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Presidential Ballot Access: Ohio Edition
As of today, a state is currently set to only have one of the two major parties candidates for President on the ballot, but it's not the one you might expect.
To be fair, this law has existed since 2010, albeit with a couple past temporary exceptions (probably a compromise number downstream of a 2006 court case over a third-party candidate 120-day deadline; see references to Blackwell and progeny here). and the Ohio legislature (majority Republican) has done nothing less out of explicit desire to screw over democracy and more because the Ohio GOP's House and Senate are fighting each other, and a GOP interest in getting some sort of Red Tribe value out of it (the closest bill, HB114, also bans some foreign contributions to ballot initiatives, for about the reasons you'd expect). DeWine, the (Republican) governor, is pressing pretty hard to find some sort of solution, whether that ends up an emergency legislative fix, hoping the courts can and will step in, or a more dubious executive branch intervention. And it's not like there's any plausible situation where Ohio would be the turning point for the 2024 election.
((There's some theories that Ohio Dems are trying to bolster Sherrod Brown's chances, though I don't think that's very likely or even particularly coherent.))
To be less charitable, nice motive, still excluding a major political party from the ballot. It's not going to be doing any wonders for society, and as we get closer to the election, the available options, whether taken or merely proposed, will only make the mess clearer. The current planned resolution looks to be a 'virtual Democratic National Convention call', officially nominating Biden before the actual Chicago
disasterconvention. Hopefully, that's enough of an excuse for the Ohio legislative special session to also clean things up, but more likely the virtual call gets counted as close enough for Ohio law (less optimistically, it leaves no one able to challenge it). But the whole thing has just been a parade of one group after another absolutely certain that someone else will fix the problem that they're rolling directly into, and 'it wasn't my fault' is an awful epitaph.Fauci et All Foiling FOIA
None of this is particularly surprising, from a cynic's perspective -- government employees fucking with FOIA requirements is a day ending in Y. There's a steelman where certain scientists involved in climate change research were getting spammed with so many duplicative FOIA requests that it edged on harassment, though given neither Morens nor Fauci every worked in environmental stuff that that's leafspring-grade steel.
There's no serious chance of serious punishment, here: Morens was already investigated and found not guilty of anything that the NIH cared about, and if anyone has problems with him lying to Congress, well, there's some fun legal realism questions about whether the law is the statute or the enforcement, but the enforcement still comes from one place.
On the other hand, it does seem enough to have pissed off no small number of partisans aligned to that One Place, if, cynically, more in the sense that Morens et all got caught. HHS is at least moving against EcoHealth Alliance. If you were to ask what one would consider a good sign, well, there's certainly end results that could point to people taking this seriously.
Title VII Religious Freedom in California
Another day, another VanDyke dissent:
We've had discussions here about a more expansive framework for discrimination, but this seems the punchline. Title VII has prohibited religious discrimination in hiring and firing of employees for sixty years, and while the exact borders of the doctrine have ebbed and flowed from one jurisdiction to the next, or as courts have pushed at the very edges, trying to bring them to these style of cases has been an expensive shitshow, where even the lucky winners spend decades for minimal defenses. Even defining this class of cases is a mess: I want to say discrimination against the 'majority' (but anti-woman discrimination is clearly covered!), or 'non-subaltern' (but trite agnosticism is protected, he says as a trite agnostic), rather than just Groups Progressives Want To Discriminate Against, and that's kinda the problem.
However, that punchline's also a bit of a repeat: not just that VanDyke is writing his dissent at an en banc appeal that had no chance of victory, or that the original opinion had to be edited to not be hilariously wrong, but that Kennedy went to and was decided by SCOTUS almost a year before the original appeal decision came from the 9th Circuit. The facts in Hittle are different, sure -- Stockton alleges, not very credibly, that they 'really' fired Hittle for endorsing a consulting business and for not disclosing closeness to a union president -- but the courts were (supposedly) not yet deciding facts, but merely the motion for summary judgement.
Instead of motions for summary judgement focusing on questions of law, various balancing tests and excuses can fall into play where judges don't like the plaintiff's perspective. Instead of protecting Hittle against employers that were outraged by his place in a complaint-named 'Christian coalition', the law in California now holds that there is a "legitimate concern that the City could violate constitutional prohibitions and face liability if it is seen to engage in favoritism with certain employees because they happen to be members of a particular religion." Sure, that anti-endorsement test had been explicitly rejected contemporaneously to and previously by SCOTUS, but SCOTUS "can't catch 'em all", and increasingly doesn't seem interested in trying.
That failure mode isn't and wasn't inevitable: despite my expectations, Fulton hasn't come back to the courts (yet). But it's a problem that haunts any attempt at legislative or executive branch 'fixes'.
((At a more concrete level, Hittle was fired in October 2011, at a time where he was nearing age 50. The unusual length of the court case here reflects Stockton's bankruptcy rather than overt malfeasance specific to him, but it still means he's in his mid-60s today. Even should, SCOTUS hear this case, overturn it, remand with direct instructions, no further interlocutory appeals or weirdness occur, and the trial occur speedily, he might see a court room on the facts before he self-moots by old age, but probably not before he sees his 70th birthday.))
