Hypothetically, When you buy an iPhone, do you expect to also get the latest model when it is released?
That being said, Apple also releases iOS updates to previous phones, even after they've been paid for.
If this doesn't seem strange to you, then perhaps the same thought process of buying a specific version of software with the expectation that it will work for several years is not unreasonable.
I see no need for a subscription model on every type of software. I pay you once, you ensure that it's written in a way that will continue to work for years to come. End of transaction, as far as I'm concerned.
1. It makes sense that Google wants to stop apps from abusing their storage platform. There are a lot of projects that abuse the data storage capacity. There was that one app that converted files to Base64 or something and was storing files that way as email text. Obviously not cool. However, Google needs to be explicitly clear on expectations and throw some people-power behind the reviews, since many are being denied by (seemingly) some automated process.
2. The second issue I see is that it will encourage less secure methods of using these apps.
SMSBackup+ in particular is discussing the possibility of moving to "App Passwords" to bypass 2FA and provide the app access it needs to upload and store the data.
Issue being, App Passwords are incredibly fragile, they provide near-unfettered access to IMAP and other account features with no auditing.
Caveat emptor and all that.
I think SMSBackup+, specifically, has a bit of a gray line as SMS messages can technically be sent via email and vice versa, (among other similarities). It's a shame that Google is becoming so draconian about their data storage uses.
Some things such as google docs text documents do not count towards your quota - so people converted data to base64 and uploaded that as docs to get free storage - bit of a dick move if you ask me, as it forces google to take steps like this one and kill the goodness for the rest of us
Google offered unlimited storage of private documents and people used it. I see nothing wrong with that. If this became an issue then goggle should have set limits or made it count to your google account storage. There is no point offering "Unlimited storage" and then stop people from using it.
I went to a restaurant that offered free refills last week. I brought a 50 gallon barrel with me, and then took home a whole barrel of soda...
(Or, in other words, somehow all sense of fair play and decorum go out the window once we're anonymous on the internet. And this is why we can't have nice things.)
Google doesn't like storing files as e-mails with base64-encoded binaries because it competes with Google Drive. That solution - the Gmail Drive - existed long before Google Drive, and even had a nice tool that mounted your gmail storage as a network drive on Windows! GMail storage isn't unlimited, so I always considered it fair - they give me a couple of GB of free storage, it's up to me how I use it.
As for the unlimited offers and restaurants, people don't do that too much in meatspace because they'd get thrown out by security for obvious abuse. But they do it a little, like e.g. couples buying one cup and using it together. There are also natural limits to how much soda you can consume or use, even if you got away with taking home a whole barrel (sodas lose gas fast)...
(And note that the "decorum" and "fair play" doesn't apply in meatspace either, when it comes to e.g. retail chains making mistakes in their promotions, like that one famous case where (AFAIR) Lidl in Poland offered refunds for products you didn't like if you brought back the box, whether or not the product was still inside. You can imagine what happened next.)
However, ultimately, it's the company that's playing tricks on people with "unlimited" marketing, and they deserve the problems they get when people take it at face value (offering something with no intent to fulfill that offer is plainly dishonest). Reminds me of a mobile vendor that offered USB modem with free unlimited LTE for $notmuch, back when LTE was a somewhat new thing (~2012). A friend bought the subscription to test it out, and discovered that the "unlimited" LTE was actually throttled past 20th or 30th GB. Guess which company I never considered buying Internet services from since?
It's not because of customers that we can't have nice things. It's because of companies using dishonest marketing tactics and then acting surprised when some people call them on their bluff. It isn't so hard to say "no hard limits <small>but we throttle you past XX $unit, and there are following restrictions on use...</small>", except treating customers with respect is anathema to modern business.
Whats the marketing term for "practically unlimited for normal usage patterns"? Because I think that's what they are after here in marketing.
The majority of the population will use these "unlimited" plans/products in a way that they never realize the limit. However there is always the outlier person that sees "unlimited" and is basically using the product at the max 24/7
Its much easier to say to the avg joe you have unlimited X instead of. Choose from the following 27 plans depending on how much a,b,c,x,y,z you need or even a you only pay per x of what you use! The avg person isn't going to even know those factors.
