Google Drive is Evil

This blogpost is here: https://defining-computers.blogspot.com/2020/07/google-drive-is-evil.html.

Google Drive Is Evil (666)

666

As Unix file permissions, this file mode allows the entire world to read and write a file.

It basically makes the file a graffiti magnet: a place to write things like "Call {phone-number} for a good time.", etc.

It's particularly evil when this is the effective file permissions for your system files, as was the case for a certain early Internet-capable computer operating system of the 1990s and early 2000s.

[JMR202007231800 edit:

(I thought I had posted elsewhere about the real meaning of "666" in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and I had promised myself to link that post in here, when I dashed this rant off just before hitting the hay several nights back. And I then forgot about it. Now I can't find that post.

I guess this is a good enough place to post it again.)

For a little preface, here (https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html) is a little explanation of why we shouldn't fear conspiracies, in which I point out that the author and leader of all the conspiracies is none other than the father of lies, the devil. And he can't keep his stories straight, and we can draw conclusions from that fact --

Conspiracies will always fail, even if they do serious damage going down.

And here (https://reiisi.blogspot.com/2011/10/conspiracy-theories.html) is a little discussion of a typical part of one of the reasons I feel a certain ambivalence about Google.

To go into some detail on this, in Unix-like computer operating systems, there is a concept called "file permissions". These are the permissions (or limits) that the system enforces about who can access a file. Traditionally, they were specified as bits in a binary number, representing the on/off states for sets of permissions, 1 being on and 0 being off.

The permissions were these:

Read, Write, and/or Execute allowed

Or,

rwx

Reading or expressing that as a binary number, you get the following

(0)	000	:	no read,	no write,	no execute
(1)	001	:	no read,	no write,	execute
(2)	010	:	no read,	write,	no execute
(3)	011	:	no read,	write,	execute
(4)	100	:	read,	no write,	no execute
(5)	101	:	read,	no write,	execute
(6)	110	:	read,	write,	no execute
(7)	111	:	read,	write,	execute

So "6" was read and write permissions allowed.

There were three sets of these permissions, one each for the owner of the file (the "User"), the primary group that the owner was a member of (the Group), and all others (Other).

So, a "600" permission setting allowed the owner to read and write a file, and gave no one else access.

A "644" setting allowed the owner to read and write the file, and allowed the owner's primary group and others in general to just read it.

A "660" setting allowed both the owner and the owner's primary group to both read and write a file.

A setting of "666" allowed basically anyone to read the file and write to it.

This "666" permission is not in-and-of-itself strictly evil. If you want a graffiti wall, "666" is pretty much what you usually want to set it as.

The scriptures in the Revelation which refer to "666" as the mark of the beast indicate that the mark would be in the palm of the hand and in the forehead, or a person would not be allowed to engage in necessary commerce activities.  (Such marks have appeared in history, I leave that research to the interested reader.)

I'm not going to say that John was or was not also referring to file permissions. But if we interpret these file permissions in such a way, the palm of the hand might be the device drivers for an operating system, and the forehead might be certain files in the kernel (as one possible interpretation, although there is a little bit of detail I'm not discussing here: The evil "666" would be for configuration files rather than actual drivers and kernel executables. The "766" and "777" for drivers and executables, while just as evil, are obviously enough wrong and hard enough -- cough -- Java -- cough -- to implement.)

This would essentially be allowing anyone with the necessary arcane knowledge to control a computer's calculations and functions from a distance.

A certain popular operating system had this kind of setting as a "feature" during the early days of the Internet (ca. 1993-1999). (In other words, the OS allowed anyone who knew how to reach a computer running that operating system full control over the computer. I'll let the interested reader look that up as well.)

What does this have to do with Google?

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Google offers a file storage and sharing service they call Drive.

Google  Drive

Freebies always come with strings attached. One of the strings on this one is that you have a part of your drive that you don't manage. The effective default permissions are not 666, but are 622.  You can change them to 662 if you want, but they don't let you shut off write permissions for the "everybody else on the web". Anybody who has the e-mail address for the account you use to access Google Drive can share anything they please with you.

This might not be so bad. It's a bit like a physical mailbox. But the physical mailbox comes with postal system laws about abusing the postal system, whereas Google Drive doesn't have any way to dis-incentivize abuse of the system.

So you get advertisement you didn't want to see, and you have to look at it to delete it.

Even if it is some group of men in some third world country pretending to be women who post intimate pictures of themselves and offer sexual phavors.


You can delete your share link to the file, but they can make another file and share it with you again after they figure they've caught all the phish they could the last time around.

The techniques to block this kind of thing are available for e-mail, and work well enough there to keep the offensive mail to somewhat to a minimum:

• black lists of users you don't want anything from,
• white lists of users you will accept things from,
• and grey lists to block users who behave in certain ways (like huge To lists, which would be share lists for Google Drive).

These techniques should have been in Google Drive from the beginning. They weren't, so I didn't use Google Drive for a long time, until certain friends needed to share stuff with me on it and found it easiest to share on Google Drive.

--- Protocols for these techniques should have been part of the e-mail protocols from the beginning, but they were too hard to implement at first. And there were certain hyper-competitive companies that insisted on being king-of-the-hill in the computer industry, which insisted on making e-mail an end-user product and feature that they could use to compete unethically in the marketplace before the protocols were complete.

Now the protocols exist in conflicting ways, which is not a good thing, but a separate rant.

(The solution should have been two or three levels of protocols, and ordinary users should never have had to see the unfiltered protocols.

But, as I say, certain companies were too impatient. They needed to take over the industry, so they needed them before they were ready. History repeats itself.) ---

Now that I use Google Drive, I regularly get graphically explicit offers for sexual phavors all the time, and I have to go to the trouble of phlagging them as ophensive and illegal, and of deleting myself from the huge share lists.

When enough people flag them as offensive and illegal, Google eventually deletes the share list, at least, if not the actual files. But that's after the people who phish with the sexually explicit shared files have caught enough people who couldn't resist looking for more to make it worth their while to do it again.

Google Drive is either an incompetent service or a blatantly malicious service.

It's time to boycott it.

(Maybe not yet time to boycott Google's gmail, maybe not yet time to boycott Google's Android phone OS, maybe not yet time to boycott Google's Chrome web browser, etc. Maybe not. But definitely time to boycott Google Drive file storage and sharing.)

I will be going back to keeping my own files on my own physical file systems, and using either e-mail or self-hosted web servers to share my files. I suggest you do so, as well.

[JMR202203201344 edit:

Braver words than actions. 

I still have not been able to extricate myself from Google's services. Not enough time, money, or other resources to set up my own mail server, get a static IP address and a domain, and then maintain it.

God sometimes requires us to do the very difficult or even attempt the impossible, but He generally does not require us to operate beyond the bounds of our resources and reason.

For now, at least, I must satisfy myself with simply being aware that Google is filtering my mail, tailoring my search results, trying to profit on the services they offer, and not trying to bankrupt themselves meeting ideal expectations about their services, meaning that I have to be willing to delete obvious spam without wasting time or emotional energy looking at it.

Which, really, is in keeping with the understanding I get from reading the Revelation: 

The mark of the Christ is to keep his teachings in our hearts, minds, and acts.

The mark of the beast is to let the adversary of our souls impose his false teachings on our hearts, minds, and acts.

The influence of the devil does tend to work from the outside in.

But our spirits came out of God, and the influence of the light of Christ works from inside us, outwards.

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