Andrea on my.opera

That's another side of the I-Need-To-Do-It-Online craziness : on-line document editing. Google Docs and Zoho are the most known on-line office suites, and they are are quite complete and even useful. So what's the deal? Simple : do you trust saving your documents on-line? Where on-line means some server somewhere in this planet. A server you can't physically access. A server that can be accessed by the people working at Zoho and at Google, though of course they say they won't.

If you answer "yes I do trust em" then take a look at this :

Google software bug shared private online documents

yes you did read good : "Google has confirmed that a software bug exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant's online Docs application service. The problem was fixed by the weekend and is believed to have affected only .05 percent of the digital documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet."

Not breaking news but still scary. And if you think Google is bad and others are better, let's take a look at Zoho, the main contender in on-line docs services :

Zoho Writer flaw highlights disclosure problem in Web 2.0 world

That's plain scary. Those bugs are proving that using on-line docs suites is just not safe. And they're just some of the bugs that we got to know about, who knows how many similar situations happened and we never noticed cos they fixed it silently overnight.

Someone could object : on-line docs suites are great but not for documents containing sensible data. So, are we supposed to use a different office suite depending on how sensible we consider our data? Sensible data is not only credit card numbers and similar stuff. If I am writing docs about my job activities, they are sensible even if only a doc containing a bunch of lines and few images, maybe a proof of concept for a commission. If I'm in a rant mood and I write down some nasty lines about my job boss or the husband of my sister, that's sensible too. Even a list of things I bought last week is sensible from some point of view. Almost everything can be considered sensible, so what are we supposed to use on-line docs suites for? Only useless crap we could very likely not even write? Do we have to think "is it fine if what I am writing becomes public domain cos of a bug?" before starting writing something?

Bugs can happen in every software scenario, problem is that if we put our documents on-line we are building the chance for those bugs to make our private data not private anymore. It happened and it can happen again. Reality proved it, no matter the marketing they try to apply to that, to make people think that "it is cool to be in the cloud, share stuff, do everything on-line". Facts are proving such services are not safe. Just like emails are not -- they give you 2gb, 5gb of space and tell you : "ok leave all of your emails and attachments here, no need for erasing things anymore! isn't it cool?" so that they can scan your e-mails and harvest for info they can sell to marketing companies; they write in TOS that they'll do it, but people is usually not reading TOS and they know it. That's the business model behind GMail, for instance : we give you a huge free space, you fill it with e-mails, we scan those mails and sell the info to third companies (that could mean selling directly to them or use the info to generate ads to propose to you) -- everything is anonymous they swear, but do you trust someone that one morning lets thousands of strangers read your private data?

And to finish : Google Chrome browser is nice, fast and everything -- but it doesn't let you manage cookies. Yeah, it's like that. You can just "accept all" or "refuse all" cookies basically. Since user needs cookies for using websites where he/she needs to login and where he/she is required to provide data (like sites asking your age before letting you enter), the average user will likely leave cookies on "accept all" since he/she is not wanting to keep changing that option going through menus etc. Cookies are used to gather info, Google makes money with such info, so they want you to accept all cookies they need you to accept. I don't like that. I don't like that a company tries to look good and cool and everything, giving software "for free" while we are paying for it instead, only that we don't pay with money but with information. 99€ can be a price I can understand and accept or refuse to pay, but how can I give a value to the information about my life? Do you think Google is giving the users a detailed and correct view on what does it mean to use Google Services? Most users are not informed about it, they get the hyped comic-book like video explaining why Chrome is so fancy, and how come they were so great creating a new browser for the new web, but they don't say that you can't selectively manage cookies and so Chrome is basically a Google terminal for information gathering. That's unfair, from my point of view.

Anyway, the post was about on-line docs suites ridiculous privacy level, not on how much I disapprove Google-like business model

I hope I didn't bore you too much people Ciao!

PS : I am trying to draw but in latest times my creative mind is almost sleeping it seems. Maybe it's the weather, maybe a lack of motivation. Maybe both. We will see. I suppose I still have some things bothering me and not letting me concentrate on creating.

The previous layout kinda bored me, so I decided to change it and make it more groovy. I love that word -- groovy. Just the way Ash says it in Army Of Darkness. Groovy. Anyway, hyper cool movies apart (now, you gotta love Army Of Darkness by the way), the new layout is still in progress, though I don't know if and how it will progress. There is no sidebar at the moment, since I found it not useful. If I'll change idea, it'll come back. Another change is that I am starting to use the posts with an intro and a "read more" for accessing the rest of the article: they are useful if you're posting many videos and you don't want your page to be too slow loading and too myspace looking, especially.

Enough with the talking, I hope you like my new layout! The #ff00fb color I am using for links etc will probably change to something else. Maybe to some kind of orange. I wanted to use orange at beginning, but something inside of me sadly said me no, and that's it. Dark shadows. Never mix your life and your feelings for colors, smells, sounds, otherwise nasty links will start messing with you. Am I wise or what.

Mmm before closing I also want to say that I am trying to emm cough emm draw my cards emm cough cough for the mmm aa-emm trade card cough gang... I know it is not so believable after so many months, I also know I am approaching ridiculousness quite fast cos I never sent any card.. I did all kind of silly experiments with papers and colors and drew nothing. Now I am really trying to craft something. Really, I am. Beware ... "The cards coming from another world!!!" (well from another country at least!).