Slashdot Mirror
Speculating About Gmail
rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier,
here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"
I was still under the impression that this could be an april fools.
I am assuming from the way this reads that it has actually been confirmed?
Here's my question: how are they going to make sure people only have one account each? What's to prevent people from getting dosens and backing up their harddrive?
I presume I probably wasn't the only person who put their email address into the 'interested in an account?' section on the gmail website before remembering that it could be linked to all my previous searches on this machine... http://www.google-watch.org/email.html suggests deleting the google.com cookie before and afterwards, but might be too late for that...
-jermy
Clearly playing at people's thinking that it was a joke.
Seriously, it is nice to see that the Google system is not so overly polished that they wipe out any traces of human emotions and cute little oddites.
Happy birthday, April!
I thought Gmail was just Google Groups. Threaded group mail anyone? The press release was just an April Fool's announcement for a product that they already have. Or not. Maybe they are leveraging the technology of Usenet/Deja/Google Groups with a privacy layer on top to create a 'closed' Usenet.
They are trying to do the Google thing to the Email what they have done to Search. Internet Search has become synnonymous with Google. Perhaps way ahead,the Personal Interconnection through Emails and on Internet will have a Common Starting point- the Google thing with the services like Gmail and Orkut.
Senthil
obviously if this is the goal they want to achieve, why would they hide it to the world?
2 49&mode=thread) that xserves G5 were going to power such a thing, 100 000 xserve G5 (Virginia tech made it clear they didn't get any deal so why Google would) can reach between 299 million and 579 million US dollar. Add to that the cooling, the room, the interconnect and all those little niceties that comes with it and it turns out that the project will cost a lot of money, not impossible but still. It will also probably need to come with its own electrical system, a mini-central if you wish, else it will cost them quite a lot per month as far as the electirc bill goes.
What would be the point? This is not a new concept or something no one ever though of, the only true obstacle to such a thing is money, they'll need a lot of it.
I read here (http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/31/2341
Which would in turn require over 650 machines to stick them in (at 8 drives per node, itself probably a tad high since the bus would grind to a crawl in such a machine). All that adds up to at least half of a million dollars.
In that kind of quantlty I could do you a Raid controller driving, say, 128 drives, for about the cost of one machine. You need to Raid it anyway - you couldn't sau "sorry, we lost all your emails when on drive went down". I would bet that Google have some kind of economy raid controller in the works even if not yet deployed.
Bandwidth isn't the problem. How much bandwidth do you spend reading email? Most of that data will sit there unread for months.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Most of the 1G storage quota will be taken by large attachments of movies and other stuff that gets forwarded around. Google are figuring out that if they merge identical copies the actual average storage consumption per user is going to be far less than 100mb.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I believe the primary concern is identity theft and other things.
You don't want bank, credit card, and other personal identification floating around in your emails for the rest of eternity, do you?
I happen to buy things online and bank online.
Not to mention sometimes there are things I'd rather not leave in the inbox. I'm sure you've had at least one thing you'd probably be irked about being unable to delete. While it's only that one thing (then, anyway) it can be quite a thorn!
Yahoo allows me to delete my entire account and profile then ban my username. The whole damn thing. Google just turns off my password and tells me it'll be there waiting when I come back?
No thanks. I've got a couple ICQ accounts I can't recover from the modem days and it's annoying. I don't even want to think about having thousands of emails that I can't get rid of.
I tend to skip all articles about Google on The Register, because they are all written by Andrew Orlowski -- who seems to have a personal vendetta against Google. I suspect it doesn't rate his personal website high enough :-).
As long as they don't become as ubiquitous in mail service as they are in the web search field, and as long as they don't use their quasi monopoly in the latter to leverage the former, I don't mind.
But if Gmail'd become the defacto mail service provider (crushing its older siblings in the process), eliminating your choice of preserving your privacy, would you still sing the same song ?
Privacy is a fundamental element of democracy, helping us preserving our identity and individuality in the society, don't take it too lightly.
try 'yourname@gmail.com'
in order to get yourname at google, you have to work there (which I have made it a life's goal to do!)
Read jack phelps dot net
Ok... you must mean one of two things there.
1) Google searches for torrent files and has a listing like their newsgroups. You can already search for torrents through Google, first of all. Secondly, it doesn't combine torrents to maximize efficency so you still have multiple trackers that may carry duplicate files. Besides, you can also search for any OTHER kind of files, too.
