I don't know about this newspaper, but my local newspaper ties your online account directly to your real identification. You can't even sign up for their website unless you subscribe to the physical newspaper. In order to register for their website (and subsequently make any comments on an article) you have to enter your address and the subscriber number that appears on your bill. There's no way to provide "These J. Nutz" as your identity, unless you managed to get a credit card in that name and are using it to pay for the newspaper.
Newspaper publishers, for whatever reason, really dislike anonymity or pseudonymity these days. You can't even write a "name withheld by request" letter to the editor anymore. It's a shame.
"Stuck" may have been hyperbole on his part, but I'm in a similar situation so I sympathize.
20 years ago I had a dialup internet connection from BellSouth. The associated email address was, and still is is, my first name @bellsouth.net. I've had that email address for two decades, two moves, four jobs, and several ISP changes. When I no longer had a need for a backup dialup ISP and I stopped paying BellSouth (AT&T at that point), they let me keep the email account for free. That email address is known to most of my family, friends, coworkers, former coworkers, and various other business associates and acquaintances. It's been on my resume and my business cards. It's been used to register for numerous services I've long since forgotten about but might want to access again someday. I haven't used it as my primary email in years, and I don't usually give it out to anyone anymore, but it's been in circulation for so long that I have to check it, so that it stays active and so that I don't miss anything interesting or important.
AT&T offloaded its customers' email accounts from their own interface to Yahoo several years ago. I normally use an IMAP client instead of the web interface, but that's beside the point: there are a lot of people who are somewhat involuntarily attached to Yahoo Mail, either an account they created @yahoo.com years ago, or with their current or former ISP email address. Yes, people could just abandon those addresses and never interact with Yahoo Mail again, but that isn't a reasonable option to me, all things considered. I am, in a way, "stuck" with that address until I die or AT&T decides to shut it down, whichever comes first.
I agree entirely when it comes to "tolerable" and "reasonable" and "obnoxious." Even if we completely ignore the fact that Yahoo's advertising network has been repeatedlycompromised and used to serve up malware, the "legitimate" ads they display are from the gutter of the internet.
Going to any Yahoo site with ads enabled is like visiting a newsstand in the red light district. Lots of pictures of scantily clad women being used to promote something entirely unrelated; that's a grenade waiting to go off if you visit Yahoo at work. Lots of pictures of gross skin conditions and other medical problems. Lots of click-bait captions ("Surprising Ways Coconut Oil Can Change Your Life!," "20 product features you never knew existed!"). Lots of trashy, scammy sounding ads that remind you of the junk you see on TV at 3AM ("Search For Mesothelioma Lawyers," "How Much Can You Save By Refinancing?"). And on many Yahoo properties, each page will load a dozen or more 300x156 images all down the side of the page. Seriously, fire up a sandbox VM and go scroll through this page on Yahoo News without an ad blocker, it's unfuckingreal!
Yahoo Mail also insists that you enter your cellphone number in order to create an email account. This is a hard requirement and can't be bypassed. Gmail will try, and if you don't enter your number they'll remind you at every opportunity, but as of yet won't force you to link your email account to your pocket government GPS tracker. I know a lot of folks are attached to long-held @yahoo.com addresses but surely nobody new is signing up for this shit.
It has already been leaked that US satellites detected a "heat flash" while the plane was at altitude.
Suppose some mechanical failure, or a fire from a load of batteries on board, etc. compromised a fuel tank and led to an explosion. Wouldn't that also generate a "heat flash" while the plane was at altitude? Assuming the aircraft exploded, there are numerous possible explanations that don't involve a bomb.
US and British intelligence agencies have cried wolf too many times to have any credibility left with me. Until proof to the contrary is provided, Occam's razor tells me this was just a catastrophic accident.
An open message to Comcast execs: be absolutely sure you're ready to make customers decide between your content and Netflix. I bet you'd be surprised how often the response won't be what you'd hope.
