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Google Docs To Host Any File Type
ezabi writes "According to a post on the official Google blog, in the coming weeks Google Docs will offer to host all file types with a limit of 250 MB, which as they say is larger than the current limit for email attachments. This will have its consequences: paid file sharing will die, more shared pirated material, newer vulnerabilities and malware distribution channels..."
Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?
There are plenty of free filesharing sites, and 250mb is pretty paltry by their standards, not to mention the fact that Google has pretty decent standards for who it lets have an account. Given the amount of information they have on everyone, it's the last site you want to know if you're doing something illegal.
Unless I guess you count .gov domains.
I never really trusted putting any of my documents in google docs at all...then the google voice thing happened and that sealed the deal.
p2p users are targeted heavily by the anti piracy groups because p2p users are comprised largly by individuals with very shallow pockets.Google could potentially even the playing field here.
...Not to say that Google is doing it for this reason...or that piracy is justified. Just saying a company with this much influence could change the media industry's approach on combatting illegal activities.
Nothing precludes them fucking up; but it should be no harder to attach permissions to an object you upload than to an object you create.
> host all file types with a limit of 250 MB,
Can we just use split to store larger files ?
split -a 5 -b 250000000 bigfile
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
When do we start getting to download Fansubs from google too?
I wouldn't expect viewers, this sounds like just a file hosting service, with certain formats viewable online. It doesn't necessarily mean that any format you upload will be viewable online.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
What does it matter if the documents are encrypted? Paid file sharing dying would be a good thing, people shouldn't have to pay to share what is theirs. The only downside I see is increased vulnerabilities.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I would rather it be me screwing up permissions on something than rely on someone else.
Microsoft is moving into the ad-supported online hosting biz with SkyDrive. Looking at my SkyDrive right now, it tells me I have 24.99GB available space (I'm not really using it for anything). Among other uses, once Office 2010 ships, SkyDrive will be a portal to the Office 2010 Web Apps. If you upload Office documents to your SkyDrive, you will be able to click on them and view/edit them in your browser, without owning your own copy of Office.
Breakfast served all day!
Before evil google did this evil thing, terrorists were forced to use rar to chunk their nefarious plans into sizes small enough for email attachments, or use horrible file sharing services like rapidshare which only makes them hate the west even more. Now their plans for global sharia will be made easier thanks to their malevolent brothers-in-arms over at google.
I hope those evil doers over at live workspace don't read this news because sharepoint is an even eviler tool for pirates and malware authors and satan himself.
The headline and summary has to attract eyeballs, more eyeballs, more posts, more activity more ads being viewed, more income.
I believe Miranda Hart's christmas special had a parody on a BBC prog, "Can twitter kill you". Reporter going around with ever more suggestive overvoice "do you know that right now your child is dying from twitter in this school", Worried Mom: "This isn't my child's school".
Simply stating that you can now store 250mb on your google account in a single file (wonder what the total limit will be) is amazing. Some HD maker must have had a very nice christmas.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?
I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.
Then it sounds like no third party file sharing/storage services are for you.
I was merely noting that the problem of assigning correct permissions to uploaded files is of identical difficulty to the one of assigning correct permissions to files created in google docs.
There is no reason to be especially confident about either; but there is good reason to have equal levels of confidence, however high or low those levels be.
As in "bugs or missing features that are existing now for years without being addressed."
The biggest shortcoming I see is a lack of proper versioning. Docs will save every stupid edit you make every few seconds creating hundreds and hundreds of divergent versions. Utterly useless for tracking changes in drafts over time. The solution is fairly simple. You get a button up at the top that tells you which draft you're in. Click on it and you can spawn a new draft. So you start with your rough draft. When that's complete, you say "new draft" and here's your second draft. You can invite people to comment on a draft by draft basis. If you'd like, you could saw "I'm spawning off Joe's draft since he's going to make edits." If he's not going to edit, just comment, then you can let him have a go at the second draft. Then you can move on to your third draft, fourth, etc.
At this point in time the only solution is to manually create a new file called second draft, third draft, keep them all in the project folder and then manually compare changes. Kind of defeats the aweseomeness of docs here. Of the features I use in Word, this is the only place where Word has docs beat. Of course, nobody I know can use the comments and revisioning tools worth a damn so I'm not really getting proper mileage out of them. *sigh*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I read "paid file sharing will die", yelped a heartfelt cheer and forgot to read the rest.
