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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."
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Microsoft Announces OneDrive Downgrades
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You'd like to do it instantaneously, but that's too slow.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jdccdevel on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:17PM
If microsoft can tell what's stored there, they can read what's stored there. That means no (or transparent to microsoft) encryption. Which means unknown third parties accessing my data.
No Thanks, I'll keep my files where I can control them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:24PM
See, I'd be more concerned about "suddenly reduced available hardware at the whim of a corporation"
Their service had a feature that people liked, and because they couldn't make enough of a profit on delivering what they promised, they just deliver something else instead.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:33PM
Which is why before placing your data on any cloud server, you encrypt it yourself before you upload it.
Never, ever, trust the providers promises that their encryption (if they have any to begin with) has your best interests in mind.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday November 04 2015, @04:50PM
... but also avoid 'services' that access your data. I seem to remember Microsoft's "Don't get Scroogled" campaign. Now they're sucking up personal information with Windows 10, looking at what's stored on OneDrive, etc. Nice.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:04PM
It might be hard to successfully sue them for looking at files, because their current privacy policy [microsoft.com] says
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @03:38AM
Well, who says that such privacy policies even matter in the eyes of the law?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:09PM
Clearly, you must be a pedo who is hiding all his pedo-things in OneDrive. What other reason could you have to make your data inaccessible to Microsoft and your friendly LEOs? Did I mention that the LEOs are your friend? THere is no reason not to trust them. They have your best interest at heart citizen!
Won't somebody think of the children? Pedo's do, they think of the children a lot!
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Wednesday November 04 2015, @06:03PM
You're preaching to the choir on this forum, but most people hear the word "encryption" and immediately think "wow -- totally safe." I don't what the solution is. Obviously it should start with more honesty in marketing but that's just a pipe dream.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:20PM
Which is why before placing your data on any cloud server, you encrypt it yourself before you upload it.
The problem with that is the convenience factor.
OneDrive is wired right into Windows 8 and later. It shows up in your directory tree as if it were a regular directory.
With other versions of windows you need to add a utility to map it in, but with 8 and 10 its just there.
Once you give up Drag and drop file management, in favor of any sort of non-automated encrypt-the-store you might as
well just not use it at all.
There was never a promise of encryption, there was only vague promises of not making it public. With exceptions for
law enforcement of course, and the unwary user can make the whole thing public with a couple of
errant clicks: http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/onedrive.aspx [microsoft.com]
Even worse, if you happen to be a clueless (aren't they all?) habitual Facebook user, You run into this: [microsoft.com]
When you share content to a social network like Facebook from a phone that you have synced with your OneDrive account, your content is either uploaded to that network or a link to that content is posted to that network. Content posted to social networks and hosted on OneDrive is accessible to anyone on that social network.
For a while I used OneDrive to store various user manuals in PDF form, all available on the net (somewhere), just for convenience.
I've since disabled it in every computer and device I own, and removed any apps. I can still get at it via the web interface, but I no longer have any reason to do that.
There are some third party projects that propose to use all the cloud storage offerings and meld them into one drive, with redundancy and encryption.
But I haven't kept up on any of these enough to know if they are going to survive or be banned.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:09PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:34PM
DVDs are old-skool. Blue-ray and 4K are the pirates' booty now.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:06PM
In fairness, the movie collection wasn't the only thing in that 75TB usage quote. It also included backup of several entire PCs.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:12PM
Chances are that the people with Tb's didn't really car about encryption anyway - it wasn't "private" information, mostly commercial movies, etc., which may be why it was unencrypted.
Anyone with a brain storing confidential information of any amount would presumably be encrypting it and not show up except in "Other" file types.
(But they may not be renaming it, so it may well still be possible to identify the file type from the extension.)
Nobody really has Terabytes of confidential data. They may have confidential data, and may have Terabytes of data, and may be using cloud providers, but the intersection of the three must be miniscule, if there's any at all.
I'd guess most of these are used like old FTP sites, free web hosting, etc. before them - massive drop points for pirated content that you can link to direct and not need fancy software to download and watch.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 04 2015, @09:33PM
mostly commercial movies,
The actual quote from TFS and Microsoft's announcement was:
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
So you are assuming things that weren't actually said.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @07:26AM
They're encrypting brains now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 05 2015, @02:07PM
Brains have always been encrypted. Despite much effort, decryption attempts have remained of quite limited success.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:32PM
> No Thanks, I'll keep my files where I can control them.
Yeah... about that... didn't you get the memo about MS, Google and Apple agreeing that local storage is bad for you?
Expect them to buy WD, Seagate and the others pretty soon, to "shore up [their] own supply", and discontinue customer products.
Far-fetched? Yup! Unrealistic? Only if you trust Intel and Samsung to stay in that market, and those two are pretty fickle.