I think "Unlimited(asterisk)" marketing is here to stay for those reasons and if you are the minority power user then its up to you to read the asterisk
Sometimes it seems that HN and HN-like users like to argue for the sake of arguing. Everyone knows what unlimited means in the dictionary definition and in the marketing definition. Google was doing users a solid with the quasi-unlimited storage, and people abused it. Now people here are arguing that if it's unlimited, then why does it matter what is stored there? Well it's not unlimited, we all know that it's not unlimited, and circumventing normal usage isn't going to work in the end for everyone. I can think of two examples where users didn't have to circumvent normal usage patterns but are severely limited by company policy.
The first is a lot of mobile US carriers. They have unlimited plans, but after n amount of data, your throughput is throttled. You don't even have to do something crazy like use your data plan as an ISP for you and your neighbors in your apartment. It's as plain as day when you sign up.
The other is Olive Garden's unlimited pasta offering. Some friends and I took this up as a way to kill time before a movie. We needed food, but we had two hours. Why not stuff our face til coma? Turns out that the first plate is a full portion. Every other portion thereafter is about ⅓ - ½ the size of the original (estimating), and judging by how long it took to get the 2nd and 3rd orders of pasta out, there's a soft time limit before they'll bring out your additional orders of pasta.
I understand why people want to be so skeptical about unlimited offerings, but are you really doing yourself any favors by intentionally spitting in the face of an offered service?
> Sometimes it seems that HN and HN-like users like to argue for the sake of arguing.
Sometimes. But sometimes, they actually disagree with the official/majority/whatever opinion, and this is this case. I disagree that the way "unlimited" is used in marketing is honest, or desirable, or should be allowed.
> Everyone knows what unlimited means in the dictionary definition and in the marketing definition.
Not everyone. That's literally the point of using this kind of language - some people will not know that marketers have their own dictionary that's different from the one normally used, and the way most of those people will use the service will not reveal the difference, so it's one of the cheapest lies the marketers can tell to pull in extra customers. It's a lie nonetheless.
> The first is a lot of mobile US carriers. They have unlimited plans, but after n amount of data, your throughput is throttled. You don't even have to do something crazy like use your data plan as an ISP for you and your neighbors in your apartment. It's as plain as day when you sign up.
It is, or it isn't. Where I came from, there are plans that offer you e.g. X GB of Internet, and then you're throttled. It's plain as day, says right so on the offer. Then there are other plans, that say "Unlimited", where what they really mean is ~5X GB of Internet and then you're throttled. It's dishonest, especially because those offers are created to make them look more competitive against real ISPs who do offer actual, unlimited Internet, usually by cable.
> I understand why people want to be so skeptical about unlimited offerings, but are you really doing yourself any favors by intentionally spitting in the face of an offered service?
It's called "voting with your wallet". Doesn't really work at scale, but still, it sends some market signal.
That doesn't excuse false advertising. If a company wants to offer "enough foo for 99.9% of customers", they can say that. If a company offers unlimited foo, it ought to be able to provide unlimited foo (which it can't, of course, because it doesn't have unlimited money. Their problem.)
On a related note, I'd love to work for a company that offers unlimited vacation that's located in a country with decent protection against unfair dismissal. I wonder if I could get compensated for the (infinity-365) days of vacation a year I can't take?
"GMail offers unlimited email storage, I can encode arbitrary data in an email. Therefore GMail offers unlimited storage! Wait, they banned me? HOW DARE THEY, FALSE ADVERTISING!"
Where back in the human world its not ambiguous at all what what Google, and every other service ever, means by this and is completely correct to call it unlimited.
Yeah, and "tasty" is a specific marketing term meaning "poisonous", which I won't explain to you when I offer you a tasty sandwich.
Marketing does not create reality, no matter how much marketers may think otherwise. Words have meanings, you can't unilaterally attach some new one to a word and expect people to agree with it.
