Category Archives: internet

How much will it cost to store Google photos on AWS

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Google Photos will end its free unlimited storage on June 1st, 2021. The difference with premium Google Photos is that the photos are stored RAW (no compression and be 16 times larger)

I was wondering how much did it really cost for Google to store photos per user.
Since I am more familiar with AWS than Google Cloud. Let’s evaluate the minimal cost to store photos on AWS.

AWS S3 (simple storage service) is the defacto choice to store the photos and is object storage service. In addition, S3 is the most cost effective solution (cheaper than EBS elastic block storage, EFS Elastic File System). Our assumptions are:

  • losing photos is not acceptable (Redundancy is a must)
  • only a few photos will be accessed (infrequent access)
    We can therefore select S3 Standard – Infrequent Access

In this post, we only look at the storage cost to build a minimal viable alternative to Google Photos. Regarding S3 pricing, there are three other factors to account (which won’t be covered here):

– request and data retrieval pricing
– data transfer and transfer acceleration pricing
– data management features pricing

Google Photos Cost

Price (EUR / monthly)Capacity up to (GB)Cost to store
015?
1.99100?
2.99200?
9.992000?
Google One pricing

To find the cost of storage per gigabyte (GB), let’s have a look at AWS calculator.

PS: Later, I’m going to mix USD and EUR pricing.
As I’m in Europe, Google Photos show the pricing only in EUR. In whatever regions, AWS pricing is always in USD. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Estimating the cost per GB

I used the https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator to estimate the costs. The more you consume, the better cost deal you’ll get.

  1. Press the button “add service”.
  2. Enter in the search “S3”, “Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)” will appear.
  3. At its bottom right corner, click on the “Configure” button.
  4. Don’t forget to select the region before entering any calculations.

I inputed the maximum storage capacity (99999999 TB) for S3 – Infrequent Access. Here are the following costs in the different Europe regions:

  • 0.0125 USD in Ireland, Stockholm
  • 0.0131 USD in London, Paris, Milan
  • 0.0135 USD in Frankfurt

Let’s take 0.0125 USD/GB as the minimum and 0.0135 USD/GB as the maximum

There are S3  Intelligent-Tiering storage class cheaper. The longer backups and archives are, the cheaper the storage is.
The pricing for Glacier is at 0.004 USD/GB and Glacier Deep Archive is at 0.00099 USD/GB.

Estimated cost of storage

The max storage column was calculate by multiplying the capacity by maximum price per GB. Example: for the capacity of 200 GB, 200 GB * 0.0135 USD/GB = 2.7 USD

The min storage column is a bit trickier. Once you exceed the capacity, the subscription goes to next tiers of pricing ( next row). The formula is (previous_capacity + 1) * min_price. Example: for the capacity of 200 GB, (100+1) GB * 0.0125 USD/GB = 1.2625 USD

Price (EUR / monthly)Capacity up to (GB)Min storage cost (USD)Max cost for S3 Infrequent (USD)Max cost Glacier (USD)Max cost for Glacier Deep Archive (USD)
0150.01250.20250.060.01485
1.991000.21.350.40.099
2.992001.26252.70.80.198
9.9920002.51252781.98

There must be an anomaly, the max storage estimated cost is 27 USD for the 2000GB. While Google charges only 9.99 EUR.

To make more cost effective solution is that of object lifecycle management whereby the photos could be transitioned to a cheaper storage class (like S3 Glacier or Glacier Deep Archive ) after a period of time depending the lifecycle configuration .

Obviously at very high volume, AWS pricing scheme is much lower than its calculator showed us.

Cheaper storage but slower access

The photos could be transitioned to a cheaper storage class (like S3 Glacier) after a period of time depending the lifecycle configuration you put in place.

However the cost of data retrieval is more expensive, the longer archives are.

Conclusion

This exercise was only about storage cost.

To make the service complete, we must account for the outbound data transfer, cost to run the software services on top.

The majority of premium customers use less than half a storage and retrieve a few percent of their photos.
For these type of service, the worst case scenario: reach the maximum storage capacity and retrieve all data.

Last, how could Google afford to make storage free under 15GB ?
In one year, the max storage will cost 0.2025*12 = 2.43 USD.
2.43 USD, a meagre sum compared to the 182 USD revenue per user that Google makes (https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth )

Special thanks

I consulted with AWS business support. Special thanks in particular to Nicholas, the support engineer, who re-verified my calculations and brought new light with references.

File Sharing infringements in Germany

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In 2014 , I downloaded plenty of films on BitTorrent. I received several copyright warning letters from law firms asking compensation up to 1000€ each and a declaration to cease and desist.

