Google drive does support metadata like a description and comments. I wonder if someone posted some copyrighted text in a comment?
Update: Recreated it. Most of them are now flagged. Took about an hour for that to happen. So far, all that have just one byte, being a "1", and also the one that contains "1\n".
The one with "1\r\n" hasn't been flagged. The file names of the flagged files: "one.txt", "onev2.txt", "output04.txt" and "output05.txt".
Screenshots of the email and Google drive: https://imgur.com/a/RHnEJcj (note the little flags on the Google drive view, and the file sizes)
Just added some files with "0" and "0\n", we'll see if "0" is copyrighted :)
Difficult to believe that Google has become so internally dysfunctional that it hasn't fixed this technical embarrassment twenty hours after first being being seen, and then five hours after being reported on front page of Hacker News.
Sometimes I wonder if people think that infrastructure for billions of people is some sort of magic where you push the fix button and magically everything's solved across the globe.
I wish they would finish the thumbs down functionality in youtube music or look at WearOS once in a while (150000 one stars reviews LOL).
Some may say 'you get what you pay for', but after a few paid google gapps accounts getting locked out lately for no good reason, I'll be moving and not paying anymore after drawing a blank from support.
So it's official, Both 0 and 1 are copyrighted :)
Absolute madness cannot be reviewed…
Reason cannot be applied.
Here for instance is a clunker I've had from Cash App support (I'm disputing a package I never received which was returned to the merchant and the merchant won't answer any communications):
"M.J. from Cash Support once more. To be clear, I am not misunderstanding the location of the package at this point, and understand that it has been returned to the sender now.
...
As I mentioned in my previous message, should FedEx update their delivery information to indicate a non-delivered status, we can then process a dispute on your behalf. You can reply back to me here directly should you file the missing package claim with FedEx, they conduct their investigation, and update the package status to reflect non-delivery. At that point we can then move forward on getting a dispute processed for you."
LOL. They know the package has been delivered back to the merchant but they still want me to file a missing package claim for it. The absurdity of the situation is lost on them. All these large companies hire now is soulless drones with no mind of their own.
"Follow the script on the screen, never deviate, even in the face of absurdity. Forever onwards, loyal drone."
Then Automated Stupidity took over.
What if I comment on some file with some copyrighted content in the text, just implying something about that IP, with the copyrighted text in my comment? How can this be infringement?
Translation: "We have no idea if you actually own this content or not, but it would be _way too expensive_ for us to find out for sure! So you're out of luck, but don't worry — it's all worth it so we can make sure children can't stream Marvel movies from Google Drive! Thank you for your contributions to Disney+'s bottom line."
I thought about posting this comment the other day and decided not to, but your mention of Disney+ stirred the idea in me again.
We have so much modern media about Dracula, Sherlock, Cthulhu, etc, a thousand flowers bloom... new movies, new games, new art of all kinds.
Disney & friends stole that from us. We won't have a million new takes on (for example) The Hobbit for decades because of them.
We have copyright terms of up to 120 years... stuff like Pong was made before I was born and won't be public domain until long after I'm dead.
Disney kills culture by ensuring that by the time the copyright expires, no one cares anymore, because no-one was exposed to it in the many decades after it's initial-release profitability (think abandonware, not-in-print books, etc). I think this is true for 99.999% of all works, not the outliers that the corporation milked for a century or more.
It also manifests in other strange ways that I'd summarize as killing our culture. Think of nursery songs as an example. Recall Little Miss Muffet sitting on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. I mean what is a tuffet, who eats curds and whey? The reason we don't have nursery rhymes in present day is that any of those songs are wrapped up in copyright and can't legally be shared.
The only saving grace about your Pong example is that game mechanics aren't copyrightable, so we thankfully have countless clones of Pong to play. Interestingly the same doesn't apply to Tetris, for some reason EA seems to have been able to succeed in largely removing Tetris clones.
The whole incident made me mad, sure. But what it really made me feel was disenfranchised under the regime we live, as it is.
We... are not allowed to LIKE things, unless we do so under a capricious mega corps terms. And whatever release valves our society have are guarded behind financial, logistical, legal barriers, that are just inaccessibly to all but the largest fish with the most to lose. The fact that you like something is and can only be, as far as our culture is concerned, an asset to some corps bottom line. That's it. You're chattel and chattel only.
Sit there
Consume passively
Do not do anything.
Every time I see a thing that I like, this thought just stews in the back of my mind. Fandoms are cattle pens. Liking things is a mistake.
I'm afraid they'll have incentives to automate that review, and then simply repeat that you can't appeal. Now you still can't access your file AND you're out of a $100 :-/
Many places have restrictions like that for limited things like loan decisions, but it's about time to start forcing companies to provide a manual appeals process for other types of decisions that can significantly affect people.
We've gone from copyright as a mechanism for sharing works and licensing others to a situation where there are the in-group, the big media corporations who are allowed to license and remix content, and a sub-class who essentially are not.
