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GmailFS - The Google File System
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Aug 29, 2004 06:22 AM
from the never-meant-to-be dept.
from the never-meant-to-be dept.
Scott Granneman writes "Looking to use that new Gmail account for something really innovative? How about combining it with a brand new filesystem for Linux? Then GmailFS might be the answer: 'GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. ... GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename.'"
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This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
They're supporters of Linux. Somehow, it doesn't seem like a very "on the spoke" maneuver to aggravate them.
Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Take the XM-PCR case as an example. XM clearly went out of their way to provide an easy-to-hack-with-a-computer model of their devices. However, they provided that model with the unspoken proviso that it must be used ethically.
Along comes a programmer with script-kiddie level skills who makes an automatic MP3 maker program that uses that device. That alone would have been fine by XM. However, that programmer decides to try to make a quick buck out of his work by selling it for $20 a copy. Furthermore, once media attention discovers his program, he raises the price.
That's the kind of thing that awakens the sleeping RIAA, and the RIAA orders XM to send the programmer a legal nastygram in order to show that he is approching the limits of an untested area of law. Of course, Slashdot groupthink blames XM for the letter and calls for a boycott.
Please people... RTFM before you start hacking anything. Especially, follow what the device makers tell you not to do, and don't try to seek direct obvious profits from your hacking.
We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back. Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?
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Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're seeing far to many cases of one black hat who comes up with the "forbiden hack" that causes a company that puts out a hack-friendly device to wish they never had and want to take the hacking tools they gave the world back. Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?
I wouldn't call a piece of software that permits legal fair use to be "black hat". It's also strange that normally corporations who stomp on hackers trying to leverage their devices or services for relatively moderate ends get lambasted on /. but when that corporation happens to be Apple or Google, a lot of slashdotters put on the white knight armor and ride to the resque of an entity that surely has enough lawyers to fend off for themselves.
Realistically though, GmailFS is and always will be a quirk. They can of course break it any time they want but since 1 gigabyte in storage space costs, what, a handful of glass beads nowadays, do you really think enough people will bother with this to cause serious scalability problems for a search engine company that handles a hundred million hits per day?
To sum it up: wake up, Gmail isn't going to be cancelled just because somebody made a cute hack to use it as a filesystem. You can still pretend to be part of a special in-crowd of Google lovers because you managed to beg an invite off of someone.
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Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
You give companies too much credit. If a company wanted something to really be hack friendly, there would be no complaints when it was hacked. They are not hack friendly if they complain about hacks. Your script kiddy comment is pretty lame. If the company made a product that someone with no skillz can hack it then the company got what they deserved. They choose to cut corners on security/development/testing or choose the wrong method to deliver the product to the users, either way it was a specific decision made by the company to maximize profits and they got burned. Any company can develop an encryption system in about 5 minutes and sell it for $50 a user. Imagine the profit that company can make until some script kiddy realizes it is only ROT15 and hacks it. It happens all the time with software and hardware. It is not always hacker friendly on purpose, it is cost cutting and/or a questionable business model. Remeber the CueCat?
Wireless phone companies and makers (Cellular and cordless phones) started with and to some extent still use this exact business model. They were using analog signal totally unencrypted for anyone with a radio scanner to hear, cellular in the 860mhz region and cordless in the 49mhz and 900mhz region. These devices started to catch on and get a foothold. Suddenly the consumers started to wake up and realize anyone with a scanner or a UHF TV tuner could pick up these signals. Yes, on purpose, they chose to use something very unsecure, made no real attempt to make it known it was unsecure [1]. How did they fix it? Went to congress. Congress eventually gave them what they wanted and banned the cellular region from new scanner radios and made it illegal for people to knowingly listen to cellular and cordless freqs. The phone making companies knew all along these transmissions were open to anyone with a radio that picked up those bands, they chose to ignore it, not develop anything or use readily available technology at the time to encode or encrypt it because it would have cost them more money. They were not hacker friendly, just trying to make more money. To this day, analog cordless and wireless phone signals are still able to be picked up by anyone in plain form, although it illegal to do it (yeah, that is the only thing preventing it). Luckily for the most part, analog has been replaced on the cordless side with digital and digital spread spectrum and wireless has gone almost all digital with various methods of encryption and encoding. With that, it takes more then a consumer radio to eavesdrop now.
