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Gmail Commentary and Responses
Phil Windley writes "In his inimitable style, Tim O'Reilly tells us why GMail matters. The piece is entitled, 'The Fuss About GMail' but that doesn't begin to properly identify the real meat of what Tim's saying. Tim does discuss some of the privacy concerns on GMail and why he's not concerned, but he also breaks new ground on why GMail is not just another free email system. For example, Tim talks about how GMail might herald an era of large centralized computing and calls for APIs to allow GMail content to be move back and forth between it and other systems." Reader chris mansley writes "Google is quietly responding all the flak being given to their new email service. They have added a statement to quell the growing list of concerns. No more keeping email forever is at the top of the list. The reviews have been sparse on details and screenshots, but now Google is providing a sneak peek here and here." The only thing I didn't like about Gmail was their apparent intention to keep your mail forever, regardless of your wishes. Since they've now clarified that they don't plan to do that, it doesn't seem like there's much of a problem any more. Yahoo and MSN already link your searches on their respective engines with your account profiles on their respective free email services, and no one seems to care (maybe because no one uses MSN or Yahoo as a search engine these days, but still).
If you've got a trust-nobody mentality then what Google has to say means nothing, they're going to rip up their privacy policy and send every e-mail that goes through their system directly to John Ashcroft using their PageRank sorting technology to indicate which e-mails are most relavant to his desire to repeal every amendment in numbered order...
Of course, if you're sane, you trust Google because if they really wanted to screw the world over, they simply could decide that since their search engine is so good, everybody needs to pay $25 a month to keep accessing it... or decide to start logging all search queries to a user-specific cookie... or just take their bat and ball and go home. They've already got enough power to mess with us even worse than Gmail could be, and they've yet to be caught abusing any of that power or going back on their word.
That's how trust is really built... by letting them have the ability to screw up and seeing that they don't manage to do so. I'd certainly trust my e-mail with Google more so than I'd trust some of the other major "free e-mail" services out there.
Since that 1GB will quickly be filled with spam and nothing else. Let them search and index THAT!
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
If you don't like Google's terms/serving ads based on your email... don't use Gmail! It's really that simple, no need for extra laws. Let the free market decide.
Google is
honest
trustworthy
loyal
helpful
friendly
courteous
kind
obedient
cheerful
thrifty, brave clean and reverent.
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Which is a good point, right?
Google right now faces a huge issue: "spam" websites designed to bomb it's search engine.
The one common thing about all spam emails is that they have a link to a product page [unless they're *scam* emails, a completely different thing]. Google can use algorithms on mail that gets marked and checked as spam to nerf the page rankings of those webpages.
Why is this important? Because it gives people a free service, gives google advertising money, and has a huge benefit to the search engine.
The best filtering "algorithm" is 5 million users doing your filtering for you. Google doesn't have that right now, because they don't ask anyone to rate their web results. Google stands to gain a huge statistical advantage by incorportating email into their services.
(maybe because no one uses MSN or Yahoo as a search engine these days, but still)
Yahoo Groups
You'd be surprised how many people use it
Off topic I know, but what ever happened to the summary bit, and then "more that shows up when you actually click on the story" part?
If the poster couldn't do it, why couldn't the editor? Three keystrokes required...
Please help metamoderate.
Being text based without blinking and popping up is of course a huge plus.
-I am an elective eunuch.
Isn't this true? What is the difference?
I like this approach, it makes you think about what you say. Maybe some emails shouldn't be sent. If you have to worry about it, you shouldn't do it.
Jeoin
heck they plan on hardware failure, and if a box drops dead, they do not even pull it out of the line up until sometime the following week.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Oh wait... nevermind.
I think they've clarified they privacy policy to a level that us geeks should easily be able to understand...
When you hit "delete", more often than not in computer land, your data is not immediately rendered unrecoverable. In most operating systems, deleted files are ushered over to a "holding bin" for a final clear-out command to really get rid of them in case we want to change our mind. Once the OS finally lets go of the file, the file system often takes the short cut of just removing the index pointers to the file and/or marking the space as "unused", but leaving the data still spinning on the drive until something eventually wants to use that space... let's face it, a "quick format" doesn't have time to hit every track on the drive, it's taking a shortcut and that's what makes it "quick".
So, really, they're just saying that in order to make their magical mega-system work, "delete" isn't going to mean "Expunge it all right away!" but simply "Put in the pile that'll be discarded the next time the garbage collection process comes by." Therefore, they'll need to keep your "deleted" e-mails for an undisclosed length of time... they don't intend on keeping it forever, although they have to word the privacy policy in a way that might be misread that way because to do less just wouldn't be being honest.
