Speculating About Gmail 612
rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier,
here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"
Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I am assuming from the way this reads that it has actually been confirmed?
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
What amazes me are the services that offer I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
Hard drive capacity has gone up a lot since the time of HotMail - I'm amazed no free email service started offering reasonable disk space earlier.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:4, Insightful)
What amazes me are the services that offer <100MB storage. I'm acting as a mini-isp to friends, and with a $50/month dedicated server we're renting, $10/month gets us 10GB of email+web storage.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
True. However, 1PB would require over 5200 of them. Which would in turn require over 650 machines to stick them in (at 8 drives per node, itself probably a tad high since the bus would grind to a crawl in such a machine). All that adds up to at least half of a million dollars.
And for what - Something that amounts to a community service project? Hey, I'll give Google full credit for their current image in the geek community, but this seems a tad ridiculous.
So, I'd say they must have some sort of ulterior motive behind this. Either using huge numbers of people as guinnea pigs to test their new infrastructure (as the topic poster suggests), or something we haven't thought of yet. But just for the hell of it? Probably not.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, of course, all of these businesses have extra, fee-based "premium" services on top of their base free packages, because they've figured out that advertising revenue alone won't keep your head above water on the Internet.
The Passport system may have been a reason Microsoft purchased Hotmail (although I think the Passport system probably came well after the purchase of Hotmail), but it's not why Hotmail was created in the first place.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
I imagine the client interface will also be as fast and powerful as google, too. A lot of the reason why I've hated web-based e-mail in the past is that (at least with a lot of the larger services like yahoo and microsoft) they're f'in SLOW. Google has the server infrastructure to make it fast, and because they'll be using text-based ads and probably a google-esqe lightweight interface it may just be faster than using Outlook on my desktop.
I'm sure their other incentive is that this would give them a lot more information to work with. Consider their creation of Orkut [orkut.com]- they want more info to tie together. Having your e-mail means having who you e-mail. Sort of an auto-social-networking tool... I'm sure they'll figure out more cool stuff to do with the information they get from your e-mail.
The only question is- can they be trusted?
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are using outlook on our desktop, speed is the least of your concerns...
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
In that kind of quantlty I could do you a Raid controller driving, say, 128 drives, for about the cost of one machine. You need to Raid it anyway - you couldn't sau "sorry, we lost all your emails when on drive went down". I would bet that Google have some kind of economy raid controller in the works even if not yet deployed.
Bandwidth isn't the problem. How much bandwidth do you spend reading email? Most of that data will sit there unread for months.
Google don't use RAID... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google don't use RAID... (Score:5, Informative)
As the parent pointed out (mod him up), Google's GFS is better than a large raid system in many ways. While a RAID system tolerates the failures of individual disks (which then need to be replaced), Google's GFS _expects_ the failure of most components, including CPUs, memorys, disks, systems, etc -- and in google's case nothing has to be replaced.
Their system is so fault tollerant, Cringly writes: [pbs.org] "Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus. "
This is far cooler than any RAID from a fault-tollerance point of view.
(apparently since then google went to rack-based systems so it probably detects dead ones so they can replace them easily)
Re:Google don't use RAID... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't forget that Google has ads too. They may not be big and flashy but companies will pay a _lot_ of money to have their ad come out on top for certain search keywords.
The same will be true for Gmail. Remeber that they admit that machines will be crawling through our mail to allow them to bring us targeted ads. And if any internet activity is more popular than a google web search, it's email. The sheer volume of email flying around on something with the scope that Google is aiming for, will produce a whole lot of ads.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:4, Funny)
People more receptive to ads during search? (Score:5, Interesting)
So to me, GMail looks like a service that will be massively more expensive per user for Google, with a lower return from click-throughs.
Anyone have any ideas of other situations where these ads might be successful (e.g. clicked on)?
Re:People more receptive to ads during search? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see a problem with this - PROVIDING - it is secure enough and private enough that only I get to see the results of that.
I can quite honestly see it replacing bookmarks in my regular work.
Currently, whenever I find something interesting at work, I mail the link to my home account.