An Appeal to Heaven
Compare February and to May. Diff, context. Also see here, and here.
The Cloud is Someone Else's (Broken) Computer
Unisuper is an Australian superannuation fund, which is close enough to a psuedo-mandatory version of American retirement funds. AshLael might know the more specific differences. It has 600k members, about one in fifty Australians, with over 125 billion AUD (~88 billion USD) funds under management. It also fell off the internet on May 5th, only restoring full functionality May 20th, allegedly as a result of a 'one-in-a-million' bug in Google Cloud services dropping both the main Unisuper database and all Google Cloud backups.
This is a little weird, and not just for having an actual benefit from multicloud. Google Cloud Platform doesn't have the best reputation, but 'keeping multiple copies of long-standing data' is one of those things cloud providers are supposed to excel at, and having first disclosure come through the client rather than the cloud provider is a decision that Google Cloud didn't have to make. There are even arguments, a la Patio11-style, that part of what a client Unisuper's size is buying from a cloud provider is to have a name to fall on a sword. This has lead to no small number of people reading tea leaves to conclude that the fault 'really' reflected an error by Unisuper (or a separate smaller contractor) making a configuration mistake. Unisuper was migrating from VMWare, which has its own mess, and is exactly the sort of situation you would see greater vulnerability to client developer error. That still wouldn't be great for Google, since most cloud providers at that scale claim a lot of safety checks and emergency backups, but I could understand if they just failed to idiot-proof every service.
Nope :
We probably won't get a full breakdown until the Aussie regulatory agency finishes an investigation (if then), so there may always be more to the story, and a lot of fun questions about what, if any, data was out-of-date or lost from the backup. But this is pretty damning for Google, as things stand.
On one hand, this probably is a one-in-a-million bug, and readily closed. On the other hand, as anyone with network engineering or statistics or X-Com background can tell you, one-in-a-million means a lot less than the naive expectation, and Google Cloud Platform has an estimated just under a half-million business customers, and this is an embarrassing bug.
Does that mean that they're got it out of their system for another million customers? Or that this is just the first time it happened and was big enough a deal to make the news?
((Okay, the real answer is I'm being pedantic and reading too much out of a turn of phrase.))
The bigger problem is that Cloud has long been sold as The Professionals Doing It Right. That was always a little more true at the margins than the center. As bad as rando small businesses trying to maintain a Gitlab instance can get (and it can get bad: even by web software standards, it's a masochist's tool), no small number of seemingly-legit smaller cloud providers have gone belly up, wildly revised their offerings, or just plain disappeared. It's quite possible that Unisuper moved to Google Cloud in part because the Broadcom buyout of VMWare (only finalized in December 2023, but after 18 months of regulatory review) raised concerns that they'd start lopping down product offerings.
(But to move to Google?)
It's increasingly tenuous, here, though. Unisuper are not fresh college grads confused by the difference between a RAID and a backup, but a massive company that maintains many sites as a matter of course. Google is one of the Big Three when it comes to cloud provisioning. One can imagine counterfactuals where a self-run or classically-hosted Unisuper herped the derp, but the factual here makes them look like the competent ones. And that's not alone.
Which would be one thing if Unisuper were the only people pressed into cloud services.
How's everyone feel about OneDrive integration in Windows, or Google and Apple cloud in their phones?
Ohio passed the bill extended the period for the DNC's official ballot deadline to the start of September.
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I remember reading about how the federal agencies involved in the Waco massacre claimed both in court and to numerous FOIA requests that they had little to no video or audio recordings of the raid or the siege, and maintained this story for years. Finally it was revealed through litigation that pretty much all the agents involved in documenting the operations had claimed to be using "personal" devices for their official documentation, with the understanding that anything useful to the agencies would be entered into the record when it was convinient to do so, and the rest withheld from public scrutiny indefinitely. This was in 1993, more than three decades ago.
Within the last few weeks, we've seen ATF agents involved in an unjustifiable no-knock raid resulting in the fatal shooting of a law-abiding citizen claim to have left their body-cameras behind. In the shooting of Bundy supporter Roy Finecum (Wikipedia, lol), FBI agents attempted to conceal having fired shots at Finecum while his empty hands were raised over his head. The record overflows with similar examples.
We discuss with some frequency the question of whether government conspiracies are possible. What we see here, as we have seen many, many times before, is that deliberate efforts to evade lawful oversight are both routine and universal. Nor is there any reason to believe that all or even most such efforts are caught; given the absurd scenarios that result in discovery, here being one email mistakenly breaking cover, or in Hillary's case an unrelated sex-crimes investigation snagging a laptop with emails on it, we are very clearly only seeing a small and randomly-selected portion of the cases. This was, in fact, a government conspiracy, directly related to one of the worst disasters of the last hundred years, which very well might have been directly caused by the conspirators themselves.
No one cares. Nothing will be done. Everyone knows it.
