On Tuesday 02 November 2004 11:48, Ian Bruseker wrote: > On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 11:17:14 -0700, Nick W <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Storage now is <$1/GB, I have 100GB of potential mail space on my laptop. > > If I need to send/recieve a huge file I use my FTP server...a GB isn't > > that big nowadays. > > You're comparing the wrong thing. Congrats, you have 100 GB of space > on your laptop, but is your laptop a mail server? The proper > comparison is that Hotmail only gives you 2 megabytes. Compared to > that, 1 gig is a kickload of space. That's the comparison, that's the > reason people want GMail accounts. They want an email account they > can access from anywhere and not have to worry about running out of > room and deleting that cute picture of their niece that someone mailed > them two years ago. And before you get to the next argument to be > made by any self-respecting geek, you may be technical enough to set > up a mail server with terabytes of space and get web access to it, but > your average user is not that skilled. > > As for Aaron's privacy argument, I'd say your life is only as private > as you choose to make it. I use this GMail account to receive this > list and some other mailing lists. Am I worried about Google reading > my mail? Um, duh, no, they're public mailing lists. Google has > already spidered the archives for its web search engine, it's just > reading the same thing again. I get the odd email from my wife > because this is the best way for us to both communicate while we're > both at work. We plan what we're going to have for dinner, or if
So what kind of food you prefer, which restaurants and frequency will all be there for marketing purposes. > we're going to work out. Do we pass each other bank account numbers Frequency of your workouts. Do you do it at home, or away from home. Stuff like that. Personally, if I was selling you insurance, I'd be interested in that type of stuff. As they also would be with your eating (and therefore potentially inferred drinking) habits. This might not be legal/possible now, but that won't stop it from becoming possible down the road. > via our gmail accounts? Again, duh, no. The positively ancient adage > of "don't put anything in an email you wouldn't put on a postcard" But nobody follows this, nor should they need to if they choose more private information repositories to start with. > holds as true for GMail as it does for any other email service, > including the one you set up on your own home/work server. It may be > "your mail server", but what other systems scanned through that > message _before_ it got to your computer? People shouldn't be all > smug about not using GMail accounts because it somehow better protects > their privacy. It most certainly does not. You want privacy? > Encrypt. Simple as that. Nothing short of that will do. :-) I bet you can't find out anything about the child I sponsor in Mexico, in spite of the fact they they've never sent an encrypted email in their life. That had everything to do with not having information in harvestable places, and nothing to do with encryption. You're simply choosing to put that information in much more public places. The truth is, that this is much like leaving credit card carbon paper laying around. Generally, it isn't a problem. But the potential certainly is there for it to turn into a problem, so why on earth would you do it? Kev. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
