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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I have wondered in the past what kind of monitoring / data harvesting google is doing with colab. I don't use them for anything nontrivial or work related precisely because I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google. This story reinforces that they are snooping.

That aside, I don't think I find this too upsetting. They don't let people e.g. mine cryptocurrency either, I think it's fine that they limit how you can use their free (or cheap) "service".

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Is there a good alternative to Colab you can just pay for, that's good for hobbyist individuals? Especially one that gives you shell access?

I tried using PaperSpace for a while but it works maybe 1 in 3 times I tried to use it, they (temporarily) banned me for no reason, they send me "itemized" bills with empty line items, and their support was no help.

What's wrong with Colab Pro out of curiosity (assuming you don't already know of it, which isn't restricted like the free version)?

Last time I checked it wasn't available outside the US and Canada at all, and didn't have a terminal, but I just checked and both of those seem to have changed.

I'm also not a fan of having to upload files to Google Drive and then write special code to import them. It means my code isn't portable to run locally or anywhere else and it's just extra effort. I just want normal file access and to write scripts like I normally would.

Still, I was spurred to ask the question because some people are categorically opposed to anything Google due to privacy issues.

Technically that's not the target use case for Colab; it's Notebook in, Notebook out.

That's a use case more suited to running a VM itself.

- Amazon Sagemaker Studio Lab (free, email signup, no AWS account or credit card required)

paid services on AWS:

- Amazon Sagemaker Studio

- Amazon Sagemaker Notebook Instances (think EC2 + jupyter + integration with AWS services)

Studio Lab doesn't have any GPU instances available in practice, unfortunately. They're permanently out of resources at the moment. The other two options are pretty expensive.

What I settled on is I have a computer with a lower-end nvidia gpu that lets me debug code and do basic stuff but is impractical for training any large model or with lots of data (although since the incremental cost is only the electricity, you can often still get far by training overnight or when you're doing something else). And then I use AWS more deliberately once I've figured out exactly what I want to run. Otherwise, you're reserving a cloud GPU for all the setup and debugging.

If getting a gpu is not practical, I'd try one of the K80s or other cheaper GPUs on AWS for all your debugging and then port to the more expensive instances only if you need them. Doing this as a hobbyist will be relatively inexpensive. I think a lot of the cost incurred as a hobbyist comes from reserving a gpu when you don't actually need it.

Azure and JetBrains both offer jupyter notebooks too

Disclaimer: I work there.

https://www.grid.ai/

Yes, I like them (and I feel like I've seen some other similar services but haven't looked into them closely). Its easy to start and stop interactive instances (easier than AWS imo) for doing stuff in notebooks, and to run training jobs on more powerful GPUs when you need to, because you're only paying for it when you're actually using it.

OVH actually has a (distantly) similar service (much less user friendly than grid and without the whole "grid" feature, but that matters less for hobbyists if you're not doing a lot of parallel runs). I liked the OVH one a lot in principle, but in practice found it too buggy to use properly (and they don't have customer support). For a budget project it could be worth trying.

PaperSpace has improved a lot in the last few months. I've been using them nearly exclusively recently and have had zero issues.

They provide persistent storage and access to the full JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebook software, unlike Colab. I find this makes life far easier, since all my normal terminal workflows work fine.

You could use my Colab imitation docker image on OVH: https://hub.docker.com/r/fxtentacle/ovh-colab-sagemaker-comp...

OVH charges $2 per hour for a V100S

Lambda is great, if you can afford it: https://lambdalabs.com/service/gpu-cloud/pricing

JupyterLab

I've migrated several notebooks from Colab to JupyterLab when playing around with various generative art models; it's a drop-in replacement and runs on your local machine's hardware.

I did have to do some fiddling to install a bunch of Nvidia crap on my local machine, however; blame CUDA.

https://deepnote.com is exactly this!

Disclaimer: I work for Deepnote

The S3 integration looks interesting. Do you have GPUs though? I think that's the main appeal of colab and I didn't see it immediately on your site

You don't seem to offer viable GPU options - or maybe the pricing page is not up to date?

