OK Google: A stranger with stash of pirated films is spamming my Google Team Drive Google seems powerless to stop its Google Drive file sharing service being exploited by a spammer who has linked other users to their stash of pirated movies, among other dubious files, users have complained. Team Drives is part of Google’s G Suite offering, aimed at businesses, education and other professional organisations. …
My bad, sorry about that.
So you're saying a paid solution with 24/7 support fundamentally doesn't work?
edit: by fundamentally doesn't work, I mean it doesn't keep your drive details private - anyone can link to your 'team', so they know it exists?
Since when did the existence of a monetisation model provide any sort of warranty for fitness for purpose in the software industry ?
It's the single biggest thing wrong that was never fixed in this business. If your car has a defect and kills people as a result, the manufacturer is liable. If your software has a defect and kills people, well, there was no warranty for fitness for purpose and we don't accept liability. Thanks for the call. Byeeeee.
Or better yet: Sure we've been aware of this problem for some years. You can fix it by upgrading to a whole new set of defects for just $x,xxx.
By contrast:
I just had the airbag fixed in my Mazda 6 due to a manufacturing defect. The car is 13 years old and I am not even the original (as in "first") owner since I bought it pre-loved. I've never paid a dime to Mazda other than in the form of their service agent in NZ for servicing over the years I've owned the vehicle. Despite this, Mazda (the manufacturer, not the service agent) were able to contact me to inform me of the issue and arranged the fix at no cost to me. I doubt anybody thinks this is unusual or unexpected.
Imagine suggesting this sort of responsibility and liability for remediation rests with a software vendor.
I can hear the laughter now.
>>You get a free product staffed by volunteers (it sounds like) and it turns out to be shit, but you've based your business on it? Worse, you've paid good money for what's essentially an unsupported service with no SLA?
That type of environment and many many other shortcomings are why most enterprises go for Office 365 instead.
Got one. My advice is to have a cup of tea and a Jaffa Cake.
After that, I might choose to mutter something rude about Google.
have a Jaffa Cake Now, there's sage advice if I ever heard it.,,,
Any advice on how to avoid the subsequent memory blackout after which you often find you've scoffed the entire packet short of one (sometimes two)
That'd at least be worthy of a Weight Watchers award...
Any advice on how to avoid the subsequent memory blackout after which you often find you've scoffed the entire packet short of one (sometimes two)
Teiwaz,
There's an argument to say that this isn't a bug but a feature.
But I suggest two solutions. Option 1 is to mark out cake number 6. That is the all important member of the packet. 12 is the perfect number, as if you eat 2 (minimum dose) you're fine. 3 is also neat, as there are three more lots of 3 to go - and eating 4 leave 2 more lots the same. All very neat. Once you eat cake number 7 though, all neatness is gone, and you're forced to finish the packet.
Option 2: Go to Iceland (shop not country). Invest £4 - get big box of 100 Jaffa Cakes. Eat until gone.
As for Weight Watchers, a friend of mine who successfully lost a lot with them told me that he moved from biscuits to Jaffa Cakes on their advice. The Jaffa Cake is quite low calorie, compared to other teat accompaniment snack options. Although I believe there recommendation was one or two.
I didn't realise it was even possible to only eat one Jaffa Cake...
Any advice on how to avoid the subsequent memory blackout after which you often find you've scoffed the entire packet short of one (sometimes two)
Memory blackout? You have been seriously mislead by marketing when it comes to the number of said cakes stored within a Jaffa cake delivery tube. The unitiated out there believe that when the box reads 10, that this number is in decimal. The reality of this, and as should be appreciated by most El Reg readers, is that this number is actually binary and therefore rather than being ten, there are in fact only two cakes in each packet. These two cakes are cunningly, no, spitefully, located one at each end of the tube.
This is why one only has the memory of taking the first and the last cake out of each packet because there are, in fact, no other cakes of deliciousness inbetween. Fact*.
* any ill-perceived side effects such as a feeling of bloatedness, weight gain, spots, sugar rushes, etc, are all entirely coincidental and attributable to environmental or other similarly nefarious factors and definitely not the "missing" cakes.
Nick Ryan,
Very good. But... I can't let you get away with that calumny upon the good name of McVities. Jaffa cakes come in 2 sizes of container, so far as I know. The boxed 12 pack (sometimes in multi-packs too) - or the platicised (Pringles type) tube with 15.
Only Marks & Spencers are so evil as to only sell theirs in tens. Though they are incredibly nice, so I suppose I'll let them off. But only buy when they're 2 for the price of 1. The other supermarket ones I've tried also came in 12s.