Whelp, on the admin panel, you can get a report of those files, and then mark it as a false positive. Which I did. But then nothing happened, and nothing changed. It was no use.
The hilarious bit: It did, of course, allow me to make a copy of the file in question, and then just point the resource I was building to the new file, which was exactly the same. Weeks later... so far, so good.
Imagine your filing cabinet not letting you file employment forms with a SS# on them.
It's the sticky note password problem all over again...
It does not work, in such a myriad of ways that I'd be blown away if it wasn't just some summer intern's project three years ago and it hasn't been touched since. But it does check boxes for audits. And enterprises don't care about actual security, they just want to check boxes for audits.
They should absolutely not be stored in a GSuite document. SSNs should be treated more securely than credit card numbers.
E.g. here[1] is one of Ancestry's many catalogs based on US government data dumps that even allows you to explicitly search by SSN.
So even if one were to argue that SSNs of living people shouldn't be in GSuite, and there may be many good arguments for that, there are vast quantities of SSNs out there that are explicitly and openly shared by the government. If Google starts blocking me from accessing any of my files with notes about family history, I'll be pissed off.
I guess it's time to move off Google Docs too (I've largely left Gmail)
Edit: there is also the (sorta abandoned, or finished/complete depending on your pov) plexdrive project, which does a bit of Plex server specific opinionated stuff and mounts gdrive read only, but which may help with reducing API quota usage according to some reports. I’ve never had any issues with the quotas that I’m aware of, but I did have to tune my settings a fair bit to get it dialed in on a somewhat memory constrained vps.
openssl enc -e -aes-128-cbc -in ${1} -out ${1}.cr -iter +123456 -k <password>
ML enforcing rules is bad enough, but not allowing false positives to be corrected is ridiculous. This is why I would never consider g-suite for any business application.
Otoh, I think there is a legitimate business to be made helping small businesses and individuals secure themselves against arbitrary behavior from big tech. This kind of thing can have serious consequences (imagine if it was something of real substance that got restricted without recourse) and people need to consider hardening their activities against google et al
It's one thing to have a computer flag issues, another to make it responsible for taking action and in this case, making a decision final. Google continues to set poor examples with irresponsible implementations of machine learning. With no accountability, no recourse, no humans to talk to.
"A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must always make management decisions."
If you are using a cloud provider you are not self-hosting.
Self hosting means you own the machine.
(... I have actually used this in the past to work around my employer's moronic proxy)
It might not do anything - writing a letter that sufficiently implies that you are actually collecting documentation and preparing for a lawsuit is an actual skill, and your demands may be unreasonable for them to handle - but you will get an actual factual human being to at least start reading what you've written. And as a bonus, their KPI is in terms of "number of incidents per year" rather than "number of resolved tickets per day".
I've had better luck lately just using contact services to find the personal cellphone and email address of high-ranking employees and contacting them to get escalation.
But since it probably doesn't affect the bottom-line, it's unlikely to actually happen.
Isn't your own solution--that you would never consider g-suite for any business application--the obvious simplest way to "harden" against Google?
But the restriction here is most likely just the inability to share (I would guess publicly). I don't believe it prevents you from accessing your file.
And potentially illegal. According to Article 22 of the GDPR:
"The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."
I think that being accused of copyright infringement (and having your free speech rights curtailed) should count as "similarly significant" to a legal effect on someone.
on edit: clarification as I seem to have offended some people, there is no right to free speech in Europe similar to the right in the U.S Bill of Rights, the closest is the following https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre...
hope this clarifies it for people.
on edit 2: here you can get a country by country overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#E...
Imagine a device that indeed offers to help small time companies in resolving the issues with big tech. The business case will eventually come up to just buy them up and slowly drain their effectivity, while upping the rate tremendously and being able to - if any - strike up the compensation dishes out by big tech. Pardon my cynism but I sometimes look at the airflight industry as the equilibrium of a race to the bottom. With big tech we’re not there yet
why?
When trying to illustrate a problem or bug, one of the typically time consuming challenges is reducing the scenario to the minimal case which illustrates the problem. So thank you, @emilyldolson!
Aside from an empty file, you cannot reduce this any further. It brings to light in simple terms that non-techies can understand how absurd the "ML to solve everything" promise is -- and even moreso how wilfully negligent companies are by providing NO human intervention or support when the machines break down.
Danger of tiny scenarios - I expect that Google like any BigCo will try files containing only 2, 3, 7 - no bug, ok, and then push the fix like this
if (l = read(file) ; l == "1") ... else
Do they all do this? OneDrive, Drop, etc.?
10 years ago “useful”.
These days it’s just “dread”.
I used to be a Google first, now I am one to look at all options and decide if its worth coupling something else in my life to Google. In many cases its not worth it or even required.
Give it time... There are a lot of people feeling that dread about “gmail” now. Have you seen the recent threads about GSuite Legacy? Small businesses and families suddenly need to cough up hundreds of dollars per year or figure out how to migrate away from a product that originally marketed itself as free forever.