Good luck with that. Netflix is busy dropping content, using the rationale that you can get that content from cable TV instead. We're approaching a point where the only winning move is not to pay; I predict many folks will soon cancel cable and Netflix, and just go back to torrents.
It's part of the contract, is why. There's a clause in my apartment's lease that says I'm allowed to have up to two adults and two children living here at any given time. If I decide to go out and get three adult roommates, I expect the leasing office is going to be upset. You might ask, "why should it matter whether there are 2 adults and 2 kids, or 4 adults and 0 kids, it's 4 people either way." Well, it matters because I signed a contract saying I don't get to have 4 adults living here.
I believe T-Mobile is using the word tethering to mask the fact that the plans are not really "unlimited".
Nobody's masking anything. These folks signed a contract saying they get 7 gigs, and only 7 gigs, worth of tethering data; along with unlimited phone data. Unlimited tethering data was never part of the deal.
There is no false advertising going on here. T-Mobile did not sell anyone "unlimited tethering." They have never offered such a service. I don't understand why this is so confusing.
T-Mobile does sell a plan that gives you unlimited data use on your phone, for using apps and browsing the web and shit on your phone, plus 7 gigs of tethering data. They aren't complaining about anyone using too much data on their phone. They're going after users who are tethering every device in their home (or perhaps business) to their phone, and then intentionally evading the 7 gig limit on tethering. That limit is in the contract, and it's part of the marketing.
This sounds like a troll, or maybe Zuckerberg posting as AC. But I'll bite just in case some congressional staffer who might believe this nonsense is reading.
If your company wasn't run by fucking slave drivers, they wouldn't have such a tough time filling open positions. 16x5 +10 (+10?) is worse than what EA used to expect out of their employees, and they had the worst reputation in the business. They also wound up having to pay out millions in a labor dispute surrounding those practices, something your bosses might be wise to research.
Where are you located? Consider recruiting remotely. If the company is scared of using telecommuters, open a satellite office somewhere. Not everyone involved in software development needs to be in the bay area, or in Austin or other expensive "tech cities." Smaller southern metros like Little Rock and Memphis have rich talent pools with lower costs of living (read: you can pay people less and they'll still feel well-compensated) and lower cost per square foot to lease commercial space. We even have the internet down here!
Not that anyone in these cities will put up with 100+ hour weeks for very long, either, but there are lots of unemployed American developers looking for a job. You just can't expect to find many unemployed people in cities where a studio apartment is $4,000 a month; they can't afford to be there in the first place.
GP poster is just trolling, with his "Eclipse, like all free IDE's, sucks" comment. You don't notice him mentioning his own environment.
The only other strong suggestion he can make is Android Studio, which instead of bundling Android SDK with Eclipse it bundles Android SDK with IDEA. Which would be fine, if it wasn't languishing in bug reports of its own, new major releases every week, breaking due to Gradle configurations that cause hair-pulling (what the fuck is Gradle and what was wrong with Ant and Maven for dependency management), etc etc. And forget trying to migrate from Eclipse with the SDK over to Android Studio. For God's sake, even when Google I/O was going on, the current builds of Android Studio on offer still didn't work any better than the Eclipse SDK. Life apparently is no better in the Mac world but I don't have experience there.
Don't get me wrong, I love Android, I have 3 Android devices, I'm interested in developing Android apps personally. I'm not knocking Java, I use it. I'm not knocking existing IDEs, I use them. What I'm knocking is the constant moving target status of Android where things change so fucking quickly their own devs can't even keep up with their own IDE bundles or their own documentation. As a potential Android developer, everything I run into is a turnoff. Look at the project and look at all the open issues with the IDE tools and the SDK (forget API and device bugs, those are all to be expected, I'm talking serious problems with the developer tools only). I don't have time to deal with that shit for fun.
Let's say you're a competent Java developer and you'd like to build an Android app. I wish you the best of luck!