OR
2) Google runs their own tracker that any bozo can use. The tracker, just so you know, just forwards packets. I can make a torrent and I just write the address of any tracker in the file, I don't need to clear it with the tracker first. The thing just spits packets indiscriminately. Even if it was discriminating, it would be impossible to police especially considering the multitude of different information laws across the globe.
Or you could mean both, which suffers from the problems of both. Either way it would require far more labor to keep it "legal" than Google is willing to invest. They want it to be as automated as possible.
Anyone who uses Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or *any* webmail) for confidential material is fooling themselves about its confidentiality, but as a mail service for shuffling data around it will be very useful, but Gmail is going to have cover itself and protect itself from being the biggest mp3, warez and pr0n distributor in the world.
E-mail? Who needs another free e-mail account? Thank you Google for giving me an unlimited supply of network attached storage!
-a
I think that is it. I think that they will be savin a lot of space byobserving common attachments and storing only one copy. If you stor only one copy of each spam, each pr0n binary, each family snap you send to 10 relatives, a lot of space is saved. Of course, they may have difficulty cleaning up each and every copy, so they may (unintentionally) hold a copy after all references have been deleted - which is what they are warning about. If identical attachments are shared, how many Mb do you actuall use with your virtual Gb?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Hotmail was started for the same reason every other web-based free email system was started, and in fact why every other Internet-based business (with the exception of Amazon) was started way back when...because people still thought the advertisement-driven model of Internet-based businesses was tenable.
Now, of course, all of these businesses have extra, fee-based "premium" services on top of their base free packages, because they've figured out that advertising revenue alone won't keep your head above water on the Internet.
The Passport system may have been a reason Microsoft purchased Hotmail (although I think the Passport system probably came well after the purchase of Hotmail), but it's not why Hotmail was created in the first place.
Then the spammers sign up for a few hundred accounts, and get added to a few hundred mailing lists each, and mark all of them as spam. Pretty soon, its useless.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They're going to have mirrors, snapshots, backups, offsite backups, remote replication... Expecting them to purge your email when you delete your account is crazy.
Not according to the blog mentioned in this Slashdot article. Basically, it appears as though Google has implemented its own distributed file system which stores your data in three different places and runs on 100,000 very cheap computers. Can you imagine having full or even incremental backups of the data on 100,000 servers? Can you imagine mirroring 100,000 servers? Neither can I. However, I can imagine having my data on 3 of the 100,000 servers and designing the file system so that it replicates deletions of my e-mail.
There's papers already written about Google's existing file system. It is 'append only', they build up large 40GB+ chunk files on Linux servers and flag stuff within the file as deleted, without actucally deleting it.
So they probably only compact a file when it becomes mostly deleted entries.
They're probably using the same system for GMail, so even if you delete stuff, its not really deleted until the file store its on it compacted.
Hence the terms of service.
Hi,
Don't forget that while people will be allowed to have up to 1GB of emails in their mailbox, it doesn't mean Google will have users x 1GB of disk space. Most people won't use the 1GB of mailbox space.
I worked on the mail system of the largest provider in my country. We had 700,000 customers with 15 MB mailboxes and we had something like 1/10 of the disk space required if all the mailboxs were full. And this worked just fine.
Not only Google won't need all that disk space, bu they will probably purchase additional disk space as it becomes necessary. It's smarter to buy new hard disks later than all the disk space immediately, they'll be cheaper.
Yahoo Groups have an option to automatically email some files to new members.
;-)
Needless to say, this has immediately been (ab)used by pr0n forums (e.g. HCMF). They slice the movies in parts, put it on a group, and then to get the movie all you have to do is join. No more hassle with reluctant servers or anemic download rates !
The only limitation to this scheme was that you needed to have a rather large mailbox, usually larger than what most free webmail services provide.
Well I guess that's no longer a problem...
My bet: GMail will soon be to pr0n storage what the Tower of Babel was to anitquity construction.
(Maybe that's the real reason why they're doing it after all
Thomanonymous Micowardni
I see this as a great benefit for a lot of mailing lists, where the information is public. How easy would it be to just search for some keywords rather than reading through screen-fulls of irrelevant posts on a particular subject, especially since messages are kept after deletion? As far as personal email accounts are concerned, I do view this as a privacy issue.
Use it if you want, or don't.
The same arguments I hear now about Microsoft. Nobody is forcing you, it is going to be great, you can just NOT use it.
