But if you are a business, or your files need to stay confidential for some other reason? I don't think Google Drive can be trusted with that kind of material.
“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content
Dropbox's and Skydrive's terms are more sane.
Dropbox's, yes, Skydrive is basically the same. And, as another poster pointed out, if you read Google's whole ToS, it self-limits the purposes for which it can use that license to something more reasonable.
However, if you prefer to get different terms from Google, there's a really easy way to do it: Set up your own domain on Google Apps. According to this page you then fall under the Apps Terms of Service, which are what Google offers to its business customers. Those terms say "what's yours is yours, what's ours is ours", with nothing about licensing.
"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."
Hmm, yeah, this is a case where the single-policy approach doesn't work so well. What makes sense for services like Google+ doesn't make as much sense for Drive.
Interestingly, if you have a Google Apps domain, rather than using a gmail.com account or similar, the rules are very different. In that agreement there is no licensing clause. The most relevant section there is:
7.1 Intellectual Property Rights. Except as expressly set forth herein, this Agreement does not grant either party any rights, implied or otherwise, to the other's content or any of the other's intellectual property. As between the parties, Customer owns all Intellectual Property Rights in Customer Data, and Google owns all Intellectual Property Rights in the Services.
So, if you don't like the normal terms of service, register your own domain name and set up a Google Apps account. Then you're operating under the terms Google uses with its enterprise clients.
Literally the only times I will ever search for a file is if it wasn't placed there by me. For example, when it was placed by the installer of an application.
In the case of Google Drive, a file being shared with you by someone else is somewhat analogous to that. Of course, it's always in a known location, but if you get a dozen files a day that list quickly becomes very long unless you actively manage it.
Just for completeness, I should mention there's another approach I use even more often than either search or hierarchical navigation -- Drive has a "Recent" pseudo-folder which contains everything sorted by last access date, most recent first. It's typically the case that what I'm looking for is in the top dozen or so entries there, so my normal process is to glance there first and if it doesn't jump out at me, search. The search does an "instant" sort of thing, automatically offering best guesses after a few characters, so I rarely have to type more than three or four letters to find what I'm looking for. This is all much faster than clicking through two or three levels of folders.
Oh, that's when I access it through the web interface. For files synced to my local drive, I use either Spotlight or folder navigation. For my Linux boxen, Drive doesn't (yet) have a sync client, so my workflow is like yours. Usually I know where stuff is, but if I don't there's "locate" or (more often, actually) "dpkg -S".
Oh, yes, you have to have Chrome set up with the offline app. I haven't tried it with anything else. What would you expect it to do? I didn't think offline Docs worked with anything but Chrome, as of yet.
I suspect I started using computers about as early as you did (first experience was in the late 70s, got my first computer in the early 80s, first IBM PC was in 86, first computer I bought myself was in 91, etc.) and I've always felt the same way about organization, but on both my Mac and with Google Drive I find that searching is just faster than navigating, even if I know exactly where my file is.
A characteristic of Docs/Drive that perhaps contributes in that context is that when people share stuff with me, it goes in the "Shared with Me" folder, and I rarely bother to move it to other locations. The reason I don't bother is because so much stuff is always showing up in there that categorizing all of it would be a pain. So it's easier just to search, and that got me in the habit of searching even for documents I originated.
I would expect people posting on/. to understand that you don't upload anything to Google that you don't want the world to see.
IMO, that's too strong.
I would not suggest uploading stuff that would incriminate you, because Google does respond to subpoenas. They have to. But as for other information which you don't want people to see... Google isn't going to publish your documents, or mine them for company confidential information -- though I wouldn't upload company confidential information to any service your employer hasn't specifically authorized (Note that Google Docs has been vetted by the US government and can be used for non-classified government information). Also, Google takes security seriously and is very unlikely to be hacked (yes, there was the Chinese hack reported a while back. Keep in mind that Google was one of hundreds of companies attacked, and Google was the only one to notice it and publish the information, and AFAIK, no user data was revealed. My understanding is that the hackers got into the corporate network, not the production network where user data lives).
Of course, you should do what you feel comfortable with, but tens if not hundreds of millions of people will put sensitive data in their Google Drive, just as hundreds of millions send sensitive information through Gmail, or perform web searches for sensitive topics, etc. Nearly all of Google's products are used to access or store information which could be important to users. How many cases of users being burned by that have you seen? Google is very careful with user data.
All of that said, I do encrypt my most sensitive data before putting it in Drive.
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you. I have thousands of files in mine (I work for Google and have been using it for a few months, with a very generous storage limit, so I've got lots in there), and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time. What makes it really nice is that it indexes everything -- it can parse virtually any file format, and even uses the Google Goggles technology to extract textual descriptions of objects in images, and I think it also does OCR on images as well.
