On the Microsoft page[1] about this change they say
> Storage of this “dark” data takes up space on servers and results in increased electricity consumption, generating 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 alone.
Where "dark" data is data that is unused. However they link to this World Economic Forum Page [2] which says
> In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data. The WEF page says that half of all data is unused, but how much of the energy usage is due to the unused data? I would think the bulk of the energy would be used when the data is accessed, and data sitting on a drive not being accessed isn't really using any energy.
_Purported_. By, this source[0]. Which doesn't cite the source and seems to impute "blockchain" into this total somehow, and was focused on 2020, a year in which corona virus changed a lot of digital trends temporarily.
To the extent that the changes become permanent, they probably lead, working from home, to a far greater reduction in useless greenhouse emissions than the data ever could.
It's not only misleading it's just detached from reality.
Isn't it more misleading to claim that this is just due to environmental reasons? The first link you provide actually says the first reason is due to security (you wouldn't believe how often student accounts are compromised and/or used for sharing pirated content). The second reason is the environment, and the 3rd, reason, even though they don't say it outright, is cost, and I'm guessing that's the real reason.
But giving institutions 100TB of base storage with more for paid licenses isn't exactly stingy.
I wonder why they've not instead pushed people towards a 'real' cold storage service like AWS Glacier. IIRC that uses a mixture of DVD/Bluray automation and for deep storage uses LTO tape drives. Solves most of the energy usage issues.
> So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data.
Storage or ALL processing? SSDs typically need very little power to just store data. They need some power to read and write. But the lion’s share of energy use for “digitization” is compute in various forms.
> > In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
> So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data.
Even that sounds like a misread. "Digitisation" can refer to the sum total of moving a product or service or process to be digitised; that would also include the compute cost as well as the storage.
If Microsoft cutting cost by limiting storage capacity can be construed to be done for environmental reasons, then why can't Google lay-offs be construed similarly? This is not changing the mix of energy production, it is not changing the supply of energy, it just changes the demand.
Lay-offs similarly also reduce the demand on energy since people have less money to buy things that are energy intensive to produce, and have less money to pay their electricity bills and fuel.
Sure, in the long term this move by MSFT may reduce new energy producing capacity coming online, but so will lay-offs, and pay cuts, and recessions, depressions, famine and war.
I don't think it's bad that MSFT is cutting cost in this way, it makes them a more efficient business, but this is being done for cost-cutting, not because MSFT cares deeply about the environment, it just so happens that money is a proxy for energy (i.e. the ability to generate entropy) and most cost-cutting will also reduce energy demand regardless of the nature of that cost-cutting.
> If Microsoft cutting cost by limiting storage capacity can be construed to be done for environmental reasons, then why can't Google lay-offs be construed similarly?
“Our business footprint is 300 tons of CO2 a year. We are shutting down our operations worldwide in order to protect the people from the future. Thanks for all the BSOD”
Microsoft is following Google decision two years ago to stop their more generous (than MS) storage plan for educational institutions.
A lot of the people who had MS offering instead of google were saying that they are safe with their choice. 1TB is much more reasonable than "unlimited" and Microsoft would keep it. Now here we are.
Happy to be part of CERN so I don't have to worry about my institution storage situation at all. And it is not like one drive or google drive would be suitable for me anyway.
Are Google's, Meta's, Tencent's or Alibaba's AI workloads more environmentally friendly, or what am I missing from this point?
And AI's are destructive for the environment why? Is it more environmentally friendly to waste a lot more human time with less compute power doing mundane repetitive shit for hours that an AI/LLM can summarize or answer in seconds?
With that logic it's also more environmentally friendly to use an ox to plow the fields instead of a diesel John Deer.
> Microsoft says server farms are destroying the planet,
Ironically, on another business unit, everyone should throw away their perfectly working computer at the expense of the environment, and buy as Windows 11 capable computer.
Note the 20 GB for OneDrive + 20 GB for Outlook limit is set by McGill University, and it is applied to students (not necessarily staff) [0]. Microsoft sets a different limit: [1]
> all institutions’ tenants will receive 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with an additional 50GB or 100GB of pooled storage per paid user for A3 and A5 subscriptions, respectively (not including Student Use Benefits). With pooled storage, an institutions’ total storage limit is the maximum amount of storage all users combined can use.
> In addition, effective February 1, 2024, users of Office 365 A1 (free subscription) will be limited to a maximum of 100GB of OneDrive storage within the institutional tenant’s 100TB of pooled storage.