Warning letters concern a formal demand to stop doing a particular activity. The idea behind such warning letters is to settle disputes directly and cheaply, without resorting to taking claims to court. The copyright infringement warning letter is an out-of-court settlement offer.

Worse, all the warning letters must be replied within 7 days. I contacted some lawyers specialised in internet copyright.  I learned a lot about file sharing infringements. If you don’t have much time to read through this, go directly to the last paragraph Summary

What is illegal ?

The music and film industry pursue file sharers. As a general rule of thumb, download is allowed. You are not allowed to upload copyright material publicly.

If the exchange of music to friends via e-mail , chat or cloud storage ( even though this is an upload) takes place within the private sphere, it is then legal.

Streaming is legal as long you only download. How can you that you’re not uploading while watching ? never install any software to watch anything online. Ex : some people thought popcorn-time was uploading on their behalf.

How do law firms track file sharers ?

By default, when you use a peer to peer such as torrent, your IP address is visible. Look below at the screen capture . The IP addresses are displayed and their respective countries.

utorrent peers list . IP addresses are listed

utorrent peers list . IP addresses are listed

Copyright holders ( Hollywood , music labels … ) purse the file sharers of their content. To expand territorial scope  ( e.g. Hollywood is US based) , copyright holders use law firms based in Germany. These law firms target only IP addresses only in Germany and the time ( important for dynamic IP address ).

The name and address of the person accessing the internet cannot be directly obtained from this information.

The internet service provider ( ISP ) is not permitted to simply pass on personal details; but they must do so if presented with a civil court ruling. ( Copyright Act , Urheberrechtsgesetz,  § 101 UrhG )

The ISP is obliged by court order to send the information directly to the copyright holder. In doing so, internet providers may demand payment for providing copyright holders  the information concerning IP addresses. (According to paragraph 113, sub paragraphs 2, sentences 2 and 3 of the Telecommunications Law)

Once the name and addresses are obtained, warning letters are sent.  The requests from rights holders comprise thousands IP-addresses at a time.  The whole process is highly automated.

However the IP Address is not sufficient to prove its owner was the one who committed the crime. It could the children or a neighbor using the wi-fi.

The defense (you or your lawyer) focus on proving you are not the perpetrator but someone else did it.

It could be someone else who was using your internet access via Wi-Fi. That’s why all wifi must be secured.

Unsecure Wi-Fi

The German Federal Supreme Court decided that every person who owns an internet connection is under an obligation to ensure that it is secured.

If the wireless connection was not secured, but the owner can prove that he/she didn’t commit the copyright infringement (e.g. because they were not at home at the time the download took place), then the owner will not necessarily be liable as the perpetrator, but will nevertheless be strictly liable for causing a nuisance.

Cease and Desist letter

Not only does the warning letter ask for a compensation ( the price always inflated ) , but it asks you to sign and return a cease and desist letter (Abmahnung) within the next 7 days.

The initial cease and desist letter is crafted to take advantage of you because :

  • You acknowledge to pay compensation and the opposition side’s legal cost
  • You were the one who committed the copyright infringement.
  • You would be bound by the declaration for 30 years and future changes in the law by Parliament or through the courts would have no effect.

Instead you should submit a modified declaration to cease and desist, which satisfies the other side’s claim. You acknowledge to pay a lower compensation, you don’t know who did it and you will never be involved in copyright infringements.

There are plenty of free “cease and desist” samples online. But the modified declaration can be rejected by the opposition side if the formulation terms are incorrect.

A specialist lawyer in file-sharing case is a great help for the average joe.

How to choose a lawyer

I contacted some lawyers specialised in internet copyright. Each case costs a nominal fee. Most of them have a flat rate price no matter the number of warning letters received. Meaning all the copyright infringements committed before the last warning letter was sent will be ignored but the ones after are not included in the flat rate contract.

But the most important criterion for me was the location of the lawyer. If the case is escalated to Court, it’s better to have your lawyer in the same city.

If you choose one, you will have to mandate the law firm and give the power of attorney (  Vollmacht in German ).

Executive Summary

Now you received a warning letter , it doesn’t matter how you were caught. You read you have to pay a fine.

Remember a warning letter is an out-of-court settlement offer. The copyright holders didn’t bring the case to court. A letter is cheap, the court is expensive. 

