GmailFS - The Google File System

Scott Granneman writes "Looking to use that new Gmail account for something really innovative? How about combining it with a brand new filesystem for Linux? Then GmailFS might be the answer: 'GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. ... GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename.'"

Comments

This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Sheetrock]

They've already made it plain they don't want third-party email account checkers; now you're going to subject them to transient file storage addons?

They're supporters of Linux. Somehow, it doesn't seem like a very "on the spoke" maneuver to aggravate them.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[kaleco]

This may be a moot point - if they don't want their service being used in this way it shouldn't be too difficult for them to prevent people from using Gmail in this way. I agree that it is unlikely that Google will condone this project. Time will tell.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[alphan]

What is the big deal?

now, they can have more data to analyze.

The only thing left is finding an unintrusive way to show google adds for the file system.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[perler]

as stated yesterday, how do you conclude, that a change in login procedure while in beta is meant to exclude third party email checkers - and WHY?! with you pranoia you should apply for a job at intel ;)

PAT

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[LostCluster]

Black hat hacking is clearly causing white hat hackers to lose toys these days...

Take the XM-PCR case as an example. XM clearly went out of their way to provide an easy-to-hack-with-a-computer model of their devices. However, they provided that model with the unspoken proviso that it must be used ethically.

Along comes a programmer with script-kiddie level skills who makes an automatic MP3 maker program that uses that device. That alone would have been fine by XM. However, that programmer decides to try to make a quick buck out of his work by selling it for $20 a copy. Furthermore, once media attention discovers his program, he raises the price.

That's the kind of thing that awakens the sleeping RIAA, and the RIAA orders XM to send the programmer a legal nastygram in order to show that he is approching the limits of an untested area of law. Of course, Slashdot groupthink blames XM for the letter and calls for a boycott.

Please people... RTFM before you start hacking anything. Especially, follow what the device makers tell you not to do, and don't try to seek direct obvious profits from your hacking.

We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back. Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[nwbvt]

" They've already made it plain they don't want third-party email account checkers;"

Since when?

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Kell_pt]

It's not just about them being supports of Linux. They have no duty of offering a service in return for nothing. Our way of "repaying" them is allowing them to show ads - it's the least one can do to support their service, don't you think? Maybe they could however offer "interoperability" via some small fee. But that doesn't look good marketing-wise, as it taints a free product with the idea of incompleteness from the paid version. But that's how it works for other systems too: pay and don't have to see ads. :)

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[aussie_a]

I'm sure your trying to be funny, but just because someone said something on slashdot doesn't make it true. Point me to some proof (and part of the facts in the article aren't even true), such as google saying they don't want third party software interacting with gmail, and then the article will be true. Until then it's merely 1 person's paranoia.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your request is futile. If it's abusable, somebody will abuse it.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[azaris]

We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back. Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?

I wouldn't call a piece of software that permits legal fair use to be "black hat". It's also strange that normally corporations who stomp on hackers trying to leverage their devices or services for relatively moderate ends get lambasted on /. but when that corporation happens to be Apple or Google, a lot of slashdotters put on the white knight armor and ride to the resque of an entity that surely has enough lawyers to fend off for themselves.

Realistically though, GmailFS is and always will be a quirk. They can of course break it any time they want but since 1 gigabyte in storage space costs, what, a handful of glass beads nowadays, do you really think enough people will bother with this to cause serious scalability problems for a search engine company that handles a hundred million hits per day?

To sum it up: wake up, Gmail isn't going to be cancelled just because somebody made a cute hack to use it as a filesystem. You can still pretend to be part of a special in-crowd of Google lovers because you managed to beg an invite off of someone.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[nwbvt]

If you look at that discussion you will see that I was active on it. We pretty much established that it was nothing but FUD.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[nolife]

We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back.

You give companies too much credit. If a company wanted something to really be hack friendly, there would be no complaints when it was hacked. They are not hack friendly if they complain about hacks. Your script kiddy comment is pretty lame. If the company made a product that someone with no skillz can hack it then the company got what they deserved. They choose to cut corners on security/development/testing or choose the wrong method to deliver the product to the users, either way it was a specific decision made by the company to maximize profits and they got burned. Any company can develop an encryption system in about 5 minutes and sell it for $50 a user. Imagine the profit that company can make until some script kiddy realizes it is only ROT15 and hacks it. It happens all the time with software and hardware. It is not always hacker friendly on purpose, it is cost cutting and/or a questionable business model. Remeber the CueCat?

Wireless phone companies and makers (Cellular and cordless phones) started with and to some extent still use this exact business model. They were using analog signal totally unencrypted for anyone with a radio scanner to hear, cellular in the 860mhz region and cordless in the 49mhz and 900mhz region. These devices started to catch on and get a foothold. Suddenly the consumers started to wake up and realize anyone with a scanner or a UHF TV tuner could pick up these signals. Yes, on purpose, they chose to use something very unsecure, made no real attempt to make it known it was unsecure [1]. How did they fix it? Went to congress. Congress eventually gave them what they wanted and banned the cellular region from new scanner radios and made it illegal for people to knowingly listen to cellular and cordless freqs. The phone making companies knew all along these transmissions were open to anyone with a radio that picked up those bands, they chose to ignore it, not develop anything or use readily available technology at the time to encode or encrypt it because it would have cost them more money. They were not hacker friendly, just trying to make more money. To this day, analog cordless and wireless phone signals are still able to be picked up by anyone in plain form, although it illegal to do it (yeah, that is the only thing preventing it). Luckily for the most part, analog has been replaced on the cordless side with digital and digital spread spectrum and wireless has gone almost all digital with various methods of encryption and encoding. With that, it takes more then a consumer radio to eavesdrop now.

Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?
The only reason companies make and sell products is to make money. If they think it will sell, they will produce it.

[1] I have never seen an analog cordless phone that mentions that it is easy to eavesdrop on. Many claim 65000 codes, extra privacy or security features, prevention of unauthorized use etc.. but they are all refering to the code needed to get a dialtone from the base station, not to hear the actual conversation in progress. It appears to be on purspoe that these security descriptions are very vague.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[seanmeister]

Since Paragraph 5 of the TOS maybe?

" You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. "

Not that I like it, and not that it even appears to allow the use of their own notifier app, but there it is.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Alsee]

Black hat hacking
Take the XM-PCR case as an example

*PLONK*

-

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[GoRK]

Unfortunately in the case of the XM application, "Fair use" goes out the window because you specifically waive the right when you agree to the ToS from XM which specifically disallows recording. Thus, it is a little "black hat" in that this guy broke his contract with XM and encouraged others to do so.

The question of whether or not XM ought to be allowed to enforce such a restriction in their contract or whether such a restriction is legal or fair is a related, but completely different argument. You can say that it would be a lot like your cable company putting a 'no record' contract in your contract, then suing TiVo because they are selling a device that makes recordings. (Note that this is precicely what happened when VCR's started becoming commonplace.) The TiVo analogy differs from the XM analogy in an important way, though. TiVo would not have been subject to the same no-recording restrictions as you, and thus, only you would actually be in violation. The real problem is that anyone trying to restrict broadcast TV or radio in this manner would (and did) generate enormous public outcry, but XM doing the same thing does not. If 1,000,000 of their paying customers decided to raise a stink about it and leave, then they would certainly do something about it. As it stands, there are disturbingly few people who actually seem to care about it anymore...

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[pegr]

" You also agree that you will not use any... ...manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service. "

Seems using GMail is against their terms of service...

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[AllNicksWereTaken]

They didn't say anything about not wanting third-party gmail checkers. The reason they made the image verifier thing is to prevent potential abuse from spammers using bots to login and send spam from Gmail (whose fast servers would allow for sending HUGE amounts of spam at once).

It's still possible for third-party Gmail apps to interact with the service. They just need a little upgrade so they read existing cookies rather than login to Gmail to obtain them.
I've explained how to do it here.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Jozer99]

I don't think that XM was providing an easy to hack device on purpose. I think it is just another example of corporate stupidity, like making the Radeon 9500 easy to hack into a 9700. Because it is there does not mean it was supposed to be there.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Noksagt]

You give companies too much credit. If a company wanted something to really be hack friendly, there would be no complaints when it was hacked. They are not hack friendly if they complain about hacks. Your script kiddy comment is pretty lame. If the company made a product that someone with no skillz can hack it then the company got what they deserved.

I disagree entirely. It is a Very Good thing to make an API that is both open and easy to use. It benefits the company who creates and releases it because their programmers could easily add new features & their product will be more popular because of features that others are able to add. Problems happen when people start writing functions in this grey area, often violating the license of the use of the original product or API. This isn't the original company's fault at all--they didn't disregard "security/development/testing," and instead opted for transparency. It is the fault of the "script kiddies"--rather than contributing positive enhancements back to the community (which they could write because of the great API), they choose to write things that may break the license or even the law. Hence the grandparent's comment to RTFM.

One explicit example is TiVo. They have allowed people to add larger hard drives, write software to post TiVo contents online, etc. They don't want people to distribute TiVoed content on the net or to steal TiVo subscription service. Both are very possible, but neither is widely exploited. If someone was to start selling software to do either, TiVo should get upset! Not because they didn't know of the possibility, but because they trusted their user base. And that is bad for all of us--the next API won't be transparent.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[drawfour]

More data to analyze? Please explain how this helps them? All that's happening is emails are being sent with some weird subject line (the "fsname") and files are attached to that. I'm sure the body of the message somehow has the "path" of the file and other information (such as number of chunks, etc...).

Gmail itself analyses email content to see what kinds of emails you receive and then decides what ads to show you, etc...

Please tell us how analyzing this extra data actually helps Gmail do what they want. If anything, it gives them more data with NOTHING useful.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[nolife]

Well what companies and people need to come to terms with is that just because your company does not make a certain feature or function does not mean someone else will not. This applies to hardware, software, security and functionality.

Playing different regions games on your Xbox, PS2 or a DVD movie, hell, the whole chipping concept, using your Xbox joystick on your computer and visa versa, ripping DVD's, coping cd's, using a CueCat to scan your own barcodes, using a standalone email device with a different internet provider bypassing the monthly fee, ink jet refill kits, taking apart and reusing a disposible digital camera, pringles can for an antennea, using your wireless card as an access point, using GMail storage as a filesystem, changing hard coded default passwords, overclocking your MB or processor, removing resistor R232 from your cd burner to make it a 16x model instead of an 8x, flashing bios to get extra functionality of the next model, soldering a jumper to enable an extra feature. People will always attempt to bypass, modify, or extend the functionality of something. All it takes is one smart person to figure it out and let others know. I look at things from a different prespective. I do not view it as a company "letting" you do something with your hardware, Example with the TIVO. Almost everything you stated about the TIVO I believe was figured out by people hacking (I don't follow the TIVO so I may be wrong here). Was an email sent to support asking how to install a larger drive and they responded back? I assume someone figured it out themselves and let others know about it. Unless they post an armed gaurd standing next to my TIVO, I can use the same proceedure to upgrade mine also regardless if they approve or not. If they change the system making previous methods no longer work, someone else will figure out the new way to get it going on the future models also. Yes mod ability can help sales but certain vendor actions can wipe out sales also. I have suggested and purchased several Linksys routers based on what I know about the firmware upgrade capability. If they take that away or change it, I will no longer suggest them and get something else.
A company that does not understand that concept is either blind or made a business decision to balance the potential increase in cost of production with the potential loses from tampering. An end user that wants to use some of the hacks but disagrees with others has an opinion on what is enough, every company has an opinion on what is enough and when to take action.

Sorry for the runons and spelling but it is a really nice day out and I can not enjoy it from my KB!!

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Minna Kirai]

since 1 gigabyte in storage space costs, what, a handful of glass beads nowadays,

The benefit of GmailFS wouldn't be the space itself, but the fact that it's transparently portable- that you can access it from any (Linux) PC on the internet.

Note that if "broadband" ISPs had slightly less-restrictive terms of service, then this advantage would be irrelevant too, because you could easily place your own hard drive available for remote mounting.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Jahf]

Assuming you have rights to install GmailFS on any of those linux machines. Somehow I don't see this making it into a mainstream distro.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[RadGeekAuburn]

Playing different regions games on your Xbox, PS2 or a DVD movie, hell, the whole chipping concept, using your Xbox joystick on your computer and visa versa, ripping DVD's, coping cd's, using a CueCat to scan your own barcodes, using a standalone email device with a different internet provider bypassing the monthly fee, ink jet refill kits, taking apart and reusing a disposible digital camera, pringles can for an antennea, using your wireless card as an access point, using GMail storage as a filesystem, changing hard coded default passwords, overclocking your MB or processor, removing resistor R232 from your cd burner to make it a 16x model instead of an 8x, flashing bios to get extra functionality of the next model, soldering a jumper to enable an extra feature. People will always attempt to bypass, modify, or extend the functionality of something. All it takes is one smart person to figure it out and let others know. I look at things from a different prespective. I do not view it as a company "letting" you do something with your hardware, ...

[emphasis added --RGA]

But, of course, when you use GMail storage for something that Google does not intend, you are not doing something with your hardware. You are doing something with someone else's hardware (and that is what makes it unlike all of the other cases that you cited).

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Zork the Almighty]

Since the fair use doctrine arises out of court decisions it is likely that XM's contracts are perfectly legal, at least as they pertain to personal copying.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[nofx_3]

rebuild a knoppix cd with support for gmailfs and set it up in your fs tab. Now any computer that you are allowed to reboot and use a cd-rom on should be suitable for access.