How does a per-file limit of 250MB stop any of the mentioned things from happening?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Except 1/8th the size?
Boggle.
It is so sad to get these reminders of just what a bunch of ignorant people fill the Net like counterplex.
Let's just refresh everyone's memory of searchable Google Voice:
* Google implemented search for Google Voice for people who decided to make their stuff public
* Dumbasses in the media tried to spin it as some sort of privacy violation
* Articles came out stating why the idiots babbling about privacy violation were spewing garbage since the only Google Voice stuff being indexed was stuff people decided to make public
* Same dumbasses in the media came out with 'yeah, but...I still want to be mad at Google followup articles'
Idiots like counterplex obviously just read the sensational headlines and parrot them as their own 'insight' into future stories.
Knowing Google, I'm sure they have actually thought about the repercussions of allowing all types of documents to be hosted/uploaded, or paving the way for mal/spy/shitware and alike or piracy. As much as everyone is going to look at the negatives, I"m sure Google has developed some sort of scalable trolling application to look for patterns or heuristics for that type of thing. After all, is Google not the king of the hill when it comes to data mining, pilfering, trends, habits, popularity of all of us already?
Does this include executables? New Malware channels INDEED. I know a whole lot of people who wouldn't know what an extension is, besides pushing back a deadline.
All your documents are belong to us?
Dark Reflection
They cost money because it costs money to share data. Or did you think bandwidth, servers, and storage were free?
Users pay their ISP's for the bandwidth, can install a free OSS server on just about any machine, and with 2T drives available store data at a very reasonable cost. Again, vulnerabilities and malware are really the only downsides.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
As usual, you can make things as public as you want. After all, they are on-line. If you want to keep them for yourself... keep them in your computer, not "in the cloud".
Google offers e-mail, is it public? and can you search through it?
Google offers picture albums (Picasa). Are they public? Can you make them private and unlisted?
Google already offers google docs. The same thing, you can make them private or public.
Google voicemail messages were public, because users configured they settings to make them public. Why would this case be different?
I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING is free. At least for them.
Fixed that for you. ;)
I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.
Wrong. Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their free software and content.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Combined with Manymoon this looks like a serious contender to pricey online project management services like Backpack. Lack of artificial user limits is what makes Google strategy such an attractive proposition.
I can see this being a very useful tool in the future. We currently use an internally developed tool to allow our users to upload and share large files. Unfortunately, as with anything, we've run into a few external user issues with them running an older version of Flash or their virus scanner interfering with the file download. Of course, the external user likes to blame us in these cases. What the Google brand can do for us is provide us a standard. It's a brand that people trust, and one that we can point to as a trusted standard. Now, if an external user has issues, we can say "Hey. It's Google. I don't know what you're doing wrong."
Looks like I get to start playing the testing game soon.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Then install an FTP server on your home connection and share away. You can even get a second connection so that you still have usable internet.
Sharing your own content is trivial and can be free (for small values of $cost). Sharing your content with the world in a useful way will be very expensive.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Guess that's Google's answer to things like Microsoft's Skydrive.
Wonder if it will be blocked from work too.. :(
---- Booth was a patriot ----
We already pay for our bandwidth usage through our phone/fiber companies. Why should I have to pay somebody else money to upload a file to a friend or even thousands of friends(in this day in age of torrents)?
I know very few people who use USB keychain drives for this kind of thing. I teach physics lab courses, and when students need to bring home a spreadsheets or something, they just email it to themselves. I don't think the size limit is the main reason they don't use flash drives. One reason is that they don't know in advance that they're going to need one. The other is that email is less of a hassle.
If you're getting up into the amounts of data that can't go in an email attachment, then you probably need a full-fledged file synchronization utility like unison anyway. Unison is smart about recognizing data that haven't changed, and it also takes away the hassle and confusion that people experience with trying to keep straight all the different versions of files they have when they try to use a keychain drive for this. If you don't have a decent tool like this, then mirroring large amounts of data is likely to be slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone. TFA says:
Presumably the "Premier Edition" part means you'll have to pay. So for the majority of applications where you have this much data, Google will give you convenience or zero cost, but not both.
One exception I can think of is that this could be a nice, convenient way to make off-site backups of a certain amount of personal data (that novel you've been writing, ...) in case of fire or earthquake.
Find free books.
