For copyrighted content, we have to respond to DMCA notices like other services. Sharing content to the public and getting reported by a third party is the only path for that. And in those cases, you definitely get a specific notice about the takedown. The web UI would also show you exactly which file was affected, and prevent you from sharing it again. It doesn't just delete files. (That would be unacceptable.)
Note that there's currently a 2 GB file size limit. It seems like the most likely explanation is that you put a large ISO in your SkyDrive folder, and it never succeeded in uploading because it exceeded the limit.
The file was 600Mbish. It successfully uploaded via the desktop client then was later downloaded on another machine via the desktop sync thing. Later that evening it was gone. I didn't delete it (it wasn't in the recycle bin) and I confirmed it was the correct live account I was signed in as. To be clear it was still on the source machine but not the destination. No antivirus had quarantined at either end.
That by elimination would suggest that either:
1. There is a reliability limit somewhere which is unknown and unpublished or a synchronisation bug.
2. You're unaware of a process or a false positive.
I should have opened another account to test this against with the same file but to be honest if I found a bug, windows live support has been abysmal. Hell they couldn't even work out how to close my account when the close account page refused to work...
FWIW, I can say with confidence that your issue had nothing to do with the fact that the file was an Office ISO.
How do you handle child porn filtering?
I have three children and take photos of them. I am worried about false positivies.
1. PhotoDNA runs on every upload. It's only used to identify known child pornography that has already been reported, to make sure it can't be re-uploaded.
2. Automated flesh tone detection only runs when a photo is shared. (This is a change in policy; it used to run on upload.) There are heuristics that try to measure whether it's personal sharing or broad sharing, and we're continually improving those. The goal is to make flesh tone detection only run during broad sharing.
3. If the broad sharing criteria is met and automated flesh tone detection triggers a positive result, that is the only case in which an item is anonymously sent to manual review. It's some highly controlled clean-room environment where a dedicated team tries to determine whether the content is a legal risk or not. Clear cases of shared child exploitation porn are reported. (A parent's "baby in bathtub" type of photos are not the target here.) In most cases, it's adult pornography or family photos. In those cases, the folder is marked as porn and simply can't be shared again. (There's a user-visible message on the web UI.) It's not deleted, and it continues to be fully accessible to the owner across all machines.
The scanning policy used to be more aggressive and didn't exclude content that was unshared or only shared to a small set of people. None of us liked that policy to begin with, and then some high-profile false positives helped force the policy to be revised.
However, the terms that are linked to me at the bottom of OneDrive.com specifically tell me that uploading porn is not allowed and presumably (haven;t double checked) tell me that if I do my MSA will be deactivated.
It's nice to have you and co. tell me that you allow porn, but the fact that the terms I legally agree to contradict what you say sort of puts me in an uncomfortable position.
Have you thought about changing the terms of use to accurately reflect your policies?
I have several ISOs from TechNet and they are all still there.
There are very few digital things that are illegal to possess (and no, a digital copy of The Matrix is not illegal to possess), and I believe Microsoft has both a legal and moral obligation to ensure the files on its servers are not child porn.
I don't think this measure is effective (it's trivial even for non-techies to circumvent hash-based detection) nor proportional to the likely incidence/impact of this crime. While I cannot speak to what their legal obligations are, I don't think we should encourage invasion of privacy for no particularly good reason. As such, I strongly object to the notion they have a moral obligation to commit this particular harm. Facetiously claiming that doing so somehow protects children is just a joke in particularly bad taste.
I was under the impression that PhotoDNA was more than simple hashing - that it used an algorithm like Google's "similar images"
But it is my belief that file hosters have a legal and moral obligation not to know what they are hosting for their customers. It is not the obligation of a host to look at a customer's files and decide what is ok and what is not. It is the same thing with Tor nodes or if you decide to encrypt files. I actually think that any online sync host like this or like Dropbox should not have any chance of knowing what I store with them. That's my private business and there is zero reason for them to know, is there?
I actually think that any online sync host like this or like Dropbox should not have any chance of knowing what I store with them
Cryptography is readily available to anyone who cares to use it.
2. You ought to provide some kind of legal citation for your claim that a judge can order a service like Onedrive to shut down after just two allegations of illegal content.
End-to-end cryptography should be the standard.
Really? It was my understanding that True crypt was done for and I don't know of any other similar software that is open source (ie trust worthy).
https://www.grc.com/misc/truecrypt/truecrypt.htm
Although we all have reason to believe every single encryption tool out there is compromised, where does that leave us? Paralyzed. IMHO, we won't have 100% trustworthy software ever and we're better off using what we have then not using anything at all. Remember, in this thread we're talking about our privacy, not some top-secret project for which developing a encryption tool from scratch would be affordable (that'd be cool though).
I, personally, never use these file storage services to hold anything but encrypted data assuming that such data can disappear overnight without any warning.
>Last year
No conflict.
If you roll your own solution, do you limit to desktop usage, or how do you get mobile support as well?
Imagine having 10,000 files up there and they delete one...that would keep me up at night.
This OneDrive does not change metadata, it's a 'simple' cloud storage.
BTW: interesting, I've submitted this link an hour or so ago, and it was immediately flagged as dead. :)
1: http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/micros...
I uploaded a legit Office ISO I downloaded from MSDN to SkyDrive (as it was called back then) to test throughput up and down.
After 3-4 hours it was gone.
My data isn't going near it.
Edit: just to clarify... I think they hash incoming files and delete known ones as part of a takedown system. This was an ISO that had been shared on TPB as well as MSDN. Of course their policy allows these measures but I'm not happy putting something up there on the basis that they can arbitrarily delete it.