First you're going to need to pick an IDE. I've always used Eclipse and hey look, there's an Android SDK for Eclipse. Perfect! Download, extract, fire it up... Errors. This version of Android SDK requires Android API version foo, you have version (foo - 9), please use the SDK manager to upgrade. The hell, the IDE bundle doesn't even launch out of the box?
Alright, so you're distributing your IDE with an outdated version of your API, I can forgive that. Run SDK Manager like it suggested, let it do its thing,. Update available for SDK tools and SDK platform tools, looks good, do it!...And, errors. Package not found, blah blah, let's see what Google has to say about this one.
OK, apparently hundreds of other developers are having the same problem and have, after much wrangling, figured out a solution on their own. I see, I have to go into SDK Manager Settings, create a new User-Defined Add-On Site pointing to https://dl-ssl.google.com/andr... because the URL that ships with the IDE is missing the "s" in "https" and that server doesn't have the right packages available to download. That highly intuitive process would surely have been my first try anyway, but at least someone else found the fix.
SDK Manager seems to find the packages now, great! Got past that hurdle so let's do the upgrade. Wait, now what! What do you mean you can't upgrade to SDK Tools rev. 23 while SDK Platform Tools 19.0.2 is installed? I checked the boxes to upgrade them both; if Platform Tools has to hit rev. 20 before SDK Tools can be upgraded, why is the installer going in the wrong order?
If and when you finally get the actual goddamned IDE installed and working, have fun with the official developer tutorials to create your first "Hello World" app. See, the API has changed over the years^Wmonth^Wpast week and so the app architecture that the tutorial talks about isn't valid anymore. XML files that it says should be there, aren't, so there's no way to follow along in the tutorial by editing them.
I gave up on Android and won't touch it again unless I'm being paid to.
God fucking damn, you salty cocksucker. You made me log in with this fucking account for the first motherfucking time in 5 years just be-goddamn-cause I needed to really show the fuck how I felt about your cunt-smelling post, you fucking shit.
He was in their employ. Once they asked for access and/or recinded his 'permission' and he refused to cooperate he became a criminal.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the entire story here, but since when is disagreeing with your boss a criminal offense?
What he did is inappropriate, but once they asked for access and/or rescinded his 'permission' and he refused to cooperate, he became a candidate for termination and perhaps civil liability. Whether or not he committed any criminal acts is up for debate. I think it's very dangerous to suppose that resisting your employer - even, no, especially if your employer is the government - is illegal.
It is pretty stupid to give them your real name for your Bush-hating blog though. If you plan to actually, you know, respond to your emails, whatever you put for your real name will be on them, right in the From header.
You can change what appears in the From header at any time. Login to GMail and go to Settings > Accounts > Send Mail As > Edit Info. However, changing your name there does not change the name that appears when someone uses the Calendar exploit against you. It will show whatever first and last name you entered when you first registered for your GMail account.
Then, simply put, you are being stupid for assuming that Google would ever protect your privacy in that regard in the first place.
Bullshit, as Google explicitly told me when I signed up that I was required to provide accurate personal information, and that they would protect it. The following two sections are excerpted from the Google Terms of Service, presented when creating a new GMail account (emphasis mine)
5.1 In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date.
7.1 For information about Google's data protection practices, please read Google's privacy policy at http://www.google.com/privacy.html. This policy explains how Google treats your personal information, and protects your privacy, when you use the Services.
So I followed their link over to the Google Privacy Policy, Last modified: October 14, 2005. Under "Information Sharing," my personal information may be shared by Google in the following scenarios (emphasis and braced comments mine)
Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances:
We have your consent [nope]. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
We provide such information to our subsidiaries [nope], affiliated companies [nope] or other trusted businesses or persons [nope] for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf [nope]. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy [nope] and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures [nope].
We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law [nope], regulation [nope], legal process [nope] or enforceable governmental request [nope], (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service [nope], including investigation of potential violations thereof [nope], (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues [nope], or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google [nope], its users [nope] or the public [nope] as required or permitted by law.