The GPU add-on cost is about 7.50$ per hour for a 12 GB K80 (which has 24GB, so you share it? Also, it's from 8? years ago?). As an add-on, other vendors would give you V100s (possibly multiple ones).

I am pretty sure that's not actually what you are offering, because that would be ridiculous. So you probably want to update your pricing page ;-)

The K80 presents to the OS as two cards. It is common of hosters to seel those parts separately (AWS does so too).

I use https://vast.ai

Vast.ai you can pick a rig with (multiple) consumer graphics cards of your choice

At saturncloud.io we focus on helping data science teams move to the cloud (either in your AWS account or ours). One component we provide is hosted jupyter lab (along with SSH access so you can use PyCharm/VSCode or anything else.

Hobbyists often use our free tier (30 hrs of GPU per month) or pay for more compute ($0.69/hour) to do a variety of GPU workloads.

We do prohibit things like DDOS attacks and cryptocurrency mining.

> I worry about google stealing my stuff or that I would be violating agreements with my customers by exposing their data to google.

Perhaps it just follows Google cloud's user data policy as long as you're using a paid service? But the latter might be a legitimate concern; some customer may ask their data not to leave any networks outside the contract and depending on this types of public services will increases the likelihood of such accidents.

They do all the harvesting. Everything they can. Every morsel of data they can get, they get.

Same thing Microsoft does with Windows, github and VSCode.

Just hoovering up all the ideas you have.

if you can prove this you can make a lot of money

Oh yeah, how?

Class action, violation of the Terms and Conditions.

I'd honestly be shocked if Google/Microsoft are monitoring the clients of their public cloud and keeping the data to create their own products off of.

Prepare to be shocked.

proof?

The existence of copilot, for one.

that's not proof, lol. That uses publicly available code. are you suggesting it's trained on private code? not to mention I was talking about cloud workloads since you said everything

Nobody said anything about private or public. What was said was 'everything they can get their hands on'. Thou doth protest too much.

everything they can get their hands on includes both private and public data?

they have access to the private data, by definition. the entire point is that it's not exposed nor is it used. clearly you've never worked at one of the companies in question lol. when you're on-call you might need to actually access private data.

true data sovereignty products are something countries in the EU are wanting USA companies to implement though, so then it's simply inaccessible, not public or private.

the industry is moving in this direction with things like AWS Outposts

Google needs to spend more on PR I think.

> when you're on-call you might need to actually access private data.

When I was on-call and had to dive deep to solve customers' issues at one of those companies, we could only access anonymized data stripped of all PII (including emails and even IP addresses), to the point where the only non-scrambled things we could get were timestamps and error stacktraces/executed commands (which were also stripped of all PII, which made debugging a bit more difficult).

And every instance of access to that anonymized no-PII data required a physical authenticator, and it would automatically send an email to your manager (and some mailing group, i forgot) and create a special log that indicated "such and such was trying to access this anonymized ABC data for XYZ stated purpose".

That includes private data. Thou critical thinkest too little.

I think you want "thinkest" (2nd person) rather than "thinketh" (3rd person).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thinkest

Thanks. Edited.

The terms and conditions almost certainly bind you to arbitration so no class action.

What about Europe?

I'd be shocked if they weren't, it seems like a totally standard big corp playbook move. It would be the same exact thing Amazon was doing with their independent seller data[1].

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

that's not the same thing, since it's public info.

They’d need to be very careful in doing so, as they both operate services that are certified and audited to meet US Gov FedRAMP High control standards, and doing that would violate several audited control standards.

A breach in that area would cost them potentially billions in losses.

Public clouds are separated from their gov versions, with gov versions using older, modified versions of what everyone else uses. public clouds ARE NOT fedramp compliant

Not necessarily. Lots and lots of .gov operates in commercial clouds. Google doesn’t even have a distinct offering - just support add-ons for things like CJIS compliance. Microsoft’s footprint is a lot more complex.

Outside of the DoD space, the main distinctions between these offerings is where data can be stored and where and to what level of vetting vendor employees are.

This is not true. Google Cloud ‘s FedRAMP offering uses the same regions, zones and binaries and configurations as the regular public cloud offering.

Source: I work on FedRAMP compliance for GCP Databases.

