Just tested this myself. Got the same results as you while using different file names.

Difficult to believe that Google has become so internally dysfunctional that it hasn't fixed this technical embarrassment twenty hours after first being being seen, and then five hours after being reported on front page of Hacker News.

At the scale at which Google operates, even if they fixed it within a minute it probably takes some time to test and roll these things out.

Sometimes I wonder if people think that infrastructure for billions of people is some sort of magic where you push the fix button and magically everything's solved across the globe.

Sure it'll take time.

Google cannot have it both ways though. They have a habit of completely restricting all ways of appealing or contesting these issues ostensibly because they think their tech is so good that it isn't required (at least in the vast majority of cases), and yet we have people permanently locked out of their personal and work GMails for months on end (or indefinitely) and now being accused of copyright infringement for the digit "1", with a bold assertion at the end of the email saying "This restriction cannot be reviewed".

Google's become so big that collapse/disruption is inevitable.

>They have a habit of completely restricting all ways of appealing or contesting these issues ostensibly because they think their tech is so good that it isn't required

Are you sure it's not just because providing them would cost money?

They'll certainly cost money. Can they afford it? Yeah, they can.

I think the issue is that Google thinks that operational scale is what defines the correct solution- even when they are not at the scale that requires the solution they are using. They seem so enamored with operating at stupidly high scale that they don't realize they actually can afford to do this right, and if they did that while being mindful of scale, they would be much harder to displace than they currently are.

Companies don't spend as much as they can afford, they spend as little as they can get away with.

I'd have more sympathy if it weren't "A review cannot be requested for this restriction." It's designed to be as brutal and draconian as possible. They chose this. It is guilty until proven innocent, with no recourse.

Sometimes I wonder if people will excuse anything Google does that hurts people and assume it is some sort of magic to not choose to do that.

That's what Goolag does for quite a long time already. Changed IP address? Goodbye mail. Know your password? Still no. Know your secret answer? They laugh at you. Out of options? Sucks to be you. We don't care if you're in a different country or having an emergency. Google is just plain evil.

"Guilty until proven innocent" implies the guilt presumption can be reversed by proving you're innocent.

I don't think this is the case here.

Nah, it's just "you're guilty, the end."

The faster the fix can roll out, the faster a breakage can also roll out. Move slower and break fewer things.

I remember interviewing at Amazon (this was 2009) and being told that any engineer could deploy to the main site at any time. The thought terrified me.

A product manager with an MBA will argue this affects only a handful of customers, mostly non-paying, so fixing it should sit at the end of the backlog.

Is that wrong? How many outraged people here are going to stop using paid-for Google products because of this? (people who didn't stop using paid-for Google products for all the times this kind of thing happened before). It's approximately none, isn't it?

The problem is that it hurts the perception of Google, particularly for enterprise customers. If the perception is that Google is unresponsive and gives customers no recourse to address obviously incorrect behavior of its automated systems, it makes it harder for enterprise customers to trust Google with their workloads.

A one off bug like this isn't the end of the world, but it fits into the larger pattern of how Google operates.

Yep, I've been in a position to choose cloud providers before, and I wouldn't touch Google with a ten foot pole (it's basically AWS or Azure in my mind).

I'm already unhappy with the level of control they already have on my life (Gmail and Android).

You can only pile straw on the camel for so long. People will tolerate small problems to a great extent, but not infinitely.

It's certainly good competitive info for Microsoft or others to share during sales calls.

It’s a broken window. Is a perfect example of the craziness of the current state and approach that even the Everyman can understand and be surprised/question/have negative sentiment about.

The MBA thinking ignoring intangibles is exactly the problem, trading short term win for long term loss. Will it actually matter in the end? Probably not and the cycle will continue..

> Is that wrong?

No, resources are scarce and should be allocated wherever offers the best returns.

But it's still lame that Google has this kind of bug, don't you think?

People will think twice before using GCP. I know I'm.

But why didn't you do that all the previous times?

- 13 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350968 "On friday I woke up to find my google account had been disabled. No gmail, no adsense,adwords,webmaster tools,blog etc etc. No reason given. I've filled out the forms, got an automated response which is totally irrelevant"

- 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4013799 and it was happening often enough to be a meme then with people saying: "And this time I'd like the outcome of this thread not to be just "A Google insider wandered past and fixed this guys problem" but "Here's how we're going to make sure it doesn't happen again." and "This is a general problem with Google and their customer-no-service attitude. It's just deplorable. It really is. You have to wonder: What is it going to take for them to give a shit and actually do something about it?"