I personaly think it is scary that a comunity that is oposed to one monopoly is so eager to help an other become one.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
A few good ones:
Transmit content that may be harmful to minors
Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission
Promote or encourage illegal activity
Who decides what's harmful to minors? Google? will they ban my account for sending my friends offensive images/jokes?
If i email an mp3 will they use their compute power to check if I own the copyright? Could the RIAA force them to report me?
Since they're scanning the mail anyway, would they have to report users if words like 'civil disobidience' are in their messages? Could the government give them watch words?
I hope that GMail is real - because it would solve a significant problem for me - though I'd really need GMail to support IMAP4 for my purposes...
I've three types of email I need to manage:
1) Secret, private emails - always with known contacts - encrypted.
2) Confidential email - again, known contacts only - stored only on my intranet - not sensitive - doesn't need encryption.
3) Public contact - frequently new or unknown contacts. Enquiries; replies from Usenet/mailing lists etc.
Types 1 and 2 are low volume and can be easily managed with current infrastructure. Tailored email addresses and white lists can virtually eliminate spam. Type 3, however, is a much bigger problem... because I can not easily control who contacts me. I think Gmail offers the hope of a solution here. For my purposes (at least) - given that Gmail would be used for initial contact only - I couldn't care less about the less than private nature of these communications. I don't really care if Google, law enforcement or even the government gets to see these messages - their content would be considered public. Provided that Gmail can be integrated into my current email system - such a service would offer an interesting and convenient alternative for "Type-3" email.
People keep saying "how will Google limit people's accounts". The whole point is, Google is giving a gig because they want to gather as much data as possible, for their search analysis algorithm tuning and contextual ads. They've got a web text stream pouring in, a USENET feed, a news feed... now they want to add email as one of the main untapped sources of huge amounts of text. So they don't want to limit accounts. They're giving you free storage in exchange for providing them with tons of data that they can use to attract advertisers and better target their ads.
When you stop to think about it, package management could be a key factor in the smooth running of the Google Gmail cluster. What software would be used to make sure each one of those 100,000 mail-handling nodes was running the latest, most secure version of sendmail, qmail or postfix? We know Google uses Linux extensively. It is fairly safe to assume that they are using apt-get to sling packages. But what do the Slashdot community think about apt-get's long term suitability for these types of projects? Can the open-source, Free Software package management poster child scale to meet the 100K-node challenge? I look forward to hearing the community's response!
Gmail service is natural step in Google's provision, because Google actually *is* the Echelon. A capability of matching search activities and personalities is a missing feature for its controllers, for sure.
You can check Google's behavior difference in handling "normal" and "dangerous" 5-word queries by comparing amount of processing time. It differs by order of magnitude 10 or more. Google is definitely communicating somewhere *before* issuing a reply.
Varied results are given with traceroute communications to Google, and it would be an interesting community project to create a network map of near-to-Google topology. An example of device of interest is 64.233.175.250, just before Google machinery, as seen from Europe. It is supposedly part of Google network, but it's trip time is not adequate to be located in California. What this box is? And who does it serve?
There you are, staring at me again.
I read this as meaning that they won't go messing with their backups to purge your data, which is perfectly reasonable, especially for a free service. Backups are supposed to be write-once recordings. If you've got a problem with that, don't transmit sensitive data over a free webmail service. Nothing spooky here. In fact, I imagine every webmail service works this way. Gmail is just kind enough to warn you about this.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
When I first heard about GMail, it sounded great. But as more time goes by and the terms of service become known, it seems to me that GMail could be a problematic service. It would also seem to me that Google would try to use e-mail to build profiles of its users, which could eventually fall into the hands third parties. (Even if Google doesn't intend for that to happen right now, once it is a publically traded company things could change.)
So for right now, I would have to say no thank you.
I'd question whether people would be as receptive to targeted ads in their email, however. I often search with the aim of making a purchase, and will happily click on the Google ads if they are relevant. This is not so often the case with email, however - the only situations that I can think of where I'd be responsive to targeted ads would be pre-sales query responses from merchants, or the one or two price bulletins I'm subscribed to (e.g. if they can mention somewhere I can get X cheaper.) But these types of emails would not be half as common as my use of search.
So to me, GMail looks like a service that will be massively more expensive per user for Google, with a lower return from click-throughs.
Anyone have any ideas of other situations where these ads might be successful (e.g. clicked on)?