If Google becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy. [none of this applies]
We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal [nope] information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.
Assuming that I held up my end of the bargain and provided Google with my "accurate, correct and up to date" information, I expect them to hold up their end of the bargain, as well.
If I was worried about privacy with my gmail account, google wouldn't have my actual name to have the ability to give it out.
That's all well and good until you decide to start using actual Google services (Checkout, AdSense, AdWords, and the like). It's possible to do these things with a non-GMail email address, but you have to create a Google account anyway, so I'd venture to say most folks use their GMail address if they already have one.
I only see this as an issue for people trying to hide their identity for something nefarious.
Suppose I start a blog about how much I hate [BushCo|Obama|innocent animals in ANWR]. I give out my GMail address for anonymous comments, because Google does a great job at filtering all the spam. I have no problem doing this, and why should I? Random members of the public who come across my blog and are incensed by my opinions have no idea who MotherFarkingShiznit@gmail.com really is, and don't have any way to screw up my life aside from making snarky comments on my blog.
Suddenly, everyone who knows my GMail address can find my real name? That's a pretty big fucking deal.
It isn't like names are even really unique identifiers.
Perhaps that's true if your name is John Smith or Li Chan. However, there exists one and only one of me.
Slashdot Mirror
I look forward to the day when I can tell Comcast "sorry, I'm switching to gravity."
SJV would be even worse. Imagine turning on the TV and every channel is showing Anita Sarkeesian!
Who has a list of which configuration options I need to go into about:config and disable this time?
51111111 GET
I don't know about this newspaper, but my local newspaper ties your online account directly to your real identification. You can't even sign up for their website unless you subscribe to the physical newspaper. In order to register for their website (and subsequently make any comments on an article) you have to enter your address and the subscriber number that appears on your bill. There's no way to provide "These J. Nutz" as your identity, unless you managed to get a credit card in that name and are using it to pay for the newspaper.
Newspaper publishers, for whatever reason, really dislike anonymity or pseudonymity these days. You can't even write a "name withheld by request" letter to the editor anymore. It's a shame.
If H1N1 is the swine flu, does that make H1B1 the Indian plague?
"Stuck" may have been hyperbole on his part, but I'm in a similar situation so I sympathize.
20 years ago I had a dialup internet connection from BellSouth. The associated email address was, and still is is, my first name @bellsouth.net. I've had that email address for two decades, two moves, four jobs, and several ISP changes. When I no longer had a need for a backup dialup ISP and I stopped paying BellSouth (AT&T at that point), they let me keep the email account for free. That email address is known to most of my family, friends, coworkers, former coworkers, and various other business associates and acquaintances. It's been on my resume and my business cards. It's been used to register for numerous services I've long since forgotten about but might want to access again someday. I haven't used it as my primary email in years, and I don't usually give it out to anyone anymore, but it's been in circulation for so long that I have to check it, so that it stays active and so that I don't miss anything interesting or important.
AT&T offloaded its customers' email accounts from their own interface to Yahoo several years ago. I normally use an IMAP client instead of the web interface, but that's beside the point: there are a lot of people who are somewhat involuntarily attached to Yahoo Mail, either an account they created @yahoo.com years ago, or with their current or former ISP email address. Yes, people could just abandon those addresses and never interact with Yahoo Mail again, but that isn't a reasonable option to me, all things considered. I am, in a way, "stuck" with that address until I die or AT&T decides to shut it down, whichever comes first.
I agree entirely when it comes to "tolerable" and "reasonable" and "obnoxious." Even if we completely ignore the fact that Yahoo's advertising network has been repeatedly compromised and used to serve up malware, the "legitimate" ads they display are from the gutter of the internet.