[EDIT] - Why not demand the emails from Google? The government spies on my emails just fine, why can't they get those of Fauci and friends?
There were also a number of 'official' recordings that just disappeared, too, along with other disappearing physical evidence like the famous front door. With the noteworthy exception of Kahoe after Ruby Ridge, it's less that bringing any enforcement against FBI or DoJ destruction of evidence was tried and found hard, and more than trying them was found undesirable and left untried.
In theory, that's the next step: the House had already asked Morens twice about his personal e-mails, producing 2k with a 'voluntary' letter in November 2023, and then getting this dump of 30k pages after a subpoena mid-April 2024, and they had credible reason to believe he was sandbagging them.
But the House investigations are not criminal investigations, nor are they the FBI or DoJ. The theoretically-broad subpoena powers are limited on the enforcement side, and there's little if any executive branch support here. With a few notable exceptions all on one side of the political aisle, the threat of a contempt of congress charge is toothless unless the issuing subpoena bends over backwards about following all rules, and unlikely even then.
And one of those rules are 18 USC 2702, which generally prohibits ISPs from disclosing stored data. There are a few exceptions -- LEO have wide cutouts in 18 USC 2517, 18 USC 2511(2)(a)ii lets FISA and the attorney general do whatever they want -- and some that apply outside of a warrant, but nothing relevant here. This is also why, even though using a personal e-mail for government business makes the entire personal e-mail subject to FOIA review in civil courts (though see caveat about "under agency control", since Fauci retired), it's almost always necessary to motion for a party to the case to disclose them, rather than the ISP or e-mail service.
So, uh, mostly because they don't want to be able to.
If the House really had stones, they would threaten to zero out the budgets of offices evading their investigations. And follow through as necessary.
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Semi-related: The date of the upcoming Canadian federal election.
By statute, Canadian elections are held on the third Monday of October, unless they aren't. Also, MPs only get a pension if they serve for six years. The problem? The third Monday of October 2019 (two elections ago) was the 21st, and the third Monday of October 2025 will be the 20th. The ruling Liberal party has put forward a bill to push it back by a week , to "not conflict with Diwali". Of course, 22 Liberal (and 58 other) members reaching eligibility would have nothing to do with that, particularly when the Liberals are expected to lose a devastating amount of seats.
Why didn't they see this coming in 2007, when they set the fixed dates? The pension rule was already 22 years old at that point, so it's not like it was unforeseeable.
Why not change the pension to be after three terms instead of six calendar years? That seems like clearly the intent and this is surely not the only time three terms will be less than six calendar years!
Six years is a term and a half under normal circumstances. Trudeau called an election mid-pandemic (when he was only two years into the four year term) because he (correctly) thought he was at peak popularity at that time. If that election hadn't happened and nothing else had changed, we would have been half a year into a Conservative majority, so good call, I guess.
That makes more sense. So this is only a problem when you call an election halfway through a term.
Yup, as happened in 2006, 2008, 2011, and 2021. It's not a rare event, it just never lined up perfectly before now.
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Ballot Access - I said this back when Trump was potentially gonna get kicked off Colorado ballots. Neither of the two major parties will be off of a state ballot in any state. It does not matter what rules or procedures they fail to follow they will be on the ballot. I am 95% certain on this. In this 5% chance that it happens, I would like a followup bet that some portion of the US breaks off into its own country. Those are the consequences if you don't maintain the illusion of democracy.
The opposite is true of 3rd party candidates. A single failure to follow a single rule, or a single failure to get a triple the number of required signatures will result in them being off the ballot.
edit- went and did some research.
So aside from Alabama being weird chatgpt could only give me two other examples:
So in one instance we had a literal civil war. And in the other three instances we had major party realignments happening.
Realistically, Ohio doesn't actually have anything to gain from keeping Biden off the ballot, and the Ohio republican party just wants to be dicks about it because they can. Biden has like, a single digit chance of winning Ohio. Whether Biden is technically on the ballot is therefore a minor paperwork issue that Ohio is making a big deal about because it's an opportunity for shitflinging.
That also means that Ohio keeping Biden off the ballot doesn't actually bring any greater likelihood of secession/major consequences. It might indicate that those consequences are more likely than previously thought, but it's not a rung on the escalation ladder.
There (probably) would be: If Republicans could keep Biden off the ballot, that would (probably) suppress blue voter turnout. That would make winning other elections easier. There is a Senate seat Republicans are trying to flip, among other prizes.
Most Ohio Republicans don't actually want to do this, however. Governor DeWine is on record saying they're working to get Biden access, and the rest of the party is in agreement. Democrats are a little bitter about it and don't want to have to concede anything, but the politicos will probably all figure it out.
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It would throw a monkey wrench into all the arguments about "so-and-so won the popular vote".
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The problem there is that everyone's running 1.2-tits-for-tat and as such once the door's been opened it becomes more likely that somebody winds up doing it in a plausibly-in-play state.
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I could see some portion of the US attempting to split off, but what makes you think they'd be any more successful than the last time it was tried?