- 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217549 "Ask HN: Why doesn't Google believe in customer support?"

- 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5022091 "Ask HN: How to reach _real_ people at Google?"

- 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5120060 "My Gmail account got hacked. Google won't help. I need your advice."

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10851448 "Help HN: Cannot recover my Google Adsense because of single 1$ mistake"

- 6 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10569902 "Ask HN: Is it possible to get help from a Google employee?(for G+)"

- 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13874778 "We accediently created a personal google account using G Suite's main account, and without any warning Google just removed all of our access to a very sensitive data for our organization."

- 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20203482 "SIM swap horror story: I've lost decades of data and Google won't help", comment: "Google really fails hard in the face of providing support when issues like this occur."

That's a quick search of "help google account" in the HN search down at the bottom of the page, just submissions not comments. Comments immediately comes up with "Xoogler here - actually we used to say "if you are not buying advertising from us, Google can't help you at all"." - joering2, two days ago.

Or this anecdote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30053549 steelframe is telling about Google "After they hung up on [a paying customer] 3 or 4 times, eventually a manager got on the phone and told him (between his screams), "Look, you're not getting any phone support because it doesn't exist. There's nowhere for us to transfer you. There's nobody who can call you back about this. Your only option is to search the forums for an answer to your problem. I am going to terminate this call now. Sir, I'm going to terminate this call. No, we can't help you. Nobody at Google can help you. I am terminating this call now. We asked you to stop calling this number. Do not call us again. <click>""

And don't forget https://killedbygoogle.com/ for products people liked which they shuttered because reasons, most commonly exemplified by Google (RSS) Reader 9 years ago which still comes up in comments present day.

Well, GOOG's share price has tripled in the last 5 years, so that's how much people are staying away from them as a result.

Happened to me a few times, lost all mail accounts (I didn't have too many) because I cannot login from old ISP IP (it probably doesn't even exist anymore). People don't realize what dystopia they're signing into until it's too late ( Android forces people to create G-accounts without real need, that's why their user base is growing. (

Basically, this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30067824

I assume 99% of googlers are juggling production issues. Maybe the rest are supporting the ad platforms, as the public facing applications have been fairly static for years, aside from moving the comments on youtube to the top and bottom and back up to the top again.

I wish they would finish the thumbs down functionality in youtube music or look at WearOS once in a while (150000 one stars reviews LOL).

Some may say 'you get what you pay for', but after a few paid google gapps accounts getting locked out lately for no good reason, I'll be moving and not paying anymore after drawing a blank from support.

It only affects sharing so it isn't a disaster if this happens, probably P3 medium if you went by their bug bounty priorities.

That is what I saw, I can still access the file. I do wonder, though, if there's some threshold of flagged files where they suddenly enact some other punishment.

I'm sure that right now, competitive YouTube scam artists are sending competing channel owners files with just "1" in them, in the hope they get their Google accounts machine-deleted and their youtube channels taken down with zero recourse...

Altenatively, just the next brick laid upon the pyramid of "Google sux".

Update: It has now flagged the file with "0\n" in it.

So it's official, Both 0 and 1 are copyrighted :)

https://imgur.com/a/xMgh6Xn

Relevant Onion article here: https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...

Relevant real Microsoft patent on the IS NOT OPERATOR:

https://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2...

Why is satire so much better at predicting our dumb reality than sci-fi? This is definitely the darkest timeline.

Because rational people like to think people are rational. Rational people then go on and write their great sci fi works.

People writing satire know people are irrational. Otherwise they wouldn't be writing satire, would they?

To quote George Carlin: Take an average idiot on the street, then realize half of people are dumber than them.

GPT-3 says: In mathematics, there is a search for a satire-to-satire mapping function with the longest cycle length. These are called N-quines.

Haha wow. In another testament to the times, the length of yesterday’s satire seems as long as todays “long form”, and much more developed than todays two line satire “articles”. /end soapbox

I mean, it's not A Modest Proposal, but Onion articles are still actually article length. I know most people just read and share the headline, but they're still taking the time to do full write-ups.