Can't we be nice to the suppliers of such devices so that such devices keep coming out?
The only reason companies make and sell products is to make money. If they think it will sell, they will produce it.
[1] I have never seen an analog cordless phone that mentions that it is easy to eavesdrop on. Many claim 65000 codes, extra privacy or security features, prevention of unauthorized use etc.. but they are all refering to the code needed to get a dialtone from the base station, not to hear the actual conversation in progress. It appears to be on purspoe that these security descriptions are very vague.
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Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:4, Interesting)
One explicit example is TiVo. They have allowed people to add larger hard drives, write software to post TiVo contents online, etc. They don't want people to distribute TiVoed content on the net or to steal TiVo subscription service. Both are very possible, but neither is widely exploited. If someone was to start selling software to do either, TiVo should get upset! Not because they didn't know of the possibility, but because they trusted their user base. And that is bad for all of us--the next API won't be transparent.
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Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
But, of course, when you use GMail storage for something that Google does not intend, you are not doing something with your hardware. You are doing something with someone else's hardware (and that is what makes it unlike all of the other cases that you cited).
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Re:This seems NOT horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for offline backup (which you could already manually use GMail for) this is not very useful. Even for that it isn't really useful since Google could cancel you account if they don't like how you use it.
This is really just expression of "I could do it".
Even so, if they used the gimick of 1 G of email for marketing but expected nobody to use it, tough, they don't get to completely control how you use their product.
As far as the XM-PCR, this is just the like a VCR for XM radio. How is this an abuse? The recording is analog, all the program does is allow a time shift. These are all things that anybody could do manually for a long time. Should we take away VCRs and Tivo just because broadcasters would prefer we had to watch TV under their rules?
You already have the capacity but not the right to sell or distribute most of the content that XM transmits.
They did not go "out of their way". They did it to sell more subscriptions.
This program actually makes XM radio more marketable.
When you create a product, you do not get to regulate every thing your customers do with it. Soon we will have Kellogs telling us that we cannot make our own rice krispie bars (i.e. we have to buy their Rice Krispie Treats) with the box of cereal we bought as this violates the "license".
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FYI: German webmail provider GMX offers 1GB WebDAV (Score:5, Informative)
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where's the evidence? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could someone please show me where Google made it clear they specifically don't want 3rd party email account checkers? Did they announce this and I've missed it? Certainly a slashdot story yesterday claimed Google doesn't want them. Except for the person who submited the story, I have not seen any other proof to back this claim up.
First, I saw no other accounts of this happening to other people in any of the threads. I did read quite a few threads that said they had no such problem. GTray continues to work for me.
Second, assume this does happen, maybe its not intended to specifically block 3rd party apps. Perhaps its a side effect of them checking too frequently. It is known that the word verification check comes up after entering the wrong password about 5 times. Are these people using the wrong password?
Perhaps, Google doesn't like the way the 3rd party apps are interfacing with their system. Obviously, gmail's beta check has its own method to get email, it is likely more effcient than pulling down the html with each check. If this is the case, it may just be a matter of time before they give the specs on how they would prefer it done.
Anyway, my point is just because a word verification scheme is popping up for some users doesn't mean it is an attack on 3rd party apps like slashdot seems to say it is. There are many other possiblitites. Ever since Google announced it was going public, it's almost like people expect google to start going bad.
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Re:where's the evidence? (Score:5, Informative)
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/terms_of_use.h
"You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service"
On GMail-User newsgroup there have been reports of Google temporarily disabling accounts who use software to check GMail. Having said that, Google's own mail checker checks mail every 2 minutes. And most people who use third-party software to access GMail don't seem to have problems. Google's reaction to the breach of their ToS seems to be as random as the way they give out GMail invites...
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Re:On the spoke. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Hell, for that matter, if they just don't want you to do this because they just don't want you to, tough on you; they don't need any reason at all.