I'm not sure the US public has the stomach to force a recalcitrant state back into the fold.
I don’t know about that. I’m not sure how representative they are of the general public, but I’ve met Democrats in real life whose Civil War II fantasies would make even the standard “boogaloo”-poster blush. Expanding our scope to the general public, don’t you remember the mass celebrations on social media whenever an anti-vaxxer died during the COVID lockdowns? This leads me to believe that if the “Cathedral” (for lack of a better term) wants the US public to harden their hearts, then they’ll be able to do so just fine.
It’s easy to celebrate your enemies dying. It’s hard to live go through nuclear bombardment drills while your currency hyper inflates, you live under rationing, and there’s a draft on.
And more to the point, the Twitter democrats are not representative of the average American.
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The federal government lacks the state capacity it had in 1860.
…what? I admit I don’t have a great model of the federal government in 1860, but this seems like an insane claim to me.
I can kind of see it. The Federal government in 1860 more than 10x'd itself in just a few years, going from spending $80 million a year in 1860 to spending $1.3 billion in 1865. Over the course of doing that it organized and prosecuted a Continental war against a peer competitor, successfully. Starting from almost nothing in terms of the scale of its military.
Could you see the US government of today suddenly spending $30-40 trillion and getting anything comparatively useful done? That's 'jumpstart space colonization' money and I'm skeptical we'd get 'Moon Dust for All' once all was said and done.
This may be semantics, but I'd say that's not a function of state capacity, but of "spare" (or "surplus" or "discretionary") state capacity. The feds went from spending a couple percent of GDP to spending 15%? Okay, but the main reason we can't start federally spending 15% today is because that would be the biggest budget cut in history!
It would be interesting to imagine how anyone would budget for a Civil War II footing under current conditions. Surely any separatists aren't going to honor the US' Federal debt, and I don't see how the loyalists even continue rolling it over without hyperinflation to de-facto default. At that point it's hard to imagine either side being extended any significant credit, so budgets would have to be actual receipts-meet-outlays budgets, and the cost of "we have to pay for the biggest war since WWII" would be on top of "and we can't keep running the huge deficits we've gotten used to for generations".
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Two is one, one is none, and three's a spare. I run multiple backup solutions on my data because I do not want to lose a bit if any one of them breaks.
For phones, I think you're pretty much stuck with Google or Apple owning your data. That's a large vulnerable surface of your Google or Apple account, so ensuring you set up 2FA (and not via phone number since those can be easily spoofed). I use a hardware key. I'll have to reassess if I ever decide I'd like to start committing felonies, because both of those companies share your data pretty freely when there's a legitimate request from law enforcement. That'll include GPS and location data, and "person who always brings their phone with them decided to leave it at home on the night in question" is very easy to tell from the records. Also important not to google incriminating things. The military uses cell phones a lot when targeting bad guys. Most of them had good OPSEC but their wives never did. My military career was mostly in intelligence, and being resistant to the techniques we used is just not practical for anyone who doesn't believe their life or freedom is in serious jeopardy from the US government (ala Snowden).
At home I'm using a ZFS array to protect against hard drive failure and bit rot. I have a TODO for exploring backblaze, AWS, and other places for offsite storage of large unchanging data sets since I want to keep my data in the event of a house fire. I keep my important stuff on Google Drive mirrored to my ZFS array. I have a VeraCrypt file that holds anything I want to backup but not let Google read. Examples of things that someone might not want Google to read include TOR accounts and bookmarks, "hacking" tools and scripts that have been used in violation of the CFAA, and cryptocurrency keys. Not that I have any of those.
Having seen how Google handles data privacy and security from the inside, I'm not at all worried about their cloud integration from a security perspective. I trust Apple and Microsoft similarly. The company is not going to blackmail you with your nudes or leak your social security number, and employees can't access those things on your account without getting caught. The company will cooperate with any and every government if they feel the request is legitimate, as I mentioned. I keep that in mind, but don't actually want to join up with the Proud Boys or kidnap the governor of Michigan, so I'm comfortable keeping my files with them. I am quite comfortable keeping my SSN and bank account information on my Google because I have the hardware 2FA key (and no other 2FA allowed) to protect against account takeover. The government and law enforcement can already get my SSN and bank account info if they want them. And if Google deletes my account, no biggie because I have a local copy of everything.
I moved my email off gmail and don't have a plan for email backups yet. Another TODO.
In terms of very basic functionality, I was pleasantly surprised to find that AWS' basic command line interface supports something at least comparable to rsync, and setting up my own backups for this sort of data was pretty trivial. If you want to encrypt it locally (server-side is an option, but wouldn't really work with my threat model), that might get a bit more complicated, but I was originally expecting it to require actually writing scripts.
Ooh, strong point in favor of AWS. If you don't mind sharing, what AWS storage type are you using? What's your data size, rate, and cost?
