Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
They're supporters of Linux. Somehow, it doesn't seem like a very "on the spoke" maneuver to aggravate them.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Ond now we'll put up a competing internet search service using GMail disk space !
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).
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
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
This could compliment a knoppix (or any liveCD) CD perfectly.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
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?
@Whee
They're obviously setting themselves up to enter the OS/desktop market.
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.
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
my first thought was "this is stupid" but maybe it's handy when sharing semi-private files.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
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.
I
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)
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.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
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.
with some nice integrated encryption (saving a manual gpg step) for backup of small, important files.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
. . . but I have a feelng that fsck would take a long time were Gmail to die during a write :).
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Can I boot my computer from my GMail account now?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
And I can already do that by emailing to myself the zip file of my day's work.
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
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
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...
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).
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
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)
Posted by a Debian GNU/Linux user
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!
GMX has been offering 1 GB of storage for email and files for free for some time now.
.
;p
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!
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.
"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!
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.
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..."
Why not fork?
Don't mount it setuid
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
(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.
IE only is the *last* think Google would do.
Only big ligs use sigs.
One can create a crosscrypt container file so one can have transparent encryption.
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.
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.
If I had 2 accts can I have RAID-0 for faster access? :)
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.
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..
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
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 :(
-Woof woof woof!
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.
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?
@Whee
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.
It's invite only because it's not done yet. ;p
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".
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
They probably expect people to fill it up slowly with E-MAIL rather than uploading their pr0n collections etc.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
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".
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.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Because that's too dangerous.
/dev/mem for it) at some point, if there's any stupid userspace programs; sensitive data could be swapped; etc.
If you put swap on gmail, what do you think's going to happen? Your root password will be in swap (grep through
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
If you want crypt you can use a loopback crypt
l es ystem-HOWTO.html#toc3
on your GmailFS parition.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Loopback-Encrypted-Fi
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
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.
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.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
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?
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?