Marketing doesn't create reality, but the courts do and sometimes what a word means in a legal context is different than in conversation. It usually hinges on some standard of being reasonable.
Sure, and marketing which expects people to use their standard of "being reasonable", while the service being offered under a different standard of "being reasonable", is essentially bait and switch. That only a small subset of customers notice it doesn't make it more OK, it only shows the company is not dumb.
I don't know if I'd call it a bait-and-switch. Gmail is an email service and the purpose is to send and receive emails. Getting upset that you can't use it as a general purpose storage service isn't reasonable (IMHO). There was no baiting in this regard.
That's in interesting point. It's not so much that the sense of fair play is lost, but that it changes. Somehow, we lose track of the human factor when we don't see it and focus solely on "logic" or our own self interests.
In this example "unlimited", which actually means "unlimited within reason" works perfectly well (even though it isn't well-defined) in a human setting. We naturally and instinctively understand that people don't mean "take as many as you want" or "make yourself at home" literally.
But on the internet, if it's a data/storage plan, we might get angry at anything less than infinity, because logically
> "There is no point offering Unlimited storage and then stop people from using it."
I see this also apply to our "moral ease-of-use" for adblockers/paywall bypassers/torrents etc.
It is like a box of donuts at the office. They are free. You can take one. Come back for a second if any are left. But walk off with the whole box and you will be judged for it. Do so repeatedly and it will become a problem enough for disciplinary actions to be considered.
Edit: If I were to try to formalize the rules, I would say that the donuts are free for everybody in the office but not for anybody in the office.
If you are acting as a group with everybody in the office, which means behaving according to certain social rules involving fairness and sharing, then you count as an everybody and can have a donut. Once you cease to do so you no longer count as an everybody and cannot have a donut.
If you have special rights to the donuts, taking them won't get you judged. For example, the person who brings in the donuts can take the remainder home at the end of the day or may choose to give the rest to someone to take home, and there won't be any judgment. Further exceptions can exist on an office by office basis.
Tying this back to Google, I think there is one notable difference. Google is a private company, not a person, and is engaging in an extremely formal relationship by way of EULA/ToS/Privacy Policy/etc. Companies abusing loopholes in contracts are far more tolerated by people abusing loopholes in our shared social contract.
That is likely why my reaction at someone exploiting unlimited Google docs storage is far more 'meh' than someone violating social norms in the office.
Well G Suite deals in academia allow for unlimited storage. If you use the official tools they will throttle you, but if you use something like rclone https://rclone.org/ you can sometimes circumvent these limits.
When I was researching using a tool which leveraged a similar system and talked to a university which had backed up literally a petabyte of data to a single drive account.
Google's vague terms of service in terms of their "unlimited" storage is just a mess on both sides.
Like all cloud storage at the end of the day, if you're a paying customer or not, there are no guarantees you'll ever be able to retrieve anything once its off your infrastructure.
I doubt this has anything to do with my Unlimited Drive storage thing. Google are doing this to stop API consumers from storing user data on their own, presumably less safe than Google's, servers. I agree with that decision completely.
Presumably less secure is not the issue. Buried in the fine print of many of these tools that save you money or do other things with your account is explicit permission to share / distribute / use your data in lots of ways. It's explicitly not secure.
These scam apps trade off being inside the protected platforms, so users expand their trust assuming (incorrectly) that a third party app will treat their data well.
"This is how scammers are now abusing Google Calendar to pillage your data"
"Gmail app developers have been reading your emails"
The headlines are ALREADY happening.
Why should google risk their brand so some grow fast and break things startup can create the next cambridge analytica scandal? They are one big CA type scandal away from being looked at as the next facebook (not a good look).
To me, it reads like this: Google is going to prevent users from storing users' data elsewhere. As if it's Google's data, not users'. Though with the free tier this as well may in fact be the case :-/
I also imagine there is the other side where the third party has crap data security. End users figure that their data is safe with Google and may not consider that there is a third party with their various levels of security.