Concerning the maps, try https://openstreetmap.org
Concerning the GMail, see this:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30051054
Interesting thing to add in there, how on earth does copyright stuff have anything to do with safety?
"Not only can the violation of intellectual property rights damage the economy, it also poses serious health and safety risks to consumers, and often times, it fuels global organized crime."
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime/piracy-ip...
No helpful detail on why it's not safe.
You can probably gin up a copyright example from, I dunno, the DRM system on some medical device or something, though that's obviously not the real focus of their copyright enforcement work.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/dotcom-wins-settlement-from-po...
"Garbage" docs, inactive email accounts, less search results etc can all be reasonably explained by a desire to not spend money on storage for "low value" data (i.e. data that is unlikely to be accessed in a way that translates to profit for Google). Users, having been trained to rely on free services and the magic of search to summon stuff, have zero incentives to clean up their digital "pollution", and at some point, something's gotta give.
1. Storage is expensive, so software designers and users build tools and habits that are parsimonious with it. Programs would store files in carefully designed binary formats to save space because space was expensive. Users would periodically go through directories on our computers and manually delete old stuff. Apps required users to explicitly choose what to save.
2. Storage gets much cheaper.
3. Seeing that, companies like Google and others offer "unlimited storage" by projecting the observed user behavior from (1) onto the storage costs of (2).
4. But now users and app developers change their behavior since the incentive environment is now (3). Camera apps automatically save every photo you take. Phones record higher and higher resolution video. Users stop deleting anything and rely on search to wade through their sea of bits.
5. Companies how have to adapt to the reality of (4).
I don't think there was anything particularly nefarious or shitty on the part of any participant. It's just the nature of big complex iterated systems with emergent properties.
I find it interesting that one can draw some parallels to physical consumerism and its impact of ecology. We don't generally consider buying day-to-day stuff as nefarious either, until we pay attention to the aggregate impact of the entire supply chain machine, and then it's "80% less polinators" this, and "donated clothes landfills" that. The big difference is that Google as an organization can make the call to - and follow through on - telling users directly to back off if users' consumption patterns themselves become a significant enough liability on the sheets.
I think this "just happens" when you reach a certain scale. For example, I was looking at our reporting at my job the other day and realized for 10k people a day, something wasn't working with our emails. We decided it was a "low priority" because it's "only" 10k people when we send over 30 million emails a day. I'm sure those 10,000 people (a small city's worth!) don't feel that way.
So, "someone" has them copyrighted.
Statistics don't lie, which is presumably why google employs so many of them, to calculate these efficiencies.
However statistics can be used to confuse.
If a file is 50% 1's, then a 1-digit file has a 50% chance of infringing. More than that, the chance of infringement grows pretty fast.
Also, if "1" is copyright, then a file with a "1" in it is infringing; there's no chance there. It's certainty.
I wonder how many ads we need to watch before google implements something even remotely similar to user support? How many billions are enough before we get support?
I know I'm overreacting but I'm getting tired of these articles. We all know that google is messed up (to put it lightly). Some people here don't think that's the case and that's fine. Other people, including me, don't find it surprising at all.
Post something about google killing cute kittens.
I wouldn't be surprised but I would be interested in that story.
I always did say that Franz Kafka never died. He is semi-retired working in google’s PM org, occasionally consulting for the UX teams as well.
"Thankyou for helping google keep the web safe"
followed by...
"A review cannot be requested for this restriction"
Because they explicitly reserve the right to do so in their TOSes.
Not your computer, not your data etc.
That said, I agree 100% that you shouldn't rely on a single point of failure for any backup. Data must be in at least two places.
Do you have an example of Google explicitly reserving the right to delete any/all data with no notice and for no reason?
Just need to name your file something like "Output04.S01E01.NumberOne.1080p.HEVC.x265-MeGusta" and you'll be fine /s
How can they get things so wrong?
You may have to do this the hard way, via Google's address for service of process.[2] Use registered mail or FedEx.
There's also the option of taking Google to arbitration. Legal advice from one of those "free quick consult" services may be helpful.
[1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/responding-dmca-take...
Is there an alternative for encrypted backup & sync between different computers?
Dropbox offers great file history and restoration support. One day I deleted files permanently then the team kindly supported my case to restore the files within a day.
Sorry about the issue, folks! The Google Drive team is aware of it and is working on remediating it.
And thank you all for the many test cases! :)
So reviews of copyright infringement claims _can_ be requested, but only if they reach the front page of HN? That is not OK.
Try testing a file that contains more than a single 1 or 0, such as 01111000.
https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...
"Hi Dr. Emily Dolson, thank you for letting us know about this issue! The Drive team is very much aware of this now thanks to all of you we're working on it!"
So as long as you have a ton of money and are a corporation your privacy should be just fine
Also reminds me this ("Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes"): https://web.archive.org/web/20100607151726/http://www.theoni...
Zero knowledge storage needs to be the default everywhere.
