GmailFS - The Google File System 429
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.'"
Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
1) He gets his ass sued to hell
2) He gets a nice job at google
Portable partition (Score:5, Interesting)
If it can be done... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:why? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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)
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.
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)
Hmm Weird.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Pah.. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Portable partition (Score:2, Interesting)
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).
Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead (Score:2, Interesting)
i can't count how often i get called from clients complaining, that
PAT
Re:Useless. Use GMX.net instead (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone know of a service like this for people who speak English (or some other language for that matter)?
Person who speaks 3 languages - trilingual
Person who speaks 2 languages - bilingual
Person who speaks 1 language - American
Re:Possibilities for the future... (Score:2, Interesting)
unfortunately, the business model for this seemed to be nonexistant. users were reluctant to pay for anything.
Re:why? (Score:1, Interesting)
Wait no....
I KNOW! Because, then you can basicly MOVE you machine from one place to another (especially easy if your hardware is exactly the same).
This reminds me of that ask slashdot, where some guy mentioned that we would no longer have our own PC O/S on our pc, but have it all hosted somewhere, meaning we could "log on" any pc and use our files, our set ups etc etc.
Nice idea but first its got to work!.
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.
that's an old idea... (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
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)
Re:On the spoke. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
This is NOT FAIR (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:that's an old idea... (Score:3, Interesting)