If you don't have root access to the e-mail system where you work, you don't really know if "delete really means delete" on that system either. Your boss may in fact have access to your e-mail... you might as well assume that they do unless you know otherwise.
Would be a killer feature. If they could sync my PDA with my Desktop with Thunderbird I'd be thoroughly impressed.
Y! has this functionality for Outlook only; and it's seriously flawed (tasks get truncated at like 20 characters or something - ugh!).
Google certainly has what it takes to pull this off right. Hopefully, they'll provide a way for developers to integrate with the gmail API with external apps (ala T-bird, etc).
You can bet your last dollar that MSNmail, etc will (or already do; I don't use MSN) offer Syncronzation with their desktop apps.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'm really impressed with how Google has handled themselves since their inception. They have certainly been innovative, but most importantly they employ things that aren't seen enough in today's business world: openness and integrity.
I'm inherently paranoid (or, perhaps more appropriately, private) and always take things with a grain of salt - especially when it's coming from a business the size of Google.
That said, I don't blame Google for their desire to recoup costs by generating targeting advertisement. I'm very much impressed with how open they have been about the procedures they will use to actually target the ads. With this recent letter that so quickly and openly answers concerns made public recently, I'm happy to say here is a company that has been widly successful - all while being true gentlemen.
A good review can be found at http://jogin.com/weblog/archives/2004/04/15/juice
Strange. He obviously doesn't have any concerns regarding censorship, otherwise, he wouldn't have tried to destroy the Censorware project.
Just as well he's not Google's webmaster...
The motto embodied the sentiments of the "Hacker" culture in the late 20th to mid 21st centuries. This included the common thread of "anti-Microsoft(1)" outbursts and "Open Source(2)" advocacy.
Today, Google is our minder, our mother, our father, our saviour.
In Google We Trust
(2) Open Source was a rectionary movement towards Microsoft like tactics. Its leaders, often passionate advocates eventually lost their way, becoming sell-outs like the hippie generation before them.
Here are a few reviews that I was reading
A moratorium around election time to end some of these shenanigans would be appropriate.
At least with an e-mail service, Google will be standing on two feet when this happens. People will want to check their GMail no matter what search they are using. Google isn't even close to the financial power of Microsoft right now, so it needs to prepare for the attack...
1. use a browser/email plugin that can automatically encrypt your email before sending it.
2. use a browser/email decrypter plugin to unencrypt your mail when you read it.
PGP as a form of encryption is commonly available. Theoritically possible but I am not sure how practical it is.
This way all the webmail programs do not know what is being transmitted/stored.
How about other applications that can use the 1GB of storage from gmail?
e.g. online filesystem - files stored as attachments to emails to yourself.
What else?
Why is it so hard for journalists to get their facts straight and do a little research?
For example, the windley.com article, linked to this story, claims GMail offers "1 Tb" of storage.
1 GB is a helluva lot of space, but when you think of it 1 GB of text works out to on average 100MB of compressed ASCII. So what's the chance of someone using up their full 100MB of compressed text... for the average user it'd probably take YEARS.
I say there's a 10:1 chance that Google blocks attachments. For me, that means that GMail is essentially a glorified, logged IM. and.. just wait till the jane user discovers she can't send her photos to friends and family.
ya the only thing GMail has riding for it is publicity through controversy and the loyalty of geekdom to a company being forged into the next Microsoft.
Look people, gmail has not even started yet. All this you see is nothing but hype to get attention for Google.
/. crowd, don't be media sheep. It's just another mail service. There is no need for getting riled up over all these things the media says you need to get riled up over. Got it?
:)
Please
Don't bother tearing into this post, I could care less what you think.
I have an early gmail account, and have used it a little.
The most serious concern is the privacy policy itself.
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/privacy.html
Specifically:
As a standard email protocol, when you send an email from your Gmail account, Gmail includes your email address and user name in the header of the email. Beyond this, we do not disclose your personally identifying information to third parties unless we believe we are required to do so by law or have a good faith belief that such access, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, (b) enforce the Gmail Terms of Use, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues (including, without limitation, the filtering of spam), (d) respond to user support requests, or (e) protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.
"governmental request" means pretty much they'll turn over any information withouut a subpoena. I suppose for a free service, you get what you pay for.
All they said was that the average user would probably never have to delete any mail.
Where did they originally state that they intended to keep mail forever? Even their current statement doesn't indicate that they had ever intended to do so and only seems like a clarification; perhaps for certain polidioticians on both sides of the Atlantic.