Going to any Yahoo site with ads enabled is like visiting a newsstand in the red light district. Lots of pictures of scantily clad women being used to promote something entirely unrelated; that's a grenade waiting to go off if you visit Yahoo at work. Lots of pictures of gross skin conditions and other medical problems. Lots of click-bait captions ("Surprising Ways Coconut Oil Can Change Your Life!," "20 product features you never knew existed!"). Lots of trashy, scammy sounding ads that remind you of the junk you see on TV at 3AM ("Search For Mesothelioma Lawyers," "How Much Can You Save By Refinancing?"). And on many Yahoo properties, each page will load a dozen or more 300x156 images all down the side of the page. Seriously, fire up a sandbox VM and go scroll through this page on Yahoo News without an ad blocker, it's unfuckingreal!
Yahoo Mail also insists that you enter your cellphone number in order to create an email account. This is a hard requirement and can't be bypassed. Gmail will try, and if you don't enter your number they'll remind you at every opportunity, but as of yet won't force you to link your email account to your pocket government GPS tracker. I know a lot of folks are attached to long-held @yahoo.com addresses but surely nobody new is signing up for this shit.
If he put this much effort into the opposite sex, he'd be in prison for aggravated stalking.
You can bet NSA has been exploiting this one for years.
It has already been leaked that US satellites detected a "heat flash" while the plane was at altitude.
Suppose some mechanical failure, or a fire from a load of batteries on board, etc. compromised a fuel tank and led to an explosion. Wouldn't that also generate a "heat flash" while the plane was at altitude? Assuming the aircraft exploded, there are numerous possible explanations that don't involve a bomb.
US and British intelligence agencies have cried wolf too many times to have any credibility left with me. Until proof to the contrary is provided, Occam's razor tells me this was just a catastrophic accident.
$400/month is for residential 10 gig service, which surely won't come with a three-nines SLA or any HA promises. From the article,
While business pricing varies based on the deployment, residents would pay about $400 a month for 10Ggbps service.
I can't find anything on their site about business rates (or even a residential 10 gig rate, yet).
An open message to Comcast execs: be absolutely sure you're ready to make customers decide between your content and Netflix. I bet you'd be surprised how often the response won't be what you'd hope.
Good luck with that. Netflix is busy dropping content, using the rationale that you can get that content from cable TV instead. We're approaching a point where the only winning move is not to pay; I predict many folks will soon cancel cable and Netflix, and just go back to torrents.
It's part of the contract, is why. There's a clause in my apartment's lease that says I'm allowed to have up to two adults and two children living here at any given time. If I decide to go out and get three adult roommates, I expect the leasing office is going to be upset. You might ask, "why should it matter whether there are 2 adults and 2 kids, or 4 adults and 0 kids, it's 4 people either way." Well, it matters because I signed a contract saying I don't get to have 4 adults living here.
I believe T-Mobile is using the word tethering to mask the fact that the plans are not really "unlimited".
Nobody's masking anything. These folks signed a contract saying they get 7 gigs, and only 7 gigs, worth of tethering data; along with unlimited phone data. Unlimited tethering data was never part of the deal.
There is no false advertising going on here. T-Mobile did not sell anyone "unlimited tethering." They have never offered such a service. I don't understand why this is so confusing.
T-Mobile does sell a plan that gives you unlimited data use on your phone, for using apps and browsing the web and shit on your phone, plus 7 gigs of tethering data. They aren't complaining about anyone using too much data on their phone. They're going after users who are tethering every device in their home (or perhaps business) to their phone, and then intentionally evading the 7 gig limit on tethering. That limit is in the contract, and it's part of the marketing.
This sounds like a troll, or maybe Zuckerberg posting as AC. But I'll bite just in case some congressional staffer who might believe this nonsense is reading.
If your company wasn't run by fucking slave drivers, they wouldn't have such a tough time filling open positions. 16x5 +10 (+10?) is worse than what EA used to expect out of their employees, and they had the worst reputation in the business. They also wound up having to pay out millions in a labor dispute surrounding those practices, something your bosses might be wise to research.