McGill seems to offer desktop apps to students, so they have paid licences. [2] This means they could offer 50 GB per student, and I imagine they could allow the student to have more OneDrive files and less Outlook data. Furthermore, if they care about research data, that should be in a common SharePoint space with well-defined access and edit permissions.
Interesting, I personally use my institutional OneDrive sparingly, but I would love to see my professors and IT staff scramble to switch from 1TB of cloud storage to 20GB. I have always opposed selling everything to MS and nobody has ever cared to offer alternatives (only Moodle and it's badly configured lol)
Microsoft did get me with their back-up your documents feature to OneDrive. It’s preposterous.
Something will come of it, particularly because of how much buy-in there is/was from academic institutions who jumped ship from Google Docs+Drive to Microsoft cloud offerings.
They could make the theme for bing and other microsoft websites dark instead of white, literally just a change of color, if they wanted to reduce screen power usage globally - so many "no impact" changes with software that this has to be a fake justification.
Honestly I don't feel the sacrifice. My house is flooded with old chargers. They're in a bin like old legos.
The e-waste related to including chargers in the box is a real thing. That change also allowed them to halve the size of the boxes, effectively doubling the shipping yield. On a billion-device level that's a non-trivial change.
And yes, it's good for their bottom line. And yes, it effectively increased the price by $30. Sucks for me, yes. So what?
It is saying like why should IC engine performance always suffer because for fuel efficiency.
Ultimately the supposed and alleged environmental harm *always* in every single case is a result of human consumption so some human has to suffer for these allegedly environmental moves if not the person buying iPhone then the Apple employee or Apple Shareholder or average tax payer.
Just a philosophical question, that I think is on topic, I wonder how many cloud services will have to give people unpleasant experiences for those same people to stop going all in on cloud services, especially in the era of we reserve the right to change the terms and conditions without notice at our discretion
This is where the emerging field of research data management and digital preservation come into play.
Reproducibility and vetting research output, as well as other forms of accountability requires research data to be present and available. Hence the requirement to safeguard that data. However, a personal share hosted on institutional cloud storage isn't the best place to store research data for lack of accessibility, discoverability, etc.
McGill does offer research data management services. [1] These services are meant to guide researchers as well as cooperate with them working towards long term archival solutions and policies for safeguarding research data.
For 'dark' storage something in the style of AWS Glacier storage would probably do the trick from an environmental point of view. Drives can be filled and then left unplugged and only spun up when data is requested which apparently isn't very often.
I seem to vaguely recall that some of the glacier data was just put on Blu-ray discs and filed away. Seems like a viable solution and with the cloudesq abstraction it doesn't necessarily matter so long as it's being done properly.
Of course I suspect the environment is being used as convenient excuse to people with environmental policies.
So will mircosoft pledge to reduce the size of windows updates? Pledge to reduce the bloat that is a fresh windows install? Will they place any limits in the size of Xbox updates?
well, Xbox updates for example don't work automatically anymore. In fact they've disabled most things that would have encouraged a user to leave their Xbox in 'fast boot' mode, instead switching it to fully shutdown.
Yeah, literally scrambled and verified but I still have 25Terabytes of data (this is the limit since forever) with no notice of reduction. I'm not saying that this isn't true, but I'm saying that McGill admins can set data limits.
Edit: our IT admins are really baffled too and will now verify with Microsoft if this is an actual thing or just poor phrasing from McGill.
Update: there'll be a change apparently but not this draconian. Storage will be limited to a minimum of 100GB/user with an additional 100TB "pooled" storage for everyone. While this is a shock to me and my admin, McGill's policy is still exceptionally draconian.
> Microsoft’s storage reduction is driven by security risks [...]
> Sustainability is an important consideration that drove Microsoft to make that decision.
Why is a university IT's announcement written as if by Microsoft's PR office? The style of the announcement is very weird. Has McGill outsourced all IT support services to Microsoft, thus it is written essentially by them?
Not every instance of Propaganda or Mass Surveilance warrants a 1984 reference. Very few in relation to how often it is invoked.
Newspeak is very specifically about the idea of making some ideas impossible to express. You seem to be calling Microsoft's bullshit pretty well.
(Simlarly, panopticism is about supressing expression of ideas though the threat of surveilance and subsequent repression, and going by how much political discourse has eroded, our version of surveilance capitalism doesn't seem to limit anyone from voicing their ideas, no matter how far it strays from prior social expectations of decency)
Are they going to scale down the price accordingly?
