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Google Drive and Cloud Storage

Reviews

So Google just launched Google Drive and although this has been quite a week on the cloud, and the response from the web to “Google’s Dropbox Clone” has been mostly “meh”, i do understand the sentiment, it is basically a Dropbox Clone, sure it has some new features but those are mostly baked into Google Docs already, so what is my view on this Goggle Docs+ i mean Google Drive…

Oh Shit it does Sync!

That’s awesome if it was released in 2006, its 2012 now and there are plenty of sync everywhere including cloud services, some more simple, some more fancy, but that’s pretty much the service, Google launching it now, feels and seems like an afterthought, because Microsoft and Apple went into it, they better do it as well, also it pretty much does only that, its a sync engine for Google Docs and that service although cool is not that awesome and it doesn’t replace at all using a local office software.

Oh Snap Google Owns Me!

So most of us are loyal and use a lot of Google Services, i know i do, and the day some algorithm in Google decides to suspend my account for some random reason (ie a bad Google Adwords ad, or putting my nickname on Google+ or whatnot), and of course i can trust the non-existent Google support to help me out, so yeah, using Google nowadays should be done with a backup/alternative always in mind.

Worst! Google unfortunately resides in the USA the home of such nice things as the Patriot Act and the reason why a lot of companies don’t host any personal/private information in the USA, cause its too easy to just go into your files, you need warrants and judges to go to your home to check your computers, but going to your cloud files… hummm not so much, and with the latest CISPA, it will just get worst, if banks/governments dont trust putting anything inside US borders, why should we trust Google with our stuff?  (ie i know most other cloud hosting are on US, im just stating the fact that Google is also).

Oh Jeez i have to Pay!

So Google launches Drive and decides to updates its storage price, and the web gives a sigh…

If Google Drive was launched with the previous storage prices it would have been an awesome cloud hosting mini revolution, i would see people using and integrating Google Drive in lots of different ways just to find uses to that cheap pricing on storage, but no! the new prices are 4X or more expensive than it used to be, and now its price is just on par with the cheapest of the pack, so why choose Google Drive? Not on storage price!

Its a Google App Engine all over again, they start with a really cheap price and then when people start using it they change the rules of the game, so if anyone is already deep down on Google Services and needs more storage, they will have to pay 4 times or more just to have THE SAME STORAGE THAT THEY USED TO HAVE! its ridiculous and in my opinion its another huge fail from Google.

But wait it gets worst, now with the new storage prices, Google Services have all different storage limits, like Gmail has 10GB, but Drive has only 5GB and Picasa has 1GB what? but Google+ Photos is unlimited, its ridiculous and besides making it more complicated it also kills the gmail “you never have to delete an e-mail ever again” popular slogan, cause now gmail storage stopped growing… thats just sad T_T so sad…

Oh Wow it kinda Sucks!

Ok so Google Drive is syncing to Google Docs, but…no not really, since your documents formatted with Google Docs wont sync, yeah thats right, they will only live only on the Google cloud, so when Google kills your account those files will be lost forever, nice file sync Google, its mostly one way… plus at least in my opinion, not supporting linux is just another silly mistake.

Also Google’s new “all services have the same terms of service” makes Google retaining/granting ownership or license of any material you upload, unlike competing syncing services, if you put something on Google, even if you delete it later on, Google still owns some rights to it, i know! its fucking embarrassing and ridiculous.

Oh chucks i quit!

So whats my take on this Drive… humm ill skip this one, it kinda just makes me dislike Google even more, the old Google ignored users, but this new Google just doesn’t respect its users, Google’s moto “dont be evil” is pretty close to becoming moot.

Ultimate Adblock Privacy List

News

[ For you guys that know how this works, the filter subscription url for ablock plus is http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt ]

I was having a chat the other day about privacy and how the value of facebook is around not only the people/clients, but also everything you/upload/say on facebook is property of facebook and even when you are online all those like buttons, means they are still tracking you and selling who you are and what you do to the highest bidder…

That got me thinking, first thing i did was “clean up my facebook account”, ill still use facebook its a great site and communication tool, and i know facebook works like a subversion repository and everything you do is recorded for all time, so my clean up is purely aesthetic, but still this way not only is my facebook a bit cleaner but its also a reminder for me to not add more personal stuff there…

Next i searched around for that privacy protection, from Noscript, to an improvement on my hosts file (mine is already a beauty to behold, but more on that on another post), but i realized that i could use the awesome adblocking extension, adblock plus to do that job, especially cause i want for instance to block facebook or twitter buttons, but i dont want to block facebook or twitter, so i searched around and actually found they already have a couple of nice “privacy” filters, i put “” cause although good, they aren’t as cutthroat as i want them to be, that took me to my next step….

My very own privacy filter for adblock plus, it isnt huge and its not all encompassing, i have no big issue with small vendors or even a big vendor knowing a bit about me, my issue is they know too much, so this adblock filter is more of a privacy crippler that in conjuction with my hosts file and adblock plain list, makes my web oh so much more wonderful and safe!

How to Install this Beauty

Its simple, get yourself a good browser like firefox or chrome (remember both these browsers already track some of what you do, so if you want to go private all the way go for SRWare or something), then find on their respective Add-Ons/Extensions sites Adblock Plus and install it, then on the adblock plus options you will see a Filter Subscriptions, just add a new one and put whatever name you want, like “Awesome Privacy List” and put this url http://p.oito.eu/privacy.txt and thats it! It will update itself once a week when i add or remove hosts, the original list is part my personal choices and the awesome privacy lists from Abine and Privacy Choice.