-kaplanfx

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Nerd With Nalgene]

They can of course break it any time they want but since 1 gigabyte in storage space costs, what, a handful of glass beads nowadays, do you really think enough people will bother with this to cause serious scalability problems for a search engine company that handles a hundred million hits per day?

Yeah, 1 gigabyte of storage costs a handful of glass beads.
But do you really think it will stay 1 gigabyte of storage?
It took this guy only 3 days to hack up this program in python. Give him another three days and he could make it register a dozen accounts and link them together transparently into one filesystem. In fact, it scales pretty easily to the point where I could have unlimited storage on Google's servers--and then it would be a problem for them, and they would have to break it.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[LostCluster]

I wouldn't call a piece of software that permits legal fair use to be "black hat".

Anything that violates a terms of service IS NOT LEGAL. The penality is civil rather than criminal and rarely enforced, but there is a punishment assigned for doing that in laws, making those things are against the law.

If a piece of software does something that the TOS says it can't do, it is illegal software from the moment it's coded. That fits black hat's definition.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Electroly]

Wait... if you're already carrying something around (KNOPPIX), why not just carry around a 1GB keychain drive instead? They're smaller than a CD, even.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[geminidomino]

Cause a 1GB Keydrive costs almost $200US?

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[drinkypoo]

Anything that violates a terms of service IS NOT LEGAL

Unless you are explicitly granted the right to carry out those actions in federal, state, or even local law - because you cannot sign away your rights.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[peteforsyth]

It's difficult to see how Google could completely prevent automated use of their storage system. What are they going to do, have you copy a mangled word out of a picture box every time you want to check your mail?

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Thomas Shaddack]

Price. A 210 MB mini-CD costs much less than a gigabyte USB disk.

Safety. It's much easier to damage or lose a USB disk than a gmail account.

Security. Once encryption gets implemented to GmailFS, remote secure data storage will offer many possibilities. Think eg. of low-budget human rights groups in repressive regimes.

Simultaneous access from multiple locations. Logging to a server from two geographically separated locations is much faster (and cheaper) than fedexing a USB keychain.

I am pretty sure more reasons could be found.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[sjames]

It took this guy only 3 days to hack up this program in python. Give him another three days and he could make it register a dozen accounts and link them together transparently into one filesystem.

If/when he does that, he will be clearly abusing the system. If/when he takes steps to disguize the nature of the emails in the face of Google saying "please don't do that", he'll be abusing Google.

At this point, GmailFS looks like a clever hack done "because it's there" rather than a real attempt to abuse Google. Considering that several times that storage can be had for a few bucks surplus or many times that can be had for $50, I suspect that it will remain just a clever hack rather than full scale abuse.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[sjames]

Note that if "broadband" ISPs had slightly less-restrictive terms of service, then this advantage would be irrelevant too, because you could easily place your own hard drive available for remote mounting.

GmailFS could be modified to take care of this. Run a daemon that check's your mail for a particular subject line. Use emails to yourself as the transport protocol for your filesystem. The daemon reads your messages to yourself, and posts replies with attached files in response. Slow as hell (for a filesystem), but functional.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[sjames]

Many claim 65000 codes

And don't bother to mention that 65,000 codes is not very hard to exhaustively search.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[LostCluster]

fair use trumps terms of service. period.

Sorry. Fair use is "common law" not "statuory law". Therefore, terms of service which are "contract law" always trump fair use. The correct order is law of the land, agreements, and then traditions.

This is a problem in the system, but attempts to correct it by putting fair use concepts into the written laws keep failing for some strange set of reasons that are hard to explain here.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[sjames]

Problems happen when people start writing functions in this grey area, often violating the license of the use of the original product or API.

This wouldn't be such a problem if our legal system could recognize once and for all that each person bears responsability for their own actions. It's not the company's fault if I use their product to violate a third party's copyright. At the rate we're going though, we're going to have to use exponants in the term 'contributory^9 infringement), that is, you encouraged someone to encourage someone to blah blah copyright.

Why is it we get upset when 13 year olds hack around, but not when 40 year old lawyers try to 0wnz3r everyone's thoughts through legal hacks?

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[2TecTom]

... or a horribly smashing new business opportunity. G-Drive anyone?

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[RevAaron]

Insightful? What the hell. Sure, the keychain would be smaller, but it's a fuck of a lot more expensive. How much is a blank CD on which I can burn Gnoppix? 30 US cents. The 2 GB keydrive? US$300? Would you mind buying me one of these oh-so-convenient 2 GB keychain drives? Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get one of these, but there are plenty of us withouth the dough to blow. The 2 GB model would be needed, because otherwise most of the flash disc would be taken up by the Gnoppix install.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[Ciaran_H]

Considering that several times that storage can be had for a few bucks surplus or many times that can be had for $50, I suspect that it will remain just a clever hack rather than full scale abuse.

There will always be freeloaders out there. Personally I believe that at some point in the near future, somebody's going to do exactly that - get it to link several accounts together. It could probably be done by having the equivalent of a FAT in the accounts, although how it'd be updated - as well as which account it would use - would be anybody's guess.

Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google.

[sjames]

There will always be freeloaders out there.

That's true enough.For some, the feeling of getting something for nothing is a reward in itself, even if something is quite small and 'nothing' costs a lot more than nothing.

Like the people who crack DirecTV. I find it amusing that in exchange for spending more than the cost of a subscription on dodgy hardware (a continuing investment as things change) and uncounted amounts of time, they get service that may cut off at any time. Even at minimum wage for their time, the monthly DirecTV bill would be cheaper!

Back on topic, someone may try to use this to abuse Google. However, the potential to abuse a neat hack doesn't make the hack itself bad.

I suppose the multiple accounts could be treated similarly to the zones in ext2/3

Competing Search Service !

[Mr Europe]

Ond now we'll put up a competing internet search service using GMail disk space !

Re:Competing Search Service !

[LostCluster]

Funny, but totally impossible. In order for any bot to crawl somebody's GMail disk space, that bot would need that user's GMail passwords. Sorry, I don't trust a scum-bot with the ability to send e-mail as me. Do you?

Re:Competing Search Service !

[damiam]

No one said anything about using your account. The bots-makers could create a couple dozen accounts of their own to store whatever they're storing.

Re:Competing Search Service !

[Inthewire]

Wow.
Way to miss the point.

Parent was suggesting using GMailFS as a storage medium for a rival to Google, not writing a search engine for crawling GMail accounts.

Re:why?

[Tongo]

Why do men climb mountains, why do they explore new lands, why do they explore space or the depths of the oceans. Mankind does it because it's there (or can be done).

Nice

[Orgazmus]

This is really nice, but as i see it, there are two options:
1) He gets his ass sued to hell
2) He gets a nice job at google ;)

Re:Nice

[LostCluster]

3) Google installs a filter that detects people using GMail in that way and closes such accounts with out warning, since such people have violated the TOS that has been clearly posted since the start. Affected people go crying to Google wanting un-backed-up data back, but Google declares that was "your problem".

Re:Nice

[Scarblac]

Affected people go crying to Google wanting un-backed-up data back, but Google declares that was "your problem".

Affected people start running RAID-1 on a bunch of Gmail accounts :-)

Re:Nice

[LostCluster]

I know of no RAID system that can recover from the sudden loss of all disks involved in the same moment without data loss.

Re:Nice

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Google puts a bandwidth limit on each account

Assuming you're using Gmail for legitimate emailing, you won't be tranferring your entire GB of email back and forth every month. So just impose a 1 or 2 GB monthly transfer limit and you're covered.

Re:Nice

[Leebert]

Affected people start running RAID-1 on a bunch of Gmail accounts :-)

Yes, as soon as someone creates the GMail block device and not the GMail filesystem. :)

Re:Nice

[uncl_bob]

Uhm .. that is in fact a great idea, isnt it? Like a single mail per block or something. Cool cool cool ... *starts hacking* :-)

Re:Nice

[complete loony]

Using all the invites given to those accounts to increase the total volume size....

Re:Nice

[Thomas Shaddack]

4) GmailFS gets rewritten in order to mimic the behavior of the "normal" user, trading detection avoidance for a degree of resource wasting and performance penalty.

Re:Nice

[LostCluster]

5) Users declare that GMailFS's already slow performace cannot possibly get any slower, and then it does. Users abaondon GMailFS and buy a hard disk.

Re:Nice

[Thomas Shaddack]

Users declare that GMailFS's already slow performace cannot possibly get any slower, and then it does. Users abaondon GMailFS and buy a hard disk.

GmailFS is inherently limited, in comparison with a hard disk - which will limit its use to niche roles.

But there are usage scenarios favoring this kind of filesystems. Quasi-anonymous remote file storage is an useful thing, especially as it allows access by multiple people from multiple locations, and especially if encryption layer is added to maintain security. The speed penalty will discourage widespread application, but GmailFS (and similar projects that will inevitably follow) still remains a very good tool to have on one's belt for special cases.

Portable partition

[kaleco]

This could compliment a knoppix (or any liveCD) CD perfectly.

Re:Portable partition

[kaleco]

It wouln't be as limiting as connecting to my home server which is on a 512kb DSL connection. The upstream is castrated at about 256kb.

If it can be done...

[KitFox]

Somebody will do it... Doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. But still, does it accomodate the recent change in the login proceedure and possible future changes well?

Re:If it can be done...

[surprise_audit]

Marcus Ranum did NFS over email back in 1995

Re:If it can be done...

[LinuxHam]

Exactly. This reminded me of two things. First, the research work someone did to convert network bandwidth to a filesystem. He turned ping payloads into low-latency storage and intentionally malformed emails (bad recipient) to Exchange servers as high-latency storage.

At the time, Exchange was the only server to include the entire body of the failed email in the bounce message, and you could keep the connection open idefinitely with about a packet a minute. Then once you closed the connection, the server would turn around and shoot your file (well, email) back to you.

Second, all this seems perfect for LUFS where they say, "remember, everything's a file -- and if it's not, it should be!"

GoogleOS

[ols22]

They're obviously setting themselves up to enter the OS/desktop market.

Re:GoogleOS

[ols22]

addons, schmaddons They're changing the face of computing and in doing so, they're redefining the OS. There *will* be a major paradigm shift in desktop thinking and google will be a part of it I predict. This is just another 'hint' that they're not *just* concerned with searching...

Re:GoogleOS

[Gherald]

The joke is lost on you.

Re:GoogleOS

[ImaLamer]

Though it might seem funny it almost isn't.

Think of your gmail account as your home folder or My Documents for the Windows users. That is just the start. Google has the ability to provide you with a drive that goes forever and search abilities to find anything in a snap.

Netscape founder, Marc Andressen, once said "An OS is nothing but a bag of APIs we write to."

Once you have a working kernel you can do anything. The fear that Microsoft had was that their kernel would be the only thing that mattered and their API's would become irrelevant after Netscape and portable plug-ins and Java apps took over.

Look at version 4.0. It's features rivaled that of slow/homebrewed OS startups.

* Navigator
* Messenger
* Composer
* Netscape AOL Instant Messenger
* Conference
* Netcaster
* Collabra
* Calendar
* AutoAdmin
* IBM Host On-Demand ("Integrated, Java-based 3270 application for IBM host access")

Microsoft started to see that the Internet was the new platform. It's true, I'm in my browser 99.9% of the time I'm on the PC. The OS doesn't matter.

Microsoft isn't known for their superb kernel, it's the whole user-land. Now that most people hit the browser after boot/login the kernel is the only thing that does matter. That is why people dual-boot with linux. It's stable and they can do most things. Occasionally they need to do something special so they reboot. Windows has become a mere application that loads your games.

Computer users don't usually care what type of file system it is or any of that mumbo-jumbo. They want to be able to work. If Google explodes into a Yahoo! type portal and provides portable (Java?) interfaces then they can become the "OS" of choice.

Look at this from Wikipedia:

Hardware <-> Kernel <-> Shell <-> Applications

Those are the four parts of your system. If the shell is replaced by the browser then the Internet as a whole is the application. That is what scared Microsoft into killing Netscape. (if you want to put it that way)

Re:GoogleOS

[PhoenixFlare]

Google has the ability to provide you with a drive that goes forever

Not if people keep coming up with ways to use the accounts for free while bypassing all the ads. All that storage and bandwidth has to be paid for somehow.

Now, if they switched GMail to a paid service, something like that might be practical. I don't think a lot of us want to see that happen, though.

Re:GoogleOS

[ImaLamer]

Well, I understand that the concept is based on ads and another thing. Two people are bound to have the same e-mail (spam, automated mail) - they only store one and the difference between the two. Like any compression method out there.

But I see your point though. Imagine though that we both have an mp3 of Stairway to Heaven stored. Likely we got it from the same source - therefore the same file. Gmail stores it once. (all done with hash's)

If they don't do this already they should. How many times is the word "viagra" sent via e-mail? Why not just give it a value which is smaller in bit size and substitue for it. Whole sentences can be stored the same way.

Re:GoogleOS

[PhoenixFlare]

If they don't do this already they should. How many times is the word "viagra" sent via e-mail? Why not just give it a value which is smaller in bit size and substitue for it. Whole sentences can be stored the same way.