The big thing with GMail apart from its space, is google's name behind the search feature. A proper search function really appears to be lacking in pretty much every major email client out there, once you get into large volumes of mail (which if you are reading this, you probably are) searching the mail takes serious amounts of time.
One existing, non-web, alternative is Bloomba which has a *great* search function, even on high volumes. My email client is already indexing well in excess of 10K messages (folders cap out at displaying >5K, I have two of those) so I dont have a real count), and searches all take less than a second.
paul reinheimer
Who can show me a "secret" link to sign up for the beta?
But seriously, I'm not to concerned about my mail privacy. I'm pretty open about my life because I have nothing to hide. Information like when I take a crap, or my credit card number (and etc) shouldn't be in an email that I write or recieve so no worries. It's hard to have your privacy violated electronically when you don't leave much hidden. Another point of view is that while there may be ideological issues at stake surrounding these privacy concerns in reality there is nothing to worry about for the majority of potential users [of Gmail].
I just type my sig in the reply form...
I just type my sig in the reply form...
That's a damn good point.
mod++
You can bet your last dollar that MSNmail, etc will (or already do; I don't use MSN) offer Syncronzation with their desktop apps.
Microsoft-owned Hotmail has been integrated into Outlook Express since the late 90s. A free msn.com address is nothing more than Hotmail by another name.
I originally thought the ads were going to be embedded in the email. But the ads look prety much the same as the ones when you use their search engine and the google ads on web pages based on their content.
Sorry - that should say "wouldn't nerf the page rank of slashdot if some spammer cleverly inserted slashdot at the bottom of his viagra spam".
"governmental request" means pretty much they'll turn over any information withouut a subpoena. I suppose for a free service, you get what you pay for.
Just notice that the wording is in a negative mode at that point. They're listing situaitons in which they won't reveal information. They're not saying that they will hand over infomation to a weak government request... just that you don't get to sue them if they decide to so.
It all goes back to whether you trust Google to know the difference between a non-mandatory government request they should comply with and one they should turn away.
Well done Google.
Now lets turn it on and give it a try!
Makes you wonder what is next?
I want a Google watch!
last figures i saw showed approximately
40% of users use google
30% use msn
30% use yahoo
25% use aol
various others have smaller shares...
clearly some folks use more than one engine...
if google charged for search and they would suffer...
as original poster pointed out few complain about msn and yahoo cause they dont give a damn....hysterical ninnys will complain about just about anything so let em.
if you want free email from google, google will have the option of setting some terms...dont like em, dont use it.
move on.
With millions of mailboxes full of keywords such as "viagra," I couldn't think of a worse way to associate ads with a user.
I don't know and could be completely wrong about it, but this campaign of privacy concerns about the way Gmail is going to scan our mails and how evil its is, seems to me more like a kind of Yahoo! and MSN and who knows who other else fighting for their survival...why would I pay 20 o 30 something dollar a year to upgrade my Inbox to 25/30MB when I can have 1GB for free?
And by the way, isn't Yahoo! or MSN already scanning every single of our mails in search of antivirus and antispam? No privacy concerns here? Am I missing something here?
It seems most geeks would rather have paedophiles were able to exchange child porn freely than have someone read their ultimately fucking tedious and worthless emails. I mean, you're geeks, FFS. You should be campaigning for the poor fuckers who have to read your rejected Star Trek erotic furry fanfiction, not bitching about how someone might come across your anti-Microsoft rants that no one except for a few obsessive autistics could care about
If you want secure mail, get your own server. Try some initiative for a change. You aren't in High School any longer, so there's no more jocks around to steal your lunch money
Oh c'mon, you guys get too worked up over privacy. Even if google forwarded your email to every person in the government and admitted it, it'd still probably be a great alternative to Yahoo! and Hotmail.
Just talk in code, like so:
"Did you get the "Spanish omelets" I sent you?"
"Yes, but I'm afraid the "tomatoes" stole the "Monkey""
"Oh ok, the crow flocks at midnight!"
See, two guys talking about Spanish omelets, monkeys and birds. Mr. Ashcroft is none the wiser!
More screen shots
If you want to mail sommat you don't want The Government to see, then use another method of mailing it.
I understand why people are a little freaked out by G-Mail, but really, if you need privacy, you shouldn't use ANY mail service that you aren't absolutely sure doesn't read email, and you should encrypt your message as plain text emails can be intercepted at any of the thousands of mail servers your mail will pass through.
