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Comment by rickmb | Hacker News Reader

So Microsoft is peeking into private folders, and judging the contents based on political and religious values not inscribed in any law? And completely terminates all Microsoft service to anyone found wanting to obey by these fundamentalist directives?

The warning should not be "watch what you store on SkyDrive", the warning should be "stay the hell away from Microsoft".

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From the code of conduct.: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows-live/code-of-cond...

> provides or creates links to external sites that violate this Code of Conduct.

Along with

> depicts nudity of any sort including full or partial human nudity or nudity in non-human forms such as cartoons, fantasy art or manga.

So linking to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturism would be enough to get banned, no?

No need to go that far. Try linking to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_Adam

Now I need to go warn a family member who majored in art history.

"nudity in non-human forms"

Does that mean that in photos, chimps must wear clothes?

The explained what they meant by that. Non-human seems like a poor term though, perhaps "non-photo" would be closer to what they mean?

I assumed they meant, like, bare-breasted elfs. And presumably you can have a photo of a stallion with certain parts visible but can't have a similar painting of a centaur....

Either way it becomes very difficult to draw lines.

It probably means "flesh tones that our CV algorithms would flag as illicit" -- that is, they are probably prohibiting you from storing images that would create false positives.

To be honest, I think these clauses are broadly worded so they can suspend anyone's account and come up with a justification after the fact.

Note the prohibition of advocating pornography and expressing hatred.

Why don't they just put: "We can ban your account without prior notice for any reason we see fit."

Tons of services have that.

Hey ... I'm partially nude right now, both arms all the way up to my elbows!

I prefer my private data to be "clothed" in an encrypted file system though.

The same thought crossed my mind as I read the article. How does Microsoft know what I'm storing in a private directory?

Creepy level: 110%

Probably by hashing your files and comparing them to a known list of "banned content". I imagine this is one of the ways Gmail disallows child-porn or malware to be sent.

Less likely but more worryingly it could be skin-tone detection and other pornography detection algorithms with a human filter.

In this case they were photos the guy took himself. It's hard to see how they would have got onto a blacklist unless Microsoft put them there.

Naw, I think they just have cheap humans going through it. No big algorithms there. :)

I'm suprised how easily people swallow someone else's hearsay and then spray vomit it out as the truth.

For all we know that guy had a lot worse things than a couple of half nude pics in those 9GB of data.

Having followed a bunch of these types of stories on some other sites (webhostingtalk), 9 out of 10 times the "victim" is holding back so much details from the actual story that they might as well be lying.

And for all we know he had a picture of his newborn. Aren't you promoting the same hearsay?

you said: I'm suprised how easily people swallow someone else's hearsay and then spray vomit it out as the truth.

and then you said: Having followed a bunch of these types of stories on some other sites (webhostingtalk), 9 out of 10 times the "victim" is holding back so much details from the actual story that they might as well be lying.

You're contradicting yourself. You're stating hearsay (you had no direct contact with the issue of 9/10 lying people, you only heard it from webhostingtalk) and then purporting it to be true.

Regardless of whether the original author is telling the truth, it doesn't matter because that's not the point of the article. The point is that you may lose more than you know simply by being deemed a violator in the eyes of Microsoft, so it's buyer beware.

Relating to your comment: People are innocent until proven guilty in the US. If Microsoft found something that they deemed a code of conduct violation, then they can bring it up with the police or they can at least bring it up with the account owner. Maybe it was SkyDrive uploading more than he expected?

> Aren't you promoting the same hearsay?

I'm promoting the statistical observation that there is a 90%-95% chance that these types of stories are made up.

My dataset is gathered over the last decade, from hundreds of stories, first published by the "victim", then detailed by the other party.

> so it's buyer beware

No. It's reader beware, if you want to take my comment into context.

The fact is if there is no sensationalism, then there is no story. Hence we get mostly sensationalism when we get stories. And that's not hearsay.

Care to share this dataset? Otherwise one can only consider you as trustworthy as the stories you condemn.

>I'm promoting the statistical observation that there is a 90%-95% chance that these types of stories are made up.

As far as statistics go, there's a 100% percent chance you pulled that one out your arse.

While we can't easily confirm the truth of what happened, we should be able to confirm if the quote from the SkyDrive ToS is accurate. If it is accurate, then it is worth pointing out to people.

I don't think that private file storage services should be snooping in what I'm storing. Their limitations to what I store should be limited to what's legal (they can have stricter limitations to what I share if they want), and they shouldn't be checking every file (even automatically) to see if it looks legal.

I tried to look for the ToS, but it seems that to see them I have to first get a LiveID and agree to the LiveID ToS, so I gave up at that point.

Code Of Conduct: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows-live/code-of-cond...

Service Agreement: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows-live/microsoft-se...

The people objecting to this on the basis of hypocrisy are making an obvious error and should know better. The population of people complaining about how they were wronged by a corporation has different characteristics than the population of skeptical comment writers.

Stop pattern matching and start thinking.

