GMail
Every once in a while I find I have too much e-mail that is unread, piling up in Thunderbird… so I run through and look at the stuff that I’ve been ignoring. I ‘m glad I caught this stuff from one of the mailing lists that I subscribe to:
It seems that there are a couple of websites that let one share one’s unused GMail invites: GMail-o-matic and GMail Swap. I’m sure there are many, many others. But, continuing in the thread of the mailing list, I came across two more interesting items…
One, is a pretty cool little utility that allows one to use one’s GMail account as a filesystem for Linux. Considering how many invites I have (after I donated a couple to the sites above), I could have a remote 5 gigabyte file system (that probably is dog slow) using the rest of them if I sent the rest of the invites to myself. This application of GMail is just fantastic: not at all what Google intended, bless their hearts, and just a neat hack all around. Makes me want to run a Linux emulator on my Windows XP box just so I can have a GMail filesystem. Great hack. Totally.
Next in the thread came the GMail Is Too Creepy people, who posit that the GMail privacy issues are too great and too numerous to warrant getting a GMail account or even receiving an e-mail from someone with a GMail account. After reading through their site, they are totally right. I’m a privacy advocate, especially in the digital age where the amazing fluidity of digital data gives potential ne’er-do-wells a wealth of evil opportunities to exploit a hapless ‘Net public… on the other hand, there’s no sense in becoming a card-carrying member of the Culture of Fear and purposefully forcing my mind to settle on such dreadful prospects as Evil Corporations Out To Get Us. That, and this stupid little essay made me immediately hostile towards their purpose.
Guess what, guys? I use GMail just like I used to use my HotMail account: for incidental mail, for giving to people who I want to communicate with but don’t really care about, for services that I don’t want to spam my personal account… I absolutely care about privacy, I don’t necessarily adore evil corporations, I do care about the privacy of those I respond to… oh, and about item #3: since I happen to be one of those teenagers that went to college and majored in computer science and oh, guess what, happen to know something about history. Don’t be a jerk; people will find your causes more appealing.
To go back to how I agree with the aforementioned site, however, check out this URL for why governments like GMail for spying purposes.