Google to encrypt cloud storage

[Moon Jones]

On 21.08.2013 00:45, rysiek wrote:
>> Yet they not only support SMTP and IMAP4, but they give instructions on
>> how to set up Mozilla Thunderbird.
>
> How gracious of them!

I feel you were being sarcastic. But it's not the case. Removing those 
help pages won't alienate their clients. It's truly a way to be nice. 
Also, although dropping SMTP and IMAP4 support and replacing them with 
some exotic closed protocol won't do a thing. Android update and the web 
interface would do the trick. It's even worse. When Yahoo has dropped 
POP3 support, without replacing it with anything, some Sourceforge 
projects were started just to replace that. So, again, it's truly a nice 
gesture. Maybe, only maybe, it helped them initially to gather up 
strenght. Today that means zero.

> Ever heard of SPDY?
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY

Yes. I heard of it. Thank you for including the wikipedia page. Have you 
read it?

 >> OpenSSL 1.0.1 or greater introduces NPN.

 >> The browsers Google Chrome/Chromium, Firefox (version 11+, enabled 
by default since 13) and Opera browser (version 12.10+) support SPDY.

 >> Amazon's Silk browser for the Kindle Fire uses the SPDY protocol to 
communicate with their EC2 service for Web page rendering.

An open standard with quite large support from the open source 
community. Meaning many more can follow.

So what's the point?


>> They use XMPP and they allow connections from outside their network.
>
> Uhm... I'd be very careful with this one:
> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/05/20/2315216/google-drops-xmpp-support
> http://windowspbx.blogspot.com/2013/05/hangouts-wont-hangout-with-other.html

I dislike slashdot. It's almost all noise. And one of the sites blocking 
Tor. But I was interested in your argument so I went there for the 
second time today. And there I read:

 >> Note that no end date has been set for Talk

So, again, what is your point?

>> In most ways they are way ahead of the competition.
>
> And most of these cases are a relic of a bygone era when Google actually
> practised what they preach, because they were the small, geeky underdog pitted
> against giants like Microsoft.

The pope preaches. Google sells. If I use Google search words start 
popping up suggesting me what I might ask. If I have gmail there is 
advertising related to the CONTENTS of my received emails. If I go 
around youtube I get a full column on the right hand side with 
suggestions. And you know what is impressive? They are all about right. 
And I surely have missed the time where someone officialy from Google 
went out and said «we're going to cripple all that for your privacy». 
Quite the opposite. They said it's one of the reasons people use Google 
instead of the competition.

I personally like how you dramatise things. Yet, they were never small. 
Google has not started with Woz in a garage and it wasn't selling sports 
shoes out of a trunk. They had money. They had computing power. They had 
storage. Just because they have expanded over they years, does not mean 
they started as a image board on a Pentium hold behind a highschooler's 
desk.

> Now they themselves are a giant and are slowly but steadily abandoning their
> open-source, open-standards ways in favour of walled-gardens, proprietary
> protocols and such.

You might have a case with the patents. But that is all.

Actually the open standards, although good by being open, they are crap. 
Email is ugly and squirts information all along the path even if you do 
bother to encrypt everything. HTTP is chatty to the extreme. And so on. 
XMPP is nicer than OSCAR and PNG is better than GIF. That statement does 
not make telnet safer.

>> To me it sounds pretty much like the GNU/Linux kernel development: make your
>> project popular enough and conform to our coding structure and we're going
>> to include it in the main tree. Fail to do so and you are free to develop
>> patches and loadable modules.
>
> Where did *that* metaphore come from?..

 From the kernel source.