Good line of thinking. I wouldn't be suprised to see something like that popping up soon if the flood of spam continues as it has - though as a way to reduce the impact of that spam, not to allow the email servers to be used as remote filesystems.

Re:why?

[dJOEK]

there are far more elegant ways to do network storage.

people are just blinded by that Gigabyte figure.

would you use a pop3 box to store your files? no.
would you go climbing the mount everest barefoot just because you can? no.

Great!

[Yeechang Lee]

Thanks to GmailFS, I can now look forward to seeing the following files when I log into my computer:

-rw-rw-r-- 1 ylee ylee 2384 Aug 28 04:25 BUY V1AGRA N0W.pdf
-rw------- 1 ylee ylee 3723 Aug 28 04:39 RE: Stupid weomn cheating.xls
-rw------- 1 ylee ylee 2342 Aug 28 05:05 URGENT RESPONSE NEEDED.doc

Thanks, GmailFS!

Re:Great!

[MrNonchalant]

Actually this is (close to) impossible. From the site:

"All subject lines have a fsname (filesystem name) field which has two purposes:

1. It prevents the injection of spurious data into the filesystem by external attackers. As such, the fsname should be chosen with the care you would exercise in choosing a user password."

Re:Great!

[Alsee]

-rw-rw-r--
-rw-------
-rw-------
---x--x--x 1 ylee ylee 98304 Aug 28 05:06 PORNDIALER

-

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

It won't eventuate

[Quick Reply]

Gmail can allow up to 1GB storage based on the fact that not all email accounts are going to get anywhere near the limit, if GmailFS becomes real, Gmail would become unsustainable (and where is the Ad revenue?) and in summery Google will get very angry and pull the plug in a mean way. On another note, I'm surprised that having direct access to the root folders of a gmail account (like it's a pop/imap account) is even possible.

Re:It won't eventuate

[Anonymous Coward]

and in summery Google will get very angry and pull the plug in a mean way.

But if we get to use it all through the wintery that'll still be useful.

Re:It won't eventuate

[LostCluster]

Whatever interface-ripping this tool uses, it's clear that it is dependant on GMail having the interface that it has today still operational. Google could very easily "break" this program simply by adding some clutter to it's currently pristine user interface.

This really is an action by one kid that could ruin the sandbox for everybody...

Re:It won't eventuate

[nwbvt]

I very much doubt this will be all that popular, as I see very few realistic uses for such a thing. As for accounts solely being used with this hurting Google, that may be the case. But so would accounts which the user forgets about and just accumulates spam. I don't think they are counting on each individual account bringing in profit, just the gmail system as a whole.

Re:It won't eventuate

[gl4ss]

pull the plug? no fucking way - they're in it too deep. and what do you mean IF it becomes real if it already is as real as it gets?

google might very well not react at all - as it is not in their intrest to notice millions of people that something like this is possible(this is not the first time someone thought of this either, just the first time that someone did it).

and how many of the gmail users do you think would use something like this? one in a thousand? shouldn't bring them to their knees(and if it does.. wtf were they thinking of rolling it out like this then).

*I'm surprised that having direct access to the root folders of a gmail account (like it's a pop/imap account) is even possible.*
well, it could just spoof itself being a user using the normal web interface.

Re:It won't eventuate

[Nerftoe]

..if GmailFS becomes real, Gmail would become unsustainable..

Joe sixpack and Stacy no-brain are not going to be using GmailFS. If all gmail users on slashdot were to implement GmailFS, it would still be a small drop in the bucket of their total user base. Even if Google is aware of this use of their Gmail services, they may overlook it because:

It may not be worth their time/money to block

They want to remain "holy" in the geek community

Re:It won't eventuate

[surprise_audit]

Doesn't have to just be Gmail. I would be surprised if YahooMail and Hotmail couldn't be used in a similar fashion...

Re:It won't eventuate

[wwwojtek]

I very much doubt this will be all that popular, as I see very few realistic uses for such a thing.

What about using it as cheap remote backup?

Re:It won't eventuate

[dirk]

I find it interesting how many people are against this hack. IT seems it is Google's own fault for not finding a better revenue model. This seems exactly the same as an Xbox Linux hack. Sure, MS loses money on every XBox, but that's their fault for selling them at a lose. The same thing goes for ad stripping from web sites and apps like AIM. The vast majority of /.ers are for these hacks because they are innovative, useful and cool. Yet when this one comes up that uses Google in the same way, there seems to be a decent number of people against it. It seems if it is okay to cost MS and AOL money by hacking their stuff, hacking Google is just as allowable.

Re:It won't eventuate

[ingsocsoc]

Someone should work on that so we can all make massive RAID arrays with them :)

Re:It won't eventuate

[SirTalon42]

$ cat /dev/random >/dev/Yahoo! & cat /dev/random >/dev/HotMail

Hm... PERFECT!

Re:It won't eventuate

[strider44]

For ad stripping of web sites, AdBlock allows you to download the ads without showing them, which I and many other people have enabled. AOL uses the IM to advertise their online service as well, so it doesn't really lose them money, just make them gain less money.

I think that people like the linux XBox hack (which yes just loses them money) cause basically it's demonstrating complete irony. You're buying an XBox, and using it to promote Microsoft's number 1 enemy! That's just funny.

Why are people against this? I think it's because the google technology is in itself innovative, and using this hack only strives to stifle that innovation. If google are forced to pull the plug on it then that benifits noone. Not only that, but the googlefs is dangerous in many cases. It hammers the connection of google, and not only that if you get banned you have lots of data to lose.

Re:It won't eventuate

[ornil]

I think the difference lies in what could happen when the target company reacts. I don't think people would mourn is MS and AOL were to go bankrupt, or even simply stop producing a particular product.

Whereas people are afraid something bad will happen to Google (and whoever takes their place would be worse), and they don't want GMail to be pulled or crippled.

Re:It won't eventuate

[follower-fillet]

> Whatever interface-ripping this tool uses,
It uses the Python Gmail binding libgmail.

> Google could very easily "break" this program simply by adding some clutter to it's currently pristine user interface.
It's not quite that easy to break, check out the frame source of a Gmail folder view window sometime--there's basically no HTML, just a bunch of calls to Javascript functions with all the data contained in arrays.

> This really is an action by one kid that could
> ruin the sandbox for everybody...
Highly unlikely. Besides, you have to blame at least two kids, the author of GmailFS & the author of libgmail.

--Phil.

P.S. Heh. :-)

Re:It won't eventuate

[follower-fillet]

> I'm surprised that having direct access to the root folders
> of a gmail account (like it's a pop/imap account) is even possible.
Well, considering the number (more than one) of existing POP proxies for Gmail there's no reason to be surprised.

GmailFS uses the Python Gmail binding libgmail as its backend interface to Google. It library includes demo POP, SMTP & FTP proxy servers if you're interested in seeing how it works.

--Phil.

Re:It won't eventuate

[InfiniteWisdom]

Hosting and transferring 1GB of mail costs a LOT more than keeping track of a few hundred bytes worth of contact lists, and relaying some IMs. A small percentage of 3rd part users is not likely to have a significant impact (or you can be sure Trillian would have been sued by now)

Re:It won't eventuate

[follower-fillet]

> What about using it as cheap remote backup?
That's been one of my plans.

I'm the author of the Python Gmail binding libgmail GmailFS uses as its backend interface to Gmail. The library includes a demo FTP download proxy & a plan for upload is still in the works. Thought about WebDAV support as well, but most popular (unrelated) request has still been IMAP support.

Funny thing is I briefly looked at a VFS based solution a few weeks ago, but I primarily use OS X for my development and it doesn't have any VFS ported to yet that I'm aware of, so didn't go down that avenue.

--Phil.

Re:It won't eventuate

[shaitand]

"Why are people against this? I think it's because the google technology is in itself innovative, and using this hack only strives to stifle that innovation."

In what manner is it innovative? They aren't the first to offer gigabyte email accounts, their spam filtering isn't the best. So what exactly is innovative here?

Re:It won't eventuate

[alphakappa]

IT seems it is Google's own fault for not finding a better revenue model.

And you, Sir, are a damn fool. Can you suggest a better business model for Google? Any donkey can say "It's their fault for not finding a better revenue model".

Re:It won't eventuate

[Repugnant_Shit]

Simple:
Microsoft/AOL = proprietary, greedy.
Google = proprietary, but open

Re:It won't eventuate

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference, in my opinion, is that an XBox is a product and GMail is a service. If I buy an XBox, I expect to be able to open it up and uses the pieces however I want. If I use MY own software, I can use the hardware. As long as I don't use their software, it's should be ok.
GMail is a service. You "pay 0$" to use their service. The service is defined as "This is an email acount, you get and store emails, and if you want instant notification, you can use this stuff..."

If you change the way you use your XBox, unless you copy some games, Microsoft's revenues and costs aren't affected. If you change the way you use GMail you change their costs, and then you fuck their business.

You could argue that buying an XBox implies you will buy some games, but then again, a couple of people I know bought XBox but never bought a game, even if they didn't hack it or anything...

Either way, if they don't like how you use their services, they can terminate the service. They can't remote detonate your XBox though...

Re:It won't eventuate

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yet when this one comes up that uses Google in the same way, there seems to be a decent number of people against it. It seems if it is okay to cost MS and AOL money by hacking their stuff, hacking Google is just as allowable.

Do you really feel there is a moral equivelance between Microsoft and Google? Google's informal motto is Don't be Evil. Many would agree that Microsoft's informal motto is "Make Money".

Google strives to put out the best possible product. Microsoft strives to get something that's "good enough" out there as fast as possible. If somebody else puts out a great product they rush to put them out of business by dumping their work-alike product on the market.

Oh, and Microsoft was convicted of abusing it monopoly position in US Federal Court.

Since when is it a crime to root for the good guys and boo the bad guys?

Re:It won't eventuate

[Quick Reply]

Well *IF* meaning if Google doesn't pull the plug before it's final, and yes it will be unsustainable because after a Final release of GmailFS, there will no doubt be a Windows port.

Re:It won't eventuate

[Prior Restraint]

In what manner is it innovative? They aren't the first to offer gigabyte email accounts, their spam filtering isn't the best. So what exactly is innovative here?

#define CONSPIRACY_THEORY 1

What's so innovative? Four words: Six degrees of separation.

By keeping the email service invite-only for so long, it's trying to establish large known social networks. My ex-wife got her account from me, I got mine from a buddy at work, who got his from his brother-in-law, who got his from his roommate in college, and so on.

If, as some people have speculated, Google gets into IM, it can add your invitees to your buddy list, and occasionally drop in a "Hey, Bob's not online just now, but his friend Sue is. Would you care to introduce yourself to her?" If they went really crazy and decided to start a dating service, they can use the social networks to show how you're connected to your potential mate. If they start an online job seeking site, they can potentially connect you with someone inside whatever company you're looking to get hired at.

A lot of this sounds pretty stupid, and places like gmail swap work to undermine it to a certain extent, but I wouldn't put it past someone at Google to try something like this, just to see what would happen.

Re:It won't eventuate

[Prior Restraint]

Can you suggest a better business model for Google?

How is this insightful? This is total nonsense. Consider:

Let's pretend I start selling text ads in my Slashdot sig. "YOUR AD HERE! WILL POST CONTINUOUSLY!" and pick a price high enough to live on comfortably. I quit my day job and spend all day, every day, posting on-topic rants to every article on Slashdot.

Early on, I get a few rubes at some ad agencies to pay up, but things falter once they learn how the moderation system works, and now my posts consist of me ranting against the moderation system, and how it's unfair that people are allowed to turn off others' sigs.

Somehow, Slashdot deems the whole saga worthy of a story, and now dirk comes along and says, "IT seems it is Prior Restraint's own fault for not finding a better revenue model."

The sixty-four thousand dollar question is: Do you consider dirk to be a damn fool?

Re:It won't eventuate

[strider44]

Please read my message. I didn't say directly that GMail is innovative, but Google itself is. They spend millions on innovation.

Interesting

[linuxci]

Of course this is interesting, and shows the talents and ideas that can occur in the world of free/open software.

But Google is a business and they do need to make money and this would be a surefire way for them to lose money (a load of their storage used up, no way to show their adverts, etc) so if anyone seriously used this I can imagine their account disabled.

What I want is google officially creating (or officially blessing the ones that already exist) a gmail notifier app for Mozilla. Technically, using the 3rd party ones that the Mozilla community develop are against their terms of service. They already do an official notifier but it's Windows only - a Mozilla based one would be cross platform.

Re:Interesting

[linuxci]

perhaps they just don't want to side with mozilla entirley.

you shouldn't expect them to just endorse mozilla because it's your favourite and it's the IE alternative.

I'm glad they don't take sides.

I don't consider this taking sides.

Does meaning writing an app for Windows only mean they're siding with Microsoft? No!

Neither does making the app for mozilla, but with Mozilla you get cross platform support, so Mac, Linux users can benefit. Even BeOS and OS/2 users can use it! Any platform moz or firefox is available for can benefit.

Re:Interesting

[shikan_taza]

But Google is a business and they do need to make money and this would be a surefire way for them to lose money

Just a thought: is there a business opportunity for an ASP to host remote filesystems in this manner? A client would just need a dumbed-down PDA or some such thing (and an Internet connection, of course). Just my two cents.