Of course, if you're more worried about Google extracting information from your files than about your ability to find them, then this aggressive search indexing is stronger motivation to encrypt. If you just want to be able to find your stuff easily, from anywhere, it rocks, and encrypting will break it.
I've never done anything close to this bad. To the best of my knowledge, the company I work for has never done anything close to this bad.
I guess I have a different perspective on how bad this is. The positions we're talking about are very well-compensated even with this no cold-calling agreement (calling it salary fixing is a bit of a stretch, IMO). I agree that it should not have been done, but none of the victims are hurting.
They would not feel the same if they worked in Atlanta, would they?
That I can't say. I've worked in Boulder, Mountain View, San Francisco and New York, and my colleagues have worked in a lot of other Google offices, but I don't know anyone from the Atlanta office. What's so terrible in Atlanta? Maybe you should transfer to Boulder. It's pretty awesome here.
It's the most clearly evil thing I know of Google doing. Apple has done plenty worse, but they don't make any claim to not being evil the way google does.
Does one evil act make someone evil? If that's the standard, then absolutely everyone is evil, and evilness becomes a useless yardstick.
It was removed just a few days after someone posted a complaint on the review of the commit that added it.
It was still there in October 2011 (search for "ru"), just moved around a bit. Next revision from that is the one that removed it. So it was there from May till October.
October is when the complaint was posted on the review, and a few days later it was removed.
You're assuming that all of the Democrats and the two Independents in the Senate who voted for the health care reform would also have voted for it if it included a public option.
He explicitly said that was one of the two possibilities, either "(A) he got exactly the bill he wanted, and/or (B) he was not negotiating with congressional Republicans but congressional Democrats". You can argue that he should have picked (B), not (A), but you can't say he didn't offer it.
In the Ron Paulite religion, gold is a sacred and mystical metal that can stave off recessions and makes economies unsinkable. Ron Paulites could be described as something of precious metal fetishists.
I'm a fan of Ron Paul. I don't like fiat money, and I really don't like central banks. I'm not sure that gold (or any specific substance) is a better choice, though. I think the best basis for a currency would be energy, but there are lots of practical issues that make that difficult.
(that code is gone in more recent releases, but it's been there for several months)
Very interesting. There's no explanation in the commit that added it, nor the commit review, nor the commit or review when it was removed. It was removed just a few days after someone posted a complaint on the review of the commit that added it.
Does IE offer a choice of search engines the first time you run it?
It does, but it's not straightforward - it basically asks you if you want to use Bing or "something else", and it will only show the selector if you pick the latter.
I'm impressed they went that far. It's still a far cry from Chrome's three big buttons, making it look like changing the search engine is some obscure customization that only the knowledgeable or the adventurous should try, but better than I expected.
Nonsense. The first part of your statement is accurate, the currency has been devaluing. But gold's value isn't any more constant than any other commodity. It's value varies according to supply and demand. Supply is not fixed, it increases when more is mined, and decreases when more is locked away in various inaccessible places (landfills, graves, etc.). Demand is not fixed, it increases when people find new stuff to make out of gold, or when speculators decide that gold is a good investment, and decreases when people make less stuff out of gold or when speculators shift their interest to other securities or commodities.
On the supply side, keep in mind that we do know how to synthesize gold -- we possess the alchemist's stone, in effect. It's not presently economical to make gold from mercury or platinum, but it can be done. There isn't any obvious path with current technology to making it economical, but that could change at any time. Similarly, there isn't any economical way to extract the huge amount of gold that's present in seawater, but again that could change. The value of gold could also easily increase dramatically if we found some really compelling industrial use for it.
Gold isn't any magical repository or standard of value. It's just a commodity.
If you really want to show that you've taken the time to get to know her, you should also include photos of her husband, children and other relatives taken while they're going to work, school, or other routine daily activities. Emphasis on "routine", stuff they do every day, consistently. There's no need to hassle them, just use a long-range lens and snap a few pics from your car. She'll recognize that the photos were taken by someone unobserved and appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Slashdot Mirror
But if you are a business, or your files need to stay confidential for some other reason? I don't think Google Drive can be trusted with that kind of material.
Read the terms that Google gives its enterprise clients: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/standard_terms.html. There's nothing about content licensing there.
From http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/how-far-do-google-drives-terms-go-in-owning-your-files/75228
Google Drive terms:
“Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content
Dropbox's and Skydrive's terms are more sane.
Dropbox's, yes, Skydrive is basically the same. And, as another poster pointed out, if you read Google's whole ToS, it self-limits the purposes for which it can use that license to something more reasonable.