Where are you located? Consider recruiting remotely. If the company is scared of using telecommuters, open a satellite office somewhere. Not everyone involved in software development needs to be in the bay area, or in Austin or other expensive "tech cities." Smaller southern metros like Little Rock and Memphis have rich talent pools with lower costs of living (read: you can pay people less and they'll still feel well-compensated) and lower cost per square foot to lease commercial space. We even have the internet down here!
Not that anyone in these cities will put up with 100+ hour weeks for very long, either, but there are lots of unemployed American developers looking for a job. You just can't expect to find many unemployed people in cities where a studio apartment is $4,000 a month; they can't afford to be there in the first place.
It's France, of course they have plenty of French fry grease for biodiesel!
GP poster is just trolling, with his "Eclipse, like all free IDE's, sucks" comment. You don't notice him mentioning his own environment.
The only other strong suggestion he can make is Android Studio, which instead of bundling Android SDK with Eclipse it bundles Android SDK with IDEA. Which would be fine, if it wasn't languishing in bug reports of its own, new major releases every week, breaking due to Gradle configurations that cause hair-pulling (what the fuck is Gradle and what was wrong with Ant and Maven for dependency management), etc etc. And forget trying to migrate from Eclipse with the SDK over to Android Studio. For God's sake, even when Google I/O was going on, the current builds of Android Studio on offer still didn't work any better than the Eclipse SDK. Life apparently is no better in the Mac world but I don't have experience there.
Don't get me wrong, I love Android, I have 3 Android devices, I'm interested in developing Android apps personally. I'm not knocking Java, I use it. I'm not knocking existing IDEs, I use them. What I'm knocking is the constant moving target status of Android where things change so fucking quickly their own devs can't even keep up with their own IDE bundles or their own documentation. As a potential Android developer, everything I run into is a turnoff. Look at the project and look at all the open issues with the IDE tools and the SDK (forget API and device bugs, those are all to be expected, I'm talking serious problems with the developer tools only). I don't have time to deal with that shit for fun.
Let's say you're a competent Java developer and you'd like to build an Android app. I wish you the best of luck!
First you're going to need to pick an IDE. I've always used Eclipse and hey look, there's an Android SDK for Eclipse. Perfect! Download, extract, fire it up... Errors. This version of Android SDK requires Android API version foo, you have version (foo - 9), please use the SDK manager to upgrade. The hell, the IDE bundle doesn't even launch out of the box?
Alright, so you're distributing your IDE with an outdated version of your API, I can forgive that. Run SDK Manager like it suggested, let it do its thing,. Update available for SDK tools and SDK platform tools, looks good, do it! ...And, errors. Package not found, blah blah, let's see what Google has to say about this one.
OK, apparently hundreds of other developers are having the same problem and have, after much wrangling, figured out a solution on their own. I see, I have to go into SDK Manager Settings, create a new User-Defined Add-On Site pointing to https://dl-ssl.google.com/andr... because the URL that ships with the IDE is missing the "s" in "https" and that server doesn't have the right packages available to download. That highly intuitive process would surely have been my first try anyway, but at least someone else found the fix.
SDK Manager seems to find the packages now, great! Got past that hurdle so let's do the upgrade. Wait, now what! What do you mean you can't upgrade to SDK Tools rev. 23 while SDK Platform Tools 19.0.2 is installed? I checked the boxes to upgrade them both; if Platform Tools has to hit rev. 20 before SDK Tools can be upgraded, why is the installer going in the wrong order?
If and when you finally get the actual goddamned IDE installed and working, have fun with the official developer tutorials to create your first "Hello World" app. See, the API has changed over the years^Wmonth^Wpast week and so the app architecture that the tutorial talks about isn't valid anymore. XML files that it says should be there, aren't, so there's no way to follow along in the tutorial by editing them.
I gave up on Android and won't touch it again unless I'm being paid to.
God fucking damn, you salty cocksucker. You made me log in with this fucking account for the first motherfucking time in 5 years just be-goddamn-cause I needed to really show the fuck how I felt about your cunt-smelling post, you fucking shit.
