Throw your hard drive away

[drummer]

Throw your hard drive away, Google's Gdrive arriving in 2009

By Christian Zibreg
Monday, January 19, 2009 15:30

Chicago (IL) - Google Drive, or Gdrive as it is better known, has to be the most anticipated Google product so far. When it arrives, Gdrive will likely cause a major paradigm shift in how we use computers and bring Google one step closer to dethroning Windows on your desktop.


The service has the potential to eclipse even Gmail, Google's second best-known product after their google.com search engine. That said, it's no wonder users have been ripe with anticipation for years - yes, that's how long the rumors have persisted. Gdrive is basically online storage where Google servers have enough capacity to hold the entire contents of your hard drive. It will likely also come with enough brains to do cool tricks now with bigger things down the road - like booting your computer from online drive to load the Google operating system.

Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.

This opens powerful possibilities. For instance, you could start working on a spreadsheet at home and continue via Gdrive web interface accessed in an Internet cafe. When you arrive back home, changes to the spreadsheet have already trickled down from the cloud to your desktop. The idea, of course, is all but revolutionary, but Google's execution could set it apart.

So, Google gets to see all my stuff, right?

With Gdrive, privacy implications could overshadow its benefits. Remember how privacy advocates chased Google "to hell and back" for indexing content of Gmail messages? It also didn't help any that the company scanned your email in order to serve better, more relevant ads when viewing a message. Gdrive would scan everything you upload to it, just like Google Desktop - the company's application that brings the power of its search engine to your desktop (it scans the content of authorized files and folders on your machine).

We don't, however, see a problem if Gdrive will let users exclude any file or folder from being sent online, plus if indexed Gdrive stuff can't be associated with our personal information. As long as Google uses Gdrive indexing to provide better search and serve better ads, most would be willing to trade tiny bit of their privacy for a free online storage. [I wouldn't, not in a million years. -Rick]

Google built an empire on "free services - a bit of privacy" strategy and it'll certainly work with Gdrive. Yet, we have no doubt that Gdrive will become holy grail for privacy advocates around the world.

http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-...4-140.html

[Guest]

This is nothing more than a thin client system such as has been around for a very long time. Personally I do not rely on windows anyway. Just another step toward google owning everything on the net.

[---]

sounds dodgy as fuck. I'd rather have an 'antiquated' HDD any day.

[Easy Skanking]

Yeah, no thanks.
I will keep my data with me and not entrusted to somewhere I will never see or people funded by the CIA.
Nice try Google, but I'm not falling for it.

[triplesix]

This is kind of funny actually. Who, legitimately, is not happy with their current 100, 180, or 250 gig hard drives?

Pirates, that's who! Who needs that much space if they aren't filling up on DVD rips and discography bootlegs?

And google is trying to convince everyone to let them store their bootlegs? Hilarious. Who falls for this shit?

[---]

Quote:This is kind of funny actually. Who, legitimately, is not happy with their current 100, 180, or 250 gig hard drives?

um, diy film makers maybe..? Although, having said that, I do agree with your point..

[TeslaandLyne]

Try Google Desktop.
It not only had every internet link I used but every click to a computer program I used.
I stopped loading it and then un installed.
But not before I recovered a web page I erased.
I had to search through hundreds of pages of links.
I have no idea where that information was stored but I hope its gone.

[mastermg]

Quote:This is kind of funny actually. Who, legitimately, is not happy with their current 100, 180, or 250 gig hard drives?

Pirates, that's who! Who needs that much space if they aren't filling up on DVD rips and discography bootlegs?

And google is trying to convince everyone to let them store their bootlegs? Hilarious. Who falls for this shit?

*walks away nervously*

[Ian Potter]

If this catches on I think the rest of us could end up paying rather more for our HDDs - assuming any of us can afford anything at all over the next few years.

All aboard the totalitarian hive mind!

[harflimon]

FUCK THE CLOUD

This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this position. So here we go.

FUCK THE CLOUD.

By the cloud, of course, I mean this idea that you have a local machine, a box running some OS, and a vital, distinct part of what you do and what you’re about or what you consider important to you is on other machines that you don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand. These machines are connected via the internet, and if you have a company then these other machines are not machines run by your company, and if you’re a person they are giving it to you without you signing anything accompanied by cash or payment that says “and I mean it“.

Can I be clearer than that? It’s a sucker’s game. It’s a game suckers play. If you are playing it, you are a sucker.

The term, like many of its sort, has deep, deep roots in the industry that it’s being foisted upon. I’m in no mood to find specific citations today but you can be assured that the idea of a “cloud” to represent the outside network was on whiteboards that I saw working as a temp in NYNEX research labs in the late 1980s. And even by that date, it was an understood context, one going back years before. (Terms I’ve seen retrofitted to give both the sense of timeliness and timelessness include zero-day, warez, and the war- prefix).

