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