Microsoft announced yesterday that they plan to downgrade their various OneDrive storage offerings.
Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers are now limited to 1 TB of OneDrive storage instead of unlimited storage. The 100GB and 200GB OneDrive plans are discontinued. They will be replaced by a 50GB plan for $1.99 per month in early 2016. Free storage will be reduced from 15GB to 5GB for all free users. The camera roll bonus of 15GB will be discontinued.
Microsoft's reasoning for the OneDrive storage offering downgrades: "A small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DECbot on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:17PM
This whole thing is disheartening. Now where am I going to backup my random bits and files?
dd if=/dev/random of=/mnt/m\$_one_drive
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @05:17AM
Actually, this is an interesting idea.
1) create a new temporary e-mail address
2) create a new OneDrive account for the e-mail address
3) mount the onedrive
4) dd if=/dev/random of=/mnt/onedrive for however many GB you get for free
5) goto 1
And just keep doing that. Since MSFT doesn't throw the data away and if enough people do this, this could make the cost of running onedrive to MSFT very, very expensive and potentially, very very quickly (trust me, they don't throw it away; it actually gets replicated a couple of times across the globe and nothing ever gets deleted - I've been on the inside, it could be illegal porn, or copyright infringing shit or whatever because to them it's just random data, you could even create file that use names of recent movies and use .mkv or .mpeg extensions on the random data you write)
In the capacity planning, they count on people not using their total alloted capacity, but what if many 'people' would start to do so.
And if they ever come back saying: "why are you storing 'random' data"? Then you answer is: it's not random data, it's integers which I've copyrighted.
The only thing I can see where they would catch on and how they could mitigate this is by doing more stringent ID control - which can easily be overcome - or by checking how many accounts are associated with your IP. This could also easily be overcome by creating the account through a new Tor circuit or just finding a mechanism to get a new IP every time.
Once the account exists, it's just a matter of filling the fuckers up with /dev/random.