Google set to launch 'online hard drive'

Google is set to extend its online storage services in a bid to become a central repository for the public’s digital data.

The web giant is understood to be readying a new data storage service – thought to be dubbed “GDrive” – that would allow users to store digital files such as music tracks on the internet and access them via a web browser.

A spokesman for Google refused to comment directly on speculation that the company will launch the service in a matter of weeks, but said: “Storage is an important component of making web [applications] fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives.”

Last year Google inadvertently leaked a presentation memo that outlined its plans in data storage – moves apparently designed to make the hard drives installed on personal computers all but defunct.

“With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)," it said.

Plans to extend Google’s reach over the public’s data is likely to spark renewed concerns from privacy activists who claim the company is already party to vast amounts of personal information. Concerns over data security escalated sharply last week when it emerged that the Government lost details of 25 million Britons in the post.

Executives at Microsoft are also likely to be wary of Google's plans. Analysts have argued that the long-anticipated GDrive could make it easier for consumers to abandon Windows, Microsoft’s dominant operating system.

Henry Blodget, the technology blogger, said: “The critical element here will be seamlessness: If Google forces users to go through an inconvenient "uploading" process,......

“With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)," it said.

Ummmm ... what's the word I'm thinking of???

Oh. NO!

If data is on my drive or my thumb drive or my flash drive, I decide when it stays and when it goes. I own the data and the backup copies.

Putting things on an external service like this means that the whole world can access it from hackers to court orders, all the data and all the backups for as far as they reach.

Not for me.

Though I’m not so sure I would store anything on there I didn’t want want anyone else to see.

That depends on how well you encrypt it. I do not hesitate to place my most valuable secrets in public places, properly encrypted. In fact, I am more likely to place my most important secrets in such places than I am my collection of Pink Floyd.

One always has to deal with two sorts of problems with data. One can lose it, or someone else you don't want to have it can get it. I back up my most valued secrets by sending myself encrypted email messages (Thunderbird, Enigmail, GnuPG) to multiple email accounts that I hold (Gmail, Fastmail and my employer), as well as keeping multiple personal copies at various geographic locations.

Why would anyone want to back up to the internet, with the price and efficiency of storage free-falling?

For the same reason that much of what else we have grown accustomed to keeping as isolated desktop applications is gradually becoming networked. Data locality is a short term (recent decades) optimization that higher level applications, and most users, don't want to deal with. Applications should work regardless of where one is located, on any device.

In the particular case of Google, they won't be looking at "backup" so much -- that's a fairly geeky kind of thing. They will be looking at where user data, such as pictures and video, are stored, just as they do now with email.

Backups need to become an increasingly embedded, hidden capability, just as networking and disk channels have become. Your data just needs to be there, with high reliability, even after your house is burnt down by the burglar hiding evidence of the crime of stealing your computer from your house after a tornado crushed it.

The price of storage is not particularly relevant here. If storage is cheaper for you, it's cheaper for Google as well.

What facilitates this is the price of networking. As the combination of increasing amounts of cheaper bandwidth and cheaper special purpose processing in network nodes brings about a massive change in how we compute, connecting us and our devices in ways that were impossible not long ago, data will cease to be locked in little islands, physically close to the owner of the data.

What drives this isn't cheaper networking -- that's just the enabler. What drives this is the essential social nature of humans. Eventually, to the extent practical, our technology will be extended to better fit our human needs and nature.

That's what is driving the success of Google, and the peaking and eventual decline of Microsoft, whose essential business model is pinned to licenses which are pinned to specific hardware. The big music and movie companies have a similar problem with their business model, which is pinned to the specific media copies of works.

With sufficient advances in networking infrastructure, compute resources and data can be moved at will just as much of our factories already have been, to anywhere in the world.

Desktop PC's are an anachronism, like having a "motor" in the basement that is used to drive all the rotary devices in the house. Motors become highly specialized. They can be cheap, special purpose, ubiquitous, like the vibrator in my phone, or huge like the generator equipment at the electric power company

Similarly computers span an increasing range, and thanks to improved communication, need only have what local resources make sense, relying on "the network" for all else, including for data storage, computation, and shared applications.

Just after writing that, I stumbled on a paragraphy by computer security expert Bruce Schneier, saying much the same thing, only better, on his block at Schneier on Security :

Predictions are easy and difficult. Roy Amara of the Institute for the Future once said: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."
Moore's Law is easy: In 10 years, computers will be 100 times more powerful. My desktop will fit into my cell phone, we'll have gigabit wireless connectivity everywhere, and personal networks will connect our computing devices and the remote services we subscribe to. Other aspects of the future are much more difficult to predict. I don't think anyone can predict what the emergent properties of 100x computing power will bring: new uses for computing, new paradigms of communication. A 100x world will be different, in ways that will be surprising.
But throughout history and into the future, the one constant is human nature. There hasn't been a new crime invented in millennia. Fraud, theft, impersonation and counterfeiting are perennial problems that have been around since the beginning of society. During the last 10 years, these crimes have migrated into cyberspace, and over the next 10, they will migrate into whatever computing, communications and commerce platforms we're using.
The nature of the attacks will be different: the targets, tactics and results. Security is both a trade-off and an arms race, a balance between attacker and defender, and changes in technology upset that balance. Technology might make one particular tactic more effective, or one particular security technology cheaper and more ubiquitous. Or a new emergent application might become a favored target.
. . . IT systems will continue to become more critical to our infrastructure -- banking, communications, utilities, defense, everything.
By 2017, the interconnections will be so critical that it will probably be cost-effective -- and low-risk -- for a terrorist organization to attack over the Internet. I also deride talk of cyberterror today, but I don't think I will in another 10 years.
While the trends of increased complexity and poor management don't look good, there is another trend that points to more security -- but neither you nor I is going to like it. That trend is IT as a service.
By 2017, people and organizations won't be buying computers and connectivity the way they are today. The world will be dominated by telcos, large ISPs and systems integration companies, and computing will look a lot like a utility. Companies will be selling services, not products: email services, application services, entertainment services. We're starting to see this trend today, and it's going to take off in the next 10 years. Where this affects security is that by 2017, people and organizations won't have a lot of control over their security. Everything will be handled at the ISPs and in the backbone. The free-wheeling days of general-use PCs will be largely over. Think of the iPhone model: You get what Apple decides to give you, and if you try to hack your phone, they can disable it remotely. We techie geeks won't like it, but it's the future. The Internet is all about commerce, and commerce won't survive any other way.

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Web giant thought to be readying 'GDrive' – an online home for consumer's digital data