However, if you prefer to get different terms from Google, there's a really easy way to do it: Set up your own domain on Google Apps. According to this page you then fall under the Apps Terms of Service, which are what Google offers to its business customers. Those terms say "what's yours is yours, what's ours is ours", with nothing about licensing.
Thanks, but no thanks Google
From Google Drive EULA
"When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content."
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/24/2972228/cloud-storage-terms-of-service-comparison-avoid-google-drive
Hmm, yeah, this is a case where the single-policy approach doesn't work so well. What makes sense for services like Google+ doesn't make as much sense for Drive.
Interestingly, if you have a Google Apps domain, rather than using a gmail.com account or similar, the rules are very different. In that agreement there is no licensing clause. The most relevant section there is:
7.1 Intellectual Property Rights. Except as expressly set forth herein, this Agreement does not grant either party any rights, implied or otherwise, to the other's content or any of the other's intellectual property. As between the parties, Customer owns all Intellectual Property Rights in Customer Data, and Google owns all Intellectual Property Rights in the Services.
So, if you don't like the normal terms of service, register your own domain name and set up a Google Apps account. Then you're operating under the terms Google uses with its enterprise clients.
Literally the only times I will ever search for a file is if it wasn't placed there by me. For example, when it was placed by the installer of an application.
In the case of Google Drive, a file being shared with you by someone else is somewhat analogous to that. Of course, it's always in a known location, but if you get a dozen files a day that list quickly becomes very long unless you actively manage it.
Just for completeness, I should mention there's another approach I use even more often than either search or hierarchical navigation -- Drive has a "Recent" pseudo-folder which contains everything sorted by last access date, most recent first. It's typically the case that what I'm looking for is in the top dozen or so entries there, so my normal process is to glance there first and if it doesn't jump out at me, search. The search does an "instant" sort of thing, automatically offering best guesses after a few characters, so I rarely have to type more than three or four letters to find what I'm looking for. This is all much faster than clicking through two or three levels of folders.
Oh, that's when I access it through the web interface. For files synced to my local drive, I use either Spotlight or folder navigation. For my Linux boxen, Drive doesn't (yet) have a sync client, so my workflow is like yours. Usually I know where stuff is, but if I don't there's "locate" or (more often, actually) "dpkg -S".
It is a lot like Spotlight, except that Spotlight doesn't search images by content.
Oh, yes, you have to have Chrome set up with the offline app. I haven't tried it with anything else. What would you expect it to do? I didn't think offline Docs worked with anything but Chrome, as of yet.
A characteristic of Docs/Drive that perhaps contributes in that context is that when people share stuff with me, it goes in the "Shared with Me" folder, and I rarely bother to move it to other locations. The reason I don't bother is because so much stuff is always showing up in there that categorizing all of it would be a pain. So it's easier just to search, and that got me in the habit of searching even for documents I originated.
I would expect people posting on /. to understand that you don't upload anything to Google that you don't want the world to see.
IMO, that's too strong.
I would not suggest uploading stuff that would incriminate you, because Google does respond to subpoenas. They have to. But as for other information which you don't want people to see... Google isn't going to publish your documents, or mine them for company confidential information -- though I wouldn't upload company confidential information to any service your employer hasn't specifically authorized (Note that Google Docs has been vetted by the US government and can be used for non-classified government information). Also, Google takes security seriously and is very unlikely to be hacked (yes, there was the Chinese hack reported a while back. Keep in mind that Google was one of hundreds of companies attacked, and Google was the only one to notice it and publish the information, and AFAIK, no user data was revealed. My understanding is that the hackers got into the corporate network, not the production network where user data lives).
Of course, you should do what you feel comfortable with, but tens if not hundreds of millions of people will put sensitive data in their Google Drive, just as hundreds of millions send sensitive information through Gmail, or perform web searches for sensitive topics, etc. Nearly all of Google's products are used to access or store information which could be important to users. How many cases of users being burned by that have you seen? Google is very careful with user data.
All of that said, I do encrypt my most sensitive data before putting it in Drive.
Open it while you're offline, and you can see the full document content is there.
Don't forget to encrypt all this before sending it to "the cloud"
There is a cost to doing that: Google Drive's search features won't work for you. I have thousands of files in mine (I work for Google and have been using it for a few months, with a very generous storage limit, so I've got lots in there), and although you can organize things in hierarchical directories, the search features are the way I find the stuff I want 99% of the time. What makes it really nice is that it indexes everything -- it can parse virtually any file format, and even uses the Google Goggles technology to extract textual descriptions of objects in images, and I think it also does OCR on images as well.