Relevant SMBC comic: "Mister President! India is suing for half of our data!" https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-08-29

Perhaps this issue came about because Google's AI read this article.

From 1998 no less!

Careful there. My law firm in east Texas happens to own the patent rights to a system and method of concatenating a plurality of 1s and 0s for the purpose of generating an encoding of a creative work, and as such you are in peril of infringing on one of my claims with your concatenation of 1s and 0s!

General Mills owns the copyright on 0s, sir. (Cheerios)

But do they own an NFT of an 0?

I believe 0 and 1 belong in the public domain, at least under US copyright law - there appears to be a significant amount of prior art.

FYI while Drive and YouTube's Content ID systems operate based on copyright, they are not entirely bound to it since they only actually have to comply with DMCA requests (barring any lawsuits that claim Google has the resources to create automated copyright detection systems[0]). Even when claiming copyright, they can remove and block access to content for any reason they want legally.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/business/media/viacom-and...

They theoretically are based on copyright, but in practice the way it works is a few trusted entities are allowed to submit content and claim it as their own. If you have access to a Content Owner dashboard, you can claim literally any content you want from there- you'll just be putting your access to that dashboard at risk if you claim content that isn't actually yours to claim and Google gets wind of it.

This is how movies and music are added to the system for copyright enforcement purposes- they are effectively uploaded to YouTube and never published (this is called an "asset" in Content Owner parlance)

People have posted recordings of typing on keyboards so they can file claims and steal ad revenue from anyone whose video has the sound of typing. People are exploiting the bugs in the system.

Youtube's Content ID system is an artificial substitute for actions based on copyright law like DMCA takedowns, because actions based on copyright law have forms and procedures and you need to pay a lawyer to review them. Youtube's system is designed to be so generous to established content owners that they prefer to use it over legal filings, and to have very little recourse for appeal when a video gets taken down.

Not sure if prior art is relevant, per se (usually quoted in the context of patent law but IANAL), but, certainly, any copyright has expired by this point.

It might be that the 1s and 0s are derivative works, such as being derivatives of sin(x) and cos(x) for x->0.

Seeing as the default font used by google's file reader is Roboto and that typeface has only been around since 2014, so my expression of 0 using Roboto is copyrighted 2014.

I do not know how any of you _hackers_ stole my original work, and I certainly do not authorize it's use. Immediately send me your full name and address so that I can have my lawyers contact you.

I hope you did that from a burner account!

Exactly my thoughts. I'd not want to risk angering the Google gods with this experiment, considering your account can be disabled by yet another automated system with no way to contact a human.

Better do it from a burner device on a burner internet connection, to prevent Google from detecting any link between your burner account and your real account.

Remember, "there is no review for this restriction"

Well that MP3 the RIAA flagged was FULL of ones and zeros, so it only makes sense they would get flagged ;-)

Silence copyrighted too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

Does this mean every binary file is now a derivative work?

That’s it, kids, the internet is now illegal — until we switch to a quaternary system using only 2’s and 3’s <taps forehead smartly>

Suspicious -- just when Google is announcing success with qbits and quantum computing.

Wouldn't that still be binary, just using different symbols?

Does that mean someone copyrighted binary? :p I guess that mean that this comment and everything digital is copyrighted.

Technically any creative work you author is copyrighted, so your comment was copyrighted anyway.

Whether or not large tech companies will punish people for infringing upon your copyright is yet to be determined.

I don't know about US lawy but in German law there is a requirement on some originality. ("Schöpfungshöhe") The barrier is low, but a 1 certainly doesn't receive the protection.

Yep. A HN comment a couple of sentences long, OTOH, is probably just on the threshold where whether it counts as a protected work depends on just how “unique” the comment is.

As we are on HN, not reddit, thus comments are more than "yes" or "lolz" they are most likely protected.

However one implicitly gives a license to YCombinator - at least to publish it. And what other rights can be upheld would be interesting.

Maybe it's because you have "one" in the file name: "zeronewline".

"A review cannot be requested". What a soulless suck machine.

"In order to review, please reach the top of HN"

You do not have sufficient social credit to request a review, please become a better person and try again.