Now, if while google is searching the web, it started using MY personal preferences and keywords to build up a much more tuned result list, things could start to get very interesting.
Without the wealth of information that your emails provide, it cannot even begin to store YOUR profile properly.
A cookie can only do so much; a 1GB gMail folder could be just what google needs.
they don't need that much disk space (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget that while people will be allowed to have up to 1GB of emails in their mailbox, it doesn't mean Google will have users x 1GB of disk space. Most people won't use the 1GB of mailbox space.
I worked on the mail system of the largest provider in my country. We had 700,000 customers with 15 MB mailboxes and we had something like 1/10 of the disk space required if all the mailboxs were full. And this worked just fine.
Not only Google won't need all that disk space, bu they will probably purchase additional disk space as it becomes necessary. It's smarter to buy new hard disks later than all the disk space immediately, they'll be cheaper.
Re:they don't need that much disk space (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, most headers are standard (From:, Subject:, etc) so they could be tokenized down to 1 byte.
Right, not only that, but since google IS a data management company, I suspect they'll break out your email into tokens and just store those tokens. Remember, just because it's an email service doesn't mean google is stuck using mbox, maildir, or any standard "on disk" format. They can easily tokenize your email and store it as references to tokens, to be reconstructed on the fly when you want to read it. The advantages are it reduces the disk space required, so what you see as 10GB may only exist as 10MB of token references, and several GB of shared tokens shared between all users. Also, they can massage the data any way they want for demographic info, trends, and of course, targeted ads.
How cool would it be to see an email zeitgeist [google.com]? You'd find out things like "the most popular phrase in email the day after the super bowl was 'Janet Jackson'".
Changing subjects - I think the targeted ad thing has HUGE potential if implemented properly.. You email your dad asking if he wants to join you for a weekend of golf in Palm Springs, and when he opens the email there's an ad for a Palms Springs golf course. Or email your brother about finding a WiFi hotspot in Seattle, and when he replies you get an ad for a WiFi-enabled coffee shop in Seattle.. Lots of potential there.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Funny)
For example, when mail (example: spam) is sent to 100 people, keep 1 copy of the message
Better still, when spam is sent to 100 people, keep 0 copies of the message...
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're kidding, right? Gmail is four things that I can see, and none of them are community service:
- AdSense fulfilling its destiny, by (eventually) gaining an extra several hundred million pairs of eyes every day
- A massive experiment in distributed computing and data management, the fruits of which will be phenomenally valuable
- The ability to simultaneously put every other free email provider (and by force of ubiquity, every competing search engine) out of business, just in time for an IPO. Yes, Microsoft, Yahoo, that means YOU.
Nope, nothing charitable about it. LRe:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Funny)
Nit-picking aside, your second reason is a community service, Google are really good at publishing the results of their research. That experiment in distributed computing is not just going to advance the state of the art in scalable systems, its going to drive it.
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:disk space is cheap. (Score:5, Interesting)
-a
Re:Hmm (Score:3)
Very Real (Score:5, Informative)
If you are ainterested in an account, you can give them you current e-mail here [google.com]
and they will send information once GMail goes gold.
Also note that Firefox and Mozilla support is explicitly mentioned!
Re:Very Real (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Very Real (Score:4, Informative)
Skynet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Skynet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Skynet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Skynet (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Skynet (Score:4, Funny)
Only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole HDD? Probably not many (although I suppose you could zip it and span into floppy-sized chunks... <shudder> I remember doing that back in the days of mere 40MB HDDs, and it sucked. Don't even want to imagine it now).
But, imagine this - Upload your entire Ogg/MP3 collection, as a set of email attachments. Poof, instant access to your entire music library from anywhere on the planet. Not exactly "instant" access, but good enough over broadband to stream in realtime.
Which leads to another point - Will Google bother making it difficult to get files into and out of your storage, or just let us basically abuse it however we want?