Isn't this fraud? The customers (institutions or others) had agreed on a certain amount of storage space for a certain price, but now Microsoft is changing the cards on the table.
[+] [-] imgabe|2 years ago|reply
> Storage of this “dark” data takes up space on servers and results in increased electricity consumption, generating 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 alone.
Where "dark" data is data that is unused. However they link to this World Economic Forum Page [2] which says
> In 2020, digitisation was purported to generate 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data. The WEF page says that half of all data is unused, but how much of the energy usage is due to the unused data? I would think the bulk of the energy would be used when the data is accessed, and data sitting on a drive not being accessed isn't really using any energy.
This is really misleading.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft...
[2] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/dark-data-is-killing-...
[+] [-] akira2501|2 years ago|reply
To the extent that the changes become permanent, they probably lead, working from home, to a far greater reduction in useless greenhouse emissions than the data ever could.
It's not only misleading it's just detached from reality.
[0] https://www.ey.com/en_ch/decarbonization/how-digitization-ac...
[+] [-] tallanvor|2 years ago|reply
But giving institutions 100TB of base storage with more for paid licenses isn't exactly stingy.
[+] [-] esskay|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjornsing|2 years ago|reply
Storage or ALL processing? SSDs typically need very little power to just store data. They need some power to read and write. But the lion’s share of energy use for “digitization” is compute in various forms.
[+] [-] robertlagrant|2 years ago|reply
> So the 4% figure is not the storage of only dark data, but the storage of ALL data.
Even that sounds like a misread. "Digitisation" can refer to the sum total of moving a product or service or process to be digitised; that would also include the compute cost as well as the storage.
[+] [-] proactivesvcs|2 years ago|reply
This isn't dark data. It must be kept, so it is being used.
[+] [-] robin_reala|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flanked-evergl|2 years ago|reply
Lay-offs similarly also reduce the demand on energy since people have less money to buy things that are energy intensive to produce, and have less money to pay their electricity bills and fuel.
Sure, in the long term this move by MSFT may reduce new energy producing capacity coming online, but so will lay-offs, and pay cuts, and recessions, depressions, famine and war.
I don't think it's bad that MSFT is cutting cost in this way, it makes them a more efficient business, but this is being done for cost-cutting, not because MSFT cares deeply about the environment, it just so happens that money is a proxy for energy (i.e. the ability to generate entropy) and most cost-cutting will also reduce energy demand regardless of the nature of that cost-cutting.
[+] [-] euroderf|2 years ago|reply
Excess employees will be mulched.
[+] [-] Erratic6576|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertlagrant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elashri|2 years ago|reply
A lot of the people who had MS offering instead of google were saying that they are safe with their choice. 1TB is much more reasonable than "unlimited" and Microsoft would keep it. Now here we are.
Happy to be part of CERN so I don't have to worry about my institution storage situation at all. And it is not like one drive or google drive would be suitable for me anyway.
[+] [-] Lucasoato|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crimbles|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] formerly_proven|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staplers|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FirmwareBurner|2 years ago|reply
And AI's are destructive for the environment why? Is it more environmentally friendly to waste a lot more human time with less compute power doing mundane repetitive shit for hours that an AI/LLM can summarize or answer in seconds?
With that logic it's also more environmentally friendly to use an ox to plow the fields instead of a diesel John Deer.
[+] [-] pjmlp|2 years ago|reply
Ironically, on another business unit, everyone should throw away their perfectly working computer at the expense of the environment, and buy as Windows 11 capable computer.
Priorities.
[+] [-] Kwpolska|2 years ago|reply
> all institutions’ tenants will receive 100TB of free pooled storage across OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange, with an additional 50GB or 100GB of pooled storage per paid user for A3 and A5 subscriptions, respectively (not including Student Use Benefits). With pooled storage, an institutions’ total storage limit is the maximum amount of storage all users combined can use.
> In addition, effective February 1, 2024, users of Office 365 A1 (free subscription) will be limited to a maximum of 100GB of OneDrive storage within the institutional tenant’s 100TB of pooled storage.
McGill seems to offer desktop apps to students, so they have paid licences. [2] This means they could offer 50 GB per student, and I imagine they could allow the student to have more OneDrive files and less Outlook data. Furthermore, if they care about research data, that should be in a common SharePoint space with well-defined access and edit permissions.
[0] https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft...