Re:Interesting

[damiam]

The problem with Mozilla is that you then only see your GMail status while browsing; if someone sends you an email while you're using OpenOffice or whatever, you won't see it. It makes more sense to put a notifier in the system tray (which they've done) or in the Linux notification area. What I'd like to see is an API released for 3rd-party notifiers so that they don't have to do all the inefficient screen-scraping that currently goes on.

Re:Interesting

[jdowland]

Of course this is interesting, and shows the talents and ideas that can occur in the world of free/open software.

It also highlights the biggest achilles heel for the open source community: too many of the talented authors waste their time on things like this, when real quality software problems could be tackled instead.

Re:why?

[Eric604]

my first thought was "this is stupid" but maybe it's handy when sharing semi-private files.

Re:On the spoke. . .

[Tim C]

That doesn't matter. What you might well be doing is sucking up more bandwidth than they'd like you to, and as they're their servers, it's their bandwidth and it's their service, if they don't want you to do it, tough on you.

Hell, for that matter, if they just don't want you to do this because they just don't want you to, tough on you; they don't need any reason at all.

Interesting Hack

[protektor]

Interesting hack but I suspect it is soon to become just one thing in a long list of things that Google bans or doesn't allow.

Re:3rd party software

[doofusclam]

If you bothered to read that thread, or actually used gmail yourself, you'd know that they aren't cracking down on third party addons (although they'd be in the rights to do so) - they're just adding captcha style logons in situations where an incorrect password has been entered too many times. It's simply to stop programs brute forcing gmail accounts.

Just because you can...

[eSims]

Doesn't mean you should.

An old adage that applies quite well even to the Internet age.

Gmail generates ad revenue, but abusing the account in this way both deprives Google of ad revenue as well and costs them network traffic and will likely increase their disk usage.

This is like that cool neighboor of yours that says you can borrow his tools and then you go over take everything you can find as well as set up a sign in your front lawn for others to join "the fun".

Goolgle won't leave this intact long and I don't blame them a bit.

Re:Just because you can...

[LordLucless]

If it can be done, someone will do it, regardless if it should be done or not. If Google doesn't want this sort of thing done with GMail, then there is obviously a security hole in GMail. Google should work at fixing the interface to GMail so it can't be used in this way. Any other method - EULAs, legal threats, etc - won't cut it. People will still use the tools, even if they're illegal or in violation of a EULA.

Re:Just because you can...

[Cereal Box]

And I can assume that if Microsoft had 1GB Hotmail accounts that you and other Slashdotters would discourage the use of an equivalent piece of software...?

Re:Just because you can...

[gl4ss]

Just because you offer(and advertise, on one level or another) 1GB of virtual space for free doesn't mean you really want to do that.

yes, that's how they dub it. 1000 megabytes of FREE STORAGE, what should we care if a profit making entity takes a risk in their throw-in offer.

Re:Just because you can...

[cmacb]

"And I can assume that if Microsoft had 1GB Hotmail accounts that you and other Slashdotters would discourage the use of an equivalent piece of software...?"

You're joking right?

That would be totally different. A way cool thing.

But that isn't going to happen, because the Microsoft system is likely to colapse of it's own weight as soon as (or should I say if) they every give out the 250M they have promised. I think they may wish they had only promised 100M like Yahoo. Marketing department running it's mouth again.

Re:Just because you can...

[atriusofbricia]

All you said is of course true, I'm just wondering why anyone would go to the trouble? I'm thinking really the only use for such a thing is if you're booting off knoppix or something like that. Or you need some storage "out there".

But, in both of those cases it would be far better to hook up with one of the many cheap webhosts offering multiple gigs of space out there and use that instead.

This is a neat hack, nothing more.

Re:Just because you can...

[Cereal Box]

You're joking right?

What are you talking about? I'm making the point that the parent was saying "whoa whoa, this is Google we're talking about, don't abuse them with this GmailFS stuff!", and I have no doubt that if Hotmail had 1GB mail accounts and a "HotmailFS" were to be created that a horde of Slashdotters would be screaming "abuse the hell out of this! Make them run out of storage space! Make them rack up massive bandwidth bills!" You know, because they're Microsoft and they deserve it...

Re:Just because you can...

[cmacb]

I was joking about your joking.

I'm against all such vandalism no matter who it is directed against.

(Unless it's Microsoft)

(joking again)

Re:Just because you can...

[cmacb]

I just checked. I don't have mine. I've heard they are beta testing it with selected users. I can't blame them for that, after all Gmail is a slow rollout too. It's just that their page (the one you read while you are checking your mail) has all sorts of implications that it's already in production. What *IS* in production is the deal where you pay money to get 2G. I'll just settle for the free 250M, when and if it comes.

Since I have no paying relationship with MS, other than one of their mouse devices I'll be the last to get mine. Which is OK, as I already have Yahoo and Gmail. The Hotmail ID is for comparison purposes. When people ask me for advice on things like that I like to be able to tell it like it is.

Innovation

[digitaltraveller]

This is great. If google's smart (and they are) they will encourage this and work out a way of benefitting from it.

Question for the kernel hackers: What is the status of FUSE or LUFS? Is there plans on standardising on one of these API's?

The status quo of not having a standardised userspace filesystem interface in the kernel is creating problems. (eg. the incompatible VFS/IOSLAVE hacks that should never have happened)

Re:Innovation

[gl4ss]

well, the new google that tries to stop 3rd party email notifiers might not be so noble.

Re:Innovation

[sulimma]

This is great. If google's smart (and they are) they will encourage this and work out a way of benefitting from it.

Great, AdWare ads in your man pages and pdf's.

Re:Innovation

[AlXtreme]

I knew LUFS has been inactive for about a year now, never did look into FUSE, but there seems to be some discussion between the two.

I think the solution can only come from AVF at this point. All the filesystems built around FUSE should be maintained directly in the FUSE source tree to provide a *coherent* filesystem offer. Being an LUFS developer, I"d offer my help on migrating / integrating the LUFS filesystems.

In my opinion, FUSE will only really start to take off once it's included in Linus' tree. I too would love to kick out all the VFS abominations, but for now I'm not holding my breath.

Perhaps Kolivas could be motivated into including it...

Re:Innovation

[Ibag]

Well, I'm not convinced that this is great. It seems like an abuse of a service. Taking a free email service and converting into hard drive space? Yes, is a neat hack, but wide spread use of this would be reason to change the system so that things like this aren't possible.

How could google possibly benefit from this, and why would they encourage people to use extravegent amounts of their resources while doing it in a way that completely bypasses ad revenue? They couuld make this a positive by detecting and charging money for this, but if badnwidth and storage uses are high and income is nonexistant (and they don't fuck with your data), there isn't just some magical way of turning a bad thing into a good thing.

I know, you probably want to reconcile "I like google" with "I think this is cool" but if a man were covered in leaches you wouldn't say "If you're smart, you'll turn this into a positive! See, they are taking all your bad blood! And if they don't fall off from overfeeding, you could market yourself as the amazing leech boy and join the circus!" This is not some blessing in disgeise, and to suggest that it is without even hinting how is disingenuous.

Re:why?

[Sheetrock]

I imagine this could work like the anonymous writeable /incoming ftp directories used to for pirates -- get an account, load it up, and distribute the login name and password.

Not a usage that Google or the GmailFS designer had in mind for the service, I'll bet, but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody started doing this if the technique for using Google as free network storage became popular.

It's quite unlikely Google will embrace GmailFS because they're probably not counting on having a significant chunk of their users maxing out their 1GB storage. It's a neat hack, though.

Dont care if Google dont like it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now this is hacking. An off the wall idea and dare I say it, something uniqu, turned inot reality.

Kids, look at this as an example of what sideways thinking can do. I love it - more because the true spirit of hacking is proven alive, rather than what it does.

Although, that's pretty cool too.

Re:Dont care if Google dont like it...

[nblender]

Not bad. Just over 3 months from idea to implementation. When you want something written, suggest it on slashdot and wait. http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=108136&c id=9194177

Re:Dont care if Google dont like it...

[pchan-]

An off the wall idea and dare I say it, something uniqu, turned inot reality.

hmm, i remember having done something similar with my idrive account using a web-dav filesystem... in 1999. idrive.com (now deceased) encouraged their users to do this (webdav is included in recent versions of windows as "web folders"). ah, those were the days, unlimited storage, all the quality media you could download from idrive at quite amazing speeds, and scour.net to search it all for you. hmm, quite alot like gmail, but with files instead of email.

Re:Dont care if Google dont like it...

[DrEasy]

Yes, definitely a very cool hack. I'm thinking this could be used in an OS course somewhere, it really brings it home that a file system is "only" about providing a handful of functions in its API, it looks much less scary this way. Of course there are a lot of choices as to how to implement such an API, but that's another story...

Possibilities for the future...

[LoadWB]

I am pretty sure this is the type of outside use that Google is against. Even so, it may be a useful technology to incorporate INTO Google, as a future Google service, or even to be provided by other services.

Imagine if Google was to provide some sort of remote filesystem storage for ANY OS, perhaps accessible via FTP or other protocol-over-HTTP. A searchable public filestore: not just what people keep in their websites, but the files that they keep... Intentionally made public, of course. The "technology" to do this exists in some forms already.

Yeesh, but then the various corporate execs would have fits because people were storing their favorite MP3s, DVD rips, TV shows, or whatever in their Google Public Share.

If it was not so abusive to FTP servers, I have thought more than once that an FTP search would be pretty cool. Let us say that you are looking for a specific filename that someone has in their anonymous FTP account. Punch it into Google, and blammo!

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what developes from this over the course of the next few years.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[myster0n]

That would be nice indeed. But how would they generate revenue from that? It wouldn't do google or us any good to have such a service if it causes google to go bankrupt (and therefore deprive us of this service).
We aren't living in the times of the dot com bubble anymore.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[Hast]

Like good old Archie? Although I doubt that system is running any longer.

Besides that a lot of "less legal sites" have FTP search. Typically of sites found in IRC channels.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[Fallen_Knight]

would be a good service to provie, removable drives that appear to be like USB-flash drive, but really read/write to some remote storage.

hmmmmm time to patent!

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[orthogonal]

<i>That would be nice indeed. But how would [Google] generate revenue from [remote file storage]?</i>

<ecode>
$ ls -pX /mnt/gmail

drafts/ etc/ home/ kazaa/
mail/ porn/ spam/ usr/
access.log bookmarks.html restart.sh text.out
~this.listing ~brought.to.you ~by.Pfizer ~Pharmacutical
~makers.of ~the.best ~restorer.of ~your.hard.drive
~Viagra! ~special.trial ~offer.for ~gmail.users
</ecode>

(The <ecode> tag appears not to be working, and my user page is now being subjected to ugly colors. Let us pray somebody at Slashdot notices before the New Year.)

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[LoadWB]

Dunno. I am not a marketter. But I can say that if there is any money to be gained from a service like this, someone will figure it out.

The only thing I can think of right off the top of my head is the search results page could have ads of some nature.

I am pretty much tapped out after that. I think, though, that the possibilities for revenue are just as great as the possibilities for use. The user just needs to be locked into some proprietary Google control, like what the search pages are.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[LoadWB]

Already done. Bill G reads these forums, too. Next time you will keep your billion dollar idea quiet!

I think that is actually a pretty neat idea, though it would thoroughly suck in an off-line situation where you NEED those files. Or perhaps the device could have 512MB (or more) storage for the most used files, or a selectable list of files to stay local.

hrmmmmmmm indeed.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[LoadWB]

Archie... I remember using that a few times. So long ago, and so many layers of crap since that I had just about forgotten.

Good question, though. I wonder if it does still exist.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[Chess_the_cat]

Too bad that's been part of OS X since it was released.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[danimrich]

it does not need to be public file storage. Google could profit from the fact that a lot of files exist on thousands or even millions of computers. When someone uploads such a file to the net, Google would just need to store it once and can thus maybe offer storage a little cheaper than other (smaller) services. Also, they could use efficient compression algorithms. And if all that fails , maybe someone pays them for hints regarding pirated mp3s ;-|

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[pchan-]

this was tried already in 1999/2000 by two companies: idrive and xdrive. both are now extinct. you could mount their filesystem via webdav (see "cadaver" for unix, "web folders" in windows), or access it with a browser. you had a shared folder that people could copy files out of ("sideloading", idrive called it) to your own account. even better, idrive had scour.net search the shared folders and make those files available for download right from their search engine. a great way to find mp3's, and guarenteed fast downloads.

unfortunately, the business model for this seemed to be nonexistant. users were reluctant to pay for anything.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[nerph]

I have no idea what I'm talking about

Couldn't this idea leverage the concept of bittorrent, or P2P in general, except push the sharing up to the server level?

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Both of them still have web sites, though they're payware now.

Re:Possibilities for the future...

[swb]

It's possible that marketers might want to know what kinds of things people store. Common file types, perhaps some way of annonymizing the data stored in the documents themselves (which has some pretty scary privacy issues).

Essentially what Google does for email, they could do for file storage.

This could be useful

[base3]

with some nice integrated encryption (saving a manual gpg step) for backup of small, important files.

Re:This could be useful

[boijames]

Yes, good point..

So could..

#!/bin/sh

if [ -z $1 ]
exit
fi

mypgpid=923C135D
mygmail=root@GMail.c om

/usr/local/bin/pgp -feast $mypgpid $1 | mail $mygmail

Re:This could be useful

[base3]

Likely good enough, yes, but not the same as the convenience of a mounted, encrypted filesystem, though. Thanks :).

