Random Developments

I just handed in my badge and, in a few hours, I will be technically unemployed for the first time since college (oh so many years ago). Tonight there’s a going-away barbecue and, after that, I leave this building for the last time as an employee. My next job (in the not-too-distant future, I hope) will be in Melbourne.

As an administrative note: I will be entirely offline until early next month, so no posts until then. Further news when I get access to a computer again…

Volkswagen in Brazil is giving away a flight into space to customers who buy a new car. Now that’s a contest I’d like to join!

More details: you have to buy a car between April 16 and June 27; of all buyers, eleven will get a trip to Moscow and will fly in a zero-G training plane. Of these, one will also be selected to go into a sub-orbital flight. No further details on this flight, but it leaves from the USA and goes “above 100km of altitude”.

More details (in Portuguese) in their website.

It looks like some “privacy advocates” are against Google’s GMail service, with a California senator going as far as proposing to outlaw it. Now, I’m very much for privacy, but either I don’t understand what, exactly, this guys are opposed to, or they completely missed the point of the service.

Let’s review it. Google will offer (and is already offering to a select few) 1,000 megabytes of storage space for web-accessible e-mail, for free. In exchange, textual ads may be displayed close to the e-mails, and those ads will be targeted based on words that appear on the messages the user received.

Critics seem to think (or at least are trying to make non-techies think) that someone will actually look at the messages in order to select the ads; a guy I saw today on BBC (didn’t catch his name) was saying that it is completely unacceptable that Google will read private messages. Now, come on. No one will read anyone’s messages! A piece of software will break the message into tokens and will select ads based on those tokens. This is not much different from what several anti-spam solutions do; Bayesian systems, for example, will do exactly the same: scan a message, break it up in tokens, and analyse the tokens to take some action. Is this a privacy issue? I don’t think so.

Going back to GMail, the token-selected ads will be shown to the recipient of the message, who is supposedly well aware of the contents of the message, so that no data is leaking there. Granted, if a user clicks on an ad, presumably the advertiser will know that the hit comes from a GMail ad; if the user then proceeds to buy something (or otherwise identify himself/herself to the advertiser), the advertiser may record the fact that this person receives (or has received, at least once) e-mails with a specific token in them. Then, again, since the user bought something, the advertiser already knows what the user is interested in. It would be a problem if (big hypothetical here) Google were to share with advertisers the information on what users saw which ads; I’m sure advertisers would love that, but I see nothing that indicates that Google would do that (and it would definitely kill their “do no evil” motto).

In any case, in my opinion, it all boils down to: it’s not a compulsory service. No one is being forced to use it. There are plenty of web-based e-mail services, most of them free; if you don’t like GMails privacy policy or ads, go somewhere else. Or pay for a premium service. Me, I would use it, though not as my main mailbox (at least at first); from what I’ve seen in reviews, it looks much better than any other option.

The movie “Cast Away” is on TV tonight. You know, that one with Tom Hanks and that lovely volleyball. This is not really relevant for most people, but my name happens to be Wilson (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean).

I also happen to be leaving my job; next Tuesday will be my last day. So, as a parting gift, a group of co-workers gave me… a volleyball (Wilson, of course) decorated more or less like the one in the movie.

Personally, I want to believe this is a good thing.

Kasia tells it all. Believe it, it’s exactly like that.

Not that I’m trying to discourage people from becoming programmers.

Ok, question of the day: is Gmail for real?

For those recently arriving from another planet, Google has announced today, of all days, that in the near future it will start to provide e-mail for anyone for free, in a service called Gmail, and that users’ mailboxes will hold up to 1 gigabyte (250 times as much as competitor Yahoo! Mail, for example).

The press release is definitely a tad too informal, so it does look like a hoax. However, it is clear that Google already has a good experience managing very large volumes of storage, and it certainly has the expertise required to do so at a reasonably low cost. So, if anyone can do it, they can.

Another thing that makes this look real is that, well, Google is heading towards an IPO; if it is a hoax, it is way too credible not to cause any damage (and, had the IPO already happened, it would certainly impact their valuation) (by the way, did it impact YHOO or MSFT?).

Just in case, I submitted my e-mail address in their registration form (as did most of the Internet, I’m sure). Maybe tomorrow I’ll receive a message from them saying basically “gotcha!”. Or maybe not.

If it is real, I can’t wait to see how they will deal with abuse issues. I mean, if you have that much space, it becomes very profitable to write a small app that uses mailboxes as file repositories to hold whatever you want. One could register 100 accounts and mail oneself the whole content of a hard-disk for safe keeping, for example (and that is the most innocent kind of abuse I can think of). Bandwidth throttles and limitations may help, but I’m not sure they will be that effective; given some enthusiasm and a somewhat talented programmer, you could use Google’s storage as the new Napster…

Let’s wait and see.