But this new round of it comes pre-packaged with marketer infestation. After all, it’s a great word: it insinuates soft fluffiness, a size and grandeur, and a fuzzy meaninglessness. So if you fail to deal with the underlying hard facts and cases, who can blame you? It’s a cloud. Soft, huggable cloud, I do love you and your rounded edges.

But what this all kind of hides is the situation of how you feel about stuff you generate.

Let me step aside and say that as a historian guy, I am big into collecting a lot of cast-offs. This is what I do. I’ve downloaded thousands of podcasts and millions of blog posts and a lot of other insane stupid stuff. We’ll get from that what we can, in the future. This is not about that.

This is about your data. This is about your work. This is about you using your time so that you make things and work on things and you trust a location to do “the rest” and guess what, here is what we have learned:

* If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models. This is kind of like firemen sitting around giggling at you because you weren’t aware of the inherent lightning-strike danger of improperly bonded CSST.
* Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they, themselves are fired because the company is out of business.
* You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

These questions that you have all work around that other overused word: value. To me, history guy, your old junk you used to do is of interest to me. But there’s a lot of people and a lot of stuff, so I wouldn’t want you to do it just for little ol’ me. But for yourself? What about yourself?

What of your work do you value? All of it? Likely not. The time you spend downloading a lot of porn, for example, is pretty cool, and if you lost all the porn, you’d probably be unhappy, but you could probably get the porn back or brand new porn that’s like porn 3.0 and new levels of porn. Probably the same for movies, for music - oh no, this data is gone, but why worry about it, you didn’t make the music or movies, so it’ll work itself out.

Less so the things you make: the writing, the linking of friends, the combined lists you collaborate on - maybe that has some value to you. When you die, of course, everyone else starts attaching arbitrary value to things you worked on or forgot about. A childhood photo of you has new meaning because the person the child became is gone. The essay you wrote in elementary school about being successful has more meaning because you turned out to be very successful. Again, this is value imposed from outside.

So what, then? What is really of meaning to you? Your twitters? Your weblog entries? Your list of bookmarks? Your photos? What?

Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service (or ad-supported service), quietly flinging you past an End User License Agreement that indicates that, at the end of the day, you might as well as dragged all this stuff to the trash. If it goes, it’s gone.

There was a time when we gave the Cloud (before it was a Cloud) a big pass because technology was kind of neat and watching it all actually function is cool. I mean, if someone gives you an amazing Moon Laser and the Moon Laser lets you put words on the side of the moon, the fact that the Moon Laser’s effects wear off after a day or so isn’t that big a deal, and really, whatever you probably put on the side of the Moon with your Moon Laser is probably pretty shallow stuff along the lines of “WOW THIS IS COOL” and “FUCK MARS”. (Again, to belabor, a historian or anthropologist might be into what people, given their Moon Laser, chose to write, but that’s not your problem). Similarly so, with those early BBS writings, or the first web forums, or the first photo album sites, or the sites from 1993 and 1994. Interesting, neat, but your “work” among these halting baby steps isn’t causing you despair if it goes away. (And you’re pleasantly surprised when it shows up again, sometimes.)

Contrast, though, when people are dumping hundreds of hours a year into the Cloud. Blowing out photos. Entering day after day of entries. Sharing memories, talking about subjects that matter to them. Linking friends or commenting on statuses or trading twitters or what have you. This is a big piece, a very big piece of what is probably important stuff.

Don’t trust the Cloud to safekeep this stuff. Hell yeah, use the Cloud, blow whatever you want into the Cloud. The Internet’s a big copy machine, as they say. Blow copies into the Cloud. But please:

* Don’t blow anything into the Cloud that you don’t have a personal copy of.
* Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Don’t let them.
* Recognize a Cloud when you see it. Are you paying for these services? No? You are a sucker. You are giving people stuff for free. I pay for Vimeo and I pay for Flickr and a couple other things. This makes me a customer. Neither of these places get my only copy of anything.
* If you want to take advantage of the froth, like with YouTube or so Google Video (oh wait! Google Video is going off the air!) then do so, but recognize that these are not Services. These are not dependable enterprises. These are parties. And parties are fun and parties and cool and you meet neat people at parties but parties are not a home.

So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Cloud. Fuck it right in the ear. Trust it like you would trust a guy pulling up in a van offering a sweet deal on electronics. Maybe you’ll make out, maybe you won’t. But he ain’t necessarily going to be there tomorrow.

And that’s that.

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