-Derick
What does a gigabyte of disk space cost nowadays? How about one dollar? Better yet, how much does a gigabyte of disk space cost Google? Is this really so fantastic? They will make that cost up in advertising so fast it'll make your head spin, and I'll be glad to watch Yahoo, Hotmail and the others fall behind.
I just don't need it.
Yahoo and MSN already link your searches on their respective engines with your account profiles on their respective free email services, and no one seems to care...
./ --- my personal favorite).
I do.
That kind of thing is *precisely* why I don't use those email services other than for stupid registrations for free stuff (once called "soul-sucking email registration" in a post on
As for GMail, 1000MB of space sounds great, but when I have to worry about computer systems that track my interests and someone else controlling who gets to see my information and when...well...I set up postfix on my box, buy a domain, and that's the end of that. I can store 122GB of email if I want to, forever if I want to, and I don't have to sell my soul to adverts and the FBI in order to do so.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
I can say that I trust them (the founders) pretty much totally. It probably had something to do with the posted signs saying "Don't be evil." All over the place. Its rule number 1. I also use gMail, and while I don't think its as amazing as people have made it out to be, its nice to not worry about inbox limits. If your still concerned about privacy think about this. They have your IP address and every search you've ever run, personally thats more revealing about me than most of my e-mails. Do they log them all in some huge scary database? No. But if you're paranoid enough to worry about bots reading your mail, you should probably think about that potentiality as well. -Ian
"If you've got a trust-nobody mentality..."
Then what the hell are you doing signing up to use a Free email service, or for that matter being on the internet to begin with?
If you do not trust google, then you really shouldn't trust hotmail or yahoo either.
3dinfo@maficstudios.com
...that means my would-have-been-top-choice user id "googler" is already taken! :-(
You know what I think? I think the whole privacy issue is a "grassroots" campaign initiated, funded, and propogated by the one company scared spitless of Google: Microsoft.
My girlfriend's cousin's best friend's roommate in college reported that his brother-in-law (who works for Microsoft, so you know it's from a reliable source) tells me he "handles" the PR firm that is managing this whole campaign, to make it look like Google is a big, scary ursine terror, instead of the big fluffy teddy bear they really are. Microsoft has (to date) spent $1.2M buying advertising disguised as special-interest groups, "reporters" for major tech rags, and M&Ms for the office.
Really. Don't laugh at me like that. I'm serious. It's all part of Microsoft's astroturf campaign to discredit Google.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
OT: Quick question...
Does qmail allow you to setup multiple profiles so that you can send email as another address? I have several email addresses and like to send email that appears as if its coming from said address. Does gmail allow that or is all outgoing email addressed from your gmail account?
Thanks!
The thing to be a cross between web mail and a desktop email client: it is written in several hundred kilobytes of javascript.
This looks amazingly like Opera's M2 mail client. What Google calls "labels" M2 calls "views." It's the same flat-file, searchable, non-folder solution in both cases. And I love my M2.
As far as Tim's idea of gmail being the next internet OS, he's just an old guy ranting about dreams of future technology... gmail isn't offering to store anything but your emails. No word on attachments (therefore files). Even if you could send yourself files as attachments, how easily would it be to retrieve them to do any meaningful work? If the idea of working with all the data you have on a desktop through searches only (no matter how advanced the search algorithms) was that good, you'd already have it in Linux by now. But you don't. So stop crossing yourself before Tim's icon. Instead you have a file system, with good old directories, and cd is still the queen.
And why are people so impressed that they'll be able to use the "amazing" google search on their own emails? What separated google from the crowd when it came to web searches was their simple but effective ideas related to web nodes and who points to them and to whom they point (the page rank thing). How does that apply to your email to make it so amazingly searched? Not in any way. You're just getting another free email service, with less extravagant adverts and more space. But faith matters in life, and I see a lot of faith in Lord Google around here. So, get gmail for everlasting life in gHeaven.
Privacy? The moment you press "Send" on you email client, you kissed it good bye, no matter whose service you use. It's out of your hands, unless you encrypt it. So you could live with it so far, you'll survive gmail too.
If you look at the very first condition (a), you'll see that they explicitly define a government request as seperate from a "legal process", "law", or "regulation". Clearly, the act of obtaining and presenting a warrant or subpoena falls under the category of "legal process", which is identified as being different from a "government request".
As well, notice that that Google explicitly says that they will turn over personal information to "third parties". That could mean anyone-- your boss, your teacher, your parents, the RIAA, or even your Rabbi. The simple fact of the matter is that the only way to get privacy in e-mail is to run your own servers and only send and receive encrypted e-mail messages.
