China’s Tencent is giving away 10TB worth of free cloud storage | Hacker News Reader

China’s Tencent is giving away 10TB worth of free cloud storage

thenextweb.com

30 pointsadidash41 comments

Am I the only one that see that as an obvious trap ?

We just realized that any data going through the wire should be considered as directly provided to state agencies, and now we're excited to be able to put our private data on chinese servers ? I genuinely first thought it was a joke.

If you regularly watch your server logs, you know your ssh servers are continuously tried for bruteforce. And if you often run "whois" against attacking IP, you know that since last year, most of those attackers are chinese.

Of course, nothing allows to say those attacks are made by government rather than individuals (China is the biggest country in term of population, after all), but that's enough for me to decide not to elect this country as the place where I put my data (and yes, I try as much as I can to not store anything in US too).

As a non Chinese living outside of China and with no plans to ever travel there I'd rather let Chines government read my data than my own government.

To put it another way: both China and the US might read all my mail and then consider me a dissident against their respective regimes. But, if the US wanted to do something with that information, they could just have me arrested; whereas if China wanted to do something with that information, they'd have to start a war.

An analogy: a teenager who sneaks out of the house at night, worries much more about their own parents finding out, than some other random adult. Other adults might be strictly more powerful than their own parents in any sense you'd like to measure, but the teenager isn't living under their rooves.

I totally agree with you that it should be considered good practice to host one's data outside one own country, so that we're preserved for any deviant paranoia government may happen to have (and other government would probably care less of individual data if you're not from their country).

All countries are not equals, though. China and US are known to have no regard for privacy, and are prone to violent actions - so I'd rather chose an other country. Of course, we can't expect any country to behave good, simply because we have no mean to know it. But we can expect countries with no aggressive reputation and with low budget to be less dangerous.

There are many reasons why you might see a disproportionate number of requests from that part of the world. At the very least China is most populous country in the world, and Asia is absolutely flooded with cheap hardware. SSH worms have been commonplace for almost decades now, suggesting SSH attempts from a Chinese IP address are obviously the work of an evil government is a little bit unfounded crazy talk.

> Of course, nothing allows to say those attacks are made by government rather than individuals

You have to admit this is hardly suggesting it's the case :)

My point was : I can't know if there's problem with China government, but provided their background, I would rather go elsewhere. I don't see how this could not be perfectly reasonable.

I can't understand how the math adds up! 10TB harddrive on ebay costs $900[2]. To download 10TB once with standard AT&T 30GB-$300 plan, it costs 3000GB*300/30GB 30k USD! Or may be with some bulk-plans it can go down, but not orders of magnitude. Hard-drive is instantaneous, always available and safer. May be I am having a bad time to figure out the obvious answer, but what is it?

[1]-http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/plans-new.html#fbid=pKhYW7o...

[2]-http://www.ebay.com/bhp/10tb-hard-drive

Slightly OT, but I had a similar reaction to China's "Thunder".

It's a Chinese download manager that has a cache of a large percentage of all bittorrent content available on the net.

It works kind of like a communal seedbox, whenever a person opens a torrent using Thunder, it gets sent to the server which also downloads the same files, unless the server already has it (which it usually does). You'll then be downloading from the normal P2P network in addition to downloading from Thunder's servers. It always manages to max out my bandwidth (2 megabytes/s) so I'm not sure what the max speed you can get is. This also works for old torrents with no seeds and no peers, as long as someone once used Thunder to download the torrent, you can grab it from their servers.

The service costs ￥150 per year ($24.5, €18.56), which seems incredibly cheap for all the storage and bandwidth costs they'd incur

Assuming you are referring to Xunlei [1] it is effectively a P2P network. The files you download are then shared with other users.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunlei

Yes, that's the one. The paid version gives access to their file servers, where it becomes more like usenet than P2P.

They also allow you to stream the content on their servers instead of downloading to your local disk. You can then use torrents as a kind of 'bookmark' and use Thunder as a practically unlimited cloud storage + video streaming service. They also transcode all HD content to 'fast', 'HD', and 'ultra HD' versions for you to choose between when streaming.