It doesn't seem that anyone else commenting on the article has noticed this yet, but if you click through to the Google Docs blog it has the pricing info:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your-files-in-cloud.html
Instead of emailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB. You'll have 1 GB of free storage for files you don't convert into one of the Google Docs formats (i.e. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations), and if you need more space, you can buy additional storage for $0.25 per GB per year. This makes it easy to backup more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over email.
Combined with shared folders, you can store, organize, and collaborate on files more easily using Google Docs. For example, if you are in a club or PTA working on large graphic files for posters or a newsletter, you can upload them to a shared folder for collaborators to view, download, and print.
Again, after the 1gb limit, that $0.25 per gb-yr. By comparison, Amazon S3 is $0.15*12=$1.80 per gb-yr, almost an order of magnitude more expensive.
I hate fucking idiots.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I'm not sure if you've noticed: rampant file sharers think EVERYTHING should be free. At least for them.
Wrong. Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their free software and content.
Ah, let me make that statement a bit more accurate...
Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their stolen software and pirated content.
The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.
will now become "Gdoc plz?"
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
How long before we see a FUSE plugin that lets you treat this like an NFS server?
(or did I miss it, and one already exists?)
You try and QoS connection requests from all over the world , oh wait , you cant because they're already down the line from your ISP by the time they get to you.(well DUH)
Rampant file sharers pay good money for hardware that enables them to share their stolen software and pirated content.
Your software was stolen? Are you sure you didn't just misplace it? Scan your drives again to make sure it's really gone.
The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.
I can see it now. ACTA paragraph 666 - no person shall possess more than 640kb of storage without a license. That, after all, is enough for anybody.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I never really trusted putting any of my documents online at all.
Not unless I;
Putting documents online is putting them in a public space. You only do that if you want them to be available.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Once I found some stolen software and downloaded it so I could burn it on a CD and return it to its owner. He wasn't interested, for some reason. I even offered to mail it to him. I don't think he had bought new software, either, so I guess he just didn't need it anymore. People are confusing when it comes to stolen software.
It would be nice if they started building editors for various file formats, so through google docs we could collaboratively do some video editing, programming, photo editing, etc
I store my most valuable 20-gb or so online in S3 via JungleDisk (a software client that provides a WebDAV local front-end to S3 and a web-hosted WebDAV and http access)
For the peace of mind, about 4 dollars a month (including upload/download charges) isnt bad. I find it worthwhile especially as my Nokia phone can directly access Jungledisk's online webdav server
I won't drop Jungledisk, but I'll use this too. Multiple redundancy can never be a bad thing except possibly in a marriage.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
because they have no other choice
So what makes this a troll?
This isn't an anything, and it's certainly not inflammatory or offensive.
Explain yourself, Mr. Mod!
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
I get your point, but did you have to use the most annoying textual construct of the modern internet era to do so?
It would only be worse if you did one of those snarky parenthetical explanations (read: this shit.)
I imagine when someone makes a post about "stolen" copyrighted materials, this is what shows up on your computer:
Semantic defense squad to the rescue! We have a situation we need to derail with a meaningless argument immediately.
I put it on MY server, so that I own it.
I still don’t get why anyone would be so crazy to host anything important on a company’s server. Especially one that is known as the ultimate data kraken.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I'm waiting for the Duplicity plugin!
Encrypted backups, for half the money Amazon S3 charges...
Since Google is a US company, does that mean that any documents I store online from Canada are subject to perusal by DHS as well?
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
There has long been rumors that they don't store each of your attachments but find ways to find out who else is storing them as well and then just keeping them all in one (backed-up?) place. Why would this be any different?
Unless you want to pay, and then it's $.25 per gigabyte per year. If you get the $50 package (200 GB) or more, you get a free Eye-Fi card that uses SDIO and can wirelessly upload your pictures (if you have a supported camera) to your PC, server or an online image storage service. Currently plans go up to 1TB of storage, which is quite a lot. That's the personal version, which they did first. The commercial version will be $3.50 a GB but probably offer unlimited storage.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They sell movies? When did that start? Next you'll be saying they say they sell music. The very idea is ridiculous. Who would pay for that?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Wait, can I send .exe files through gmail now?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Perhaps he was more concerned over the fact that his right to choose how his software is copied ("copy" + "right" = "copyright") was taken when the software was copied, and unlike the software, which can be duplicated, the right to control the copying of your created works, and other people copying it without your permission, are mutually exclusive. Just because he was left with a copy of the software, doesn't mean nothing was taken that he wasn't left with ("copyright" - "right" = "copy") I understand that concept is quite abstracty and beyond people who can only deal with metaphors involving cars :-/
Oh, whether you think a person should have to right to control the use of their creation is another matter. Copyright means they have a legal right to, I'm not suggesting whether that right is either ethical or not. But you cannot argue that nothing is taken that the creator is thus prevented from using, as demonstrated above.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Dude, suggesting that somebody's future predicting powers may not be 100% accurate 100% of the time is all the pleasure some people have in their lives goddamnit, don't take that away.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I never really trusted putting any of my documents on computers at all. Just in a locked safe, sitting in a larger locked safe, in a secure room in a non-government, non-corporate secure facility with access by nobody except me.