I'm not saying that Google is evil-- though they do admit that they will be more than helpful in providing anyone with your personal information if the request satisfies any of the above conditions which, in my opinion, are overly broad -- but I do think that any organisation that really cared about your privacy would have a simple policy: they would not turn over information unless the request was made through the legal process.
The intro blurb says this:
>No more keeping email forever is at the
>top of the list.
I think this is in reference to the claims bouncing around that Google would be keeping mail forever even after you deleted it or closed your account. THEY NEVER WERE GOING TO DO THIS. There was a misunderstanding about what Google meant when they warned that "residual" copies of emails could remain around after you deleted them.
They were just warning that they wouldn't be able to erase every copy from every backup instantly and some people got confused and started yelling that the sky was falling. Sheesh.
Apparently a few reporters weren't around English class the day they covered what "residual" means.
There is now a clear statement on the Gmail site that they will make a reasonable effort to remove deleted data as soon as practicable.
My theory is that Gmail was a wake up call to Microsoft, AOL and YAHOO that they were not ready for. I think that one or all of those companies are pulling strings behind the scenes and THAT is what the fuss about.
Granted that California senator (or whatever she is) is playing this for the face time during an election year, but one has to wonder if she has recieved any contributions recently to her campaign...
Is there any technical reason why you couldn't write some clever code that would allow you to mount GMail as a networked drive, just like Konqueror does with its multi-protocol support?
Files would be stored as attachments, along with a file allocation table of some sort. Send a mail to yourself to write a file; delete the mail to erase it.. but all totally transparent to you. It'd be a bit slow, but some clever caching/buffering could take care of that.
You could theoretically get it to span across several accounts to store files larger than a gig. Just add un/pw's to a config file to increase your storage capacity.
Even if they don't end up providing pop3/smtp, you can still just script the html sessions like YahooPOPs! does.
Amazon.com enteres into search business
Can Amazon Unplug Google?>
And certainly any IMAP server would have multiple copies on tape...
-
why you need 1GB for email. For the spam of course!
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
I do not understand why there is all of this fuss about google's gmail. Firstly, it is a service that YOU sifn up for. You chose whether you want them to target ads to you. They are using technology to target advertising. This is not an invasion of privacy. Would you suggest that it is an invasion of privacy for a phone carrier to log which calls you made? Of course not, they need to do that so that they can properly charge you for the services you have requested. Google wants to do the same thing, scan your emails which allows for advertising that enables them to offer you the service that you have requested. The problem here is that poeple have the perception that nobody looks at your emails. Google has technology to do this, and it is a shock to people that they are 'opened' because they see them. If people only realized that every server has this capability they would not be so worried about Google abusing it, because if they do they are just as liable as the other guy,
So... When is someone going to realize that this is just email... its just email- this is NOT something new...
Hell does the fact that they are providing 1GB of storage really make this all that different?
Wow I'm glad I have someplace to keep lots of email now my 120GB hard drive just wasn't doing it for me.
transmission_err
he then continous:
1. Giving users a lot of space. Okay, this isn't rocket surgery. Disks have been getting cheaper for a long time now. Do you honestly expect to see other large (and even mid-tier) web mail providers not increasing their offerings to match or surpass those of Gmail? It seems like a no-brainer to me.
2. Proving virtual folders, conversations, search-based message lists, or whatever you want to call them. So we've got threading (not new) plus virtual folders (not new) in a single mail interface. Well, stop the presses! It's amazing to think that no mail clients have offered this functionality in the last 5-7 years! Oh, wait. They have.
3. Adding context-sensitive ads to your mail. Yippie! I'm gonna switch right away so I can start seeing SPAM that I cannot filter even in my previously non-spam mail. Sign me up!
see http://jeremy.zawodny.com/
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
if Google is watching they may end up witnessing a crime or few and they're obligated to report it. At least I'd hope they'd have the integrity to do so. They're first party. They're not signing away their right to read your mail. They've just agreed not to share that information with others unless required by law. If Google flags your account for whatever reason, as long as they don't share it with people who don't need to know, there's no invasion of privacy.
If the government intercepts an e-mail and finds it originated from Google they can get a warrent and request that Google cough up all the information they can. The cops need one legally gained piece of information to get probable cause which opens up a door to much more information. Google can do their own investigation and decide whether or not to fight to keep that information private. Or if they confirm in their own minds a crime is being committed, they should be more than happy to help law enforcment.
And I would certainly hope Google would keep records and comply.
