Microsoft to Offer Free Online Storage

athloi writes "Microsoft Corp. is giving computer users up to 500 megabytes of online storage for their documents, music, photos and video. They're offering it to a select 5,000 test users for now, but will make it widely available later this summer. This move is the latest in a series by the previous large corporation we all loved to hate to compete with the newest large corporation we might hate and fear, Google."

Comments

Interesting Combination of Apps Coming Up

[popo]

It should probably be noted that Microsoft also bought FolderShare.com (which is a very sweet little app).

The free-storage combined with FolderShare's file swapping is starting to paint an interesting picture... IMHO I wouldn't discount this as "trying to be like Gmail"...

I'd love to see the EULA

[RobertM1968]

The most relevant information to this whole thing (to me) is the EULA MS is foisting on people. Some of their previous EULAs for their online properties have included giving them the right to sell, market and/or redistribute any content you create and upload to those online properties. That, and other privacy issues (using the information to profile you in some manner and then sell ads to you via their LiveSearch stuff for instance - as referenced in a previous post regarding their work on obtaining as much private, identifying data on people as possible) are things I'd like to see clearly addressed and spelled out in their EULA.

I am also interested in how this all fits in with their current DRM schemes and related practices. Will they DRM any music I upload? Report me to the RIAA? Assume the program archives I upload are pirated and sue me?

All in all, I see this service as one for only the brain dead - based off MS's previous track record for trustability. (Yeah, it's probably not a real word, get over it).

Re:Hate what?

[Zeebs]

Google hasn't burned it's social credit with tech types, yet. I'm not claiming they will, and I'd like to think they won't.(Why yes I am interested in buying a bridge why do you ask?) I think the might hate and fear is a little strong but not far off in meaning.

Yes, but is it ssh(fs) accessible?

[macemoneta]

AOL gives everyone that signs up for an IM account 100MB of web space, but the interesting thing is it's ssh accessible. That means that you can mount it with sshfs or sftp, making it a handy place to keep (encrypted) data that you access from multiple machines. For example,

sshfs userid@members.aol.com: /some/directory

The above (after responding to the password prompt) makes the 100MB available in your local "/some/directory/". The data is also web accessible at:

http://members.aol.com/userid/

I find the space, even though small, very handy for storing small amounts of useful information. Using encfs on the sshfs mounted space allows remote access to things like server status/logs in a secure fashion, even when the machine is not directly SSH accessible.