Of course, if you're more worried about Google extracting information from your files than about your ability to find them, then this aggressive search indexing is stronger motivation to encrypt. If you just want to be able to find your stuff easily, from anywhere, it rocks, and encrypting will break it.
This is a real security hole
You mean, this was a real (if very minor) threat to the airlines' revenues. There's basically zero security value in requiring ID to fly.
That's not a good choice. That doesn't do shit.
That would depend on how many people made the same choice. Just like voting.
I've never done anything close to this bad. To the best of my knowledge, the company I work for has never done anything close to this bad.
I guess I have a different perspective on how bad this is. The positions we're talking about are very well-compensated even with this no cold-calling agreement (calling it salary fixing is a bit of a stretch, IMO). I agree that it should not have been done, but none of the victims are hurting.
They would not feel the same if they worked in Atlanta, would they?
That I can't say. I've worked in Boulder, Mountain View, San Francisco and New York, and my colleagues have worked in a lot of other Google offices, but I don't know anyone from the Atlanta office. What's so terrible in Atlanta? Maybe you should transfer to Boulder. It's pretty awesome here.
None of the people I work with feel the way you do, and many of them have been with Google for 5+ years.
It's the most clearly evil thing I know of Google doing. Apple has done plenty worse, but they don't make any claim to not being evil the way google does.
Does one evil act make someone evil? If that's the standard, then absolutely everyone is evil, and evilness becomes a useless yardstick.
It was removed just a few days after someone posted a complaint on the review of the commit that added it.
It was still there in October 2011 (search for "ru"), just moved around a bit. Next revision from that is the one that removed it. So it was there from May till October.
October is when the complaint was posted on the review, and a few days later it was removed.
Well, I just defined "incorrect" as "anything SuperKendall says". So what you said is incorrect, by definition.
I'm a bit surprised no one has yet asked any smart questions.
I'm not. Look, when posting flamebait, you need to be a little bit subtle. When you make it so blatantly obvious, you just get ignored.
You're assuming that all of the Democrats and the two Independents in the Senate who voted for the health care reform would also have voted for it if it included a public option.
He explicitly said that was one of the two possibilities, either "(A) he got exactly the bill he wanted, and/or (B) he was not negotiating with congressional Republicans but congressional Democrats". You can argue that he should have picked (B), not (A), but you can't say he didn't offer it.
In the Ron Paulite religion, gold is a sacred and mystical metal that can stave off recessions and makes economies unsinkable. Ron Paulites could be described as something of precious metal fetishists.
I'm a fan of Ron Paul. I don't like fiat money, and I really don't like central banks. I'm not sure that gold (or any specific substance) is a better choice, though. I think the best basis for a currency would be energy, but there are lots of practical issues that make that difficult.
It does.
That depends.
(that code is gone in more recent releases, but it's been there for several months)
Very interesting. There's no explanation in the commit that added it, nor the commit review, nor the commit or review when it was removed. It was removed just a few days after someone posted a complaint on the review of the commit that added it.
Does IE offer a choice of search engines the first time you run it?
It does, but it's not straightforward - it basically asks you if you want to use Bing or "something else", and it will only show the selector if you pick the latter.
I'm impressed they went that far. It's still a far cry from Chrome's three big buttons, making it look like changing the search engine is some obscure customization that only the knowledgeable or the adventurous should try, but better than I expected.
The value of gold is a constant...
Nonsense. The first part of your statement is accurate, the currency has been devaluing. But gold's value isn't any more constant than any other commodity. It's value varies according to supply and demand. Supply is not fixed, it increases when more is mined, and decreases when more is locked away in various inaccessible places (landfills, graves, etc.). Demand is not fixed, it increases when people find new stuff to make out of gold, or when speculators decide that gold is a good investment, and decreases when people make less stuff out of gold or when speculators shift their interest to other securities or commodities.
On the supply side, keep in mind that we do know how to synthesize gold -- we possess the alchemist's stone, in effect. It's not presently economical to make gold from mercury or platinum, but it can be done. There isn't any obvious path with current technology to making it economical, but that could change at any time. Similarly, there isn't any economical way to extract the huge amount of gold that's present in seawater, but again that could change. The value of gold could also easily increase dramatically if we found some really compelling industrial use for it.
Gold isn't any magical repository or standard of value. It's just a commodity.
If you really want to show that you've taken the time to get to know her, you should also include photos of her husband, children and other relatives taken while they're going to work, school, or other routine daily activities. Emphasis on "routine", stuff they do every day, consistently. There's no need to hassle them, just use a long-range lens and snap a few pics from your car. She'll recognize that the photos were taken by someone unobserved and appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Many comments here say that Chrome already offers such a screen; if it's so, then I think they're already OK.
It does. Does IE offer a choice of search engines the first time you run it?