I have done extensive research into this vital topic...
[I could use the pedant icon, but actually a Mr Greedy one would be more appropriate.]
Unfortunately, and this is a national (bordering on international) tragedy, but, as of September 2017, Jaffa cakes come in packs of 10.
Please see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41400677 for a report on this tragedy.
Your research is out of date and needs to be refreshed. You know what to do...
Nick Ryan,
Oh Noes!!!!! Disaster! I stand (well sit actually) corrected.
I've obviously been saved by my love of special offers. Must have not had McVities since, apart from the tubes of 15, or the Christmas meter long boxes. Sainsbury's have had the 3 packs on special quite a bit, and the M&S near me often do deals on theirs too.
Still, it disturbs me that I've clearly not been eating enough Jaffa Cakes. It might be my current thing for choccy covered gingers - or my Christmastime lebkuchen addiction.
Quality is likely good enough for a medium sized 1080 TV or tablet, but it will won't show off your new 50" HDR set to its best. Still, some films demand the best quality you can get hold of - Lawrence of Arabia, say - whilst others lose nothing from having been filmed in black and white.
All it needs is for someone just to say they looked at one of the movies, and it contained child porn and the problem will be solved, the account will be deleted and the functionality to unsubscribe will suddenly become available within 30 minutes.
You just need to know how to motivate cloud companies, and child porn seems to get the attention of all the right people very quickly.
yes, "the cloud" _IS_ highly overrated!
For businesses, I remember this really cool thing that came out back in the 90's - it was called "a web server". The best ones run Linux or BSD. It's a fair bet that setting up a file sharing system with one of THOSE, even one that involves user names and passwords, wouldn't be all THAT hard...
/me wonders if excessive Win-10-nic use has dumbed down the users into believing that it MUST be "in the cloud" ???
"It's a fair bet that setting up a file sharing system with one of THOSE, even one that involves user names and passwords, wouldn't be all THAT hard..."
It's pretty easy - Nextcloud.
I run four of them. One of which has about 800 users. My wife's phone would have exploded long ago if I wasn't shipping photos and vids off it via Foldersync to my home instance.
Sure, it's easy. Just stand up your server and install nextcloud on it. Well, of course, then you should automate the deployment somehow just in case you need to do it again. Then you're gonna have to figure out how to scale it if you have a significant number of users, of course.
Oh, well, and then set up some kinda access control system, of course. No problem, you can just maintain a list in the admin interface by hand. Now who was the person who looked after the list again? We need to add someone new. Why are they on vacation? Sigh. I guess we need some sort of maintenance rota for this thing. Oh, someone *did* remember to take that disgruntled guy we had to fire last month off of the list of folks approved for access? Right? right?
What's that you say, the hard disk in the file sharing server died and now everyone's lost all their data? Well, crap. Now we're bankrupt. For my new company, I guess we'd better think about redundancy and backups for the shared file server...
...okay, now NewCorp has its file server complete with expensive enterprise-level redundant storage, regular scheduled and tested backups, a rock solid access control policy and a team of five to maintain it. Great. Problem solved. Oh crap, now we need to let remote folks access it. Better hire some network admins to figure out all the necessary networking policy. Make sure nothing is exposed to people who don't work for the company. Maybe put it behind a VPN? But then we have to maintain the VPN and everyone hates dealing with access to a VPN. Also, crap, we'd best make sure this server has a solid TLS configuration. And make sure its certificates are kept up to date. And make sure the software is kept secure. What's that you say, Nextcloud is written in PHP and has a record of security vulns as long as your arm just like everything else that's ever been written in PHP? Well, crap.
tl;dr: running servers (file servers, mail servers, web servers, whatever servers) is superficially easy. Doing it in a safe, sustainable, secure way is absolutely not and it very often *is* the best idea to pay someone else who does it at scale to do it for you.
"tl;dr: running servers (file servers, mail servers, web servers, whatever servers) is superficially easy. Doing it in a safe, sustainable, secure way is absolutely not and it very often *is* the best idea to pay someone else who does it at scale to do it for you."
All very true - but you need to ensure the person you are paying to do it for you actually does a better job of it than you would as well.
I don't see any point in paying someone to cockup a task on my behalf when I'm quite capable of doing so for myself at a fraction of the price.
Would this open any of the business to potential prosecution? If they are using a service that essentially seems to expose them to illegal data without any way to remove shouldn't they be able to break out of the contract with goggle or claim any fines they receive back from them? They wouldn't have done it intentionally but the inability of google to resolve the issue in a timely fashion shows a level of incompetence and that as a business product it is unfit for purpose.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