I mostly use it as an offsite backup for unchanging things like family photos and such (a few hundred gigabytes total), not as primarily-accessible storage, so I use
STANDARD_IAwhich is a bit more expensive to read. I think I've determined that it'll cost an extra month or two to actually pull the entire backup were that ever necessary, but at the scale in question that's still pretty reasonable. Cost is somewhere around $100/year.I did do some finagling on the bucket setup and access token permissions to make the contents versioned (can't be completely overwritten) and prevent my CLI instance from deleting things accidentally.
From what I hear, the AWS S3 API is basically the same as many of its competitors (dunno about the CLI tool), and I have friends that swear by BackBlaze (which is free to retrieve). I figure if AWS has much more incentive to worry about bit-rot than an HDD in the closet, and if they starts losing data we're probably in a shooting war or something catastrophic.
On the other hand, I've had family members burned by storing things in bank safe deposit boxes in the past because of issues at the bank, while their houses were safe. Could have been the other way around, sure, but with digital data it's easy enough to make copies.
Great info. Thanks for sharing!
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This seems reasonable. My threat model is a little broader than yours -- the question of 'what happens if something I've already done and isn't controversial today becomes a felony', possibly without me knowing or having prior notice, is a little more prominent in my mind, as a not-straight furry who follows a lot of CTRLPew stuff -- but for a lot of people (and, honestly, even my own use case) there's reasonable questions about where this falls into paranoia.
Yeah, I feel like I recently saw a US court case where someone was found guilty for breaking a law that wasn't a law when they committed the acts. I can't find it now for the life of me.
There are plenty of not-straight furries at Google, so if there's a culture/legal shift I would expect Google (and other FAANG companies) to fight tooth and nail (heh) against court orders to reveal incriminating stuff related to that. For the CTRLPew stuff, yeah, I'd back up those files and notes in a way the cloud providers can't see them. The VeraCrypt file is annoying because I have to upload the whole thing when any small part of it changes, but I'm not sure there's a better solution. I have zero trust in any company's claims of zero-knowledge, unbreakable encryption, or resistance to government seizure.
The rules for ex post facto laws are complex and more than a little arbitrary: the courts have basically allowed everything and anything to pass muster in civil contexts, criminal laws which are 'merely' regulatory in contrast to punitive ones get a pass, and for kinda goofy historical reasons only a very small subset of process changes specific to testimony or rules of evidence are really taken seriously.
There's definitely stuff that would fall into that category, sometimes even stuff that would heavily squick out normies, but I'd caution against overestimating solidarity of any group. Even outside of cases that ultimately revolve around stupid interpersonal shit, there's a long-standing interest in reporting certain classes of bad actors when they're exposed through the fandom. That's not even always necessarily wrong, but neither code nor major names in the fandom notice the difference between Laws I Like versus Potential Laws I Don't.
As a trivial and probably-not-too-controversial here example, were federal law changed such that use of uncleared AI image generation models were criminal copyright infringement, I'm very skeptical that a lot of the mainstream fandom or even its Google-specific employee base would be willing to bend over backwards to protect customers from overbroad warrants in the way that they would over, say, sex toy sales receipts or did over normal copyright infringement.
I don't think it's likely we'll see a massive swing back (zero isn't a probability, though) on the more standard homosexuality, or even just Braeburned- or Rukis-level stuff, but I'm old enough to have seen a number of new taboos established around the borders or less common tastes.
Yeah, lots of agreement there. Cryptomator is supposed to be pretty decent as per-file encryption goes, but their security audit situation is nowhere near as robust as VeraCrypt's and the user experience is Not Great Bob (though better than using GPG raw!), and per-file encryption unavoidably leaks some metadata. Bulk-mounting a variety of smaller veracrypt volumes can kinda work as a compromise, but it's definitely not supported well by the VeraCrypt GUI, acts inconsistently if you're working with volumes rather than files, most workarounds risk leaking password info, so on. Dunno of any approaches that are better.
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Even on your last point, you could use something like Tresorit where they are at least happy to not proactively police you, even if they could, unlike Google which takes initiative to search your files for wrongthink. Why bother with Google Drive? There are many storage providers out there without as much oversight.
Yeah, maybe I should. Part of it is also inertia since I have been pretty invested in Google infrastructure since their early days. But I also don't think Google actively polices your Drive files except for CSAM and people sharing movies through Drive. Having been on the inside, I just don't think there's that much active policing by Google of the sorts of wrongthink I participate in.
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Have you considered keeping a periodically-updated backup in the trunk of your car?
I did that with a second TitanKey for a while. Cars have wild temperature swings and aren't great for storing electronics, so I ultimately moved it to a safety deposit box with a small local bank. It also turns out that if something requires me to do things infrequently but consistently, I usually end up forgetting and failing to do it. So for me, right now, I would rather pay money than time for a backup solution.
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I appreciate the rundown on your file storage strategy, this sounds thorough and fair. I especially like your strategy of using cloud storage and your local storage pool as redundant backups of each other. That seems to me to be a judicious use of cloud storage, while maintaining personal autonomy and avoiding lock-in. I'm not anti-cloud, but I do think being smart with how you use it is the right call. This goes for autonomy as well as cost; I have tens of thousands of family photos stretching back decades, and it became pretty clear to me that any cloud photo provider would cost an insane amount of money to store all this uncompressed.
