Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative

Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by ttul on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:17PM (#15596666)

When you were running an operation at Google scale, the challenge of fighting fraud is something that people who have not worked at that scale can only imagine. These guys will also encounter fraud at some point. And when they do so, I guarantee they will be no better at it than Google this.

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by amenghra on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:11PM (#15597036)

If they can't access the data, then they shouldn't be able to moderate it.

There are plenty of things on the web where you can upload data and they don't use machine learning algorithms to decide if your content is "valid" or "invalid". It all depends on various tradeoffs.

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by scientistem on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:57PM (#15597367)

Right, google drive has a big problem with public file hosting and piracy. If the content is encrypted the safe harbor becomes trivial to preserve.

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by camus2 on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @09:14PM (#15598218)

> Right, google drive has a big problem with public file hosting and piracy.

I'm pretty sure this isn't a DMCA takedown case here. Google scanned the content of the file, didn't like it and removed access via an algorithm. Nobody but Google knows how it works.

If the content is encrypted then it's impossible to use google docs document viewers, editors, or collaborate online on a document directly via google doc. It becomes just a dumb file host with no added value.

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by twiss on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:09PM (#15597021)

You're probably right about that. But, I believe that reading and blocking private, non-shared, documents in a user's account is not the right approach to abuse. If it ever becomes necessary, Airborn OS could inspect publicly shared documents for abuse, too.

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by hueving on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @09:36PM (#15598281)

You just made a perfect argument for why the Google design is inadequate. It centralizes way too much power to make them the target of lawyer and it makes them the arbiter of acceptability as well.

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:20PM (#15596698)

You state that the problem of fraud is particularly challenging "at Google scale". There is a fairly easy solution: Don't do things at Google scale. Many of these nearly unsolvable social problems we've created, such as YouTube content moderation, are manageable, or simply don't occur, outside Google scale.

Which begs the question: Is doing things at Google scale really something to aspire to? Has even Google solved the problem of doing things at Google scale if they have problems they cannot solve adequately at Google scale?

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by jasonvorhe on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:53PM (#15596922)

Better shut down access to your service after a couple of hundred users?

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Re:Show HN: Airborn – Private Google Docs Alternative by JangoSteve on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:08PM (#15597019)

To be fair, Google has a little more than 200 users.

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