I would try this . . .

[acceleriter]

. . . but I have a feelng that fsck would take a long time were Gmail to die during a write :).

Booting

[arose]

Can I boot my computer from my GMail account now?

Booting from gmailfs

[Hal XP]

The geek factor aside, I can't see the point of the exercise. I can see the value of PCs which can boot from a network-mounted disk image. Look ma, no hard disk! This clearly can't be done with gmailfs. You need another filesystem (containing, say, your web browser) to access gmailfs. And that makes it no different from having a backup of your ~home or your precious porn collection stored on removable media like a CDR or a USB thumb drive.

And I can already do that by emailing to myself the zip file of my day's work.

Re:Booting from gmailfs

[theguywhosaid]

>your precious porn collection stored on removable
>media like a CDR or a USB thumb drive.

>And I can already do that by emailing to myself the
>zip file of my day's work.

I want your job.

why i think it wont affect google(logical arg...)

[Anonymous Coward]

1. 10% of gmail users use linux.
2.Most linux users use firefox or mozilla
3.Many users use adblock extension on mozilla(i doubt this)
4.google ads dont reach users anyways(who clicks anyway)
5.Most ppl wont use GmailFs.(I have 80GB hd...why another slow 1 GB)
6.GmailFS is used by 0.1% of gmail users
7.Google doesnt care
8.Profit.................oops
DO no evil google , u will get geek support

Hmm Weird..

[Piranhaa]

Well it's nothing big really, but I noticed something with the screenshot of the Gmail account and teminal shell. Now, when you're logged into GMail, your space shows up as 1000MB, not 1 *true* gigabyte. However, in the terminal for the Google Filesystem, it shows up as 1024000 MB (1 *true* Gigabyte). Thought that I'd just point this out, as I said, nothing really that big but I noticed it...

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually "Gigabyte" means 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is because "giga-" is a metric prefix meaning 1,000,000,000.

1,073,741,824 bytes would be properly described as a "Gibibyte", as per the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC's) International Standard. This was adopted in 1998.

http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/

Re:Hmm Weird..

[mewphobia]

If you had ever filled up your gmail account completely (was I the only geek who had to try) you'll see that it can actually hold 102% or 1024MB.

It just says 1000MB at the bottom of the screen :P

Good of you for noticing.

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Shinobi]

Actually, 1 true standards-compliant Gigabyte is 1000 Megabyte. It's just that the computer industry ignored the standards. And somehow, it seems that so many Open Source weenies who clamor for adherence to accepted standards are keen on ignoring accepted, open standards they don't like.

To reiterate, the whole mess is the fault of the computer scientists etc who broke the adherence to standardized definitions of what Mega, Giga etc signify.

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Shinobi]

Actually, Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta etc aren't metric prefixes. Those prefixes are part of the SI system, of which the metric system is just a subsystem.

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Hes Nikke]

Correction:

1000000 Bytes == 1 true GigaByte
1024000 Bytes == some bastard child of a KibiByte and a MegaByte
1073741824 Bytes == 1 true GibiByte

(look it up)

*downs flame retarding suite*

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Hes Nikke]

yeah, i'm replying to myself... i just noticed that i forgot a few zeros on that GibiByte figure....

(wow this suit sure got hot quickly)

Re:Hmm Weird..

[mikael_j]

And in case you haven't noticed, just about no one likes the gibi-mibi-blublublu units that are apparently only used by 14yr-olds who are showing off on slashdot..

/Mikael

Re:Hmm Weird..

[surprise_audit]

TechTV did that too - they set up a Gmail account called FillMyBox and, live on TV, asked people to email stuff to them in chunks of 10Mb or less. I swear to God this is true - I have the video clip...

Re:Hmm Weird..

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

and the only people who use this spec are hard drive manufacturers, who are fucking nitwits out to screw us.

why the fuck can't they go with established standard?

gigabyte was effectively defined as 2^30 well before some fucking "standards" body decided to go the route of HDD makers.

i say screw 'em. a GB will be 2^30 always to me...just like a MB will be 2^20 and a KB = 2^10.

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Shinobi]

Actually, the SI prefixes were defined in 1874, well before the computer science people fucked up and broke the standards compliance.

Re:Hmm Weird..

[Donny Smith]

I noticed the guy has six freaking invitations!

does it support the "account yanked" operation?

[Daniel Ellard]

This is a cute hack, but practical? No.

If you want google to paw through all your files and risk having your account yanked for violating the user agreement, feel free to use it... (heck, maybe google won't yank your account in return for the opportunity to index your files...)

Mail-based file systems are nothing new, nor are http-based file systems (or WebDAV, for that matter).

Re:does it support the "account yanked" operation?

[justins]

If you want google to paw through all your files and risk having your account yanked for violating the user agreement, feel free to use it... (heck, maybe google won't yank your account in return for the opportunity to index your files...)

Wouldn't "pawing through your files" violate your user agreement with Google? Seems like there would be some privacy protection guaranteed in such an agreement.

Why gMail?

[Sancho]

Sure, it's got 1GB of storage, but so do a whole slew of other services now. Why not hammer Hotmail or Yahoo's servers and leave Google's alone? :)

Backups

[tpwch]

I'm going to try to use this thing for backups of my config files. Its the perfect solution for that, can be automated in cron to do daily backups for example (unlike most web-based storage things)

Re:Backups

[snake_dad]

What's wrong with creating a tar/gz/zip/whatever and mailing it to yourself? Easily scriptable, no need to use an iffy FS that could go away at any time, and easy to retrieve would you ever need them..

Re:Backups

[surprise_audit]

Don't need a filesystem for that:

tar cvf config.tar [list of configs]
mailx -s "config files" username@gmail.com < config.tar

Stick that in cron...

Re:Backups

[wwwojtek]

you need to split everything in pieces <10MB (gmail imposes limits on the size of incoming mail) and now that would be a sophisticated script ;-) (split -b could help)

Re:Backups

[surprise_audit]

The grandparent poster was talking of config files. If you have more than 10Mb of config files, you may have other problems...

Re:Backups

[tpwch]

Yes, but its kind of hard to delete the old files from gmail from a shell script...

Re:Backups

[vivekg]

On the other hand, you can try mybackup script, which can email back the file to your gmail account.I am using to backup my data regularly using this script.

Re:Backups

[follower-fillet]

> I'm going to try to use this thing for backups of my config files.
That's been one of my plans.

I'm the author of the Python Gmail binding libgmail GmailFS uses as its backend interface to Gmail. The library includes a demo FTP download proxy & a plan for upload is still in the works. Thought about WebDAV support as well, but most popular (unrelated) request has still been IMAP support.

--Phil.

Re:Backups

[Prior Restraint]

If you're putting that in cron, you should consider dropping the v.

Re:Backups

[surprise_audit]

You're right. Or the list could be added to the email for an easy reference list of what's in the tar file. Or instead of using tar, use shar, for a completely ascii transport.

Pah..

[Anonymous Coward]

gmx.de offers one Gigabyte of storage for your mail and files. You can access it with konqueror via webdavs://mediacenter.gmx.de/ and you have your encrypted connection to your remote files. An all for free! For a few bucks you get a whole 10 GB of storage. Wohoo!

Re:Pah..

[br0ck]

But will they stay free? I used to use XDrive as a free online storage provider, but then they began requiring payments and held my files hostage unless I paid the fee.

Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[killbill!]

GMX has been offering 1 GB of storage for email and files for free for some time now.
Expand this to 5 GB for 3 EUR / month or 10 GB for 5 EUR / month.

You can also share your uploaded files with other GMX members, and mount your GMX account as a network drive using a WebDAV client (they provide a pre-configured Windows client but you may use another one) .

By the way, their e-mail features totally 0wn any other e-mail service: automated e-mail retrieval from all your other POP-enabled mailboxes, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...

I knew all that time spent learning German at school would come in handy some day! ;p

Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[CableModemSniper]

Awesome! Now I am glad I took German in HS too.

Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[perler]

..and they have the most annoying spam filtering beside web.de

i can't count how often i get called from clients complaining, that /my/ server doesn't send their mails - and when i ask them for the recipients address it is most definitely a gmx.* account.

PAT

Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[moosesocks]

Wow. This is a really neat service! I'm guessing it's somewhat like a free iDisk (although iDisk is only 100mb, and comes as part of .Mac which costs $99/year)

Anyone know of a service like this for people who speak English (or some other language for that matter)?

Person who speaks 3 languages - trilingual
Person who speaks 2 languages - bilingual
Person who speaks 1 language - American

Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[vrt3]

In the registration form you can only choose Germany, Austria or Switzerland; is it possible to sign up if you live anywhere else? Without lying, that is?

Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead

[justins]

How does any of that make GmailFS "useless"?

Heaven knows accessing Gmail is likely to be faster for those of us in the states.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you reach more than 100MB of 'your' storage space, Gmail contacts you and asks to remove some data, even if (in our case) it were legitimate hi-res surface-scans of metal structures, entirely educational.

I confess that I assumed they would do something like that. 1GB per quasi-anonymous, non-profit user is too ridiculous for them to keep it up.

Already Blocked?

[tpwch]

Is this already blocked? I tried it out, this is what I got: File "/usr/lib/python2.3/urllib2.py", line 412, in http_error_default raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp) urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 502: Bad Gateway

Google FS

[Barryke]

There is a Google FS:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125 -g hemawat.pdf

Re:Google FS

[Barryke]

sorry, working link right here (PDF)

In Other News

[p0]

RIA raids Google's storage room...

hi Bender !

[Anonymous Coward]

"it were legitimate hi-res surface-scans of metal structures, entirely educational."

That's a nice way to describe robot pr0n, Bender. Way to go!

Prediction from the earlier GMail notifier FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

The author of the notifier story (who didn't bother to actually link to any real software or provide any evidence) claims that gmail requires "catchas" for login now. Well, I can login to gmail just fine without a captcha. Gmail only seems to show catchas when something appears to be "attacking" their login system.

Big systems need ways to limit abuse, otherwise a single user with a broken perl (or python) script will take down the entire service.

Gmailfs works by sending an email EVERY TIME a file is updated! (from my understanding at least) I predict that users of gmailfs will soon start bitching about their accounts getting shut down after they send a few thousand emails.

How dare google do this! I was just compiling the linux kernel on gmailfs and suddenly my account stopped working! Google sold out to microsoft!

Linux ? BeOS !!

[mmu_man]

That kind of thing would be much better as a live-query-enabled fs for BeOS/Zeta.

Re:why?

[CableModemSniper]

Theres lots of things wrong with the filesystems availible for Windows and Linux, I'm sure. But even if that was a reason for this, this doesn't fix it. (Since it's just a Unix like FS that happens to use GMail as the storage device as opposed to a physical drive). I'm sure the coder didn't say to himself, "You know what's wrong with file-systems today? They aren't implemented as a slow screen-scrapping interface to webmail!". It was probably more along the lines of "Crap, I only have enough HDD space left for some Python scripts and FUSE...hmm GMail gives me a gig..."

Traffic?

[harmonica]

Do you know of any traffic limits once you start sharing those 10 GB of data with a lot of "good friends"?

Re:Traffic?

[piquadratCH]

Do you know of any traffic limits once you start sharing those 10 GB of data with a lot of "good friends"?

Traffic limit is at twice the size of the account. 2GB for the free one, 10 or 20 for the paid ones. So, no warez or pr0n sharing here...

Just a suggestion...

[MichaelSmith]

Don't mount it setuid

nice but ...

[xlyz]

with so many free ftp account available, apart from the Gcoolness why should you use it instead?

Re:On the spoke. . .

[gl4ss]

it doesn't matter if they just would like you not to do it.

what matters is: are they going to do anything about it?

besides, this(they wanting to limit what you access the gmail with) is kinda puzzling since they want their search engine to be used through a common api they themselfs made available.. so why be assholes now? i don't personally like the gmail interface that much(i got an account i never use).

the whole invite only thing is bullshit too, since if you know a nerd, or are yourself a nerd, then you got pretty good chances that you could summon few invitations in just mere minutes(what i mean is that there's extra hassle in getting in, but getting 'in' is still so easy that there's no practical limit).

Now, can we mix things?

[KitFox]

I'm halfway wondering if there is a good way to combine this with floating data storage in such a way that we could claim 3 GB of data on the GMFS. The main downside that I can see if the likelihood of severe delays in getting the data back when you want it. But hey, we have FDS (Floating Data System), and GMFS (GMail File System)... Why Not FDGMFS (Um, yeah)? Like I said before, it probably COULD be done. Doesn't mean that it SHOULD be done. But it won't stop somebody from trying. (Heads off to try.)

...Which brings up another point

[Mulletproof]

Why would Google care about something like this in the first place? Storage is Storage. ...Unless they didn't actually want/expect people to use that gig of space. Kinda like old Simplenet-- It's unlimited webspace in name only; A marketing tool and nothing more.

Mmmmmm, I'm feeling all that good Google karma.

Re:...Which brings up another point

[ymgve]

It's not the usage of the space they object to, rather the fact that many unneccesary http connections from mail checkers and the like slow the servers down. Even more so when you plan to use gmail as a filesystem with (worst case) several connections per second.

Re:...Which brings up another point

[nolife]

Storage is Storage. ...Unless they didn't actually want/expect people to use that gig of space.