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Otherwise I would see this as a near perfect vehicle for warez/mp3/etc... I huge distributed file system in the sky, it could easily be wrapped accessing it like usenet with no "falling off" the server. You would have a number of "key" accounts that index the data accounts, which distribute the data across any number of accounts and messages in those accounts - all with googles bandwidth.
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe this is the first step of Google trying to provide universal storage for everyone. I'd guess it's safe to say that Google now does more processing than anyone else on Earth (searching through the internet for nearly every internet user). Perhaps now they're investigating offering to be the main provider for another resource: storage.
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, who's the lucky supplier that has the contract to provide all the drives and computer assemblies? Any RFP's available for wiring all this stuff up and maintaining it?
Re:Only one? (Score:5, Funny)
You spelled Eschelon and Carnivore incorrectly.
What if this were about Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine for a moment that this story was about Microsoft, and the ensuing madness that the statement "Maybe this is the first step of Microsoft trying to provide universal storage for everyone" would cause.
But because it's Google, Slashdot readers give them a free pass. What makes you all think that Google's intent is so purely benevolent? I would think that the suspicious nature of Slashdotters would regard such an expansive enterprise with much skepticism.
Thats easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't limit the number of accounts, they just limit attatchment size and keep an eye out for abuses, like hundreds of downloads of from 1 account, or a scripted mailing of hundreds of 10 meg attatchments to any one account.
Re:Only one? Of course not. (Score:5, Insightful)
A project like this would take garbage and sift through it to find, make, stamp and press gold.
The skynet jokes while funny, don't do anything to curtain the tin foil wonderment at possibly the greatest data mining/data tool created to date.
This story is bigger than it appears. ((um...and greetings to the new data overlords :P)))
What? Are we treating this seriously now? (Score:4, Funny)
Gmail was an April Fools Day joke, yes?
Re:What? Are we treating this seriously now? (Score:5, Insightful)
It just isnt private email (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has AFAIK a wonderful track record (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anybody have anything to the contrary?
Re:Google has AFAIK a wonderful track record (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google has AFAIK a wonderful track record (Score:3, Insightful)
Google rose fast. If it misbehaved, it could fall fast. There are plenty of competitors waiting in the wings, some with plenty of budget (M$, Yahoo).
I think that we should give Google the benefit of the doubt - while keeping eyes wide open. Abuse of power occurs when people think they ca
Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
-jermy
Re:Privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
If Google are tracking everyone for targeting advertising, etc, why does everyone get near-identical search results for the same search queries? And why are the adverts quite obviously keyword-based? (Search for 'digital camera drivers linux', for instance, and get adverts for digital cameras).
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless they start sending me unsolicited spam, either via email or to my house, I have no problem with this. I often appreciate the targeted ads on google. Especially since the spammers started creeping in, sometimes the ads are more what im looking for than the actual results. Anything not personally identifying is A-ok with me.
Google has been pretty legit so far, and has gone well out of its way to keep its users happy, so nailing them to the cross over something that might happen seems premature.
It's great (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is just providing a service. Use it if you want, or don't.
bunch of pack rats... (Score:4, Funny)
Go ahead and horde my spam. I don't want it anyway.
-Grump
Best April Fools Joke (Score:5, Insightful)
So all those that came up with all the reasons why it must have been a joke, are the ones that were fooled.
Re:Best April Fools Joke (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly playing at people's thinking that it was a joke.
Of course they won't delete mail... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of course they won't delete mail... (Score:4, Insightful)
If they want everyone to have 1Gb of storage, tricks like this will help them to reduce the amount of actual disk space they need.
Although what happens to this plan when the next Windows mass mailing worm inserts some random text into each email preventing GMail from creating a single instance of the email I don't know.
I also think that they will compress all the emails stored, a mailbox that is 1Gb when uncompressed may only be a few hundred Mbs in reality thereby saving Google high disk costs.
Privacy isn't such a huge concern (Score:5, Insightful)
If I can get a free account, myname@google.com, with 1 GB of storage, and with IMAP or POP3, I don't give a damn if they use my mail for marketing research, or if they keep it long after I'm dead. The reason is I don't work for M16, the KGB or the CIA, I only break little laws and I don't dig child porno. So basically who cares if a few of my mails get left on a server somewhere.
