

China’s Tencent is giving away 10TB worth of free cloud storage - adidash
http://thenextweb.com/asia/2013/08/30/forget-1tb-chinas-tencent-is-giving-away-10tb-worth-of-free-cloud-storage/

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oelmekki
Am I the only one that see that as an obvious trap ?

We just realized that any data going through the wire should be considered as
directly provided to state agencies, and now we're excited to be able to put
our private data on chinese servers ? I genuinely first thought it was a joke.

If you regularly watch your server logs, you know your ssh servers are
continuously tried for bruteforce. And if you often run "whois" against
attacking IP, you know that since last year, most of those attackers are
chinese.

Of course, nothing allows to say those attacks are made by government rather
than individuals (China is the biggest country in term of population, after
all), but that's enough for me to decide not to elect this country as the
place where I put my data (and yes, I try as much as I can to not store
anything in US too).

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levosmetalo
As a non Chinese living outside of China and with no plans to ever travel
there I'd rather let Chines government read my data than my own government.

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derefr
To put it another way: both China and the US might read all my mail and then
consider me a dissident against their respective regimes. But, if the US
wanted to do something with that information, they could just have me
arrested; whereas if China wanted to do something with that information,
they'd have to start a war.

An analogy: a teenager who sneaks out of the house at night, worries much more
about their own parents finding out, than some other random adult. Other
adults might be strictly more powerful than their own parents in any sense
you'd like to measure, but the teenager isn't living under _their_ rooves.

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sravfeyn
I can't understand how the math adds up! 10TB harddrive on ebay costs $900[2].
To download 10TB once with standard AT&T 30GB-$300 plan, it costs
3000GB*300/30GB 30k USD! Or may be with some bulk-plans it can go down, but
not orders of magnitude. Hard-drive is instantaneous, always available and
safer. May be I am having a bad time to figure out the obvious answer, but
what is it?

[1]-[http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/plans-
new.html#fbid=pKhYW7o...](http://www.att.com/shop/wireless/plans-
new.html#fbid=pKhYW7oAof0)

[2]-[http://www.ebay.com/bhp/10tb-hard-drive](http://www.ebay.com/bhp/10tb-
hard-drive)

~~~
cheapsteak
Slightly OT, but I had a similar reaction to China's "Thunder".

It's a Chinese download manager that has a cache of a large percentage of all
bittorrent content available on the net.

It works kind of like a communal seedbox, whenever a person opens a torrent
using Thunder, it gets sent to the server which also downloads the same files,
unless the server already has it (which it usually does). You'll then be
downloading from the normal P2P network in addition to downloading from
Thunder's servers. It always manages to max out my bandwidth (2 megabytes/s)
so I'm not sure what the max speed you can get is. This also works for old
torrents with no seeds and no peers, as long as someone once used Thunder to
download the torrent, you can grab it from their servers.

The service costs ￥150 per year ($24.5, €18.56), which seems incredibly cheap
for all the storage and bandwidth costs they'd incur

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UVB-76
Assuming you are referring to Xunlei [1] it is effectively a P2P network. The
files you download are then shared with other users.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunlei](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xunlei)

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cheapsteak
Yes, that's the one. The paid version gives access to their file servers,
where it becomes more like usenet than P2P.

They also allow you to stream the content on their servers instead of
downloading to your local disk. You can then use torrents as a kind of
'bookmark' and use Thunder as a practically unlimited cloud storage + video
streaming service. They also transcode all HD content to 'fast', 'HD', and
'ultra HD' versions for you to choose between when streaming.

It's really incredible the things you can do in a country unencumbered by
copyright restrictions

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wiradikusuma
Unfortunately everything is written in Chinese.

But heck, 10TB is 10TB. I'm signing up, I hope I press the right buttons.

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wabbawabbe
Yeah, but isn't the IOS app localized to english? I know the android version
isn't :/

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wiradikusuma
I'm using Android. That is so unfair, considering Android is dominating the
rest of the world, esp. Asia (and not all Asians read Chinese).

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cheapsteak
It's not really targeted towards non-Chinese. I wouldn't be surprised if they
region-lock it to only Chinese IPs either

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happywolf
Tencent is one of the biggest Internet companies in China, with loads of cash.
Espionage will not be my primary concern because common sense dictates you
should not put sensitive information in the cloud, and if you have to put it
out, use encryption.

My concern is this type of services can be taken away from us anytime, even in
US, google and yahoo already shut down a number of services that they don't
think useful/profitable

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nobodyshere
I would probably store something private there... After some GPG of course.

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julien_c
Assuming they didn't break PGP yet.

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nobodyshere
I'd safely assume it hasn't yet been broken. There are hundreds of smart
mathematicians all over the world and in case such thing happens, we'll get to
know about it really fast because it will bring instant fame to anyone
revealing the weakness.

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autotravis
But who outside of China would put anything of importance on Chinese servers?
I guess if you just want to back up your cat gifs...

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forgottenpaswrd
But who outside of China would put anything of importance on USA servers?

It is the same question, given that USA spying is the biggest in the world,
specially industrial spying, and that thanks to the patriot acts they could
spy on you even legally.

You could put something important in the cloud, but this could not be secret.

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Gigablah
I guess it's not so much a question of spying, but whether they will manage
not to lose your data. Hell even US providers stuff it up sometimes.

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kjying
I think it is not a big problem. Tencent is a public listed company with $ 100
billion market value。 Same level with facebook and amazon

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hnha
Blimey! Any idea if there is a way to mount that on a Linux server?

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wyck
For anyone looking to do this you must download an app for your Android or
iPhone, without doing so you just get 2GB.

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li-ch
Actually, the internet speed in China will limit the usage of such services.
It took me 3 hours to upload a 1G file (and I'm in Shenzhen, where Tencent
headquarter is located). I doubt Tencent is just claiming an outrageous number
and assuming no user will ever reach it.

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jasonwill
As a native chinese,I have no comment for Internet censorship .I don't wanna
talk about whether I'm under surveillance for what i'm doing on the web.I just
wanna say fu/ck off CCP.

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epynonymous
most everything's a duplicate: mp3's, movie files, etc. the only things are
files and photos, files probably average less than a mb, photos can start to
get tricky.

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o0-0o
I just signed up, and am now uploading ten tb of win swap files. ;p

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jasonwill
I'm a native chinese,i just made a comment,but unfortunately it's deleted.I
just told the truth,but i didn't expect that in America, a country of
allegedly freedom,did deleted sth they don't wanna see...it's pathetic...

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mattbarrie
They should totally come up with a snapchat clone as well

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joeblau
Here you go:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id597761546?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id597761546?mt=8)

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mattbarrie
$800m of blackmail material

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guilloche
look at what you can find on these 10TB cloud storage with
[http://search.torapp.info](http://search.torapp.info)