The same thing many have gone through with "unlimited internet access" and "unlimited bandwidth".

Re:...Which brings up another point

[KarmaMB84]

They probably expect people to fill it up slowly with E-MAIL rather than uploading their pr0n collections etc.

Re:...Which brings up another point

[stu72]

Google will care about this because they have to *pay* for all that storage.

With normal people, they can pay for it with ad revenue.

With a file system, they cannot.

Please don't pony out the idea that the ads will still get d/l or clicked on or whatever. If you're an advertiser, you are only willing to pay for human beings seeing your ad or clicking on it, out of their own free will. Otherwise, it's not worth paying for. If it becomes known that x% of ad clicks are actually automated gmail filesystem users, then ad buyers will pressure google for lower prices.

There's no free lunch.

Re:...Which brings up another point

[Thomas Shaddack]

Even more so when you plan to use gmail as a filesystem with (worst case) several connections per second.

Which can be to large degree alleviated using HTTP/1.1, persistent connections.

Re:IE is the only working browser.

[whowho]

(i guess i should have selected "plain old text")
no, IE is probably the buggy one. it compensates for IDIOTIC web designer mistakes, like a double in the html page which creates the huge row. this is your culprit:
<TR HEIGHT="676" CELLPADDING="0" ALIGN="TOP" WIDTH="820">

and not mozilla.

Re:IE is the only working browser.

[natd]

Mate, I don't even *HAVE* IE and I use GMail. Firefox and Safari (depending on which machine I'm at) and I haven't had a problem yet...even before they officially supported Safari.

IE only is the *last* think Google would do.

crosscrypt container file

[ironhide]

One can create a crosscrypt container file so one can have transparent encryption.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Cool! Now Google can sell ads for my files!

[intnsred]

Cool! Now Google can sell ads based on the contents of my files! :-(

Is it just me, or is the GMail cheerleading by normally-privacy-concerned /.ers highly strange? Where are the rants about GMail's privacy issues -- especially when there are other free services which offer as much or more disk space and which don't have any privacy issues?!

Re:Cool! Now Google can sell ads for my files!

[KitFox]

Hmmm...

That FAQ lists several "Alternative" Free Email providers with at least one GB of data storage that "Don't invade your privacy like GMail does".

So I poked at two of them.

Aventure-Mail: No longer accepting free accounts.

Walla!: This one scares me. From the Walla TOS:
To enable an upgrade to a 1 gigabyte account, Walla! may require additional information from individuals who already subscribe to a Walla! account.

Okay... So I'm giving them more personal information.. Not too bad. They want to "Target their marketing to what I am interested in." Fine. Then I reach the next scary thing:

Walla!Mail does not use or analyze the actual text in an e-mail message to select which ads to distribute to users, nor does any human read your email to target ads or related information to you without your consent. (Okay, so none of the ads they show me are at all related to the content of the email.) In addition, our automatic link creator highlights predetermined keywords within an e-mail. These words are not personalized and you have the option, at your discretion, to follow these links to paid content. (Wait... I thought you just said you didn't look in the email to target ads... But it looks like not only do you look in the email, but you actually CHANGE THE CONTENT of the email to put inline ads in the email.)

Now, maybe I'm missing something here... GMail "analyzes" content. Yep. means if it sees "new car" and "ford" in the message, and doesn't see "sucks" in the message, it might show an advert for Ford cars on the right side, and maybe car loans. If the word "sucks" or "horrible" or various other negative words are in the message, they won't even put in ads.

Walla, instead of putting those advertisements inobtrusively on the righthand side, apparently reserves the right to turn every incident of the string " Ford " into a hyperlink to www.ford.com, or various other things. You could be getting an email about "Ford sucks. Ford makes nothing but lemons. Ford transmissions fall apart so quickly, and Ford's paint jobs peel like crazy." and every single mention of the word Ford would be converted to a link by Walla saying "Come buy our wonderful Fords!"... And this is BETTER?!

So how come everybody is screaming bloody murder about intelligent keyword checking that puts unobtrusive advertisements on the far right of the page (And mind you, I HATE HATE HATE spam, and I ignore 99.9% of all banner ads on pages, but the Ads in GMail have actually led to interesting and useful stuff sometimes), and the "official solution" is to have -the actual content of the incoming mail changed by adding hyperlinks to advertisements-?! It may SOUND scary, but it's because this world seems to suffer from Panic Syndrome.

I consider GMail's advertisements to be the least intrusive and most user-friendly of every single free email site I have seen. "But they can see if I'm sending a gmail user something about bombs!" Um... Sure... heard of Carnivore? Think they can't do that elsewhere? And why the heck are you sending something about bombs anyway?? Are you sending things to anybody that you don't want automated systems to use keywords in your email to show the recipient advertisements? Then don't send it to Walla either. They'll change the keywords in your email into advert links.

Honestly, it's all a ruddy witch hunt. And if anybody sends me one of those pre-made replies, I'll send right back to them the facts about those "other solutions" that the reply speaks so highly of. And then I will remove them from my address book. Nobody means so much to me that I -HAVE- to get in touch with them, and if they are that paranoid about what they are writing, then why am I receiving it?

FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB WebDAV

[Anonymous Coward]

It has to be about Google to be newsworthy, hasn't it? GMX, a German webmail provider, offers free 1GB mail accounts which are accessible by web, POP3 and WebDAV. You can also share your files with other GMX users. Transfer volume is limited to twice the storage amount per month.

Re:That's one big bug in firefox!

[l3v1]

Internet Explorer is the standard for all web protocols

Now it's obvious you don't know what you are talking about, so why bother boring us with your "ideas" ?

As of GmailFS... who cares what new stuff they introduce as long as Gmail is barely accessible ? Brb...

Desktop Market

[logic hack]

Why not? If google teamed up on a little joint venture with a well devleoped Linux distrobution, I could see deeper desktop penetration of Linux just because of the Google brandname.

It's wishful thinking, I know. But when it comes to penetration, I'd rather it be done with a partener I know and trust, than some entity which is already working the corners and has been known to spread the odd 'virus' ;)

Re:Desktop Market

[danheskett]

Why not? If google teamed up on a little joint venture with a well devleoped Linux distrobution, I could see deeper desktop penetration of Linux just because of the Google brandname.
The only way people would switch to this desktop OS would be if they could only google with it. If they made this happen, they'd be busted down on hard by the DOJ for the most clear Sherman violation in decades.

Re:Gmail abused, in other news...

[fwitness]

Hopefully someday this will be a slashdot header.

AskSlashdot: Why can we not fix the friggin linux NTFS support?

Keep bringing it up, maybe someone will notice.

Offtopic? Not when people are using email for damn storage.

hmm... RAID?

[maverick215]

If I had 2 accts can I have RAID-0 for faster access? :)

Re:hmm... RAID?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be
RAFEA-0
Redundant
Array of
Free
Email
Accounts

Re:hmm... RAID?

[swb]

RAID-0 takes advantage of the fact that the bus is faster (by several multiples) than the devices on the bus, so synchronized reads and writes to multiple devices can go faster than one single device on the bus.

A Gmail file system will likely max out the bus -- in the case, your internet connection -- long before you'd max out a connection-specific session to a Gmail server.

Who knows; perhaps there are waits associated with this or other things that would allow striping of data to be meaningful.

Re:why?

[djsmiley]

Because then, if your o/s fucks up, you can blame a email provider!....

Wait no....

I KNOW! Because, then you can basicly MOVE you machine from one place to another (especially easy if your hardware is exactly the same).

This reminds me of that ask slashdot, where some guy mentioned that we would no longer have our own PC O/S on our pc, but have it all hosted somewhere, meaning we could "log on" any pc and use our files, our set ups etc etc.

Nice idea but first its got to work!.

Re:Gmail

[Tyreth]

Seems like all of us with a gmail account were given 6 invites within the last 24 hours or so.

not necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

Backups can be automated, including the encryption. Use "gpg -r [your id] --encrypt-files [files]" to encrypt your files. GPG will not ask for a password, because it is using your public key to encrypt. You will however need your password for your private key in order to decrypt them.

Or, if you want a live encrypted filesystem, try encfs (a pass-through filesystem which is also FUSE based, see http://freshmeat.net/projects/encfs/). Although I haven't tried chaining them, you can probably mount encfs on top of gmailfs and have encrypted data stored in gmail..

Re:not necessary

[base3]

To the cockbreath that modded that post "overrated": I have about ten accounts, all capped. Fire away, assmunch.

No change in login procedure.

[Apathetic1]

There has been no change in the login procedure. If one types one's password in wrong several times in a row, GMail enforces an image recognition component to prevent brute force cracking of passwords.

Re:IE is the only working browser.

[officepotato]

Take a look at the HTML - There's a table, with the first row having height 676, then ... the beginning of ANOTHER row, not the contents of that row like there should be. Everything BESIDES IE is correctly rendering the empty 676px tall row. A quick run through a HTML validator might benifit the page's author.

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do men climb mountains, why do they explore new lands, why do they explore space or the depths of the oceans. Mankind does it because it's there (or can be done).
I thought that was done for women....

Re:why?

[nolife]

there's something wrong with the Windows and/or Linux filesystems.

What exactly are you refering to with Linux filesystems? Linux has many different choices of file systems to choose from and each has advantages and disadvantages.

As far as I know, none of the existing filesystems for Linux can mount your Gmail storage space so I'd say you missed the entire point of the story headline and the article itself.
Or maybe I did..

Npe, he cant.

[Tei]

Nope, cant. He is virtualizing a space, but he only access the account as normal http. Worse: even he strip the feature from html, not optimized xml api queries :(

Right...

[Jon.Laslow]

Yes, Google is blocking Third Party Checkers. So that must be why when I open up Firefox, GMail Notifier alerts me that I have seven messages waiting for me. If you would, take a look at their changelog:

Current version: 0.3.3 * Gmail changed, which broke notifiers, updated login code to the new system.

So yes, Google changed the login system, and the software was updated to work with it. Does this seem like an attempt to block other clients from checking GMail? Not really. It looks more like they updated their software, and it had a side effect which was apparently fairly easily correctable.

It looks to me as if a few people here decided to take the Third Part Checker article to be the absolute, unbending truth, and didn't bother to check around to make sure it was.

where's the evidence?

[puck01]

They've already made it plain they don't want third-party email account checkers

Could someone please show me where Google made it clear they specifically don't want 3rd party email account checkers? Did they announce this and I've missed it? Certainly a slashdot story yesterday claimed Google doesn't want them. Except for the person who submited the story, I have not seen any other proof to back this claim up.

First, I saw no other accounts of this happening to other people in any of the threads. I did read quite a few threads that said they had no such problem. GTray continues to work for me.

Second, assume this does happen, maybe its not intended to specifically block 3rd party apps. Perhaps its a side effect of them checking too frequently. It is known that the word verification check comes up after entering the wrong password about 5 times. Are these people using the wrong password?

Perhaps, Google doesn't like the way the 3rd party apps are interfacing with their system. Obviously, gmail's beta check has its own method to get email, it is likely more effcient than pulling down the html with each check. If this is the case, it may just be a matter of time before they give the specs on how they would prefer it done.

Anyway, my point is just because a word verification scheme is popping up for some users doesn't mean it is an attack on 3rd party apps like slashdot seems to say it is. There are many other possiblitites. Ever since Google announced it was going public, it's almost like people expect google to start going bad.

Re:where's the evidence?

[follower-fillet]

> Could someone please show me where Google made it clear
> they specifically don't want 3rd party email account checkers?
No, because they haven't. :-)

> Second, assume this does happen, maybe its not intended to specifically block 3rd party apps.
And it won't anyway, the authors just need to display the Captcha to the user & deal with it that way.

> Obviously, gmail's beta check has its own method to get email,
> it is likely more effcient than pulling down the html with each check
Actually the Official Gmail Notifier uses pretty standard HTTP(S) interaction with the server, except it retrieves a binary format. I've reversed most of the protocol (except some date stuff) and it's a bit more efficient, but not a *huge* amount.

See these forum postings for more details I documented:

Official Gmail Notifier protocol documented

Although note that I've done a lot more research since the those initial notes, and they aren't entirely accurate. Will end up posting some Python code soon.

--Phil.

Re:where's the evidence?

[yuting]

Google's Terms of Use:

http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.ht ml

"You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service"

On GMail-User newsgroup there have been reports of Google temporarily disabling accounts who use software to check GMail. Having said that, Google's own mail checker checks mail every 2 minutes. And most people who use third-party software to access GMail don't seem to have problems. Google's reaction to the breach of their ToS seems to be as random as the way they give out GMail invites...

Re:where's the evidence?

[mottie]

They're giving out invites like crazy now, I had 6 yesterday, used them all, and now I have 6 more today.. Curious as to if its actually coming out of Beta now? feel free to drop me a line if you want one, I'm finished inviting people now :)

Re:where's the evidence?

[Medieval_Gnome]

I'd appreciate it if you could send one off to medgno@medievalgnome.org

Re:where's the evidence?

[jc42]

You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service"

To me, this sounds a lot like a Microsoft-type "agreement" that is designed to put them in a monopoly position relative to other search bots. Thus, if your data gets scanned by alltheweb or teoma and appears in their index, they can kick you off and remove your data. If they get away with it, they'll be able to tell people "We have the only search site that can get at some web data," and they'll be telling the truth.

