Rubenerd

With all this excitement about cloud storage, I thought I'd try something a little different!

Pronounced “wah-lah”, apparently!

Wuala is a cloud storage service by LaCie that comes with 5GB of free storage, with the option to purchase more. Like the sucker for advertising I am, I saw a label for the service on a LaCie external hard drive at an Apple Store, and was immediately interested!

What sets Wuala it apart from Dropbox and Google Drive is it encrypts your data before it's sent to their servers. Technically speaking, this means not even Wuala employees can access your data, unless you make it public (which you can do).

As an added bonus in a similar vein, Wuala's severs are based in Switzerland, Germany and France. While Europe's privacy laws are by no means perfect either, these days I feel safer having my data there than the United States.

Usage

As I've mentioned previously, I dislike installing client software for online services, especially for something that may as well be public anyway. Given Wuala is performing local encryption before sending my data off however, I see their software as a necessary evil.

Once you install their client software (the subject for a future post), you're given the open to create a new Wuala account. Registration is fairly straight forward, and after responding to a confirmation email you're in your new cloud drive.

The client software runs in Oracle's Java or the OpenJDK (my choice) and should be pretty familiar to those used to the Finder, Nautilus, Thunar and the like. You can create folders, upload/download files, and set folders and files public or private (the default). They also have iOS and Android client applications.

What I really like however is it's ability to mount as a virtual local volume. Having tried on a fairly vanilla Fedora install, Wuala was able to create a new Fuse mount without any trouble, though the first time it took a minute or so to create it. Then I was able to drag and drop files from within Nautilus:

And explore with the shell. Imagine what you could do with this!

It has lots of other features, though I haven't looked much more into it yet. Something called "Time Travel" looks as though it could be a revision system of some sort.

So far I'm impressed. I'll report my day-to-day experience in the coming days.

Via @IntelMiner on Twitter. Some real posts coming again soon!

Tweeted from earlier today:

I’m coining a new term (you heard it here first). #PIE AKA #ProactiveInformationExchange to share knowledge to prevent #ShitHittingFans

I'm already used to PIE standing for something else, but I nonetheless wholeheartedly support this term and what it stands for. I'd attribute ~60% of the problems I've had in IT to poor communication, or lack of it.

You read it here… second.

In 2011 I discussed how I was giving Google the benefit of the doubt regarding their harvesting of open WiFi data, and that it was consumer network hardware manufacturers that should be working to protect consumers. I was… at least partly wrong!

Uh-oh

From my Google's non-existent whitelists… exist post I wrote on the 11th of March 2011:

Take the street view controversy. While I think Google engineers were short sighted by not closely studying the source code of the software they put on their trucks and drove around the world, I don’t believe they did it maliciously.

Unfortunately, we now know that isn't true. From Stilgherrian:

So, you know when Google’s Street View cars, the ones taking photos down every street, were also accidentally scooping up people’s unencrypted Wi-Fi traffic? Turns out the engineer who wrote the software did it deliberately, and his boss knew he did.

The European Union isn't impressed, and may reopen their case against Google. To quote John Gruber:

Uh-oh.

But the networks were open!

Back when this controversy started and people were blaming Google for stealing people's data, I read an equal number of posts from other bloggers blaming people for having open wireless networks in the first place. I acknowledged this:

These signals were being broadcast in the open, and while the scale of Google’s downloading may warrant further scrutiny, it skips the real issue that people are still broadcasting unencrypted data out of their homes for anyone to gain access to.

Still, I didn't go as far as to blame consumers.

Rather than blaming consumers (which is always an easy thing to do) however, I place the blame on network hardware manufacturers for selling devices that didn’t make this clearer.

Unfortunately, we now know in hardware manufacturers attempted to make security easier for consumers by implementing WPA2 standards, and in the process introduced a security vulnerability so severe it bypasses the otherwise strong encryption used by them. All of course except Apple, and I remember people chewing me out for having a Airport Extreme base station… heh ;D.

Regardless, there are a lot of issues at play here, not least the ethics of some Google engineers. Any company can/does have rogue players, but the key is transparency. Only disclosing this now rubs me the wrong way, a little.

While attempting to find the right diagnostic tools for a bunch of drives, in my sleep deprived state I figured if anyone would be able to help, it'd be Makise Kurisu! I should have just gone to bed.

Pixel art by homura on Pixiv.

John McDuling for the Australian Financial Review:

Optus and Vodafone Hutchison Australia have signed a deal to share and build critical infrastructure to boost coverage and bolster their networks for the launch of superfast mobile services. [..] Optus will be granted access to around 1000 additional sites [..]

My sister gets excellent coverage on Vodafone in Earlwood, but Optus is bad enough to be non-existent. Assuming this gets ACCC approval, this would be the quickest fix for our area! Something tells me I shouldn't get my hopes up too much though.

A wow moment after reading Yahoo News:

Microsoft Corp will invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble Inc’s digital and college businesses, valuing them at $1.7 billion. [..] Microsoft will get a 17.6 percent stake in the new unit, while Barnes & Noble will own about 82.4 percent

This has the potential to shake things up big time, if they play it right. Will the Nook become a Windows Mobile device? Will Microsoft use B&N in their phone's media store to take on the iPhone and iTunes? Will this largely ignored mobile platform and this runner-up to Amazon fizzle out? I don't know! The battle lines are being drawn though.

And before anyone asks, yes I know that Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, I just thought it was a fitting image!

Flick My Switch! An initiative being spearheaded by my good friend Sashin! Spread the word :D

Comments should be left on the YouTube page.

One of the current memes surrounding Google Drive seems to be how their logo was copied from Vplayer. As a logo nerd, I felt it my duty to clear the air!

TechInAsia’s post

From TechInAsia, where the above mockup is from:

The Drive icon is essentially the Vplayer one with a bit of dimensional shading added, spun 90-degrees anti-clockwise, and then looked at from the other side. [..]

What do you think of the Drive logo? Perhaps Google got its inspiration elsewhere – maybe from the funky new tech blog The Verge. Let us know in the comments.

I would let you know in the comments section of your site, but it needs JavaScript. Oh well!

You install it on your Möb-ilephone

While copying isn't unexpected behaviour from Google necessarily, I find TechInAsia's claim that their new logo was a copy of Vplayer to be a bit of a stretch. As far as I can tell, both services are employing Möbius Strip-like designs in their logos.

In fact, if we really wanted to discuss which companies are copying off whom, it took me a minute of image searching to come up with these:

The latter should be of most concern to Android and Google users, for it's an application for iPhones! It's name also gives away the design device in question.

Recycled

Still, perhaps the best known example of a Möbius Strip in use is the recycling icon. Perhaps it's making a comment that all these icons for all these services are merely reusing this same idea ;).

Here's my terrible mockup of the recycling icon, in the Google Drive colours.

Conclusion

So I suppose the case could be made that the Google Drive logo bears a resemblence to Vplayer, but to be fair to Google, they're icon is a derivative of many, many others which were all based on a single wondrous twist of a belt.

There are many legitimate technical and privacy concerns surrounding Google Drive. This isn't one of them.

Installing extensions into a new SeaMonkey install this morning, I got quite a shock!

Simple Clocks :: Add-ons for SeaMonkey
This add-on has been removed by its author.

As someone with friends in multiple timezones, Simple Clocks was the simplest way to see at a glance whether or not I'd be waking anyone up with my tweets, newsgroup messages and the like. It's a shame the developer couldn't keep it going.

I guess it's back to FoxClocks; another excellent plugin but with extra features I don't really need.