I can see Google copping a lot of heat should Company X have a data leak and that data was originally gathered from a users Google data store, whether it is justified or not.
Security is the go-to excuse for taking away control from users these days. For those that run Gmail on their own domain this makes 0 sense. They have control over the whole domain, restricting access to Gmail does nothing for security
I agree with your sentiment, but part of the key difference for me is that SMSBackup+ is open source. I've been building the app myself and using it for years, so I'm very certain what it's doing and not doing.
This may or may not apply to the other apps being affected by this ban.
If you have GSuite, it seems you can whitelist existing applications. I've done that with SMS Backup+, so it should keep working for me. At least that's my understanding.
I suppose that people on the consumer side probably don't have that option, and it's probably not enough to get people to start paying.
I attempted to use SMS Gate (a fork) to do backups from the stock messaging app to the SD card. It didn't work.
> I did hear of some folks using their own IMAP server ...
I ended up syncing to a Dovecot IMAP server on my local Linux desktop, which seemed to work just fine. I was apprehensive about the complexity of setting an IMAP server up, but that turned out to be misguided - Dovecot was incredibly simple to get up and running. I assume SMSBackup+ would work just as well as SMS Gate did here.
I eventually ended up moving from the stock messaging app to QKSMS (GPLv3, Github, Google Play, F-Droid) because it has built in backup functionality.
How about an app that just, well, sends the SMS texts to your email, as regular emails? A filtering rule would put them under a certain tag and skip inbox.
The upside of the design is that it requires only one, very clear, permission: send emails to a given address.
SMSBackup+ makes the sender the contact / phone number and the receiver as your number. It's been fantastic for archiving all of my texts and such. I've been able to search it all relatively easily.
I reached out to the author because I've been a user of the app for several years, but I haven't heard back (this was only a few days ago). I'm hoping it can continue in some form.
Edit: Note the absolute phrasing of the parent comment and that the spray force in a strong downpour isn't much less than what's done with firefighting planes in situations that call for that level of pressure.
This video doesn't prove your point. Not only are they actually not directly under that, but this is spread over a much larger distance than trying to target the cathedral would be. They configure their release to spread over a larger area than that.
It proves you can effectively firefight with water from a plane without even snapping tree branches, thus there'd be no reason the same pressure couldn't be used on a building.
I think I found out the reason everybody is going so crazy over this - a controversial figure from the wrong tribe apparently mentioned flying water tankers. Thus even neutral debate over the subject is wrongthink and has to be extinguished.
Why don't you step back for a moment and just admit that given the premises
-Firefighting airplanes can effectively spray in a way that doesn't harm trees
-Buildings are fine in extended substantial downpours
That it must follow
-Spraying a building with a plane in such a configuration would not collapse it
Otherwise you are the clueless one. This is absurd. At least you downvoters (who are ignoring the site guidelines) are letting me see some aesthetically pleasing upvote configurations again when it goes back up, so I appreciate it.
"The weight of the water and the intensity of the drop at low altitude could indeed weaken the structure of Notre-Dame and result in collateral damage to the buildings in the vicinity."
So, yeah, I'm gonna trust the experts on this one, not random armchair Internet quarterbacking.
I was clearly talking about the subject in general, in response to a blanket statement against water on buildings made by tomswartz07. Of course an ancient building might fare worse. Also noteworthy is that their comment said collapse would be inevitable but all this tweet says is "might weaken the structure."
It's not so much that it's an ancient building, it's that its structure is heavily compromised by the fire. It might fare better against an assault of water than lots of modern buildings. You can imagine one of those big warehouse spaces could fold up like a house of cards under an assault.
The larger point is that by the time you release high enough to not concentrate a huge amount of force from the water on the building, you're just not doing that much, not that much more than a really heavy natural downpour for a few seconds (which wouldn't be nearly enough to put out a fire this large).
And the trees aren't an apt comparison because the trees aren't taking the brunt of the water; the ground is. However, the roof of the structure would be taking the entire brunt of the falling water. Several tens of thousands of pounds times whatever speed its falling at squared equals a lot of kinetic energy.