One reason I notice this is that I've been involved in some projects to build special-purpose search bots that recognize and index certain kinds of (highly-technical) data. My bot can and does search a few mailing-list archives and can tell you which messages actually contain data of the specific types that are of interest.

In these cases, part of the reason for a specialized search is that google and other big search sites really deal with just natural language. They don't work for specialized data formats; you need software that understands those formats.

So the fear here is that google is making an attempt to 1) entice people to put their technical data online in a gmail account, perhaps in the form of a technical mailing list, and 2) prevent those same people or their associates from building a search site that handles their own technical data. Presumably they'll say "Well, we'll allow it if you just sell us the rights to your code."

If you don't sell, you'll be able to index the data on "open" sites, but you won't be able to index any technical discussions that happen to be archived at google.

This could be a really serious problem for a lot of researchers. Or maybe the words will get out, and researchers will learn that their technical resources should not be archived at google.

We should probably bring this to the attention of scientific societies. A lot of them are introducing rules requiring that research data for published papers be openly available. This should include "indexable", to prevent corporations like googgle from capturing their technical data or owning the only permitted indexing software.

There is a significant battle going on right now for the freedom of scientific information. The corporate world is trying hard to capture it and own it. A lot of technical societies are waking up and taking steps to block this capture. This clause in google's "agreement" is one more data point that will probably be yet another battle in the war (to use the military terminology so popular in American political circles these days ;-). But if the societies declare that papers based on such captured data are unpublishable, people will learn not to put their data (including technical discussions) on google.

Re:where's the evidence?

[jc42]

On GMail-User newsgroup there have been reports of Google temporarily disabling accounts who use software to check GMail.

Awk! I was thinking of getting a gmail account, and I'd just assumed (like a dummy I guess) that everyone used software to check (and read) their mail. Silly me. So do you have to fly out to Silicon Valley to check your email in person? And do they have it printed out for you when you get there, so you don't have to use any software to read it?

Sounds like a hassle. I think I'll just keep using my old email accounts that rely on software to do everything. At least until google comes up with a way to deliver the printed mail to me. (Hey, that's a good idea. They could send it by truck or something. Maybe I should patent that idea before someone else thinks of it. Maybe google would license it from me.)

But maybe it's just as well that google has come up with a non-software method for reading mail. What with all this copyright stuff, pretty soon it'll be too big a legal risk to do mail with these computer things. I mean, every message in my email is copied several times before it even gets to me. Lots of messages contain copyrighted material, probably most of them what with this dumb "copyrighted when written" idea they passed into law recently. I doubt that the senders ever get written permission to copy email to my machine. We know that this has gotta end soon, or we'll all be in jail.

Anyway, thanks for passing on the info that google disables your account if you use software to check your mail. It's good to read that they're watching out for our future in the copyright-over-all world that's coming soon.

Re:On the spoke. . .

[KarmaMB84]

It's invite only because it's not done yet. ;p

Re:Too Much?

[CaptainTux]

I don't think that GFS is a Google creation (unless the author works with Google and I am not aware of that). It looks like an independent project that targets GMail since it has all of the nice storage. But still, I see your point.

My question is: Why GMail? Why not target one of the other large space providers? Surely this is as easy with them (perhaps more so) as it is with GMail.

phew

[aussie_a]

for a second there I thought the RIAA raided Google's storage room.

Still In Beta ?

[polyp2000]

Technically Speaking GMail is still in Beta anyone who uses GMail is therefore a Beta tester. Whether or not Google decide to allow or reject this as abuse remains to be seen. Whatever the case this guy is providing google with valuable beta-test feedback. Something they may have overlooked that needs to be fixed, or something they overlooked that needs to be improved.

Either way it just depends which way you look at it...

Re:begging for it...

[Eunuchswear]

What clown modded that "insightful"?

How the fuck would they use the DMCA?

Why the fuck would they use the DMCA?

Re:On the spoke. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

the whole invite only thing is bullshit too, since if you know a nerd, or are yourself a nerd, then you got pretty good chances that you could summon few invitations in just mere minutes(what i mean is that there's extra hassle in getting in, but getting 'in' is still so easy that there's no practical limit).

Hmmmm... I had an account for over 2 months before being alloted some invites. If it is "so easy" to get an account, than everyone who wanted one would have an account already, and all the new invites would go unused... and google would stop allocating them. Or perhaps the invites work the way google intends. Ever think that google knows more about their service than you do? yeesh, don't they teach logic anymore...? What a maroon....

IMAP over WebDAV

[bingo_tailspin]

What would be cool is IMAP over WebDAV, so I could script my email.

find /mnt/mail -name *VIAGRA* -exec rm -rf {}\;

Re:IMAP over WebDAV

[tepples]

find /mnt/mail -name *VIAGRA* -exec rm -rf {}\;

It would miss messages that talk about V1A6R/\, especially the ones that use ISO 8859-5 to draw the R backward.

that's an old idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the begining, computers were big monsters with lots of terminals attached. Later, when technology was cheaper and computers smaller, we had a computer for person. And now... are we re-inventing the old terminals again? :)

Re:that's an old idea...

[djsmiley]

Ok it sounds odd.

But imagine for a second you go to work, you save that vital infomation to your desktop. You go home, its already on your desktop.

A new patch comes out, its already installed on every machine you use, doesn't matter if the rest of those "Lusers" who dont patch do it or not. YOUR setup is safe.

If your a lan party goer, you can turn up and "byos" (Bring your own setup), meaning you dont need to bring your PC with you.

Now imagine you also have a shared workspace in this, another desktop *(maybe even two monitors)*. You and aload of other people could all be working, on ONE desktop, one which you all share.

This idea, i think is a great one, just going to take LOTS of planning, something which some programmers these days seem to forget.

Re:that's an old idea...

[n1ywb]

Dumb termnials were great. They were simple and reliable. When one occasionally broke, you brought in an identical replacement and sent the old one out for repair (or if you were really leet you got out the test equipment and fixed it yourself.) The concept of a complex failure-prone PC for every luser desk-monkey really fucked up IT. Thank god we're moving back towards thin clients, or at least managed PCs.

Re:begging for it...

[Gentlewhisper]

Oh rats! Nobody gave me a "Funny" :)

Re:Gmail abused, in other news...

[tepples]

AskSlashdot: Why can we not fix the friggin linux NTFS support?

The developers of free filesystem drivers will fix the NTFS driver as soon as you provide complete and correct documentation covering how to write to NTFS safely.

Re:This seems horribly ANAL of Google.

[qopax]

Google made many statements on why they have so much space. And it wasn't storage. It was so that users had one email address for practically their whole lifetime, and wouldn't ever have to lose the data from their emails. This makes me believe they have planned that most users would use only a small part of their email storage at first, and after that, well, storage gets cheaper with time, so by the time people actually use half a gig or a gig, it probably costs 10 times less, according to their plan :).

Re:On the spoke. . .

[mivok]

Actually, I'd guess that the invite system puts an upper limit on the resources google needs to commit to gmail. When they decide to add some new servers to gmail or stress test it further, give out a few more invites. So there is a practical limit - for google, making sure that the service can cope with the amount of users before going live.

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a google groupie but... Google is a big company, if you sign up for gmail, chances are 2 years from now gmail will still be there and will be operating with reasonable quality, just like Yahoo and hotmail. Other smaller or less known companies can offer 4GB mail accounts and it still won't be the same: there is no guarantee that they'll be around in a year or that the level of service won't drop... and changing email addresses is a pain.

This is NOT FAIR

[Pan T. Hose]

As much as I am usually against frivolous lawsuits, this time I hope Google will sue and win. Why? Because this so called "file system" is a classical example of parasite which can only hurt Google giving absolutely nothing in exchange whatsoever. And for what? So its "developers" could have their project posted on Slashdot frontpage? So they could say "look, mom, how 'leet' I am"? I ask you, people, what if one day someone writes a "file system" stealing storage from Slashdot, saving its files in the form of gigabyte first posts filled with goat.se links and literally tons of uuencoded pornography? This is exactly the same, only much worse, because Google has much less intrusive advertisements and no corporate agenda. From every greedy US corporation, Google is unquestionably the closest to being absolutely perfect. And how do we say "thank you"? By stealing their property? By advertising this pathetic thief "file system" on the front page of the most popular website on the north hemisphere? I just wanted to protest and clearly state that I am strongly against it. I hope someone will start a paypal fund to help Google in court. We cannot tolerate such a behaviour. Please keep in mind that Google is not another Microsoft or Caldera. Google is trying to do what is best for us. They deserve our gratefulness and, what is even more important, respect. The existence of script kiddies shamefully exploiting Google's superior services for their own miserable advantage is a precedence not only insulting to our intelligence but a one actually harmful for us in the long run, because that could possibly mean the end of fantastic projects from Google, when they eventually stop to think and inevitably say: "Hey, why give them so much if they just want to steal from us? Maybe that popup pornography ads and paid search results placement weren't such a bad idea, after all?" I know I certainly would.

Re:This is NOT FAIR

[/dev/trash]

Google is a publically traded company now. They legally CAN'T "do no evil" now. They have to maximize profits for shareholders.

Re:This seems NOT horribly abusive of Google.

[lombre]

This is not an abuse of Google. Google only offers 1 G which is only 1% of the typical hard drive today, or just a little more than a CD. Performance will be abismal.

Except for offline backup (which you could already manually use GMail for) this is not very useful. Even for that it isn't really useful since Google could cancel you account if they don't like how you use it.

This is really just expression of "I could do it".

Even so, if they used the gimick of 1 G of email for marketing but expected nobody to use it, tough, they don't get to completely control how you use their product.

As far as the XM-PCR, this is just the like a VCR for XM radio. How is this an abuse? The recording is analog, all the program does is allow a time shift. These are all things that anybody could do manually for a long time. Should we take away VCRs and Tivo just because broadcasters would prefer we had to watch TV under their rules?

You already have the capacity but not the right to sell or distribute most of the content that XM transmits.

They did not go "out of their way". They did it to sell more subscriptions.

This program actually makes XM radio more marketable.

When you create a product, you do not get to regulate every thing your customers do with it. Soon we will have Kellogs telling us that we cannot make our own rice krispie bars (i.e. we have to buy their Rice Krispie Treats) with the box of cereal we bought as this violates the "license".

Re:begging for it...

[Destoo]

Because of NialScorva's Law, derived from Godwin's law.

NialScorva's Law:
Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA.

But you're right. Not insightful.

Re:GMail Swap

[bluefoxlucid]

Because that's too dangerous.

If you put swap on gmail, what do you think's going to happen? Your root password will be in swap (grep through /dev/mem for it) at some point, if there's any stupid userspace programs; sensitive data could be swapped; etc.

Re:begging for it...

[Eunuchswear]

Yup, a funny I could go with.

Looks like I pissed off the cretin who gave it insightful, he thinks my post was "flamebait".

Of course it can't of been very good flamebait as the replies haven't been flames.

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[gl4ss]

**you've got to be one classy retard not to understand that the invite only thing is because their still testing it out.**

it's in invite only to get some viral marketing on, and the "beta" spin is on it so they get off if it has some problems.

when you open a fresh gmail account it's quite likely that in the next 20 mins already you have 6+ invites to send around. everyone who wants gets in very very easily.

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[vrt3]

I haven't had any invites yet. My account is only 2 days old, but that's much longer than your 20 mins.

Re:On the spoke. . .

[gl4ss]

well, they already have had for a long time enough users *just for testing*.

if a fresh acc gets several invites to send around in just couple of minutes they're hardly limiting - they're just making you get some friends to sign on too. it's quite effective but it's still bullshit in place to get you notify your friends about this new service by sending them an invite.

it's like the "mail this to a friend!" on some 'funny' pages.

is there an end in sight?

[KingPunk]

gmailfs, will it ever end :/
google this, google that, google here, google there..
google google everywhere!

..i think im going to devlop a script that will pull names from gmail databanks via google.com to come up with the names of my future child(ren)
now THAT is truely adopting google..
/end rant

Comming Soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

WikiFS the new filing system for linux.

Uses a redundant array of wikies found on the internet using internet searches for 'wiki'.

The available storage is limited only by the number of wikis found on the internet.

Thee filing system gards against deletion by redundantly storing data accross multiple wiki sites.

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[gl4ss]

my friend signed up ~2 days ago and had something like 6 today, and another one he sent to already has them too.

and of course they(invites) are quite abundant on every chat system imaginable(irc etc).

in short: I don't know anyone who has wanted an account and hasn't been able to get an invitiation under the time what an average pop song lasts.

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[NeoSkandranon]

It took me 2 months or so of using gmail before i got any invites. Then it was 1 one day, 4 more the next and (after i'd used two) another two

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[Anonymous Coward]

GMX is THE German webmail provider and has been around for more than 6 years (about half a year longer than Google).

i just invented SLASHDOT_FS

[goombah99]

Hi I'm working on a flie system called SLASHDOT_FS. it treats the slashdot message posting system as an unlimited write-once file storage system. Data is written to a comments and then changes are updated as diffs in the replys.

comments are encrypted and written using dictionary words to avoid the lameness filter.

I implemented the prototype of this system many years ago using an encoding system called First-Post. I simply use different permuations of the words first-post (FP!, Frist psot!, etc...) along with various dummy account names to encode 1 Kilobyte of information. I run the whole thing off ny Newton.