It's amazing how often computer crimes happen and those who could fit all the pieces together to save a person's livlihood just don't care. It's not their country, it's not their state, it's not them, it's not big enough, they don't care.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Without POP and SMTP support, who really cares? I don't have time to check 50 emails a day on a web interface.
For web email I use mailvault, and for real email I use gmx, which still gives you free POP3 and SMTP.
Think about this for a moment. Now that open standards have come into play with regards to all our communications on the internet (HTML,XML,TCP/IP, etc..), Google has now put itself into position to be the predominant application provider- anything you want could be through the browser, and you have all the information flowing on the internet at your fingertips.
Plus, it will commoditize the desktop- who the fuck cares what OS you run, as long as you get to gMail or gNews or Google? At that point, Microsoft would not survive long.. how can a software company that requires revenue survive against a free operating system? since the free alternatives for their OS and office suite are becoming competitive, it leaves multimedia as it's only thread of survival... something the FOSS world needs to simplify and embrace.
Looks like a great idea to me. Go Google, and to their upcoming competitors! Of course, I maybe overly optimistic.
sure did make Google an assload of free publicity. some snotty slick haired business major is enjoying his recent promotion right now. its amazing how popculture and such can be leveraged. wish I could do that
You say that Google's new statement about not keeping data forever has eased your mind. The statement is merely one line that says, "However, Google will make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."
This statement is on a new page full of spin, and hasn't even achieved the status of the terms-of-use page or the privacy policy. How much legal weight to you think it carries?
Even if this same statement made it formally into the privacy policy, this language is vague enough so that when you're suing Google ten years after your Gmail account is closed, because Google is still passing out your old emails to the feds under subpoena, this language will serve to exonerate Google and leave you without a case.
Google: "Your Honor, we have 10,000 computers and his email was all over the place. It isn't practical to delete this data, and to expect otherwise is unreasonable."
Judge: "I see. Well, the plaintiff was duly warned before they signed up for Gmail. Case dismissed."
Jesus.
I am getting tired of the line "big companies have to be evil because they only care about profit". Let the evil companies sell crack to help their bottom line, let me support companies like Google who gives me something in return.
bring it on! --- JFK
Parent = excellent post: informed, informative, outspoken, passionate.
However, a quibble:
In 1943, Dr. Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo after his opposition to Hitler's racial policies and attempt to take over the German Church lead him to join a plot to assassinate Hitler.
Bonhoeffer certainly did have something to hide: a plot to assassinate Hitler.
We might defend Bonhoeffer because we approve of the plot, but there's no denying that the Gestapo picked him up for what it considered the best of reasons -- reasons which Bonhoeffer must have anticipated.
-kgj
-kgj
Yes, that's what I ask myself: why should I switch to Gmail? What are the advantages to outweigh the disadvantages?
Let's see: so far I have got as the advantages:
- 1GB space for mail
- slick web interface (so they claim) with threaded view etc.
- access your mail everywhere, as long as you have web access
and the disadvantages are:
- 1GB storage? Wow, cool. I've got a 250GB hard disk right here.
- ONLY web access. No POP3 or whatever. Your mail stays there, unless you forward it to a second mail account which allows you to store your mail locally (and why would you need Gmail then in the first place?). If you've got no web access (say, your DSL modem is defective or your ISP has trouble), you've got no way to access your stored mails.
- I have yet to see a web-based mail application which is as easy/quick to use as a standard one. Sorting mails, full text search, printing, exporting mails into a different file format - sorry, but I just cannot believe that Gmail will be better than Eudora or whatever.
- data storage issues. Sorry, but I want to store my important mail HERE, on my own machine, where I can make SURE that the data won't be lost and where I can make regular backups on CD or whatever MYSELF.
- privacy issues. Nobody reads my personal mail. NOBODY. I am aware that any mail travels through countless servers on its way to my computer, but why should I sign up for a service which is based on reading its customers mails and then sending ads based on what it has read (i.e. sends you spam you cannot filter out)? How long before the user profile data walks out of the Google offices and gets used by other companies "associated" with Google? They have everything there in their hands - name, address, age and every private mail you ever sent or received via Google! As well as all the email addresses of everybody you ever exchanged mails with. How long before police etc. order Google to run queries against the data? "Hey, please run a query and give us the addresses of everybody who has mail with this-and-that warez URL!" Oh, your buddy sent you a mail half a year ago and told you "hey dude, check out this cool server"? And you wrote him back "thanks, looks cool - check out this mp3 ftp here"? Sorry, expect an official visit real soon.