TheMotte, weirdly, is one place on the internet I go where people are strongly in favor of personal cloud vs. the build-your-own old-school hacker mentality. Then again, the only other places I go on the internet are open source forums, where that mentality is very strong. I'm guessing since the rationalist community drew so heavily from FAANG employees, and the motte drew so heavily from the rationalist community, we have a lot of people who place a great deal of trust in FAANG. It's not so much that I don't think they take security seriously, and more that I think their incentives are misaligned with people's data autonomy. Like when Google decided to make Google Photos not unlimited any more, with it also being somewhat difficult to do a mass-export of your original, full-quality photo data. And Google's usually not too bad with making takeout possible, so that made a lot of people pretty mad.
We put a lot of our lives on our computers, I think having control over them and the ability to make our own choices with how we use and manipulate our thoughts and memories is important. It's not the government I'm worried about -- like you say, they can get whatever they want if they really want to -- but the profit motive, and the random account deletions for inscrutable reasons. Enshittification is real. That's why I really respect your balanced approach and my guess is your strategy is that of the majority among home server enthusiasts. Keep us informed on what you decide for your ZFS backups, I've been looking for a place to store compressed file backups.
That's true, but I'm just not convinced that it's rational to swear off their services because of that alone. It's a mutually beneficial, slightly adversarial economic relationship, like everything in Capitalism. I do think the math is different for people who are breaking the law or actively working on cybersecurity stuff, but what I see most often (IRL) is "Google/FAANG bad!" grunting by people who have huge security vulnerabilities and data leakage through other methods. Maybe that's sampling bias, since my social circles don't include anyone who's been to DEF CON.
My understanding of this change was that your photos now count against your Google account's storage limits, shared with Google Drive, gMail, and all other Google services. If you have a lot of full quality photos and run out of space, you can pay for more storage or compress them. That seems completely reasonable to me. I haven't heard about difficulties in using Google Takeout. I do so occasionally and it's always been straightforward. Are complaints about that change just some combination of "free stuff isn't free anymore" and "I hate Google", or is there something legitimate there?
Hard agree. Time has shown that Stallman was right. I'm glad we can still compile our own OSs from source. In a lot of other areas, I think the battle is lost. I'm living and teaching my kids to deal with the world we're in, and I don't think abstinence-only can work if you want to have a healthy social life. I won't be the guy who refuses to open the menu from a QR code when out to dinner with friends.
The complaints about Takeout may have been overblown. I recall this hacker news thread about the problem, but people there are disagreeing with each other about the issue, and I've never personally used Google Photos so I don't know who to believe. Maybe there was something about EXIF data being stripped? And I recall there was also something about it being difficult to mass delete photos too, making it hard to get back under your storage limit without just wiping everything? That may also have been exaggerated, I don't know. Fair enough, I rescind that part of my description.
But while I understand why they did it, Google going from "you can upload unlimited photos!" to "your photos count against your limited storage quota" does illustrate that you're at the mercy of the provider when you use cloud services, and you need to have a plan for what to do if your prayers they do not alter the deal further ultimately fail.
I don't think it's so much that people think they're bad for that sole reason, and more that I think there are a lot of little reasons why people don't trust them to act in their best interests in the long term. I wouldn't advise anyone to swear off all big tech services without exception, but moreso to be judicious in how they use them and have an exit plan. The corporate version of this is "multi-cloud" or "hybrid-cloud," and it's growing for the same reasons I think people ought to carefully consider their consumer cloud strategy. It certainly saved Unisuper's skin in the story from the OP!
Google, in particular, I am just incredibly skeptical of because of their long history of killing off services people loved due to the management culture that disincentivizes maintaining existing products. I don't trust that anything Google does for consumers will exist in 10 years, except Search (though that one looks more concerning every day), GMail, YouTube, and Drive/Docs (because of its enterprise use). And hence those are the only Google services I use!
Further, I deactivated my Facebook account a long time ago not because of privacy concerns (though I have them) but because they enshittified the algorithm and force-fed me a bunch of toxoplasmosis-filled viral content that just made me angry, instead of the updates from friends and family I signed up to follow. They made the product worse to the point where the tradeoff in the data and attention I was giving them wasn't worth it, so I stopped using it.
Personally, of course, I love self-hosting things. But I certainly don't expect others to share in my self-hosting dreams, and I use third-party and cloud services to share data and communicate with other people.
I think there's an ideal balance to be struck with self-hosting, where you self-host services that are largely self-focused (personal notes, photo libraries, etc) and then judiciously use other services -- yes, even ones with terrible privacy practices! -- to mindfully share some of that data with others. The point is to be mindful, judicious, and self-aware of the choices you make, and weigh costs and benefits. Trying to get your friend to create a login for your nextcloud is decidedly not mindful, judicious, or self-aware, and when people talk about folks like that I make this face. Actually, publishing personal web services on the open internet just seems like an incredibly terrible idea to me, except in very specific circumstances.