This is the sad way of things now. Only those with a large enough megaphone get support. I'm in a battle with Cash App support and the only way I got my issue escalated was to find the personal cellphone of a manager there and call him. This is not how things are supposed to work :(

> become a better person

It's much faster and more effective to achieve high visibility by being a bad person, if you haven't noticed.

We get what we incentivize.

Turns out Google also hates 500, 174, 833, 285 and 302 (from generating files from -1000 to 1000).

This is relatively new then. As part of some testing last summer for how to handle a migration from one Drive to another, I generated a folder that had I think 10k files in it. They were all named 1.txt, 75.txt, 8492.txt and their contents matched the filename (i.e. 1, 75, 8492). They never got flagged for me. That was for a Google Workspace account, though, and they were deleted a few days later once I was done with the tests.

I did notice it flagged "1", "1\n", but not "1\r\n". Then, it didn't flag "0", but did flag "0\n". So line endings seem to matter as well, but not in some consistent way.

They are probably on some kind of hash list accidently. Its probably not about the content as such.

Another bunch of numbers got flagged (186, 451, 336, 173, 266). I deleted the experiment, just in case I got my account deleted for too many naughty numbers.

That probably looks even more suspicious.

That's interesting. 500 and 302 popped into my head as common HTTP status codes. The others don't seem notable to me.

“A review cannot be requested for this restriction.”

Absolute madness cannot be reviewed…

Reason cannot be applied.

Things are getting out of control. Reason has left the building.

Here for instance is a clunker I've had from Cash App support (I'm disputing a package I never received which was returned to the merchant and the merchant won't answer any communications):

"M.J. from Cash Support once more. To be clear, I am not misunderstanding the location of the package at this point, and understand that it has been returned to the sender now.

...

As I mentioned in my previous message, should FedEx update their delivery information to indicate a non-delivered status, we can then process a dispute on your behalf. You can reply back to me here directly should you file the missing package claim with FedEx, they conduct their investigation, and update the package status to reflect non-delivery. At that point we can then move forward on getting a dispute processed for you."

LOL. They know the package has been delivered back to the merchant but they still want me to file a missing package claim for it. The absurdity of the situation is lost on them. All these large companies hire now is soulless drones with no mind of their own.

"Follow the script on the screen, never deviate, even in the face of absurdity. Forever onwards, loyal drone."

It's terrifying, to be honest.

It may take some time for it to index and check the file, youtube for example takes ages to process video, I would imagine google drive is lower priority. Check back in a week or two and see if it changes.

My bet is someone did a DMCA claim on a file containing 1, either by mistake or as a joke.

Then Automated Stupidity took over.

I'd guess some giant folder of mostly-copyrighted material, which happened to include those files for some reason.

metadata match on an album track number?

Na, it’s gotta be something dumb on the big G’s part. I bet their unit tests for their DCMA search have test cases with simple files like 1 and 0, and those cases are just put into the “copyright” database.

It's AI. Automated Ineptitude.

"A review can not be requested for this restriction."

I wonder if this is an incredible hash collision. hash("1") == hash(disney_movie.mp4)

Not the case, since it also happens with other numbers.

well as it turns out hash("0") == hash(pirates of the carribean) as well.

Not sure how Disney is finding these.

Trying to hash to specific values explains how some direct-to-video stuff was created. The motivation certainly wasn't quality.

Well they were certainly before their time. Nowadays a seeded random JPG goes for a mint on the blockchain

Assuming is's a cryptographic hash function, that sort of collision just never happens.

Well, it has to happen at some point. Exceedingly unlikely, but never say never.

When the number of hash values (at least 2^128) exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe (10^80), it's never going to happen.

... unless the hash function is broken, in which case it's not cryptographic anymore. Note that the birthday paradox doesn't apply when one of the inputs is trivial.

Just because there are a lot of possible values doesn't matter. There are also a lot of possible pieces of data that could be fed into the hash function. In fact, an infinite number. Which is larger than 2^128. Unimaginably larger. Collisions will happen. Sure, intentional collisions might be next to impossible, but collisions will happen.

Consider a piece of data that is 128 bits long. There are 2^128 possible values. A 128 bit hash function will either yield a unique value for each possible data value (which will exhaust the entire range of unique hash values), or you'll have a collision. Now, lets add in pieces of data that are 129 bits (or any other length) as well - you'll have a collision immediately.