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Re:On the spoke. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
what matters is: are they going to do anything about it?
besides, this(they wanting to limit what you access the gmail with) is kinda puzzling since they want their search engine to be used through a common api they themselfs made available.. so why be assholes now? i don't personally like the gmail interface that much(i got an account i never use).
the whole invite only thing is bullshit too, since if you know a nerd, or are yourself a nerd, then you got pretty good chances that you could summon few invitations in just mere minutes(what i mean is that there's extra hassle in getting in, but getting 'in' is still so easy that there's no practical limit).
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Re:...Which brings up another point (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:...Which brings up another point (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:...Which brings up another point (Score:4, Insightful)
With normal people, they can pay for it with ad revenue.
With a file system, they cannot.
Please don't pony out the idea that the ads will still get d/l or clicked on or whatever. If you're an advertiser, you are only willing to pay for human beings seeing your ad or clicking on it, out of their own free will. Otherwise, it's not worth paying for. If it becomes known that x% of ad clicks are actually automated gmail filesystem users, then ad buyers will pressure google for lower prices.
There's no free lunch.
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Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Informative)
Since Paragraph 5 of the TOS [google.com] maybe?
Not that I like it, and not that it even appears to allow the use of their own notifier app, but there it is.
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Re:This seems horribly abusive of Google. (Score:5, Funny)
Seems using GMail is against their terms of service...
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Competing Search Service ! (Score:5, Funny)
Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
1) He gets his ass sued to hell
2) He gets a nice job at google
Re:Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Nice (Score:5, Funny)
Affected people go crying to Google wanting un-backed-up data back, but Google declares that was "your problem".
Affected people start running RAID-1 on a bunch of Gmail accountsParent
Re:Nice (Score:4, Funny)
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Portable partition (Score:5, Interesting)
GoogleOS (Score:4, Funny)
Re:GoogleOS (Score:5, Interesting)
Think of your gmail account as your home folder or My Documents for the Windows users. That is just the start. Google has the ability to provide you with a drive that goes forever and search abilities to find anything in a snap.
Netscape founder, Marc Andressen, once said "An OS is nothing but a bag of APIs we write to."
Once you have a working kernel you can do anything. The fear that Microsoft had was that their kernel would be the only thing that mattered and their API's would become irrelevant after Netscape and portable plug-ins and Java apps took over.
Look at version 4.0 [netscape.com]. It's features rivaled that of slow/homebrewed OS startups.Microsoft started to see that the Internet was the new platform. It's true, I'm in my browser 99.9% of the time I'm on the PC. The OS doesn't matter.
Microsoft isn't known for their superb kernel, it's the whole user-land. Now that most people hit the browser after boot/login the kernel is the only thing that does matter. That is why people dual-boot with linux. It's stable and they can do most things. Occasionally they need to do something special so they reboot. Windows has become a mere application that loads your games.
Computer users don't usually care what type of file system it is or any of that mumbo-jumbo. They want to be able to work. If Google explodes into a Yahoo! type portal and provides portable (Java?) interfaces then they can become the "OS" of choice.
Look at this from Wikipedia:
Those are the four parts of your system. If the shell is replaced by the browser then the Internet as a whole is the application. That is what scared Microsoft into killing Netscape. (if you want to put it that way)
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Great! (Score:5, Funny)
It won't eventuate (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It won't eventuate (Score:5, Insightful)
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Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
But Google is a business and they do need to make money and this would be a surefire way for them to lose money (a load of their storage used up, no way to show their adverts, etc) so if anyone seriously used this I can imagine their account disabled.
What I want is google officially creating (or officially blessing the ones that already exist) a gmail notifier app for Mozilla. Technically, using the 3rd party ones that the Mozilla community develop are against their terms of service. They already do an official notifier but it's Windows only - a Mozilla based one would be cross platform.
Just because you can... (Score:4, Insightful)
An old adage that applies quite well even to the Internet age.
Gmail generates ad revenue, but abusing the account in this way both deprives Google of ad revenue as well and costs them network traffic and will likely increase their disk usage.
This is like that cool neighboor of yours that says you can borrow his tools and then you go over take everything you can find as well as set up a sign in your front lawn for others to join "the fun".