For reference, this is also the same case for AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/

AWS US East-West (Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Northern California) is FedRAMP compliant at moderate impact level.

Get real, you obviously dont know how organised crime works.

You have proof of these incredible claims - seems crazy to think Google/Microsoft are stealing private data? I know some folks at the NYT if you can provide credible evidence.

Who do you know at NYT?

I know someone who knows some folks there (nobody well known, just professional contacts in IT). But I don't think it actually is all that useful (or impressive, six degrees to Kevin Bacon, right?) anyway, if somebody has actual credible tips that could lead to a big story, they should just go to

https://www.nytimes.com/tips

and contact them through Signal or whatever.

I'm sure you have heard the phrase, "accidents happen"? You need to stop having the wool pulled over your eyes, its so naive.

Good point -- I should stop being so naive and put more faith in the conspiracy theories of strangers from the internet.

A valid debating technique is to introduce doubt. Cognitive Dissonance is a powerful psychological tool.

Read this and learn! The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (spooks, feds, etc.) https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm

Hey, nice link and thanks for being supportive of reality. I think HN should, by default, assume all posters that are PRO megacorps/governments/rich - any person or group that could afford to hire shills - are paid shills. Change the color of their names or something. That way, they need to prove that what they're saying is actually valuable and not just shilling, instead of the way it currently runs where PR is trusted by default.

What's the harm in that, you know? The worst that would happen is that corporations would have a hard time astroturfing. The best that would happen is there'd be less PR.

I don't think aiming to just introduce doubt is a valid debate technique. It is a good way to disrupt productive conversation and ruin debate, though. You've linked to a website about, essentially, derailing discussions. You should stop using those as advice on how to make arguments. Throwing around evidence-less accusations just adds to the confusion, and bad actors are better at exploiting confusion than honest people.

Well you used to be able to use Google to find all the websites that the 5 eyes were seeding conversations on!

All you had to do was copy one of the opening paragraphs from a thread on a forum website like dosbods.co.uk or housepricecrash.co.uk and then paste it into Google and then you could see the exact same starting conversations, word for word taking place on a variety of websites, like pistonheads, mumsnet and others. The press help elevate websites like mumsnet to help with the "consensus cracking" aka psychological manipulation.

Different avatars, but the conversations always started off word for word identical because invariably non spooky sock puppets ie members of the public would join in the conversation so then it would deviate off. This is one of the methods to phish people.

The spooks were on house price crash because they wanted to know why people on there were hoping for a crash. The reason being is maslow's heirachy of needs, suggests shelter is one of the basic needs, so mortgages are a way of controlling people en-masse which we have seen since the late 90's with property prices going through the roof and endless hours of property porn on tv. Northern Rock 125% mortgages showed people would over extend themselves for the idea that on paper they were rich and gambling on capital appreciation without realising tax rules may change in the future. Its one of the many many ways the so called free press have played their part in manipulating and controlling the public, along with the banks lending without caution etc etc, but this is the beuaty of the hierarchical structure of control, beit employment or other entities which control everyone's lives.

I've actually met former head of MI5 Andrew Parker, in Bishop's Stortford, but I didnt know him, I only recognised him when he did a speech on terrorism some years later that was broadcast on the BBC 6 o clock news. What was interesting is he used his real life accent when talking to me, but used the BBC Received Pronunciation when doing the speech on Terrorism. I also met James Brokenshire MP then Tory housing minister, with Dame Stella Rimmington & Baron Jonathan Evans at the pump house at Wastwater, Scafell Pike, the day after Theresa May called the election! It was their way of telling me they were operating on Housepricecrash.co.uk. Why else would they drag the govt housing minister up to Scafell Pike when he was supposed to be off getting lung cancer treatment!?!

Its the spooks job to protect the economy, so phishing people looking for a housing crash is one remit, however they didnt realise they were giving themselves away in more ways than one! I'm always reminded the smallest of viruses can kill the largest of hosts! ROFL

Nah the house has been entered without permission hard drives wiped, been shot at, few attempts on my life, threatened countless times, you obviously live in lala land! You dont run a country by being nice you know!

I'd rather just warn everyone not to use their spyware.

Your ideas aren't worth that much to be honest

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