Entries for the ‘Geek Stuff’ Category

Google Drive Gets All Up In Your Business.

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

So, when did google decide that their do no evil mantra didn’t really mean do no evil?  My money is on the day they bought doubleclick, the notorious online ad firm that uses cookies to track you all over the interwebs.  Since then, everything they do online aims to learn more about you, so they can target ads more effectively than anyone else in the world.  Google Drive will be a targeting bonanza Google.

An incredibly liberal privacy policy, combined with cool features such as OCR scanning of all your pictures and PDFs will mean Google may know more about you than your mom.  You could upload some pics of your Disney World trip and a PDF of your hotel confirmation for next week’s business conference.  The next time you visit any web page using Google’s Adsense service you could see offers for hotels in Orlando.  Isn’t that kind of creepy?

Here is an article about the creepiness.

Most people are comparing it to Microsoft’s skydrive cloud storage or dropbox.  But the privacy policies of skydrive and dropbox are quite different from Google’s privacy policy concerning your files you upload to their servers.

Microsoft’s policy is actually pretty straightforward:

You understand that Microsoft may need, and you hereby grant Microsoft the right, to use, modify, adapt, reproduce, distribute, and display content posted on the service solely to the extent necessary to provide the service.

Google’s policy (the highlights are mine):

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps).

 

spam sucks.

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

One thing that I have ended up managing at work is most of the anti-spam software and appliances for clients. For those who don’t deal with corporate email systems everyday, this seems like it shouldn’t be a big deal, but spam is really a huge problem for the internet, not just an inconvenience for people. One device I manage receives between 150,000 to 350,000 messages everyday. Less than 5,000 of those are legitimate messages.

This box happens to be a Barracuda Networks appliance. You see their advertisements in airports, in magazines and even on the radio. For an enterprise solution it is pretty inexpensive, but you do get what you pay for. I think it really lacks some core functionality that should be standard on anything you are using for an enterprise-level email system.

I’ll post a review later. We also use a product by Sonicwall. It used to be called MailFronitier before Sonicwall purchased it. I’m doing a new installation of one of their appliances, so look for a compare/contrast also.