The facts stand, as have been reiterated in the thread above:
- Firefighting airplanes can effectively spray in a way that doesn't harm trees (by releasing the 12,000+ gallons over a very large area)
- Buildings are fine in extended substantial downpours (which is significantly less water per second than an air-tanker dump)
To your thought's end:
- Spraying a building with a plane in such a configuration would not collapse it
Yes, it's possible to spray the cathedral with water in such a way that it will not collapse it, but that configuration is that very little water gets on the cathedral, and is instead spread over pretty much the entire island in the Seine.
At this point in time, however, it likely doesn't matter. Since most of the building has collapsed already, due to the fire. Like we said it would.
That's much more volume at once in any one area and much closer to the subject (so less time to dissipate) than any of the actual flying water tanker videos that have been posted.
The rain falls over an extended period of time, not all at once as one glob. Only several drops are hitting you at any given instant in the rain, so you are only subjected to minuscule amounts of force at any given instant.
The difference would be like standing in the shower for 40 minutes, versus being hit my an entire tub full of water going at the same speed all at once.
I remember during the Khan Academy controversy a few years back, an educator commented on reddit about the difficulty in teaching some kids about rates. Some kids just don't get rates. They think of speed as something like "a feeling of intensity." They just don't have an abstract, generalized understanding of "N things per unit time."
Think about that for a moment. Think about all of the potential for miscommunication.
Yes, but the water sprayed from those tankers isn't much more intense than a severe downpour plus wind. The branches aren't snapped off the trees they're sprayed on here and people are standing right inside it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87hfWatbVPY
I'm comparing strong rain to water plane spray. Maybe the output of some would be too severe, but clearly some are suitable.
Given the leaps and bounds of development in this area recently, I wouldn't call HackRF a go-to device anymore (compared to the more recent devices) but yes- any of them totally would be able to pick this up.
If you don't need transmit capability, the SDRplay RSP1A has phenomenal receive performance for the price. If you do need to generate signals (and you understand your legal obligations), the Red Pitaya, LimeSDR and bladeRF are worthy alternatives to the HackRF.
The Red Pitaya is a particularly compelling alternative from a hardware hacker's perspective, because it does double duty as an extremely versatile measurement and data acquisition device.
The HackRF is a solid, if slightly dated SDR platform. There are plenty of better SDRs out there, but none of them are as ubiquitous and well documented/supported, particularly in the hobbyist space. And none of the better specs of other SDRs matter that much unless you need them, and you'd probably know if you do.
If you're just getting into SDR, I would just get a $20 RTL-SDR, and then move on to something like the HackRF or BladeRF later.
LimeSDR, BladeRF, AirSpy...
The first two are capable of emulating base stations - quite incredible. AirSpy is RX only but has incredible bandwidth and a very clean signal
Yeah, but the Mini has half the sample rate AND half the channels. That's a quarter of the capability for half the price.
I'm also kind of salty that they dropped the MicroUSB variant of the full-size model. The Mini makes sense to have it a "stick" format, the full one does not. The full one having an A connector on it has been nonsense from day one.
I still will probably end up buying one because they're still the best bang for the buck.
>I sent him a link to Mouser, a catalog where you can buy a 0.006 x 0.003 inch coupler. Turns out that’s the exact coupler in all the images in the story.
I did a super quick search, and sure enough, yep- the images in the article are most likely a $0.38/each 0603 coupler.
I'd argue that all this backlash is justification for why we don't typically have to worry about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. When something is egregiously wrong in the news, people talk about it, and we learn. As long as you're reading about something that will critical and knowledgeable people also reading it, then you should feel comfortable knowing that no backlash means it's probably fine.
I'm guessing they optimized for mobile and forgot that desktop is still a thing. Works pretty decently on Firefox on my Android phone. I usually prefer text documents to "apps" that hijack scrolling but this one seemed usable enough for me (apart from search which is difficult to get to and fails to fetch any results).