I don't know if it was known in the sixties but they had sold computer to the nazis for them to keep records at death camps before then which isn't the best track record.
People like this announcement of Google's because they push the state-of-the-art forward. And it is quite a leap. What is there preventing Yahoo and MS/Hotmail from answering to this with similar improvements? It is not like offering 1GB of email storage is a patented idea. I am sure using google to search my email is a great idea, but I don't see why their competitors would be able offer similar searches using their search engines.
/. community. (Wow, has this ever been said before?!)
I don't see how this will make Google a monopoly. Instead, they are actually threatening the duopoly ruling the webmail business right now. And I don't think it will be easy for Google, even though they might be able to offer superior service, simply because it is really difficult to change user's habits and email adresses.
I think you are underestimating the
Reality or nothing.
I instantly thought of compression when I saw this. So much of what they collect will be flat-out identical like mass forwards, spam, newsletters, mailing lists and so on. Much of the rest will have significant identical components, like common footers. Why are we assuming they're not compressing across the database? I know I would investigate that if setting this sort of thing up, and as the projects using gzip as a tool to assess similarity have discovered, it can potentially provide much useful fringe data.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
true, but google seems to be the one company that has managed to really make money with advertising on the internet. consider their constant creativity and innovation in what they provide the users and realize that they do the same thing for their customers- the advertisers, as well as themselves. I'm sure they've worked out how to make advertising profit them as much as possible, just like they've figured out how to do it without pissing users off. The reason gmail will be wildly profitable for them is that they'll have the same non-intrusive AdWords/AdSense ads based on a scan of the words in your e-mail. I'll take that- they'll probably be extremely successful at blocking spam.
I imagine the client interface will also be as fast and powerful as google, too. A lot of the reason why I've hated web-based e-mail in the past is that (at least with a lot of the larger services like yahoo and microsoft) they're f'in SLOW. Google has the server infrastructure to make it fast, and because they'll be using text-based ads and probably a google-esqe lightweight interface it may just be faster than using Outlook on my desktop.
I'm sure their other incentive is that this would give them a lot more information to work with. Consider their creation of Orkut- they want more info to tie together. Having your e-mail means having who you e-mail. Sort of an auto-social-networking tool... I'm sure they'll figure out more cool stuff to do with the information they get from your e-mail.
The only question is- can they be trusted?
I dont know about you, but I can find a lot more uses for a GB of space other than E-mail. Google is going to find out about a year after this thing's official release that 60-90% of the mail stored on Gmail will be Viruses/Spam.
What I would like to see instead of this thing would be something along the lines of online storage like XDrive but free. That way I can store files from anywhere in the world, using just a web browser to access them.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
What's my point? If you're neurotic about your privacy and you're apprehensive about giving someone the ability to cross-reference your search info with your personal info and your mail info, turn off cookies and don't use Gmail.
Well, that won't help. All mail I send to (and receive from) Gmail accounts can be AdSensed(TM) and a profile of me, associated with my email-address, can be created. This allows for targeted spam, but I expect more sophisticated stuff from Google. They can use Orkut in the exact same way to see who your friends are (even if you don't use Orkut).
Be afraid!!
I would be first in line to buy hosting on Google clusters. If they are planning to offer virtual servers running Debian GNU/Hurd, Debian GNU/Linux, EROS or OpenBSD with fool root access, I am willing to instantly move all of my domains to Google, even if it costs more than my current provider.
Do you hear me, Google?
(Do you hear me, my current provider?)
What do you people think? Whould that be a good idea? Google might actually become Internet! Seriously. They are capable of hosting everything. Imagine how it would simplify spidering and indexing.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
It will simply index your entire mailbox, incoming or outgoing.
I don't see a problem with this - PROVIDING - it is secure enough and private enough that only I get to see the results of that.
I can quite honestly see it replacing bookmarks in my regular work.
Currently, whenever I find something interesting at work, I mail the link to my home account.
Now, if while google is searching the web, it started using MY personal preferences and keywords to build up a much more tuned result list, things could start to get very interesting.
Without the wealth of information that your emails provide, it cannot even begin to store YOUR profile properly.
A cookie can only do so much; a 1GB gMail folder could be just what google needs.
liqbase
Imagine for a moment that this story was about Microsoft, and the ensuing madness that the statement "Maybe this is the first step of Microsoft trying to provide universal storage for everyone" would cause.