Re:i just invented SLASHDOT_FS

[goombah99]

I stored a copy of firefox on my SLASHDOT_FS. then I launched this firefox application , went to slashdot, now am posting this comment using the firefox app I'm running of my SLASHDOT_FS.

I have to admit the write-latency is bad so I have ot keep the cache on my local disk. (I get around the 120 second post rate liit by having 10,000 different slashdot accounts). But the read time is quite good.

Re:i just invented SLASHDOT_FS

[Kethinov]

Moron.
Use journal entries for Slashdot_FS, not comments. Journal entries can be read and written to at will and don't suffer from the lameness filter. You get unlimited read/write filesystem! :)

The system is meant to be broken.

[Dh2000]

Television channels run ads as a way to pay for costs. Now, if you were to say something like
"Don't mute the TV when the ads are on, that's STEALING!", "AGAINST CAPITALISM" or "IMMORAL", we'd rightly laugh at you.

Same thing with anything on the net, they can display ads 24/7 at every mouse click, but I reserve the right to block/mute/close/ignore them.

Even google's non-obstrusive ads annoy people.

Crying about people ignoring advertisements is beyond pathetic.

Re:The system is meant to be broken.

[Kell_pt]

You're free to turn your computer when Google displays ads. You're free not to look at the monitor. You're free to surf their website with something that hides their ads. But if the contract of "Terms of Serive" that you agree with when you press "I Agree", says you're not free to access the service using 3rd party programs, nomatter how much you want, it isn't right going around it - that's why it's called "terms of service" - it's a legal and moral agreement.
You can't accept it? You can go elsewhere, so your freedom is preserved. :)

Slashdot as a file system

[The Ape With No Name]

People do it. Scripts exist....

Re:why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm curious, because if somebody is doing this, there's something wrong with the Windows and/or Linux filesystems. What's the matter?

You're right, it's exactly that, Linux was missing a really slow FS, thus this. Windows already has two of them, so no problems there :)

Its not the storage.

[Silverlancer]

It isn't storage--its the massive number of data transfers a second. If you use Gmail as a file system, you're interacting with Gmail as you would with a hard drive. And that means you're using not just bandwidth, but server power. And if a few ten thousand /.ers did this, Google would have to add hundreds of extra servers--yet they would earn nothing off ads to pay for what normally would support millions of email users.

loopback crypto

[hey]

If you want crypt you can use a loopback crypt
on your GmailFS parition.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Loopback-Encrypted-Fil es ystem-HOWTO.html#toc3

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[ceejayoz]

Is the interface as elegant and user friendly?

Re:Too Much?

[follower-fillet]

> Why GMail?
(a) Because it's new.

> Why not target one of the other large space providers?
(b) See (a) & because the Python Gmail binding libgmail was available & it would seem easy to use. (The author of GmailFS says it was his first Python program.)

> Surely this is as easy with them (perhaps more so) as it is with GMail.
Not necessarily, the biggest misconception with Gmail is that it actually serves mostly static HTML pages, check out the frame source of a Gmail folder view window sometime--there's basically no HTML, just a bunch of calls to Javascript functions with all the data contained in arrays.

This makes it easier (and more fun) than a standard HTML scraping approach.

--Phil.

ObDisclosure: I'm the author of libgmail.

Re:On the spoke. . .

[golgotha007]

I totally agree with you on this.

I'll bet by the time Google goes "public", there will be so many Gmail invites lying around, we'll think of them like AOL CD's.

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[keeboo]

GMX is a great free e-mail service IMO. My main e-mail account is hosted there since few years ago.
Nowadays, unfortunately, GMX offers their service in German language only... So its public is restricted.

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[PhoenixFlare]

when you open a fresh gmail account it's quite likely that in the next 20 mins already you have 6+ invites to send around

Uh, right. Care to explain why I got 10 invites over the first couple weeks, and just now got 5 more yesterday after a span of almost 3 months with absolutely none?

See, we LIKE google....

[solios]

...and we DON'T like MS or AOL. Watching MS and AOL gets screwed with and/or fail gives slashdotters wood.

Conversely, Google is useful and cool and pretty much none of the things that MS or AOL are. Geeks are favorably disposed to Google because Google hasn't done anything abysmally STUPID.

Yet, anyway. :P

Re:See, we LIKE google....

[jc42]

Google hasn't done anything abysmally STUPID.

No, no; the word is "EVIL". Where have you been?

Re:why?

[letxa2000]

Those who misuse a technology will force that technology to no longer exist. Gmail is providing a 1GB *MAIL* account. It's not a free backup server. If people start using it as such you're going to see Gmail placing bandwidth restrictions on accounts, maybe even lowering the 1GB quota to something much smaller.

The GmailFS is a cute little technological achievement, but it's not what Gmail is for and I'm afraid that if any significant number of people use GmailFS that Gmail is going to suffer TOS adjustments that will affect everyone.

not *true*

[roman_mir]

You are contradicting yourself by putting true, the word inside these: **. Is this supposed to mean that you believe that *true* is actually true or that you don't really think of 1000MB as a true GB but rather as a false GB but for the sake of all the wrong ComSci definitions you still have to call it true even though in quotes, which shows how confused you are?

Ok, so that sounded like a flame, however considering the old SI standard all of these prefixes - nano, micro, milli, kilo, mega, giga, tera etc.- are base 10 and not powers of 2, so instead of calling something a *true*, (which means false) Gb, let's call it 2^10 for a false Kb, 2^20 for a false Mb, 2^30 for a false Gb etc.

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[PhoenixFlare]

Because no one likes you? The Man is keeping you down? Because it's Step #1 in the "Screw With PhoenixFlare" masterplan that we're all in on.? Who knows?

My apologies, Mr. AC. Please excuse me while I put my tinfoil hat back on and go sob in the corner, as your wit has wounded me so.

top puffing up like a cornered animal when someone posts something that doesn't jibe 100% with your experience.

Seems like you're the one doing the puffing about someone posting something that doesn't jibe with your feelings or experience. I wonder, would you still have posted anything if I agreed with the parent poster?

You do realize the term "quite likely" does not in anyway imply "guaranteed 100% certainty!". Don't you?

Quite.

Judging from my experince and the others that posted, though, the parent poster's claims of "and of course they(invites) are quite abundant on every chat system imaginable(irc etc)." and "in short: I don't know anyone who has wanted an account and hasn't been able to get an invitiation under the time what an average pop song lasts." still seem rather exaggerated.

If you still feel like arguing, then log in. Otherwise, don't expect any more responses from me.

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[LousyPhreak]

as it offers pop3 access the interface is as elegant and userfriendly as your mail client

you can use anything from mutt to outlook and even store your mail locally (for backup, reference, or whatnot) which is afaik not possible with gmail

Re:why?

[igrp]

That's an interesting thought. I don't think too many pirates will bother with this.

There are enough open servers out there. So there's really no reason for them to bother setting this up (which takes some knowledge), especially since there's no storage limit on open servers. And probably even more importantly, because sharing the login and password allows anyone to not just download but also to delete any files on that gmailfs 'device'.

On point that I haven't seen anyone bring up yet is that Google's probably counting on most average users to send and receive mostly non-binary emails. Text usually compresses really well. That's often not true for non-text, ie. binaries.

Provided the folks at Gmail use compression (I assume they do), they may not be planning to actually provide 1 GB per user.

Re:why?

[Kethinov]

You're wasting your time talking about what people should and shouldn't do with GMail. Until Google makes it impossible to do or devises negative consequences for doing it, it's fair game.

Re:On the spoke. . .

[RadGeekAuburn]

it doesn't matter if they just would like you not to do it.

what matters is: are they going to do anything about it?

And this is all that matters because...?

Because all that matters in life is what you, personally, can get away with?

Because it's alright to be an asshole unless you get caught?

Because other people's wishes about their own property are only worth respecting if they're willing to punish you for not respecting them?

I think the technical concept here is very neat. But when your neat hack needs someone else's computer to run on, it seems to me like you ought to be at least a little considerate of the other person's wishes. Whether or not they are actually going to police your behavior on that count.

Re:All set up...

[schmoo.me]

sorry...hehehe...http://schmoo.me.uk/images/Screen shot.jpg

Innovation?

[evil dave]

Wow, that is amazingly innovative. At least, it was when it shipped in Exchange 2000.

backup files

[Paralizer]

If you wanted to use GmailFS to backup small files, (as a few users above have suggested) why not just email those files to yourself? Sure you cannot automate it, and retrieving the files isn't as convenient as 'cp', but it's within the Gmail TOS and it does exactly what you want, stores a backup of your file on a remote machine. Why abuse Gmail when they already offer this?

Re:parent doesn't know what he's talking about

[nofx_3]

I just got an account today and I had 6 invites at my first login. I think it has a lot to do with the lenght time the referer had the gmail account, becuase the buddies I invited already say they have no invites.

-kaplanfx

Re:Downloading?

[Red Alastor]

They are working on it. And also on saving as draft and letting you write html mails. It is still beta. But conversation view kicks ass, and the interface is really good.

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[ceejayoz]

I like my email sorted into folders, thank you very much.

Labels work exactly the same way, except you don't have to choose one folder where two might both apply - you can label it with both.

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[ceejayoz]

Most of which, IMO, aren't as elegant and userfriendly as Gmail.

Only the Beginning: All Storage will be online...

[Phoenixhunter]

I can definitely see universally accessible data being a big part of the internet in the future (5 to 10 years out), especially if quantum storage solutions are developed. Ultimately users will be able to take any computer and have access to all of their data, programs, and the rest.

GMailFS=WinFS in the making?

[heinz57]

Looks like everybody but Microsoft is getting out alpha releases of WinFS these days... .

Re:This seems horribly ANAL of Google.

[josh crawley]

I am working with google on a daily basis and I can confirm you that they are a bunch of monopolistic assholes. As they are the first and almost only search engine, they thing no rules apply to them, that they are above everything, like agreements, contracts, etc... I guess that's the consequence of a monopoly but it's still a pain in the ass

Is that you, Search King?

Re:On the spoke. . .

[Nutria]

Because other people's wishes about their own property are only worth respecting if they're willing to punish you for not respecting them?

Amen, brother.

Thanks

[Pan T. Hose]

Thank you. Sometimes the truth just have to be said, notwithstanding the consequences. Thank you very much for your support.

Re:For the spambots:

[puddpunk]

hahaha, very sorry for being an asshole, but im sure you've reached the maximum spam input on your hotmail account, I know I have :)

P.S. if you dont get ur gmail invite, email me at puddpunk@gmail.com and i'll send ya one :)

Also, it seems some ac is pulling my stunt and incriminating me. I only did this one, not these other ones :(

Another thought for a FS

[CaptainTux]

If you want a rock solid FS without the chance of losing your data why not create a Usenet FS that functions similar to this? If all of the files were encrypted, UU Encoded then encrypted again using strong encryption it should be safe enough for your data to be out in the wild. Think this could work?

Re:why?

[letxa2000]

Until Google makes it impossible to do or devises negative consequences for doing it, it's fair game.

Thank you, you are confirming exactly what I said. It's sad that some people see things like this as "fair game." GmailFS is an abuse of a free service being provided by Gmail for an entirely different purpose. It's like the old "freakers" that used Black Boxes to get free calls on the long distance network decades ago. Yes, they could do it, but should they?

Even so, it's one thing for AT&T to have an adequate security system in place--but in the case of GmailFS we're not talking about Google having inadequate security in place. We're talking about Google lacking anti-abuse algorithms in place. It's sad that it's not the script kiddies that are going to force Google to have to put limits on their service, but their "friends" in the geek community.

Part of being part of technology isn't just doing everything you can do but doing only those things we should do. Google has generally been well-received in the geek/Linux community. Are we go to say "thanks" by abusing the free service they are providing?

Same thing, isn't it?

[solios]

WE'LL INTEGRATE THE WEB BROWSER INTO THE OS AND FORCE THE USER TO UPDATE THE SYSTEM THROUGH THE BROWSER SO THEY HAVE TO HAVE OUR BROWSER OR SUCK.

Yes, it's a Microsoft example, but I'd consider something like that to be evil AND stupid. Google, imo, hasn't done anything befitting either category.

Re:why?

[Thomas Shaddack]

It's like the old "freakers" that used Black Boxes to get free calls on the long distance network decades ago. Yes, they could do it, but should they?

Phreaking is a very important part of computing history. Also don't forget that Apple Computers was partially found with money made on manufacture of blue boxes.

It's sad that it's not the script kiddies that are going to force Google to have to put limits on their service, but their "friends" in the geek community.

Considering the inherent performance limitations of GmailFS, I don't suppose its use will become widespread. It's a neat tool to have when needed, though.

Part of being part of technology isn't just doing everything you can do but doing only those things we should do.

Who decides this part?

nice

[MasTRE]

Nice concept, but I think it's so useless for anything practial (because of the high potential for account=data loss) that the author would have wasted less time writing a paper rather than implementing it. But that would not have made /. - ah, the things we do for fame.

Unless google hacks googlefs

[nnappe]

And they manage to get ads crop like files in your directory.
They could do it in half an hour, probably...

Re:Unless google hacks googlefs

[stu72]

totally :)

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[SamTheButcher]

I'm replying to you here, out from the journals, but man, I'm glad you're back. :)

Re:FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB Web

[ceejayoz]

Glad to be back! :-) Thanks!