The threat model for why people should consider self-hosting is decidedly not privacy from the government, which is a fool's errand. Nor is it, ultimately, privacy from data aggregation, which is almost certainly unavoidable, although I maintain it is a morally respectable stance to try to minimize your personal contribution to it, just as a vegetarian might choose to minimize their consumption of animal products because they oppose factory farming.
The point of self-hosting, for me, is not really about privacy but about control. The dream of the personal computer revolution was putting the power of computing in the hands of the everyday person, giving them autonomy over their own computing to use according to their wishes. I see self-hosting as an evolution of that dream.
People refusing to open menus from QR codes is another confused Nick Young moment for me. That seems to be a clear area in which using companies' web services makes perfect sense; you're at their establishment already and want to find something to eat. You don't, like, plug in your hopes and dreams into the menu website, you're just looking for the filet mignon. Now, I hate online menus, but not for any techy reason: I just find it a lot harder to browse a menu on a phone screen than on a piece of paper in front of me. In a lot of ways I actuallly want less tech in my life!
Abstinence-only in regard to third-party web services just isn't possible, as you say. You need to access services to communicate with people, just as you probably need a LinkedIn to advance your career (as much as I hate it...). What I don't like is the attitude that you should just mindlessly use every random cloud service that advertises itself to you without thinking about their incentives, privacy policy, reputation, and quality. People should make wise choices with their computing just as they do with their automobiles or houses. If anything, my total computing footprint is more important to me than either my car or my house, and certainly more irreplaceable. I don't think you can get an insurance policy to restore your precious thoughts and memories. That can definitely be an argument to use cloud storage, but I also think it's a good argument to use multiple offerings and not to put all your eggs in one basket.
Computers have done a lot to empower governments and corporations in modern times. My goal is just that they should also empower families and individuals too, while they're at it. Of course, the dark fear is that things turn out much more somber, and the Digital Society and its Future looks very much like a tiny elite running machines that rule the world. Not that we live in such a world, of course.
This seems like sufficient cause to refuse the QR code and ask for a paper version?
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How is it difficult? I regularly takeout photos at original resolution and then compress the cloud copies.
I guess you won't respond since you blocked me, but perhaps someone else has context.
It's not unusually bad, either by Google standards or by the Cloud in general*, but Takeout has almost no tech support, can take arbitrary amounts of time to create the archive files, throttle(d) after daily download bandwidth limits that are often far less than the typical Takeout, can miss data, and is weirdly inconsistent between Takeouts. It's very far from the typical Photos experience, both in terms of user experience and in terms of literally not being part of the Photos UI.
Fwiw, I've never had any of the issues you mention (except that it's not part of the photos UI). Of course at the tail distribution of outcomes someone is liable to have a bad experience.
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If any of these datasets contain photos, Amazon's photo storage associated with a Prime subscription is truly and completely 'all you can eat'. (well all I can eat anyways, but I'll bet I have more photos than you)
If they ever decide to wrap this service up (Hi Google!), that backup would be fucked and it would be a hassle of course -- but no worse than if I'd never put the photos there.
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Meta: please consider making multiple top level comments instead of one (excellent!) multi-topic comment. The responses get disorganized as-is.
Also meta: if we allow really long posts, it might be nice to somehow allow folding the long post but not it's replies. You can fold the whole thread, but sometimes I just want to see the new replies.
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I really like the roundups. It makes discussions easier to find later, which is one of the reasons I find these threads so valuable.
I like roundups so long as they’re organized on more or less the same topic. Eg ‘abortion on the ballot in the fall’ with examples from several states, or the country politics roundups that sometimes get posted. What are simply random topics strung together can be difficult to deal with.
Is the organizing topic not System Failure?
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The value of the roundups is hard to casually overstate. Can't tell you how many times I thought I'd read every discussion on this site only to find half a dozen or more gems in the roundup that I'd somehow missed entirely.
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I don't understand the "cloud is someone else's computer" argument at all to be honest. How many companies of Unisuper's size had catastrophic data failures before "the cloud"? Probably more than one!
And as to the application of the question to the personal data storage level, it seems beyond question that for the vast majority of people, their data is more secure (in the sense of preserved from accidental loss) in Google/Microsoft/Apple's hands than if they had to manage their own backups. Maybe a cloud provider loses data for one in a thousand customers, but I suspect that every single person who managed significant amounts of personal data in the days before the cloud lost data at some point due to negligence or mishap.
There's been more than one cloud provider data failure, but yes, it's absolutely true that the average cloud provider (even including the bad ones!) on average are better than the average end user (even excluding the very bad ones).
My argument is more against the framework where the Cloud solves the problem, either entirely or to such a degree that end users don't really need to consider it. That might seem like a strawman -- everybody talks versioning and backup! -- but Actual Professional Standards often difference between centralized and decentralized backup approaches, people colloquially treat the 3-2-1 rule as solved by using different regions or services on a single provider (or worse a locally synced version) for 'media', and I've seen no small number of mid-sized deployments that have bought into it hook, line, and sinker. AWS in particular has a whole spectrum of (weirdly price and provisioned) services Just For being your all-in-one backup solution. There have been IT people responding to this incident as though Unisuper recovered its data thanks to help from Google, rather than a secondary provider.