After receiving a copyright warning letter, there are several options :

  • Be the stupid guy ( be Ned Stark ) . Sign the cease and desist letter and accept their unfavourable conditions.
  • Be the nice  guy . Return a modified cease and desist letter favorable for you ( lower compensation and you were not the perpetrator) . But never sign the original one.
  • Be bold. Reject the warning letter and reject the cease and desist letter. State no compensation will be paid. The copyright holders will escalate with another out-of-court letter. Maybe the case will reach the court only if the opposition thinks the cost of the Court is worth.
  • Be ignorant. Ignore the warning letter as if you never saw it. There is little chance that the copyright holders will ignore your ignorance. The consequences will be worsened.

A lawyer is not required but can be very helpful for your defence.

Copyright holders ( via their law firms ) bring customers to defence law firms.  The compensation requested by the warning letters is always inflated. Copyright holders have minimum costs to recover because Internet providers can demand payment for providing the names behind IP addresses.

Warning letters based on alleged copyright infringements have become big business for the German content-industry, anti-piracy firms and their affiliated lawyers. And the people who are benefitting the most are the defence lawyers whose demand is only increased by customers who receive warning letters.

Because the whole process of  1 tracking IP addresses/ 2 requesting the name holder of those IP addresses / 3 sending warning letters is highly automated, it has created a nuisance for hundreds of thousands if not millions of honest internet users in Germany. The current implementation of warning letters violates EU law . 

A major difference with France’s HADOPI , the French government sends some waning letters ( rarely with fine ) while in Germany, private law firms carry on the warning letters.

With growing losses due to piracy , the corporations are suing the content consumers instead of re-inventing the content distribution.

To avoid future warning letters, I suggest to read anonymity on P2P network

 

The following lawyers frequently send out copyright warnings:

Auffenberg, Petzhold, Witte; Baumgarten & Brandt; Bindhart , Fiedler, Zerbe; CSR; Daniel Sebastian; Denecke Haxthausen & Partner; Fareds; Johannes Rübenach; Kornmeier & Patner; Lihl; Lutz Schroeder; Marcus Meier; Marko Schiek; Negele; Nümann und Lang; Paulus; Philipp Marquort; Rainer Munderloh; Rasch; Reichelt, Klute, Aßmann; Sasse und Patner; Schalast & Patner; Scheuermann,Westerhoff, Strittmatter; Schutt, Waetke; SKW Schwarz; U+C; Vahrenwald & Kretschmer; Waldorf Frommer; WeSaveYourCopyrights; Winterstein; Zimmermann & Decker.

ICANN 60 day lock

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My blog was down for the couple past days, because I changed the hoster.

Normally it should have been very smoothly. The domain was due to expired on July 1st 2017 . The support at FastComet told me to renew at Planethoster because they need 15 days to transfer. But I didn’t expect a 60 day lock after transferring my domain  raychenon.com to the new hoster.  Somehow the registrant’s information  (WHOIS ) was modified when I ordered the transfer not by me directly.

FastComet transferred the website content ( DB, images, post , …)  but the domain name was still with Planethoster. Since the transfer was in progress, I couldn’t edit the DNS, nameservers . But the support at Planethoster could. I was just the middle man between Planethoster and FastComet.  The fix took a week.

Currently the domain is still with Planethoster, but all the existing links are there.

To avoid the 60-day lock :

  • Request the transfer to another registrar before changing the registrant’s information
  • Have the prior registrant opt-out the 60-day lock (if this option is offered by the registrar) before making any change to registrant information.

In the next post, I will explain the reasons why I changed the Cloud Hosting for my blog powered by wordpress.

PlanetHoster tech support

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Website hosting is a commodity, prices are dragged to the bottom. In terms of infrastructure and software, hosters are pretty much the same . Higher cost hosting providers have better customer support and extra service. That’s the general rule.

4 years ago, I chose a cheap hoster at ovh.com . I had trouble to set Domain Name System (DNS) . After a few days , no reply from customer support. So I invited a DevOps friend for pizza at home, after a few hours he couldn’t fix. The lunch cost more one year subscription. Then I reviewed on hostsearch and hostadvice . I tried out Planethoster during the free trial.

Customer Support

First I was impressed by how technical the support was. At any time of the day, within a few hours the technical support will reply to me. Just open a ticket on their website, you can reply to it by email like zendesk without being zendesk.

It wasn’t simple questions. They helped transfer my old wordpress to a new domain without breaking any link. Redirect to a sub-domain. Anonymize on whois.org …

Then the following years, I still stick to it.

Most hosters give incredible discount for the 1st year and increase dramatically the next year (Strategy of godaddy ) . But Planethoster stayed true to the initial price.

In addition, since the company is from Québec, Canada. The support speaks English and French.

