binge drinking or whatever.

If you offer unlimited and only give 2 drinks / person, you're lying, shame on you. If you drink more than 10 people combined, you're drunk with questionable social compass. When you take more than 100 or even 1000 people, then you are technically correct - the best kind of correct for a sociopath.

The service is intended for customers to drink as much as you want. That doesn't include filling up storage drums.

An unlimited storage offer is intended to store as much data as you want. The difference is that there is a low natural limit to how much you can drink.

People aren't wrong for storing unlimited amounts of data in the unlimited amount storage space they pay for. They don't have to evaluate if Google's offer makes business sense for it, that's Google's responsibility.

Yeah, I knew this was coming, just not when, cause this always comes with so-called unlimited services.

It was never unlimited storage to begin with ie. false advertising, just like a FUP is (what is "fair"? Just define the soft and hard limit).

I don't think this counts as abuse in and of itself--now if they were sharing the account with others or something, that's different.

I don't understand why datahoarders aren't using distributed storage like IPFS, TahoeLAFS or others instead of relying on centralized services. I know they have storage space themselves, but I bet they're duplicating it a lot, unknowingly (or knowingly) and if they used better storage, it would be for the good of all.

Have you tried pulling a non-popular file out of IPFS? I can't find the link but an archive put up I think, BeOS ISOs - it wasn't possible to get the file back again, just like if a torrent isn't seeded.

Why is storing a limited amount of data on a service selling unlimited storage considered abuse?

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