Google Close To Launching Cloud Storage 'Google Drive' 205
MrSeb writes with this selection from ExtremeTech: "Why doesn't Google offer a cloud storage service to rival Dropbox, Box.net, or Microsoft's SkyDrive? Google has the most internet-connected servers in the world, the largest combined storage of any web company, and already offers photo storage (Picasa), document storage (Docs), music storage (Music), but for some reason it has never offered a unified Google Drive. According to people familiar with the matter, however, our wait is almost over: Google's Hard Drive In The Sky is coming soon, possibly 'within weeks.' Feature-wise, it sounds like Google Drive will be comparable to Dropbox, with free basic storage (5GB?) and additional space for a yearly fee."
encrypted files (Score:3, Interesting)
We need a "just works" encryption system for this, so google doesn't know what is stored.
Centrally managed for Google Apps users? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow,...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ooooh 5 Gigs!
Microsoft for all of the bashing it takes gives 25 GB for free. It can be mounted like a network drive, etc.
Re:Yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
More ways for Google to know what you're doing. Will they be scanning your documents? Checking the artist names of the songs you have there and target ads related to them?
I don't understand why this has been flagged as "Flamebait", it is the central question for such a service : would Google analyze your documents to provide targeted advertisement, or would they treat your "GDrive" as a black box ?
The former would not be acceptable for many persons (including me), but the latter would provide no upside for Google....
Only 5gb? (Score:5, Interesting)
What with the recent Dropbox mobile app give-away, linking my account to Twitter, posting a spam tweet, deleting spam tweet, completing their 'training', getting a couple of friends to join... I have 8gb for free.
If Google could match that 8gb and provide typical Google upload and download speeds, I would swap. Dropbox is too slow at time.
As for privacy: what the fucking hell are you lot storing of free sites like this? Just stick MP3s, AVIs, MKVs, and MP4s on there. If you must store documents, encrypt.
And that almost sounds like preaching to the choir. Something no one on here should be doing.
Re:New World Order will not include the USA (Score:1, Interesting)
TrueCrypt FTW
Who will trust their files to a .org located in the Czech Republic?
http://www.privacylover.com/encryption/analysis-is-there-a-backdoor-in-truecrypt-is-truecrypt-a-cia-honeypot/ [privacylover.com]
Re:Only 5gb? (Score:5, Interesting)
SkyDrive is 25 gigs without having to do any of the hoop-jumping you did to get extra Dropbox space. I still use Dropbox because, ironically, I think it hooks into the Windows UI much better than SkyDrive. Google likes to make a splash in this sort of thing, usually offering more space in order to tempt users of the existing services they're mimicking. My prediction is 50-100 gigs of space from Google.
But I've been using GoogleFS for Three Years Now.. (Score:5, Interesting)
GoogleFS on top of FUSE in Linux has allowed mounting the space that you store Google docs in for quite some time. This whole time I kept wondering, "why isn't anyone writing a GUI for this for Windows and Mac users" so they're not left out in the cold. (Not entirely true with Mac users as FUSE works there too)
Re:Is it safe? Is it secret? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:New World Order will not include the USA (Score:5, Interesting)
Three of my websites are .com. I am located in the USA. Should I not trust my files to myself?
No. Not when your government can take your domain name at will, compel you to hand over all files, compel you to unencrypt everything that's encrypted even if you don't know the key, and place restrictions on where you can send your own data.
Mozilla weave (Score:5, Interesting)
Mozilla weave (sync) is the only example I can think of, of this "cloud shit" done right. ... crypto done right, and yet "it just works".
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Developer/Crypto [mozilla.org]
Re:Yay! (Score:4, Interesting)
would Google analyze your documents to provide targeted advertisement
There is another big question - would they analyze your documents to prevent copyright infringement? I predict that, within a few years, Dropbox and the other big U.S. based services are going to be rejecting storage of files that match known pirated movies, video games etc. This is obviously one danger of using a de-duplicating cloud drive service. You could try using client-side encryption, but I have read that Dropbox either prohibit client-side encryption in their terms or drop customers that use it extensively, as it breaks their file de-duplicating model and they therefore have to provide many times more disk space and bandwidth for these customers.
the latter would provide no upside for Google
Sure it would. In the battle for mindshare, if a customer uses Google Drive, then they are inside the Google services sphere. If there is a service that Google doesn't offer, then some customers are going to go elsewhere, and the next time that customer wants to embrace some new service, they will be a bit less likely to choose Google.
Re:But I've been using GoogleFS for Three Years No (Score:2, Interesting)
Try Ext2Fsd - http://www.ext2fsd.com/ - I've been using it to read/write my ext3 volumes in Windows for years. It works just fine in 64-bit Windows 7, too. (Though it doesn't have journaling support, so it effectively writes both ext2 and ext3 volumes as ext2. But this doesn't corrupt the drive.) Since I dual-boot to Linux most of the time, the FS gets checked every couple of weeks just in case. I've never had a problem with it.
Re:Mozilla weave (Score:4, Interesting)
Mozilla weave (sync) is the only example I can think of, of this "cloud shit" done right. ... crypto done right, and yet "it just works".
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Developer/Crypto [mozilla.org]
Thanks for mentioning Weave -- it had slipped under my radar.
Other cloud app's that show they're making trustable / secure cloud storage effort:
PassPack (password mgmt, with fields encrypted locally by a key they never know. They also offer the underlying library for this as FOSS source code for anyone interested in working in a similar framework)
LastPass (similar, doesn't isolate account info from data like PassPack)
Hushmail used to have something similar.
Several secure-storage tools will encrypt then push the encrypted content to either DropBox or some other storage point.
Business flees from the US (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't Slashdot recently run a story on this very offering by European companies?
Such a reaction was predictable and understandable. Now we all get to wait and see how the loss of hosting profits for US companies compares to the gains for media companies. (And by profits, I mean lost business revenue along with increased costs.)
Remember too, that customers of outsourcing services may now have more reason to select specifically non-US businesses.