Insights For Success

Strategy, Innovation, Leadership and Security

Storage

Google to replace Drive with Google One

GeneralEdward Kiledjian

Google just announced their new Google One service. Google One will replace the existing Google Drive service and will allow users to buy additional storage that can be used across its various properties (gmail, drive, photos, etc). 

In addition to the new name, Google is throwing in some additional goodies into the existing plans

  • The $US9.99 ($CAD13.99) 1 TB storage plan will be upgraded to 2 TB for free
  • A new 200 GB tier will be implemented ($US2.99)

Existing 1 TB customers will automatically get upgraded in the coming weeks as soon as the move is implemented. 

Google One will allow you to share your storage allocation with up to 5 accounts. Each will have their own private storage using the total allocation.

Google promises to add some sort of consumer product help and provide "extras" like Google Play credits for subscribers. There aren't too many details yet so we'll have to wait and see. Sounds a lot like the TMobile Tuesday promo.

Google promises to roll out Google One to users in the USA over the coming weeks. No news on the global expansion yet.

Do this to keep your free Microsoft OneDrive Storage

GeneralEdward Kiledjian
4027405769_3f7c23844c_o.jpg

What Microsoft giveth, Microsoft can taketh away. And so Microsoft did the unthinkable last year and announced it would be rolling back the free storage add-ons it gave users (base free 15GB storage going down to 5GB and camera roll bonus) and was clawing back the unlimited Office 365 storage to 1TB.

Understandably there was an uproar and now Microsoft has a setup a special webpage where you can ask them to keep your free storage levels. 

There doesn't seem to be any downside to using this function so go do it now using this link

 

 

 

 

When unlimited Microsoft OneDrive storage isn't really unlimited

technologyEdward Kiledjian
Image by Thomas8047 under creative commons license

Image by Thomas8047 under creative commons license

The sky cleared and trumpets sounded when Microsoft bamboozled the entire cloud storage market by offering unlimited OneDrive storage with certain Office 365 subscriptions. 

In addition to bumping up your storage quote to unlimited, they switched the maximum single-file size limit to 10GB (from 2GB). Just when you think you hit the jackpot, you hit an undocumented artificial limit that prevents you from using the all you can eat buffet in the sky. 

What is this artificial limit ?

UserVoice snapshot from here (link)

UserVoice snapshot from here (link)

They limit you to 20,000 files total. This means that most users won't get anywhere near the kinds of storage usage scenarios most of us thought Microsoft would be dealing with.  Unfortunately most users aren't aware of this. They will start uploading their photo collection and then all of a sudden their agent will stop uploading files. The agent won't generate any errors. Everything will look perfectly fine but they have reached their limit and the game is over.

What about the competition? Dropbox has a statement on this (link) page that says:

The number of files you can store in your Dropbox is only limited by the amount of online storage space in your Dropbox account[...]
Dropbox’s performance may start to decline when you store above 300,000 files
— dropbox help

Although Microsoft's Office 365 + unlimited storage seems enticing, I would still stick with Dropbox for online cloud storage because it just works better in every way ( faster upload, faster download, no artificial file limits, clients on every platform that work well, etc).

Is your SD card hacking you?

technologyEdward Kiledjian
CC Image - Flick user scanlime

CC Image - Flick user scanlime

Think of all of the information your SD cards have seen, questionable pictures, sensitive data. Hardware hacker Bunnie Huang (link) gave an interesting presentation to the Chaos Computer Club Congress that highlighted the fact that SD cards are micro controllers with lax security that can easily be used to trick or hack you.

He first sets the tone of the presentation with this statement:

"lash memory is really cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it’s too good to be true. In reality, all flash memory is riddled with defects — without exception. The illusion of a contiguous, reliable storage media is crafted through sophisticated error correction and bad block management functions. This is the result of a constant arms race between the engineers and mother nature; with every fabrication process shrink, memory becomes cheaper but more unreliable. Likewise, with every generation, the engineers come up with more sophisticated and complicated algorithms to compensate for mother nature’s propensity for entropy and randomness at the atomic scale."

He then explains that engineers add smarts to counteract this act of god (which is where the power for evil comes in):

"These algorithms are too complicated and too device-specific to be run at the application or OS level, and so it turns out that every flash memory disk ships with a reasonably powerful micro-controller to run a custom set of disk abstraction algorithms. Even the diminutive microSD card contains not one, but at least two chips — a controller, and at least one flash chip (high density cards will stack multiple flash die)."

So these microprocessors contain special logic (algorithms) that detect defects and then only make available bits that are expected to be good. Also cards contain more space than shown as available (to ensure the promised amount stays available). This means that a "bad actor" can change the firmware on an SD card to copy data to this hidden storage space. This also means a card can show 16/32/64gB as available when it only contains 2GB (think of low cost no name SD cards from questionable Asian sources).

With this presentation, expect someone to develop an SD card hack to turn these little cheap trinkets into Arduino competitors. 

Not sure how we will secure our SD cards from compromise but I guess you should be buying your cards from reputable resellers and only buy top name brands.

 

Cubby is the latest entry in the cloud storage market

StorageEdward Kiledjian

Logmein is the gold standard for remote desktop access. They have steadily added a bunch of other cloud services from remote technical support to backup and configurationless VPN. Now they have decided to enter the crowded and competitive cloud storage business. 

Cubby is branding for their new cloud file storage service. The key differentiating feature compared to most of its competitors is that you can choose to cloud share any folder on your computer without having to move it into a “special” folder (for dropbox, all shared files have to be located in its special dropbox folder). They offer 5GB of free cloud storage and unlimited synchronization when your computer operates as the main server (a nice touch).

You log in to the service using your free logmein account.

We know they are using 256bit encryption (similar to their logmein product) so this shouldn’t be much of a concern for most users. I would like to see details of how cloud stored files are protected though.  

As I write this, they have clients for Windows, MAC, Android and IOS so most readers should be covered. The service is still in beta and I received my invitation about a day after applying for it. 

I don’t know the cost for additional storage but it has to be cheaper than what dropbox charges. I have installed it and am playing with it. So far no major issues but I do wish they had a couple of short tutorial walkthrough videos about how to configure a file for cloud storage and how to setup “cloudless” unlimited synchronization.

 Link : https://www.cubby.com/