Privay is a real concern, but worrying about this is like worrying about the fact that postmen can read your postcard when you send it. The truth is they can, but they don't give a shit.
Re:Privacy isn't such a huge concern (Score:3, Interesting)
in order to get yourname at google, you have to work there (which I have made it a life's goal to do!)
Re:Privacy isn't such a huge concern (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, privacy is NOT just for people breaking the law. Privacy is for anyone and everyone that lives in our society. In fact, by posting messages like the one you've posted here, you are doing everyone a disservice. We always must fight for our right to have private lives. Encryption for everyone.
Re:Privacy isn't such a huge concern (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right. But it's been the same deal with Hotmail and the other webmail services for years. Or hosting providers for that matter. Or even ISPs (that could potentially store all the data that you exchange with their servers).
If you're really worried about people digging up dirt on you if you get into a position of power, it's probably better to stay away from the Internet entirely.
whats the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
A useful server would be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no Gmail account but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, it is nice to see that the Google system is not so overly polished that they wipe out any traces of human emotions and cute little oddites.
Happy birthday, April!
Going public ? (Score:3, Insightful)
If/when Gmail is available, I would use it to store big file attachments (mainly storage) and still use my regular ISP for normal day-to-day communications UNLESS GOOGLE GUARANTEES COMPLETE PRIVACY NOW AND IN FUTURE and no caching of deleted emails and no tracking (seems highly unlikely)...
Distributed system (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, it all makes sense. They're trying to put all (but a few of) the sysadmins out of work! A noble enterprise, indeed. We hate them, they hate themselves.
But seriously, this has been a dream of admins for a long time. 'Bout time somebody sat down and did it. Why can't a single box manage 100,000 others? If one man can do 100 with the right tools he could do them all. The difficulty of transparency is incredible, but even small teams in universities utilizing a few phd's and transient graduate students are making headway in the area. No reason a well funded lab of hundreds of phds working full time can't achieve it.
Wow... I guess the BIG question is what they'll do with it. I mean... are they just doing it for their existing products? Are they going to license it out for astronomical sums to places like Lockheed and Sandia? Will they (gasp) open source it? Or, most frightening, they will run the world's largest, most efficient super computer and charge pennies for utility based computing and put Sun and IBM out of business in the process of creating a mainframe monopoly out of whiteboxes. Heck... they could probably buy out Sun to get that sweet Solaris technology for themselves. IBM has all kinds of retarded patents for toilet seats and ways to dance on an office chair. I guess they're worth getting for a laugh.
they're good! (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be the point? This is not a new concept or something no one ever though of, the only true obstacle to such a thing is money, they'll need a lot of it.
I read here (http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/31/2341
Concerned about privacy? (Score:4, Insightful)
For those people who are concerned about google monitoring thier searching habits, why not use a proxy server?
For those people concerned about privacy issues: If you don't understand the medium enough to protect yourself, don't trust it. The best solution for protecting yourself online is understanding the battlefield. Knowledge is power, therefore you should arm yourself. It is as simple as that.
Why is this a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see why the privacy zealots are all up in arms about this. Don't they have something better to do like bitch about the Patriot Act? Seriously!
Google has been very up-front about what they will or will not be willing to do with the cookie "trifecta" (Google-Orkut-Gmail, as mentioned in the Register article) that they are gunning for. Not only is it spelled out quite clearly in the Gmail Privacy Statment, the co-founder is going on recrod saying "Hey, that's not such a bad idea."
What's my point? If you're neurotic about your privacy and you're apprehensive about giving someone the ability to cross-reference your search info with your personal info and your mail info, turn off cookies and don't use Gmail.
Let's all repeat this slowly, just to let it sink in: If you don't want to use Gmail, you don't have to use Gmail.
If Google goes ahead with Gmail and includes 1E9 bytes of storage per user account, as it plans to, there's obviously going to have to be some sort of cost involved to offset their decision to provide an extremely valuable service. Much like Hotmails users are required to pawn their eternal soul to the Prince of Darkness, Gmail users are going to have to bite the bullet and accept that their privacy may not be so private anymore. Why is this such a big problem?