Ha! I out-neckbearded you both.
Why are browsers so horribly unfriendly for uploads?
Perhaps Google could put some money into fixing Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=249338
or improving it
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468
Does Chrome have a decent upload UI? I can't recall ...
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Before, we had to either use a separate server, mail the documents to eachother, or use some *other* online hosting service for sharing files in the organization.
Now everything is available at one place.
Looks like a major step forward.
But hardware wants to be free too!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If someone has a pirated copy of Photoshop, they have deprived Adobe of money just as much as if they had shoplifted the dvd, and it is absurd to say that it is only the marginal cost of media, packaging, distribution, etc.
If I photocopy a book from the library, I deprive the author, publisher and so on of money.
I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If someone creates and sells a software that replaces Photoshop, it will also deprive Adobe of money. It is not the act of depriving someone of (potential) money that is wrong (although it may be illegal). You don't have a "natural" right to force someone to give you money, you know, although you may convince the state to grant you that benefit.
Intelectual/Imaginary Property is a fiction. It may be a useful fiction, but as with all fictions, once you try to extend it and to treat it as reality, it breaks and loses much of its usefulness.
As you presumably know, GP was pointing out that what you called "free software" is not what would normally be meant by that phrase. There is FOSS and I suppose freeware, but copying commercial software does not mean it is free, except as in (stolen) beer.
It is extremely disingenuous to slip in a phrase like "free software" unless you are deliberately trying for an anti-Linux troll.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You are only depriving them if you would have purchased the software in the first place. Most people who pirate photoshop are actually depriving a cheaper or free program of userbase and/or revenue.
Very few people need photoshop, most people just want it because it's well known. Most of those people have little or no need to manipulate images, and would easily be able to fulfil their needs with a whole host of free or cheap software, eg GIMP.
I know someone who uses a pirated photoshop for resizing images, yes resizing is all he ever does with it... If he was unable to pirate photoshop, he would have downloaded something else for free (legal or otherwise). He doesn't want to use gimp or any one of the other free tools available that are capable of resizing images because he's heard of photoshop, knows its expensive and considers anything with a pricetag of 0 to be inferior (and no, he has never even tried to use gimp or any other free programs because he thinks they're shit).
The same is true of a lot of other commercial software, and it's why vendors often turn a blind eye to piracy, especially by individuals, because a pirate copy is still more profitable for them (increases mindshare, one less customer/user for a competitor) than users migrating to something else.
As for the "marginal cost of media etc" comment... In any other market (eg hardware) margins start off very fat to pay for the initial development costs (the early adopters tax) and then plummet as the product ages and competition kicks up, such that margins tend to be extremely thin on most hardware products.
Software seems to stay in the "screw the early adopters" phase, with extremely high margins relative to the production costs. Hopefully in a few years the market will mature, and software vendors won't be able to continue screwing their customers like this.
When that happens, piracy will decrease massively too, you only get copied merchandise in markets where goods are being sold with ridiculous and unrealistic margins... In any other market, you may pay a small premium for a brand but that small premium is not worth the risk of producing counterfeit goods.
That's why you get counterfeit prada, but you don't get counterfeit walmart clothes...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The connection requests will be coming down, and your downstream is likely to be far higher than your upstream for a typical home connection... Sure, you can't control the rate of incoming SYN packets (new connections), but you can throttle the rate that existing connections send ACKs, and you can throttle the rate with which you send data (over your presumably slower upstream).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
But using Google Docs is not the same as putting your docs online. Unless you also think that using web-based email is "putting your emails online". By default google docs are viewable only within your account (unless you choose to share them), but surely you'd have guessed this?
:) It's actually a pretty handy tool, I use it instead of the txt files I'd have sat on the desktop of various computers - project notes, todo lists etc.