[2] https://www.mcgill.ca/it/services/o365
[+] [-] Almondsetat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xattt|2 years ago|reply
Something will come of it, particularly because of how much buy-in there is/was from academic institutions who jumped ship from Google Docs+Drive to Microsoft cloud offerings.
[+] [-] tgma|2 years ago|reply
It always has to be the end user who sacrifices for the environment.
[+] [-] vasco|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaomingite|2 years ago|reply
I like having one connector for everything.
[+] [-] laborcontract|2 years ago|reply
The e-waste related to including chargers in the box is a real thing. That change also allowed them to halve the size of the boxes, effectively doubling the shipping yield. On a billion-device level that's a non-trivial change.
And yes, it's good for their bottom line. And yes, it effectively increased the price by $30. Sucks for me, yes. So what?
[+] [-] ok_dad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vdaea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aiauthoritydev|2 years ago|reply
It is saying like why should IC engine performance always suffer because for fuel efficiency.
Ultimately the supposed and alleged environmental harm *always* in every single case is a result of human consumption so some human has to suffer for these allegedly environmental moves if not the person buying iPhone then the Apple employee or Apple Shareholder or average tax payer.
[+] [-] lnxg33k1|2 years ago|reply
At this point I’m not even mad with Microsoft
[+] [-] CaptArmchair|2 years ago|reply
Reproducibility and vetting research output, as well as other forms of accountability requires research data to be present and available. Hence the requirement to safeguard that data. However, a personal share hosted on institutional cloud storage isn't the best place to store research data for lack of accessibility, discoverability, etc.
McGill does offer research data management services. [1] These services are meant to guide researchers as well as cooperate with them working towards long term archival solutions and policies for safeguarding research data.
[1] https://www.mcgill.ca/drs/rdm
[+] [-] ReleaseCandidat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] srmarm|2 years ago|reply
I seem to vaguely recall that some of the glacier data was just put on Blu-ray discs and filed away. Seems like a viable solution and with the cloudesq abstraction it doesn't necessarily matter so long as it's being done properly.
Of course I suspect the environment is being used as convenient excuse to people with environmental policies.
[+] [-] sandworm101|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grimblewald|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Terretta|2 years ago|reply
"And this is why we [McGill] are asking you to reduce the data stored in your OneDrive and in your Outlook email."
https://www.mcgill.ca/polling/channels/news/important-onedri...
But, amazingly, Microsoft did argue this nonsense:
1. security risk of storing files
2. environmental impact
3. ability for Microsoft to innovate more by deleting your stuff
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft...
Ministry of Truth...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_in_Nineteen_Eighty-...
[+] [-] zinekeller|2 years ago|reply
Edit: our IT admins are really baffled too and will now verify with Microsoft if this is an actual thing or just poor phrasing from McGill.
Update: there'll be a change apparently but not this draconian. Storage will be limited to a minimum of 100GB/user with an additional 100TB "pooled" storage for everyone. While this is a shock to me and my admin, McGill's policy is still exceptionally draconian.
[+] [-] misnome|2 years ago|reply
Weird, you should tell Microsoft this, because I don’t know what it was before but the link in that thread says they are:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/microsoft...
Limiting to 100TB pooled and $30/TB/month for extra storage.
One of the reasons explicitly given being “Environmental Impact”
[+] [-] dimask|2 years ago|reply
> Sustainability is an important consideration that drove Microsoft to make that decision.
Why is a university IT's announcement written as if by Microsoft's PR office? The style of the announcement is very weird. Has McGill outsourced all IT support services to Microsoft, thus it is written essentially by them?
[+] [-] asmor|2 years ago|reply
Newspeak is very specifically about the idea of making some ideas impossible to express. You seem to be calling Microsoft's bullshit pretty well.
(Simlarly, panopticism is about supressing expression of ideas though the threat of surveilance and subsequent repression, and going by how much political discourse has eroded, our version of surveilance capitalism doesn't seem to limit anyone from voicing their ideas, no matter how far it strays from prior social expectations of decency)
[+] [-] gumballindie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okokwhatever|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neil44|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] znpy|2 years ago|reply
Isn't this fraud? The customers (institutions or others) had agreed on a certain amount of storage space for a certain price, but now Microsoft is changing the cards on the table.
The "environmental reasons" smells like bs.
[+] [-] DeathArrow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j1elo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chromanoid|2 years ago|reply
Having to store data for five years seems to me to be a lame excuse.
[+] [-] crimbles|2 years ago|reply
Then O365 business.