He was in their employ. Once they asked for access and/or recinded his 'permission' and he refused to cooperate he became a criminal.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know the entire story here, but since when is disagreeing with your boss a criminal offense?
What he did is inappropriate, but once they asked for access and/or rescinded his 'permission' and he refused to cooperate, he became a candidate for termination and perhaps civil liability. Whether or not he committed any criminal acts is up for debate. I think it's very dangerous to suppose that resisting your employer - even, no, especially if your employer is the government - is illegal.
It is pretty stupid to give them your real name for your Bush-hating blog though. If you plan to actually, you know, respond to your emails, whatever you put for your real name will be on them, right in the From header.
You can change what appears in the From header at any time. Login to GMail and go to Settings > Accounts > Send Mail As > Edit Info. However, changing your name there does not change the name that appears when someone uses the Calendar exploit against you. It will show whatever first and last name you entered when you first registered for your GMail account.
Then, simply put, you are being stupid for assuming that Google would ever protect your privacy in that regard in the first place.
Bullshit, as Google explicitly told me when I signed up that I was required to provide accurate personal information, and that they would protect it. The following two sections are excerpted from the Google Terms of Service, presented when creating a new GMail account (emphasis mine)
5.1 In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date.
7.1 For information about Google's data protection practices, please read Google's privacy policy at http://www.google.com/privacy.html. This policy explains how Google treats your personal information, and protects your privacy, when you use the Services.
So I followed their link over to the Google Privacy Policy, Last modified: October 14, 2005. Under "Information Sharing," my personal information may be shared by Google in the following scenarios (emphasis and braced comments mine)
Google only shares personal information with other companies or individuals outside of Google in the following limited circumstances:
We have your consent [nope]. We require opt-in consent for the sharing of any sensitive personal information.
We provide such information to our subsidiaries [nope], affiliated companies [nope] or other trusted businesses or persons [nope] for the purpose of processing personal information on our behalf [nope]. We require that these parties agree to process such information based on our instructions and in compliance with this Policy [nope] and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures [nope].
We have a good faith belief that access, use, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to (a) satisfy any applicable law [nope], regulation [nope], legal process [nope] or enforceable governmental request [nope], (b) enforce applicable Terms of Service [nope], including investigation of potential violations thereof [nope], (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address fraud, security or technical issues [nope], or (d) protect against imminent harm to the rights, property or safety of Google [nope], its users [nope] or the public [nope] as required or permitted by law.
If Google becomes involved in a merger, acquisition, or any form of sale of some or all of its assets, we will provide notice before personal information is transferred and becomes subject to a different privacy policy. [none of this applies]
We may share with third parties certain pieces of aggregated, non-personal [nope] information, such as the number of users who searched for a particular term, for example, or how many users clicked on a particular advertisement. Such information does not identify you individually.
Assuming that I held up my end of the bargain and provided Google with my "accurate, correct and up to date" information, I expect them to hold up their end of the bargain, as well.
If I was worried about privacy with my gmail account, google wouldn't have my actual name to have the ability to give it out.
That's all well and good until you decide to start using actual Google services (Checkout, AdSense, AdWords, and the like). It's possible to do these things with a non-GMail email address, but you have to create a Google account anyway, so I'd venture to say most folks use their GMail address if they already have one.
I only see this as an issue for people trying to hide their identity for something nefarious.
Suppose I start a blog about how much I hate [BushCo|Obama|innocent animals in ANWR]. I give out my GMail address for anonymous comments, because Google does a great job at filtering all the spam. I have no problem doing this, and why should I? Random members of the public who come across my blog and are incensed by my opinions have no idea who MotherFarkingShiznit@gmail.com really is, and don't have any way to screw up my life aside from making snarky comments on my blog.
Suddenly, everyone who knows my GMail address can find my real name? That's a pretty big fucking deal.
It isn't like names are even really unique identifiers.
Perhaps that's true if your name is John Smith or Li Chan. However, there exists one and only one of me.