No, I see absolutely NO reason why I should sign up for Gmail. Nothing they offer is so incredibly good that I would gladly give up my email privacy for it. Just use GMX or whatever and download your mail to your machine - that way you can STILL check your mail via the web interface when you're not at home.
What is YahooPOPs! ?
Yahoo! Mail disabled free access to its POP3 service in April 2002. This resulted in many people (including myself) to look for alternative free POP3 services. But this exercise can be very difficult because of the fact that your Yahoo! Mail address could be with several people and informing all of them about your new email address could prove to be a nightmare.
And then one day, I stumbled across a Perl script called FetchYahoo, which almost did what I wanted! It downloaded emails from Yahoo's website and presented them in a format such that email clients like Netscape and Pine could read them. But, the format in which it saved the emails is not supported by all email clients, including the one that I use. Also, making a layman install Perl and to get a Perl script to work could be a nightmare.
So, YahooPOPs! was born. YahooPOPs! is an open-source initiative to provide free POP3 and SMTP access to your Yahoo! Mail account. YahooPOPs! is available on the Windows and Unix platforms.
YahooPOPs! emulates a POP3/SMTP server and enables popular email clients like Outlook, Netscape, Eudora, Mozilla, IncrediMail, Calypso, etc., to download and send emails from Yahoo! accounts.
How do we do it you ask? Well, this application is more like a gateway. It provides a POP3/SMTP server interface at one end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo!
If you are not convinced that YahooPOPs! works, just download it right away and give it a try. You will not be disappointed.
GmailPOPS anyone?
This is just about the biggest pile of bullshit EVER.
Does anybody know when we're going to be able to get it?
The FAQ page implies that eventually, they plan to allow POP3 access. It's not clear whether it'll be free, though.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
Generally, the files I want to backup are only the documents I create (I'm a writer). There are not that many that I generate a week, they're not big compared to things such as mp3s, and they compress well. But I'd like to have a means to automatically backup my work easily and safely.
It should be easy enough to write a script that zips up all document files in specified directories and mail it to my Gmail account as an attachment. Of course, you could encrypt it if you want more security. Then set up the script to be run once or twice a day. It should be easy enough to make most backups to be incremental with only the recent changes, and every so many days make a full backup.
Of course, using Gmail for backup depends on the reliabilty of Google, and it's quite possible that if things go wrong in Gmail, you may have no means of recovering the email with the backups. So, having an alternative place to store the backups on occasion would be a good idea. Maybe Hotmail and Yahoo mail could be used for that.
I've had a number of jobs in which I was partly responsible for keeping the email running. On a number of occasions, I had the fun of helping a user with a failed message that was obviously very personal and not job related. I always took the approach of making it clear that I wasn't concerned with the contents of their message, I was just fixing a failure in the email system. I tried to get across the idea that, yes, I can read any message that goes through the system, and so can anyone else with a position of responsibility. I tried to get them to understand that the software at every stage does have to read and understand at least a part of any email message (the headers), and there's no technical reason that the software can't be made to examine anythingg in a message. Also, email is stored temporarily on any number of machines while in transit, and isn't always deleted. The user's message was one that wasn't deleted, because there was a problem with it, and other messages could be saved, too.
One of the other ideas I've tried to get across is that, although users might find me trustworthy, they (and I) have no idea who else may be looking at their email or saving copies. This could happen anywhere along the network path. Not that this should be a problem. They shouldn't get all paranoid over it. But it's something that they should understand.
If you don't understand all this, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how email has always worked. Gmail is no different, reallly. Privacy in email is an illusion, unless you've encrypted the contents.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I've had a beta account for about a week now, and ironically enough I find the search feature the most lacking.
You can only do whole word searches... if you want to search for emails from your friend Bob Chuzzlewit-Pumblechook, and you have ten friends named Bob, you can't shorten your search by searching for "Chuzz", as that will return nothing.
Kind of ironic, since on any other email client you can search for partial words.
If anyone needs further illustration on this point, I suggest referring to Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson. Folow the narrative threads dealing with The Vault, its reasons for existing, and what others do to stop its creation.
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
We need to trust Google, and others with similar promises, to progress with our interconnected infosphere. In order to trust people with material this valuable, we subject them to audit. We audit banks, we audit factories, we audit farms, we even audit gameshows. We need to audit Google. Google needs to be auditable. Their source code, while proprietary, needs to be audited by an auditor without other financial interest in Google, unlike the Enron/Anderson incest. And who audits the auditors? Other auditors - like a web of psychoanalysts, or peer-reviewing scientists, the web of trust must be at all levels, and open to verification on demand.