That's not a Cloud-specific problem. People could -- and people did and do! -- leave all your backup drives plugged in and spinning at the same computer with your live copy, running in your personal server closet. But you could (and would) get slapped in any credible audit.
I think Cloud makes this particularly dangerous because the actual processes and ownership are often obscured or multilayered, at the same time that an increasingly few baskets have increasingly large portions of the eggs. As a business, if you don't investigate close enough, you can find out that your 'multiregion' is really just two sides of the same data center. As an enterprise user, if you don't watch your e-mails, you can find that your data is gone even if the actual hardware owner knows what they were doing. ((And along those lines, the "accidental" in "accidental loss" is some work, here: Google either lost 0% or 100% of Album Archive, depending on how you look at it.)) As a personal user, you can find out that wildly-different subscriptions all use the same (sometimes intermediate) provider.
I guess my point isn't to say that Cloud is bad, but that the Cloud isn't magic, even if it looks close enough for most people that they've stopped thinking about the matter. If you're going to use a cloud-style approach, a single account at a single provider can't be the end-all be-all for any seriously critical data. It's better than just storing your one live copy -- but better than nothing is not a complete and balanced solution. And this incident should put anyone in that sphere on notice.
((And for the broader theme for this roundup, sleep-walking into disaster because someone else will solve your problems for you runs into problems, even at a level where the 'someone else' is either Google or the Aussie regulatory system.))
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The purpose of this phrase, from my mind, is to reinforce that "cloud" is nothing magical, special, or unknowable. It's just another computer, somewhere else, that you pay someone to run on your behalf.
If that's the purpose then I would say that it is essentially a lie. When your data is stored with a major cloud provider, it is not just on some computer similar to yours somewhere, it is replicated in enterprise grade data centers across multiple geos and there is a rotation of highly paid engineers on call if anything goes wrong with it.
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Unfinished sentence there.
I'll come back and try to read this later when I can go through all the blue links to piece together the context.
Thanks, fixed.
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The law has been on the books for plenty of time. I think this is a good reminder that the basic unit of the United States of America is the State, not the political party. I think the Democrats really thought the state would simply roll over and accommodate them, and that expectation is frankly cause enough to remind them of the proper place of the party.
This really boils my blood. Nobody wants to repeal FOIA because it stinks of corruption, so when you're vigorously avoiding it, you look corrupt. This shit should land Fauci, and others, in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison. The only reason nobody will pay for this is because the entire fedgov is corrupt, and the deep state always protects its own. I don't believe Trump will actually fix this, but at least he's saying the right things. Plus, if there's something we've learned form the J6 prosecutions it's that the "Justice" department can and will find the crime if you show them the man.
There's only so much I can say about the Civil Rights Act. Its text forbids discrimination in a myriad of ways, its implementation ensures discrimination against straight white Christain men. If only it were honestly applied, but that was never the point.
This is why you never link to Wikipedia, for anything, ever. If you're going to bother, at least go to the talk page, and search the major revisions. Still, what else is there to say? Wikipedia is a tool of the uniparty. That's why the wikimedia foundation was run by a spook.
LOL. LMAO, even.
I lost my phone after my honeymoon, and did not have cloud backup turned on. Now all my photos are sent straight to Google's servers. It makes me feel icky, but it's better than explaining why I don't have any pictures of my family.
I'd love to know the rationale for repeatedly ignoring these sorts of laws. "Because we can", sure, that works until you can't. At the very least, start lobbying the states for uniform 2-month rules or something.
To preserve the illusion of federalism? Let the state legislatures feel in charge. Everybody knows the one thing Grill-Americans won’t tolerate is not having the D or R on the presidential ballot.
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RE: Google, whatever shine they used to have that they were a smart company full of smart people doing smart things is gone for me. The first cracks were when they ham fistedly censored their search algorithm to remove results for "gun" in their marketplace after one mass shooting or another. And then suddenly nobody could find gundam model kits anymore. That was probably 10+ years ago now, and I can't recall the last "smart" thing Google did. Maybe when their AI beat a Go champion? Since then it's just one public embarrassment after another, and their clown world AI training is just the most politically salient cherry on top of a company that seems to be at total war with competence.
I hate Google with a fiery passion, but they've had a couple big (even Earth-shattering) breakthroughs in the last decade.
Invention of the transformer, which led directly to the wave of modern LLMs that have everyone so fired up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_(deep_learning_architecture)
AlphaFold. I'm not qualified to comment on this, but it is supposedly an amazing breakthrough with large implications in the field of biotech.
DeepMind was sufficiently siloed within Google-the-corporation in that I don't think those count as achievements of Google-the-organisation or Google-the-culture. The thing that Larry and Sergei built appears to now be just another BigCorp with all the resulting pathologies.
The transformer came out of Google Brain, not GDM.
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