It's really incredible the things you can do in a country unencumbered by copyright restrictions

Not everyone lives somewhere where the best mobile data deal is like that, I have unlimited mobile data. But most people would be using this from wifi too.

Plus you need to increase your costs to cover backup, geographical redundancy etc.

You don't have to buy a 10TB drive to get 10TB of storage.

A 3TB Seagate Baracuda costs $127 on Amazon, 10TB worth of 3TB drives is $423

Unfortunately everything is written in Chinese.

But heck, 10TB is 10TB. I'm signing up, I hope I press the right buttons.

Yeah, but isn't the IOS app localized to english? I know the android version isn't :/

I got the QQ signup page in English. After signing up the iOS app appears to be in Chinese but a login & password box looks the same everywhere.

There is also a desktop client (in English or other languages) that connects to the same backend (at least I can see my 1TB quota there and the files are visible on the iOS app as well, not sure if adding files there will trigger the quota increase): http://blog.imqq.com/what-is-qq-disk/

I'm using Android. That is so unfair, considering Android is dominating the rest of the world, esp. Asia (and not all Asians read Chinese).

It's not really targeted towards non-Chinese. I wouldn't be surprised if they region-lock it to only Chinese IPs either

Tencent is one of the biggest Internet companies in China, with loads of cash. Espionage will not be my primary concern because common sense dictates you should not put sensitive information in the cloud, and if you have to put it out, use encryption.

My concern is this type of services can be taken away from us anytime, even in US, google and yahoo already shut down a number of services that they don't think useful/profitable

I would probably store something private there... After some GPG of course.

Assuming they didn't break PGP yet.

I'd safely assume it hasn't yet been broken. There are hundreds of smart mathematicians all over the world and in case such thing happens, we'll get to know about it really fast because it will bring instant fame to anyone revealing the weakness.

But who outside of China would put anything of importance on Chinese servers? I guess if you just want to back up your cat gifs...

But who outside of China would put anything of importance on USA servers?

It is the same question, given that USA spying is the biggest in the world, specially industrial spying, and that thanks to the patriot acts they could spy on you even legally.

You could put something important in the cloud, but this could not be secret.

I guess it's not so much a question of spying, but whether they will manage not to lose your data. Hell even US providers stuff it up sometimes.

I think it is not a big problem. Tencent is a public listed company with $ 100 billion market value。 Same level with facebook and amazon

If security is a concern then it's not really different than servers in any other country. Who'd put anything of importance online at all? Cat GIFs is about right. It'd be fine as second-string backup I suppose. I couldn't work out the point of mobile app being involved in the sign-up process though.

I would put my truecrypt partition in Chinese server.

I really would reconsider that: http://hashcat.net/forum/thread-2301.html

How is that a problem? One of the best practices with truecrypt is to not use passphrases but randomly generated key files. Than all you can resort is crypto implementation weakness and bruteforcing the key.

not a problem when you use truecrupt correctly. Using keyfiles for remote stored data is no-brainer.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/keyfiles

Blimey! Any idea if there is a way to mount that on a Linux server?

For anyone looking to do this you must download an app for your Android or iPhone, without doing so you just get 2GB.

Actually, the internet speed in China will limit the usage of such services. It took me 3 hours to upload a 1G file (and I'm in Shenzhen, where Tencent headquarter is located). I doubt Tencent is just claiming an outrageous number and assuming no user will ever reach it.

As a native chinese,I have no comment for Internet censorship .I don't wanna talk about whether I'm under surveillance for what i'm doing on the web.I just wanna say fu/ck off CCP.

most everything's a duplicate: mp3's, movie files, etc. the only things are files and photos, files probably average less than a mb, photos can start to get tricky.

I just signed up, and am now uploading ten tb of win swap files. ;p

I'm a native chinese,i just made a comment,but unfortunately it's deleted.I just told the truth,but i didn't expect that in America, a country of allegedly freedom,did deleted sth they don't wanna see...it's pathetic...

They should totally come up with a snapchat clone as well

Here you go: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id597761546?mt=8

$800m of blackmail material

look at what you can find on these 10TB cloud storage with http://search.torapp.info

Reply on news.ycombinator.com