[END rant]
--
huge spam shared database? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:huge spam shared database? (Score:3, Interesting)
More speculation about gmail (Score:3, Interesting)
SpyMac (Score:4, Informative)
Screenshots! (Score:5, Informative)
http://fury.com/article/1990.php
Perfect sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone who uses Gmail (or Hotmail, or Yahoo, or *any* webmail) for confidential material is fooling themselves about its confidentiality, but as a mail service for shuffling data around it will be very useful, but Gmail is going to have cover itself and protect itself from being the biggest mp3, warez and pr0n distributor in the world.
Re:Perfect sense (Score:5, Interesting)
For encryption it could pick up the 'to' address from the relevant field and use it to encrypt the main text box. For decryption it could pickup the 'from' address and the encrypted text from the HTML, then replace the encrypted message with the clear text.
A USB key-drive with a copy of Firebird (+ extension), GnuPG and your keys would allow you to access your mail from pretty much any computer. Though it would be relient on Google not changing their page format too often.
Your mail isn't your mail anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
"Privacy isn't a concern because, after all, *you* choose to give it up by using the service"? I think it's wrong. I think the facts that Gmail reads your incoming mail to choose which text ads it will show you is a very bad precedent. Isn't it the first time someone offers a communication service and they tell you that they will know the content of every message you get?
The fascination with the power of technology blinds the Google team it seems (like it blinds people on Slashdot), I wonder what Norvig thinks of this issue...
Re:Your mail isn't your mail anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
in fact, the TOS explicitly states that no one reads the emails:
The project they will tnot be able to announce (Score:4, Insightful)
If every European, Japanese, American, basically everyone with a passport [66.102.11.104] is made to deliver up their fingerprints, photographs and maybe iris scans, there will need to be a system to cross check all of this "At the speed of Google", every time a passport holder crosses a border anywhere in the world. Google will provide this service to governments, over an SSL secured web interface.
Google has the experience, they have the hardware in place, and they are going to make a fortune out of this. If they do it, it will be the greatest switch from good to pure evil in the history of software.
I use the word "might" above because this Biometric Net may not be created if everyone simply refuses to be fingerprinted and photographed. Of all the countries in line for this, the Americans will probably shout the loudest. Fingerprinting is for criminals; to be forced to get fingerprinted and biometrically photographed to get a passport, the data of which will be stored by other governments and anyone with an RFID reader is simply too much to swallow for any freedom loving person.
Google's Existing File System (Score:5, Interesting)
So they probably only compact a file when it becomes mostly deleted entries.
They're probably using the same system for GMail, so even if you delete stuff, its not really deleted until the file store its on it compacted.
Hence the terms of service.
Prohibited Actions (Score:5, Interesting)
A few good ones:
Transmit content that may be harmful to minors
Illegally transmit another's intellectual property or other proprietary information without such owner's or licensor's permission
Promote or encourage illegal activity
Who decides what's harmful to minors? Google? will they ban my account for sending my friends offensive images/jokes?
If i email an mp3 will they use their compute power to check if I own the copyright? Could the RIAA force them to report me?
Since they're scanning the mail anyway, would they have to report users if words like 'civil disobidience' are in their messages? Could the government give them watch words?
Privacy doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
I've three types of email I need to manage:
1) Secret, private emails - always with known contacts - encrypted.
2) Confidential email - again, known contacts only - stored only on my intranet - not sensitive - doesn't need encryption.
3) Public contact - frequently new or unknown contacts. Enquiries; replies from Usenet/mailing lists etc.
Types 1 and 2 are low volume and can be easily managed with current infrastructure. Tailored email addresses and white lists can virtually eliminate spam. Type 3, however, is a much bigger problem... because I can not easily control who contacts me. I think Gmail offers the hope of a solution here. For my purposes (at least) - given that Gmail would be used for initial contact only - I couldn't care less about the less than private nature of these communications. I don't really care if Google, law enforcement or even the government gets to see these messages - their content would be considered public. Provided that Gmail can be integrated into my current email system - such a service would offer an interesting and convenient alternative for "Type-3" email.
