The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away

Yesterday, I read The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow. It reminds me quite a bit of 1984, though with rather more tech-speak than newspeak. A few thoughts, then:

The Order of Reflective Analytics seems to be a fairly transparent analogue of Google, so much that the Order calls its premises ‘campuses’ and gives the monks ’20 percent time’, as it is with Google. I mention this only because I wonder whether this will be recognizable in five years or ten. For the purposes of the story, internally, this really doesn’t matter, but it is important on the meta level. It’s true that Google stores a huge amount of data–taking myself as an example, they have my email, my chat logs, my search and browsing history, a fair number of documents I’ve written, code I’ve written, my photos, this blog, and probably several more things that aren’t coming to mind just now. Whether I can trust them to be ‘not evil’ is an important question, and the story wouldn’t be quite the same without that association.

On a less serious note, the word ‘pan’ leaped out at me. After reading it a few times, I concluded that it referred to a Personal Area Network, but I do wonder what fraction of the story’s readers will make that association. Unless something has happened lately that I’m not aware of, PAN isn’t a very popular acronym. I suppose it’s something of an easter egg–like I expect the Google references will be in a few years.

The story has a few inconsistencies, but they’re the sort that wouldn’t be too hard to write around, and I expect the story will be revised to correct them at some point. Reading the comments on the story was something like reading a mix of story reviews and bug reports–an interesting experience.

My opinion is that The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away is worth reading. Too, an MP3 is available for download of Cory Doctorow reading the story, for those who prefer audiobooks.

Google to index the ‘invisible web’

I’ve been seeing reports in various places over the last few days that Google is going to start indexing ‘the invisible web’–web pages that are hidden behind HTML forms that Google normally couldn’t index. They intend to do this by submitting some typical queries to the forms that seem to be search forms, and crawling through menu options.

This is a great idea, and the problem of how to decide what is a ‘typical’ query seems like an interesting one. Google’s approach seems to be to use text that’s present on the site that contains the form, which is probably as good a method as any. I do wonder, though, whether it would prove worthwhile to have someone manually (or semi-manually, anyway) generating queries on sites that are known to have a lot of information behind forms, like government websites.

I hope that this idea proves useful, and I look forward to better and more comprehensive search results in the future.

GDrive

Garett Rogers and Ionut Alex Chitu both have written about the possibility that GDrive–a rumoured file storage service from google–might launch in the coming months, following a WSJ story on the subject.

I wrote something about storing things on Gmail previously when Google increased Gmail’s storage, and the things I said then are pretty much the same things I feel now. This will be massively useful for a lot of people, and for students in particular. We don’t know how much space this GDrive might offer, but even a gigabyte would be enough for most users. Five gigs or so would probably be enough for essentially everyone–I could store all of my code, all of my school work, and probably all of my scanned correspondence in that much space. It wouldn’t be enough forever, since we all continue to generate more electronic documents as time goes on, but an increase of a few megabytes a day, like Gmail, should be plenty.

I can envision a few uses for it beyond just storing my personal documents, if Google were to include the ability to share files with others–piracy issues aside. It would be nice to be able to post scans of journal articles while collaborating on a wikipedia article with others, so that everyone could have access to all of the source material; we can use email for this, but it just isn’t as efficient, and requires re-sending everything if someone new joins in.

Ultimately, I can’t predict just how this could be used without knowing a lot more about it; even that it will launch is uncertain. I do look forward to seeing what the future brings, though.

Gmail storage increase

As I was reading my email today, I suddenly noticed that my gmail storage capacity had increased to 4332 MB; when last I checked, it was something like 3000 MB, so this came as some surprise. I’m very glad it’s increased so much, though, because I won’t have to worry any more when sending large attachments about whether I ought to delete the emails to conserve space. Granted, I wasn’t about to run out: I’m using 532 MB of my space, the majority of which is due to the huge number of emails I keep (15895 conversations, at the moment).

I must say that Google is making a pretty smart move. Most people are unlikely to use 100 MB–so 4300 is as much infinity as 3000 to them, and the faster increase is more impressive. Those people who will use all of their storage space are fairly few, and since there is no easy way to use gmail just for file storage (without risking your account being disabled), it’s not a good target for people who want to keep their collection of pirated music on or such. But it is now even more excellent for those of us who (like me) like to keep a copy of their assignments in their email just in case, or those of us who (again, like me) subscribe to far too many mailing lists and such to deal with every message completely as it comes in.

Rock on, Google.

Google celebrates Banned Books Week

Banned Books Week is 29 September through 6 October, and Google Book Search has put up a nice page listing some of the banned books with links to search for them with Google Book Search. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as useful as it might be.

A number of these books are freely-available, public domain books (for instance: The Call of the Wild by Jack London; The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; Ulysses by James Joyce) and part of what makes Google Book Search really useful is that (in addition to searching through snippets of many books) you can read public domain books online. The banned books page on Google Book Search makes no mention of which books have editions available for online reading, which is really a shame.

This aside, though, I am glad that google is putting up a page for this at all; the positively obscene number of challenges that many of these classic books get is something that ought to be better-known to all. It’s frightening how many great books people want to remove from our schools and libraries in order to ‘protect the children’ from ‘dangerous thoughts’.

Of course, the proper way to celebrate Banned Books Week is to actually read a banned book. I remember that The Jungle was discussed in a modern history class I once took, and it is available online (and I imagine at my university library as well), so I may try to read it in the coming weeks. It’d be a little late as a celebration, but still probably worthwhile. I’d encourage everyone to do the same.

Google colorizes the moon

Well, not quite colorized it, but they have given a gift the whole world can appreciate. According to a post on the Official Google Blog, google is funding a $30 million prize to encourage a private mission to the moon. The details indicate that the actual money awarded could be a little less, depending on how long before the mission takes place, and whether they complete certain ‘challenges’ such as roving a large distance from the landing point and remaining for a long time (a little more than 14 days). However, it’s still a massively cool thing for Google to do, and I commend them.

Google mentions that among their motivations are hope of cool new technological advances (like Tang) and (which interests me more) a hope of renewed interest in the sciences.

Science (so I am told) used to be considered cool in America. I’m a college student, so I suppose I’m too young to remember those heady days, but I do hope that the sciences could come to be regarded as cool by the American population, and especially the American youth. Of course by science I mean the sciences generally (the STEM fields) and by cool I mean anything I can get. I hope that Google’s funding of this prize can help to promote the sciences, but, if not, I guess that tech advancements is an acceptable secondary goal.

My Library

Google Books has a new feature: “My Library”. It’s a very basic system that allows you to keep a list of the books you own (provided they are listed in Google Book Search), together with labels, ratings, and reviews.

I really like the idea; I’ve been trying out various ‘social library’ sites in an attempt to find one that I could use. It’s not as easy as it might seem, since many of them either require some form of payment or lack features I need. Of course, google books library also lacks features I need, but I can at least be fairly certain it won’t disappear when the creator goes broke.

I’d be willing to forgive the lack of features, since it’s pretty likely that google will be adding more features as time goes by, but there is one difficulty: not every book I have is listed in their index, and there’s no way for me to add a book myself. Now, it’s totally reasonable that they don’t just let anyone add a book–the database would be quite useless fairly quickly. However, it’s missing some books that I would really expect to find; for example, the hardcover editions of the Harry Potter books that I bought a few years ago aren’t in there (nor, I think were the paperbacks). There is almost certainly some other edition of those books listed, but I want to add the correct edition.

Still, I think it’ll be worth giving it a try. Maybe if google pushes this, it’ll be successful and useful. I hope so, anyway. My library is here.