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?"
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
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!
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.
E-mail? Who needs another free e-mail account? Thank you Google for giving me an unlimited supply of network attached storage!
-a
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.
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.
For encryption it could pick up the 'to' address from the relevant field and use it to encrypt the main text box. For decryption it could pickup the 'from' address and the encrypted text from the HTML, then replace the encrypted message with the clear text.
A USB key-drive with a copy of Firebird (+ extension), GnuPG and your keys would allow you to access your mail from pretty much any computer. Though it would be relient on Google not changing their page format too often.
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.
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'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)?
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!
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