But because it's Google, Slashdot readers give them a free pass. What makes you all think that Google's intent is so purely benevolent? I would think that the suspicious nature of Slashdotters would regard such an expansive enterprise with much skepticism.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
It doesnt even need major compression.
And at the same time in one foul sweep, google could practically wipe out attachment virii.
If the md5 of every attachment was stored linking back to the single copy of the attachment, it is a simple routine step to assume that once this attachment is identified as a Virus or Spam, that it will be removed and become unavailable for everybody worldwide.
I have queried this since my days in college - watching the Exchange server practically explode as it copied thousands of Melissa (mightv been lovebug) copies.
Why oh why doesnt the method I have proposed get used. Surely there is some big complex reason that I'm totally overlooking.
liqbase
I am not sure how much successful Gmail in the consumer marked due to concern of privacy etc , but once they perfect the technology this will be a great Corporate application,
G mail has everything a corporate email application needs . This will be perfect to support corporate document retentions rules etc. Also privacy is non issue here. Add a nice powerful GUI front-end, and some collabration features to this and you got an Outlook Killer. I guess Microsoft should be worried.
Gmail is NOT April Fools it seems... Check out www.gmail.com I am assuming the e-mail addresses will be somebody@gmail.com, and NOT google.com as people have thought. I have already put my name in to be notified for any beta testing. You can do this at the GMail Site in the FAQ. What worries me is that if they're offering 1GB per account... If Gmail is going to turn into a huge warez/porn/etc dump.
It took about 15 seconds to search Orkut for "April" and find:
9 42 57033126
http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=112460702
(April Buchheit: 80% trusty, 70% cool, 70% sexy)
Privacy is a two-way street, Google!
It is intereting to see a group of people that are always so quick to talk about security, and how leet they are, then go nuts over google storing e-mail. USE GPG. Encrypt your private e-mails and no body will read them.
If Gmail promised to do a 7x DOD wipe of you e-mails when you close your account, plus purge every old backup tape they have of your e-mails, within 10 minutes of your account closing, you should STILL encrypt private e-mail.
So much for talking about it and not doing it! Anyone who uses encryption doesn't care about google's privacy policy, as things are already as private as they get.
Gmail screenshot
so it's simple, simple is good.
can't wait for it goes public.
...because Google will store every piece of spam exactly once. (Well, actually, their storage system is redundant so it will probably be stored a handful of times. But that's all.)
.signature file appears at the end of every email I send. That .signature could be stored once and then referred to by a pointer. More savings.
If 10,000 Gmail users receive a piece of spam, Google will index the spam (storing it 5 times for backup purposes) and each of the 10,000 users will get a tiny little index number that points to the indexed spam.
This system will be pretty efficient, because most of the email in the world is highly redundant, if only because most of it is spam.
If Google engineers cared to do so, they could also do things like break your emails into chunks and index each chunk. An identical
Of course, a good question to ask is: if Google starts allowing users to flag spam for other users, how long will it be before the spammers adapt? Spammers can certainly make every piece of spam different from every other piece if they want to. They may be doing this already... I am not up to speed in the world of spam and anti-spam.
As for the free online storage... have you ever tried emailing an attachment to yourself with your web-based email? Hmmm... "store files from anywhere in the world... use a web browser to access them." Yep, sounds about right to me. Although attachments will probably be limited in size, as some people speculate, so don't try storing any feature films or anything.
Much like Hotmails users are required to pawn their eternal soul to the Prince of Darkness, Gmail users are going to have to bite the bullet and accept that their privacy may not be so private anymore. Why is this such a big problem?
Here on Slashdot, we want complete privacy, 1GB of email, unlimited sized attachments, all for free, oh and IMAP and POP access too, please. Users want to have their cake and eat it too. Not to mention the fact that most Slashdot users balk at companies that have any sort of personal information about them, god forbid those companies try to mine that data for useful trends for profitbility.
This is a problem because corporate management is subject to change. This is a problem because concentrations of power tend to be takeover targets for those interested in power. This is a problem because we don't know where it may lead.
Google is already worrisomly large and powerful. They've been a good citizen of the community, but what would happen should they drift to the dark side? If we are prepared, then perhaps we can accept the benefits. If we aren't, then that action may entrap us.
If you don't understand the possible consequences, then you are operating on faith. And corporations have changed management many times prior to this one, so faith is unreasonable.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.