CMS

Thanks to Cpanel , it is very easy to install in one-click WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Prestashop, WooCommerce, Magento. The updates are automatically taken care.

I’ve been a satisfied customer of Planethoster for over the past 3 years on multi hydrid now moving to Platform World ( 6 USD per month).

Disclaimer: I don’t advertise products I’ve never tried. The link below is an affiliate link. A percentage of the sale will go in my pocket. This commission comes at no additional cost to you

Activer l’Option Voyage de Free Mobile, un casse-tête

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Tout d’abord cela va faire 5 ans que je suis chez Free depuis j’ai quitté un autre opérateur . Ne résidant plus en France, je garde quand même mon numéro FR mais je rétrograde l’abonnement de 20€ à 2€.

Pour activer l’option voyage , il faut d’abord payer 10€ seulement par carte. Sauf que le code de confirmation est envoyé par SMS et que ce numéro de tel ne peut rien recevoir hors de France. D’où la raison pour activer le roaming , cette fameuse option voyage. C’est le serpent qui se mord la queue.

La réponse de Free Mobile sur Twitter ( oui, le compte Twitter de freemobile est plus facile à joindre le support officiel ):

Je remonte cette information. Je vous confirme que les cartes bancaires étrangères ne sont pas acceptées. Pour activer l’option voyage, vous devez être sur le réseau Free mobile en France, il n’est pas possible de l’activer une fois à l’étranger. Bonne journée.

Donc pour activer cette option voyage, il faut :

  1. être sur le réseau en France
  2. payer avec une carte Française supportant 3D secure.

J’ai résolu ce problème 2 par la carte d’un ami.

Mais allons plus loin dans la réflexion, Free a une autorisation de prélèvement sur RIB. Pourquoi ne pas débiter automatiquement sur le compte bancaire ? Après tout, quand il y a du hors forfait , Free prélève le dépassement sans autorisation supplémentaire.

Le support téléphonique est encore plus désarmé par cette situation. Je dois être dans le 1% des usagers.
En passant par d’autres interlocuteurs, la 2ème personne en vient à la même idée du prélèvement automatique , dont elle fera part à sa hiérarchie. Je lui promet que je twitterai ça à Xavier Niel et elle éclate de rire. Pour des raisons de qualité, la conversation a été enregistrée.

Anonymity on the peer to peer (P2P) network

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As a general rule of thumb, you are allowed to download anything. What  is penalized by law is to upload copyright material and offer it to other people. Here is a way to avoid any copyright lawsuit/penalty/infringement .Law firms track users uploaded the content by looking at their IP address. They can request the Internet Service Provider (ISP) to give the IP address’s name holder only within their respective countries. For example : a German law firm can only request a German Internet provider  (not French or British ) to disclose the name of IP address holder. Thus it is best to not expose your own IP address on public BitTorrent.

utorrent peers list . IP addresses are listed

IP addresses and ISP name are listed

VPN

A virtual private network ( VPN ) creates an encrypted ‘tunnel’ between the computer and the host server, with the internet traffic going in and out of the host server. An ISP or government can only see that the user has connected to the VPN server and nothing else – the activities, IP addresses visited etc. are all completely hidden from the ISP.

However, the VPN server can keep logs. After the post Snowden era, all your VPN history and logs are likely to be harvested by the NSA.

Go for a non-US provider. If possible with untraceable payment method.

Apart from the peer to peer ( P2P ) anonymity, VPNs can bypass geo-location restriction ( content only available in certain countries )

Seedbox

A seedbox

is a remote server hosted used for the safe uploading and downloading of digital file. Contrary to a VPN, a seedbox will not use your bandwidth. Most seedbox are hosted in a high-bandwidth data center. A seedbox can be safely hosted in a country where file sharing is illegal. Because data centers are considered professional use.  For example, the biggest datacenter in Europe is OVH ( in Roubaix, France ). A lot of French customers use OVH as seedbox while if they use their private internet, they could get a fine.

Seedbox are more expensive than VPN.

Use an internet cafe

Since the IP address matches the owner thus the downloader , it is best not to expose one’s IP address.
There are 2 important conditions to select an internet cafe :
– you can bring your own laptop.
– no ID asked. Of course, the payment method cannot identify you ( pay by cash ).

When the legal alternative is cheaper

Maybe you had a look at the cost of a VPN or seedbox, Netflix costs about the same price as a seedbox ( 9,99 USD /month for the standard subscription ) . The Netflix catalog may be smaller than all the content available on P2P but the content creators get a better redistribution of their work. You make your own choices.