Andrew Orlowski (Score:5, Informative)
Particularly he has a bee in his bonnet about Google. I've never found his shrill arguments very convincing.
I'm sure Google will go bad one day (perhaps when they've gone public, or when the founders leave), but for now they're relying on quality rather than marketing, which gets the thumbs up from me.
I'd trust them at least as much as Hotmail if I wanted such an account.
D.
How would Google manage a 100K-node cluster? (Score:5, Interesting)
When you stop to think about it, package management could be a key factor in the smooth running of the Google Gmail cluster. What software would be used to make sure each one of those 100,000 mail-handling nodes was running the latest, most secure version of sendmail, qmail or postfix? We know Google uses Linux extensively. It is fairly safe to assume that they are using apt-get to sling packages. But what do the Slashdot community think about apt-get's long term suitability for these types of projects? Can the open-source, Free Software package management poster child scale to meet the 100K-node challenge? I look forward to hearing the community's response!
Re:How would Google manage a 100K-node cluster? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think they've probably already solved all the problems you mention.
Reality check (Score:4, Interesting)
You can check Google's behavior difference in handling "normal" and "dangerous" 5-word queries by comparing amount of processing time. It differs by order of magnitude 10 or more. Google is definitely communicating somewhere *before* issuing a reply.
Varied results are given with traceroute communications to Google, and it would be an interesting community project to create a network map of near-to-Google topology. An example of device of interest is 64.233.175.250, just before Google machinery, as seen from Europe. It is supposedly part of Google network, but it's trip time is not adequate to be located in California. What this box is? And who does it serve?
it all comes down to one core issue.... (Score:5, Insightful)
TRUST.
i personally don't think the question here is the what-ifs and whos and whats that Gmail might mean. i think the core issue here is whether we are willing to entrust Google with that information.
Hotmail, Netscape Mail, @ddress, et. al., all provide a service similar to Gmail. the only real difference i can see (looking specifically at the privacy policies) is that Gmail is more open about their policies and is more willing to state openly that there is redundancy in their storage system. i'm sure Hotmail, et. al., have redundant storage for their email services, and that there are concerns similar to if not identical to the concerns addressed by the Gmail privacy policy.
i commend Google for being open about this, and because they specifically address it, i'm fully willing to open a Gmail account and use it for my personal email. hell, i'd use it for business email without a single worry.
why? i trust Google. they are opening up and telling me what they do with my emails and what happens to them. that's important to me. that's why i'm willing to trust them.
i, for one, welcome our new email overlords.
Gmail = Wastes Space. (Score:5, Interesting)
What I would like to see instead of this thing would be something along the lines of online storage like XDrive but free. That way I can store files from anywhere in the world, using just a web browser to access them.
Wow... the truth about Slashdot users comes out... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is intereting to see a group of people that are always so quick to talk about security, and how leet they are, then go nuts over google storing e-mail. USE GPG. Encrypt your private e-mails and no body will read them.
If Gmail promised to do a 7x DOD wipe of you e-mails when you close your account, plus purge every old backup tape they have of your e-mails, within 10 minutes of your account closing, you should STILL encrypt private e-mail.
So much for talking about it and not doing it! Anyone who uses encryption doesn't care about google's privacy policy, as things are already as private as they get.
Uh... what privacy concerns? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has it occured to anyone that keeping residual copies of e-mails, possibly even for a time after the account is deleted, is necessary, even required, to back up the data? Google's privacy policy is unique in that it tells you what they do with your information, rather than (only) what they'll let other people do with your information.
The other large privacy concern here, that of ad-delivery, requires Google to scan e-mails for keywords. Yep. Big woop. They do that every time you search, you know -- and in the e-mails, their privacy policy specifically says that no humans will read it without specific permission to solve e.g. technical problems.
Tin foil hats can go back in the closet, boys.
Grab your name, quick (Score:4, Insightful)