--
make install -not war
Storing a unique user ID is not an indispensable part of "nature of cookies"! It's a common approach for maintaining user sessions, but that does NOT mean that any use of cookies must somehow involve assigning unique ids to users.
Specifically, user id is absolutely not needed to store location/language information.
Using unique id to track user's sequential searches is a pretty obvious application (e.g., to know which ads would interest her), that's why some people are getting paranoid about it. It's something like library keeping a record of all the books you've read. Surely, usually, most people wouldn't care, but the privacy issues here definitely exist.
I use Google's search toolbar constantly. After a few days of using Gmail, I feel like Google is doing their best to make me even more dependent on searching (which in turn makes me dependent on their company).
The "Search Mail" box is always at the top of your page, on any screen, and since Gmail encourages you not to delete anything, the Search box becomes the easiest way to find stuff. (If there's a way to sort alphabetically by sender or subject, I haven't figured it out.) I think if I used Gmail regularly, it would make my brain even more more search-reliant in my daily life. It's one thing to have a cookie on my computer, but it's another thing to feel like they're messing with my brain. THAT is a privacy concern.
This is the funniest post for this article. I was thinking, there's going to be a rush for user ids when this thing starts.
Last night i had a dream that i was checking my email, and my unused space on my account said 990 MB free!
Finally a dream that might come true!
-John Fenley
Quote from parent: "clearly some folks use more than one engine..." Posting anon because I've moderated.
Bonhoeffer (and the rest of the Confessional Church, Bonhoffer's and Niemöller's answer to Hitler's paganistic Reich Church) was harassed long before he joined the plot.
When the harrassment began, that's when he had something to hide. Probably earlier -- an intelligent man, he would have sensed and feared Nazi malice from the beginning.
Similarly, Fred Hampton must have known the score -- must ust have witnessed firsthand how The Power uses finks, provocateurs, spooks, thugs. Hampton was in a war zone; he took sides; he was no fool. All of this gave him plenty to hide.
So my real defense is, it was four in the morning and, synchronized with the clock, I was working on beer number four.
No need to defend. Overall, your original post was the most powerful human-rights manifesto that I've ever seen on SlashDot. Keep up the good work.
-kgj
-kgj
i'm taking it that "just about" means that it's #2 at the most, putting it in second place behind your comment.
My excuses but I fail to see how this got modded to +4 (interesting).
If you know the full word that you are searching for, why not spend an extra 0.001 nanojoule to type it all up and then search for it? Granted you may want to search for parts of a string, but if this was ever a big issue, Google would not have been what it is today.
On another note, it's strikes me as the most obvious thing in the world that Gmail's competition will be reacting to this... In fact, I'd bet my arse off that that by the time Gmail is finally open to the public, there'll be at least one other (beside the spy_something one) new GigaB mail providers out there.
I understand that Yahoo and MSN will probably have some trouble expanding their current implementation to Gigabytes free offerings, but they'd be dumb not to be reacting to the applause and attention that Gmail's storage has been getting.
I, for one, am looking forward to a near future of stupidly large online mailboxes. I only hope that these mail addresses will last for ever and that we won't fall prey to the temptation of incorporating stupid rtf, pictures,- God forbid!- movies within the trivial mail, let alone spam. But I'm too much of cynic to believe that my fellow surfers are firm believers in minimalism too.
All rise for a toast to anti-spam technology and anti-troll blogs and comments.
There is a difference when you are searching the web and when you are searching email. By definition, your knowledge of your inbox is much more intimate than your knowledge of the entire web. As such, partial word matches wouldn't give you the false hits that a web search would, and if they were false hits, it would be easy enough to ignore.
Sure, I could type the entire name, that's not the point. Computers are supposed to make our lives easier.
I still like gmail enough to use it for my primary email, but that doesn't mean it is perfect.
One good thing I see that can come out of this is our ability to use Gmail to Mirror GNU content, because their server farms wouldn't be bogged down as easily, and it's free as in beer, they can go ahead and save as many copies of the programs as they want, doesn't invade my privacy
I've tried another Email seriver at: www.spymac.com. They provide 1GB(1048576 Kb) space for Email, and meanwhile hundreds of mb spaces for web host, weblog and photo storage use only. There is FIND function which is no advatange among existing web-email systems, I think. Because it has neither hight searching speed nor result page with more usability. Does anyone know what technology they are using to put up such big storage email service(distributed system, too?)? You can have a try and give your comments on this.
For: Creativity Inspiring; Against: Artificial Intelligence. http://lingfei.51.net/silverblog