Goolgle won't leave this intact long and I don't blame them a bit.
Innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Question for the kernel hackers: What is the status of FUSE or LUFS? Is there plans on standardising on one of these API's?
The status quo of not having a standardised userspace filesystem interface in the kernel is creating problems. (eg. the incompatible VFS/IOSLAVE hacks that should never have happened)
Dont care if Google dont like it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Kids, look at this as an example of what sideways thinking can do. I love it - more because the true spirit of hacking is proven alive, rather than what it does.
Although, that's pretty cool too.
Possibilities for the future... (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine if Google was to provide some sort of remote filesystem storage for ANY OS, perhaps accessible via FTP or other protocol-over-HTTP. A searchable public filestore: not just what people keep in their websites, but the files that they keep... Intentionally made public, of course. The "technology" to do this exists in some forms already.
Yeesh, but then the various corporate execs would have fits because people were storing their favorite MP3s, DVD rips, TV shows, or whatever in their Google Public Share.
If it was not so abusive to FTP servers, I have thought more than once that an FTP search would be pretty cool. Let us say that you are looking for a specific filename that someone has in their anonymous FTP account. Punch it into Google, and blammo!
Anyway, it will be interesting to see what developes from this over the course of the next few years.
This could be useful (Score:5, Interesting)
I would try this . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Booting (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm Weird.. (Score:4, Interesting)
does it support the "account yanked" operation? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want google to paw through all your files and risk having your account yanked for violating the user agreement, feel free to use it... (heck, maybe google won't yank your account in return for the opportunity to index your files...)
Mail-based file systems are nothing new [geocities.com], nor are http-based file systems [usenix.org] (or WebDAV, for that matter).
Useless. Use GMX.net instead (Score:5, Informative)
Expand this to 5 GB for 3 EUR / month or 10 GB for 5 EUR / month.
You can also share your uploaded files with other GMX members, and mount your GMX account as a network drive using a WebDAV client (they provide a pre-configured Windows client but you may use another one)
By the way, their e-mail features totally 0wn any other e-mail service: automated e-mail retrieval from all your other POP-enabled mailboxes, custom filters for automatic redirection, SMS/MMS alerts, up to 15 aliases...
I knew all that time spent learning German at school would come in handy some day!
hmm... RAID? (Score:4, Funny)
loopback crypto (Score:4, Informative)
on your GmailFS parition.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Loopback-Encrypted-Fi
Re:why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The GmailFS is a cute little technological achievement, but it's not what Gmail is for and I'm afraid that if any significant number of people use GmailFS that Gmail is going to suffer TOS adjustments that will affect everyone.
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Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not a usage that Google or the GmailFS designer had in mind for the service, I'll bet, but it wouldn't surprise me if somebody started doing this if the technique for using Google as free network storage became popular.
It's quite unlikely Google will embrace GmailFS because they're probably not counting on having a significant chunk of their users maxing out their 1GB storage. It's a neat hack, though.
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Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I confess that I assumed they would do something like that. 1GB per quasi-anonymous, non-profit user is too ridiculous for them to keep it up.
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hi Bender ! (Score:5, Funny)
That's a nice way to describe robot pr0n, Bender. Way to go!
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Re:why? (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly are you refering to with Linux filesystems? Linux has many different choices of file systems to choose from and each has advantages and disadvantages.
As far as I know, none of the existing filesystems for Linux can mount your Gmail storage space so I'd say you missed the entire point of the story headline and the article itself.
Or maybe I did..
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i just invented SLASHDOT_FS (Score:5, Funny)
comments are encrypted and written using dictionary words to avoid the lameness filter.
I implemented the prototype of this system many years ago using an encoding system called First-Post. I simply use different permuations of the words first-post (FP!, Frist psot!, etc...) along with various dummy account names to encode 1 Kilobyte of information. I run the whole thing off ny Newton.
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Re:3rd party software (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:begging for it... (Score:5, Interesting)
NialScorva's Law:
Given enough time, all legal battles in the tech industry will invoke the DMCA.
But you're right. Not insightful.
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