2^128 is a big number, and we live in a universe with physical constraints. The mathematical probability is nonzero, but it's never going to happen.

h(1) == h(some_real_data) does not have to happen at some point. Collisions are unavoidable, but the point of a cryptographically secure hash algorithm is to ensure that for all h(x) == h(some_real_data), there are no values of x that can be found by brute force, or by cleverness either for that matter.

Of course, it’s always possible that the particular hash function used could be hilariously broken…

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but doesn't the existence of collisions guarantee that h(1)== h(some_real_data) unless the hash function is hilariously broken?

Cryptographically secure hash functions state that it's unlikely to occur, but the fact that you can take data a greater size than the output will guarantee that you'll have collisions. If you have collisions and the hash function is generating output that is uniformly distributed across the possible output space, you will hit h(1)==h(some_real_data) at some point (edit: given that "some point" is a mathematical concept, not an actual point in time. Of course, there's no guarantee that we'll ever get collisions for hash functions with massive output spaces. But I'd argue that's a limit of computing, not of the math behind the functions themselves)

What makes you think that this would use a cryptographic hash instead of a perceptual hash?

Birthday paradox could play a role if there's enough content out there

Did you do that with a throwaway account? You'd be playing with fire getting a bunch of files flagged on your primary account.

Nope, living dangerously :)

Think it this way. If Google is this dumb, any account can be flagged for no reason so it doesn't increase the risk even further than it currently is.

Make sure to encrypt your 0’s and 1’s

I really want to think there is few people left out there leaving their 0’s and 1’s unencrypted in the cloud, I hope this post gets enough hype to solve the problem

> I really want to think there is few people left out there leaving their 0’s and 1’s unencrypted in the cloud

This describes most everybody.

Just encrypt the 1s. The 0s are nothing.

It looks like those files are marked as public. Does it trigger for you on files not being shared?

I didn't try that. I marked them public because I assumed that's what triggers the scan.

AFAIK the copyright scan only happens on files shared from certain types of Drive accounts, the assumption presumably being that while Google doesn't know or care if you have rights to possess data, they can be reasonably sure you wouldn't be using Drive links as the means of distributing many well-known files (video, music, software, mostly) if you had rights to do so.

How far Artificial Stupidity runs into the weeds from that basically sound beginning appears to be "still farther."

FYI Drive also does scans (configurable on business accounts) for data such as likely accidental PII disclosures on shared data, and anti-malware checks on at least Windows and Mac executables, installers, and dmgs.

What is the best in class cloud drive software which doesn't do this? I feel like Dropbox is a bit more selective, but without going into the Megas of the world, there doesn't seem to be a good file share with solid end-user desktop sync.

Honestly, when I read a few months ago that Google was scanning Drive for illegal files (probably only when shared but unconfirmed) I decided to back out of Drive, and I figured that all the other big/reputable players are doing it too so I've gone back to a portable hard drive.

Maybe B2? It's not something I have to looked into extensively. My needs for sharing data from GDrive are limited and if there is data I don't feel like google automation getting at I have it encrypted via rclone mounts.

NextCloud

I got into pCloud precisely because they have a Linux client.

Does it just prevent you from sharing the files or does it prevent you from accessing the file as well?

Just tried that, and I get a "request a review" link. Interesting.

"Unable to share This item may violate our Terms of Service - Request a review"

Clicking on it, though, gives no joy:

"451. Sorry, Google is unable to process your request. This item was taken down for legal reasons and cannot be appealed. Please visit the Legal Removals Requests page for more information."

https://imgur.com/a/5YHQtLi

Someone just needs to copyright the number 451 and then they won't be able to return that HTTP response!

Checkmate, google!

Someone already did.

Fahrenheit 451.

The flashpoint of wood pulp paper.

You... didn't think that wasn't specifically chosen for that reason, right?

Google search publishes the DMCA letter that takes down search results. It's sad they don't do the same here.

Does it flag comments for copyright infringement?

What if I comment on some file with some copyrighted content in the text, just implying something about that IP, with the copyrighted text in my comment? How can this be infringement?

No idea. I was just trying to guess at why it might flag a single byte file as a copyright infringement.

Clearly a violation of U2’s copyright.

The filename is "output04.txt".

They changed their algorithm. Now it will flag files full of 0s.