Just saw someone whose Google account was shuttered. They’d been… using Sheets to track movies they’d watched.
A question people should ask themselves, but rarely do: What would you do if, tomorrow, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox, and every other cloud provider you use closed your account without warning? Then maybe spend some of today safeguarding against that eventuality.
@craiggrannell to play devil’s avocado, that’s definitely all they had been doing and nothing nefarious that they don’t want to admit to? If the former, surely a cockup on Google’s side?
But agreed, you’re only in control of your local data and anything cloud based could go without warning.
@nanu @craiggrannell I don't think it is Google's place to decide whether the contents of a Spreadsheet is above board. It is their job to comply with law enforcement.
Until they receive a warrant, they need to keep their noses out. The fact that they don't should give everyone who still uses their services pause.
@sheepnik @nanu @craiggrannell LibreCloud. So far so good. Instance up & running in about 10 minutes. They email you your Nextcloud login details and then all you need to do is settle in. https://www.librecloud.host/
Nextcloud starts a bit barebones, but once you add the modules you want (including 2FA and encryption), they take care of the major software updates.
@the_moep @nanu @craiggrannell I don't think this is a case of the law working in mysterious ways, as I don't think making a spreadsheet for the movies you've watched is illegal in any jurisdiction.
This is Google being a bad steward for your files.
@craiggrannell @nanu there was also the guy a few years ago who got his account banned for texting his child's doctor. Google reported him to the cops who spent a few months investigating him and confirmed he had not actually done anything wrong. He sent that police report to Google and they still refused to unblock his account. Lost his online data, lost his phone number, lost his internet access...also couldn't access his online banking and other services that used email or SMS for 2FA...
All because some automated system thought that discussing his child's medical condition with his doctor constituted child abuse (and because he had those texts automatically backed up to Google's servers.)
NYT did a pretty massive article on it so seems legit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220823055404/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
@nanu
I am just here for the devil's avocado
While I agree, it's still an awful lot of work that most people don't appreciate the value of, or can't afford (even though it's not that expensive to get the basics), or both.
There have been a few companies that had a relatively cheap turnkey host-your-own-private-cloud option. The Tonido project used to do it, but shut down. I'm sure there are others.
I remembered the other self-hosting project I had in mind, yunohost.org - it seems to be just what people need, but I never used it personally.
I use mailinabox.email for my email, and sandstorm.org for my content. But while I think sandstorm is spectacular, the project is languishing a bit. There are no known security issues (at least not publicly) but development is slow. I'm trying to contribute in my spare time.
Umbrel looks pretty cool, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
I'm going to get a little technical.
The killer feature of sandstorm.org, in my not especially humble opinion, is that it uses CapNProto (a serialization protocol invented by the same person who created the open source version of Google's Protocol Buffers v2) for application instance sandboxing and ownership. So first, an attacker has to get through the application itself and then the sandbox before they can attack the host operating system. Second, you can have multiple user accounts on a single Sandstorm server and they can share app instances with each other at will but everything defaults to private.
Separating applications into individual Docker containers, which is what I presume Umbrel and yunohost.org does, provides a kind of sandboxing. But managing multiple users and sharing between users is more complex.
@farbel @craiggrannell I never use the internet.
/sarcasm.
Just trying to be funny—not adding anything useful to this conversation.
@craiggrannell I recently moved 100% of my documents into iCloud Drive because why not haha and I set up a carbon copy cloner job on the mini to back up cloud storage to my NAS. That causes CCC to download any updated files so it can back them up.
It’s been fantastic having my laptop and mini synced, and also knowing I have a copy elsewhere.
The weakness is if Apple removes all of my files overnight and the job removes them from the NAS, so I have spinning hdd archives as well.
@steveriggins @craiggrannell
I had a boss that ran into that one. Other boss asked him "what are you doing" because he got a ton of deleted notifications from drop box.
A virus was deleting every file on his computer and dropbox was happily syncing every delete.
@craiggrannell A good lesson in data sovereignty that people don't think about enough
I don't use cloud to host files and only have an MS account
I prefer to use local documents and backing up to a NAS
If MS closed that, I lose a few of my Xbox games and my progress. Nothing important
@craiggrannell
i do NOT ask sources for this one, basically because of privacy.
i already prefered my own clouds or storages, but this sounds scary. and only sheets ! i already heard some youtube restrictions.
@craiggrannell I'm reminded of all of the cases where people kept paying for an old account because they didn't want to lose the email, phone number, etc.
Sadly, not only are people bad at evaluating risks, many don't even understand things enough to even know there's a risk.
@craiggrannell I'd be pretty OK, since I've spent the last six months trying to disentangle myself from them.
The one thing I'd have trouble with is Joplin, since I use Joplin Cloud to sync my notes on desktop, laptop and phone. I'd also lose some of my iTunes music—the songs with password protection on them—but with the upside that I'd never have to log in upon firing up iTunes again.
The great advantage to slow rural internet is that there's no temptation to store a bunch of stuff on the cloud.
But I do have to remember to grab my backup drives in case of fire.
@craiggrannell just saw this today: a writer narrowly avoided losing their sum total works which were stored in google docs
Attached: 1 image Don't trust cloud services with your creative work. #enshittification #privacy #infosec #security #cybersecurity #writing #art
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