Of course, something could go wrong as it did with Voice, but you assess the risk. Just don't use Google Docs for those trade secrets, or blackmailable material
Isn't that what Bittorrent is supposed to solve?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To be even more accurate; stolen = copyright infringed, pirated = selling those "stolen" goods. It isn't piracy if there is no monetary gain.
- Raynet --> .
For testing, I archived a bunch of old documents into one docs.7z file, 84mb in size, and tried to upload it. After 20 minutes of watching the status bar creep, I got a message saying that Google does not yet support 7z files.
All this technological overkill these days.
I just ate all my important documents.
That's quite easy to do, so they probably do it. Might lead to some "oh, look, everybody is receving that email" funny moments.
Rethinking email
It sounds so much better than "stolen" or "missing" when you found it back.
Unix has created it's own solution for it, you know, for stolen bits!
On the black market, stolen bits are much more worth. /lost+found will contain all your "misplaced items"!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
So you're saying that it wasn't the software that was stolen, it was his right to choose how it's copied? But that's not exactly correct either, because he can still make (or not make) copies as he pleases. He just didn't get to stop me from making that one copy. Why would he have wanted to do such a thing? So he could get payment in return. So he lost the ability to get payment from me, short of suing me. There are of course other ways he might also not get payment, like if I got a competing program, or decided I didn't need the program in the first place. It's slippery (not that you were arguing the validity of copyright, just the technicalities).
I'm sure this guy would have appreciated your kind gesture
> I don't care how technical you want to get about the definition of theft, depriving someone of money is wrong.
If I grow my own vegetables, I won't buy the vegetables I would have bought otherwise, thereby depriving the supermarket of money! Obviously growing vegetables is wrong.
"...it was his right to choose how it's copied? But that's not exactly correct" ...and then...
"He just didn't get to stop me from making that one copy"
See the contradiction? Remembering that I'm not arguing ethical grounds here, just demonstrating the legal (which I won't try drill in cuz you understand the difference), where 'mostly's and 'yeah but's just don't fit in, because then, who gets to decide who the "yeah but it's just one person" is? What's stopping everyone from wanting to be that "just one person"? The law doesn't define what the average should be, because that's subjective, instead it must define the line. In the case of copyright, the law doesn't grant the copyright holder control over most of the distribution of their works, it grants a time limited monopoly right... mono = one, not mostly one but a little bit under but you won't notice it. Because it is absolutely defined, as long as our observations of reality are in agreement, we cannot argue over whether reality fits the definition or not... slighly less than all, by the most smallest amount, can not be equal to all, for any value of all.
So yes, trying not to repeat myself too much (long day so apologies if I am) you can see that in the context of what is legally defined, it has nothing to do with how much money they could've made, the size of the sale that was "lost", however much the MAFIAA focus on the money, only made 99bajillion dollars this year instead of 100 (how my heart doth bleed) ... the deal is, a protected monopoly for the first x years, in exchange for it going public domain forever after that. The deal is between the artist/creator/inventor/etc and the greater society, as represented* by common law (*we are talking very ideally here!). By being the "just one person" who doesn't honour that deal, and making an unauthorised copy, you're welshing on that deal, on behalf of the society.
One final point I do want to make clear (will try keep it short!) is that I am guilty of doing this myself. I've downloaded and used stuff that there's no way I could afford. Even times where I've felt it's been necessary (without going into life story enough to explain 'necessary') I'm still not going to pretend that it's right, but I still do it, sometimes just for a laugh (like download a funny film when I'm bummed out that I know I don't have money to pay for). I'm not a bad person. I'm not perfect. I'm honest though. I say this because I think it emphasises how much what I say isn't me casting judgement... we're just not a perfect species! Better to put the effort into making up for it than trying to hide it.
End of rant *lol*
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Yeah, thanks for your patient reply. I kept going into the wrong mode of argument for some reason. As you say, if the law says that a copyright violation is making a copy without authorization of the copyright holder, then making even a single copy is a copyright violation (aside from fair use, but let's assume that didn't apply here).
The average torrent junkie doesn't buy 8TB of disk and upgraded bandwidth plans because they really like sharing Linux ISOs...Please.
At 8TB I think it's fairly obvious that they're collecting/hoarding.
If the original ripper only bought his copy so that he could crack it and share it with the scene, and nobody who got access to it would have bought it otherwise, doesn't that mean the software manufacturer is UP one sale?
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling