Filed under: Business, Developer, Utilities, News, Productivity, Web services, Google
Google - All your data are belong to us
Goodness gracious, Google's
at it again. Not content to store your email and a few paltry text docs on their servers, looks like they want to store
100% of your data online. Don your tinfoil hats kids, we're going to play the "who do you trust" game...
Here's the story thus far: Google posted a PowerPoint presentation with some very juicy notes inside that were only
meant for Google eyes (I have been waiting SO long to dust that one off). Greg Linden downloaded it, and
spotted some juicy tidbits. By the time others tried, the PPT had been redacted. And now the PPT is a PDF, without
those awesome notes. So what was in them? From what we know, there were three items of interest:- Google wants to store all your data on their servers so you can access it anywhere. Probably going to be called
GDrive, as mentioned in the PPT.
- Google is going to continue to innovate in search. Again, in the
notes there are several ways they are going to improve.
- Google discusses a project calle "Lighthouse" which no one can figure out what it is...
Either way, it's clear Google is feeling the heat from products like Microsoft's Office Live and other fronts. Although MS has had to pull back a little from their "we're going to kill Google" remarks. There's more talk about these slides here and here, and the link to the PDF is right here. It's also clear the next great battle is over your data. Now who do you trust?
[Via ZDNet]
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Morgan said 6:01AM on 3-08-2006
I trust them all as much as I have to, but I'm just not going to be storing my personal files online in any future I can imagine. Network access deserts me when I need it most, and I just won't ever like the idea much.
I especially wouldn't like it with Google, I can't stand their "Don't Be Evil" mantra. It implies that they think other corporations are evil somehow. Annoying, juvenile, and probably highly effective with the Slashdot crowd. Get over yourselves Google.
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shadekh said 10:46AM on 3-08-2006
well, one of the benefits of online storage for free has always been file sharing. Plus, i do like google's way of doing business, though i would only store non sensitive info in such a service.
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Punchy said 10:59AM on 3-08-2006
I for one would have no problem with this at all. The added functionality and accessibility to me would trump any concerns I would have about where my data lives.
Awesome, bring it on, sooner than later please.
Punchy
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Steve said 11:24AM on 3-08-2006
The mention of universal personalization and the lighthouse comment point me to suspect a ws_auth system. Orkut is now using your gmail for user authentication and that makes a lot of sense. It would be very much a system like micrsoft started with passport and pulled.
Users need a single trusted site that can federate identity with all other sites. We need such an infrastructure to build identity driven solutions. I am involved with CACert (www.cacert.org) for the same reason. A common trusted personalization service that is community based.
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otakucode said 1:15PM on 3-08-2006
Ugh. All my data stored on Google's servers? Absolutely not. I deal with a LOT of data on a daily basis. Shifting around 100GB in an evening is not a big deal. Doing this over my local gigabit network is painful and slow enough, doing it on a network drive hosted at Google would be unacceptable.
Right now, for the general user, the major bottleneck of their computing experience is their data storage. Hard drives are terribly slow, even 10,000RPM Raptor drives in RAID-0 have a hard time keeping up with any sort of significant file operations. We're not going to solve that problem by sticking all of our data on a server somewhere on the other side of a slow, unrealiable link.
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