I'll just leave these here...

http://www.rsync.net/philosophy.html

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

Very clever. I like this.

I was unsatisfied with your company's support to the point that I cancelled services in less than a month. I recommend against doing business with rsync.

Your support engineers aren't familiar with basic UNIX backup utilities and decline to provide support services despite your advertising holding them in such high regard. From rsync's website: "All technical support is handled by engineers that have the access, authority and expertise to solve your issue.

There are NO first level techs and no auto-responders or ticketing systems. You will always deal with a human engineer immediately.

You will receive support for all interaction you have with your rsync.net filesystem. Support is unlimited, regardless of your tool, platform or implementation."

If there's anyone using rsync who has had a different experience, feel free to speak up, but I was less than satisfied. When I saw the shameless self promotion on HN I felt compelled to give a second perspective.

> "stay the hell away from Microsoft"

That would imply that MS is unique here -- they're not. Apple's TOS for iCloud * says it scans content and may revoke service if it finds content it deems "objectionable," "obscene" or "in poor taste" (that last one cracks me up ;) ).

If I remember right -- I'm thinking back to the kerfuffle over Google Drive's and Dropbox's TOS -- the other services have similar clauses.

* - http://www.apple.com/legal/icloud/en/terms.html

Dropbox policy says you must not use the service to:

+ publish or share materials that are unlawfully pornographic or indecent, or that advocate bigotry, religious, racial or ethnic hatred;

+ violate the law in any way, or to violate the privacy of others, or to defame others.

https://www.dropbox.com/acceptable_use

Apple says you can't use their service to:

a. upload, download, post, email, transmit, store or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harassing, threatening, harmful, tortious, defamatory, libelous, abusive, violent, obscene, vulgar, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or otherwise objectionable;

http://www.apple.com/legal/icloud/en/terms.html

Google doesn't seem to mention content beyond the DMCA (maybe I'm missing something):

We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement and terminate accounts of repeat infringers according to the process set out in the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

http://www.google.com/policies/terms/

But the thing is that they are (probably) not actively scanning your files for such content and those terms only come into effect if you're reported by someone.

Plus "unlawfully pornographic" is a huge different to "any kind of partial nudity".

All those only trigger if you share your files publicly. That's fine, but what I don't want is a cloud provider looking through and judging files that I don't choose to share with others.

Perhaps there is context missing but the Apple one above refers to "uploading" and "storing". Seems like it would apply to anything you put in iCloud? And since it includes the catch-all "otherwise objectionable" it would seem to make it quite open ended, almost unusable really.

Assuming Microsoft employees are ravenously pouring over your private folders seems a little short sighted: reliable skin detection is fairly easy to accomplish, which given a folder full of photos testing positive, might get a sample flagged for review. From a cost perspective, it would make sense that the sample might not have been reviewed manually until he contacted support.

It may also have been something as simple as having too many images in the folder fuzzy matching the huge DB of porn they have (Bing and Google probably have the largest collections of all kinds of porn on the planet). This is easily done using e.g. scale-invariant feature transform.

Certainly no cause for "stay the hell away from Microsoft".

So only "a sample flagged for review" of my files will get poured over by Microsoft employees?

Still "stay the hell away from Microsoft" in my book.

How do Dropbox and Google Drive handle this?

I would never trust my personal files with anyone that does this type of detection/manual review.

I have some "questionable content" in my Dropbox, and nothing has happened to me.

Sorry we have to check. Are you human?

Every service I've worked on doesn't look, because they don't want to know -- there's no business reason to know. Having this kind of knowledge about customer content is completely counter to the business goals.

An intelligent company will work to minimize disruption to the user. Affording the user privacy and turning a blind eye to this sort of thing goes a long way towards producing a usable product.

But, what if someone complains? What if this photo was public and resulted in a complaint?

Even then, the idea that an entire account should be suspended over a TOS violation is absurd. By all means remove the content. Perhaps even disallow uploads for a time, or even indefinitely. But a policy of disabling everything including unrelated services and purchased content smacks if ignorant product design and typical Microsoft hubris.

This is a great example of why their product services can't gain traction in the market.

Hopefully by only responding to warrants, instead of trying to play the part of the legal system.

The issue here is that it's private content. Scan the stuff I make public, sure. But there is zero reason to be scanning private content- no-one other than me is going to see it.

The other issue is who is readily available to discuss this if it happens? How do I know my emails don't just go to someone who barely speaks the language? If my Microsoft ID was locked out that's quite a few services I wouldn't have access to.

I can easily imagine them scanning for certain filetypes, then displaying large pages of thumbnails for somebody to review. Porn would be readily discernable, and some would surely enjoy having this job.

At least in the early days Microsoft was known for having a large stash of porn on their network, and it probably wasn't just for academic purposes.

Well you should read the terms of service, and then adhere to them. Perhaps Microsoft would do well to provide in bold letters near the front that most people will find their terms intolerable and should probably not sign up for SkyDrive.

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