Note: Well this was shortlived! but mostly cause a few friends pointed out that other people were already doing this, so why should I! hehehe sorry, so check out Fanboys Anti Tracking+ Annoyances as well as Adversity! Its the ones i use and they kick ass!

Oito Mini Services

News

Over the years i’ve created some tools to help me out or just for fun, i had them all over on s2r.org, but i thought with the creation of oito.eu, it would be nicer to share those tools with everyone, the idea was always for them to be simple and fast, hey you might find them useful like i do!

  • oito.eu/ip > the most plain find your ip ever!
  • oito.eu/qr > quick and dirty qr generator, based on google’s qr api
  • oito.eu/htm > full featured html editor, for those times where you forgot what was that tag
  • oito.eu/host > pulls the ip and hostname of a site
  • oito.eu/up > the most plain is this site up ever!
  • oito.eu/whois > fast simple whois
  • oito.eu/http > this one is to make quick checks on a site’s headers and stuff

Update on the Anti-Spam Txt

News

In the never ending fight against spam, i decided to update my imageboard anti-spam list, but im also centralising it and caching it (cdn and stuff on our oito.eu mirror domain), so its easier and quicker to use and update, so now the spam list is here at spam.txt just copy it over to your own spam list or just use as an extension! Voilá bad-guys gone!

As a note, it mostly includes common bad hosts,spam sites,short url providers and overall nasty sites that have spammed one of our image boards on one time or another, also if you think your site is wrongfully added to our spam list, then just send us a mail on the contact page and if you are right, we will remove you at once!

New Site! Yokatta

News

Hey hey new site, i introduce to you yokatta.org , its a plain and cute anime/japanese inspired wallpaper site! Always wanted one muhahahaha ^_^

Cloudflare Review Part 2

Reviews 6 Comments

So a couple of months ago i did a test and review of Cloudflare, it was getting popular and i wanted to check it out, so why a second part? Well 2 reasons, first instead of using it for a week, now i’ve used it for a couple of months on a couple of my sites, so i have a better view of the service, second cause i still have a couple of gripes with Cloudflare but also some nice tips to share.

My Hits with Cloudflare!
So like i said i’ve been using Cloudflare for a while now and i would say, its still a hit and miss for me, but mostly a hit, even with hosting your DNS through Cloudflare (and therefore losing control of your DNS ), but to be honest, unless you are paying for the really good DNS hosting, Cloudflare’s DNS service is far superior, i know, cause i’ve used a lot of free and paid dns hosters and hosted my own and i checked it here, with just a couple of tweaks/added services their DNS could compete with the best.

Now in terms of site performance i would say its pretty spanky awesome, i’ve had sites that were literally hanging for dear life bashing the server and just by turning Cloudflare on, it not only relieved a lot of the stress on the server but also turned the site speed way up, that’s by far the best thing about it, how much performance and how easy their CDN/Proxying system is.


My Misses with Cloudflare
But there are still today a couple of gripes, the first and largest is with their security settings and their intermission publicity type of thing they do when they block a user, as far as feedback from my visitors, i would say 100% of my visitors freak out when they reach a site and they are greeted with the cloudflare “you might be infected”! its just a fact, they expect to see a site, it really doesn’t matter if they are infected, their network is bad or they have an unlucky ip, its just not standard web usage to go to a site and be greated with something else, it feels like a pop ad or intermission ad to force someone to do something, what sites like wiki-whatever.info/exclusive-experts.com (i made them up, but you know what kind of sites im talking about) do all the time while spamming Google, its a disaster in terms of usability and no type of customization will ever change my mind, people never expect a warning from a site, even Google disabled their “you might be infected” because people freaked out even if it was with the best of intentions.

There are also some misses with the “html,css,js…” optimizations, with external objects (javascript mostly), with search engines, 1 of my site was heavily penalized while switching to cloudflare (and yes turning it back after a week made it slowly return to normal, it was weird and it was reported to cloudflare staff), but 2 other saw a huge increase on traffic (I MEAN FREAKIN 400% more 300.000 users HUGE WAY!), probably due to getting faster, hehehe so again hit and miss.

What is the Cloudflare Structure?
Cloudflare seems to work a bit like this, they get datacenters on popular internet hubs around the world, popular in the sense that a lot of traffic goes through them, i would bet that altough they spend quite a bit on hardware, that they dont pay or pay very little for bandwith and do what most large providers do and have peering agreements, thats were the free cloudflare users come in, altough clouflare provides a free service they kinda need those users to have enough critical mass for these peering aggrements to be worthwhile for both parties, so altough we arent paying they need the free users, note that this isnt something evil, its awesome win-win for everyone.

The Economics of Cloudflare
How do they get paid! Humm i would say affiliates (through their detestable intermession security warning and through some of the plugins), and of course paid accounts, on this i wonder why they start the price at 20$, maybe they think most of their free users have only 1 site, and if they have more they only have to pay 5$ for each after that, well in my case at least for now its simply not economicaly viable to pay for clouflare pro, for 20$ a month you can buy yourself a whole lot of hosting, even with the added savings of a Pro account.

How do I use Cloudflare

  • Basic Security Level: Essentially Off (because the bonus of blocking potential bad users doesnt outweight the really horrible spammy intermission alert)
  • Caching Level: Aggressive
  • Minimim Expire TTL: 4hours (but adjust this to the update schedule of your site)
  • Auto Minify: JS=OFF CSS=ON HTML=ON (avoid the JS, until now it hasnt work in any of my sites and also makes Googles PageSpeed Apache Addon freakout)
  • Rocket Loader: OFF
  • Outbound Links: OFF
  • E-Mail Address Obfuscation: OFF
  • Server Side Exclude: OFF
  • Always Online: OFF (still a good feature, it only shows a bar on top saying that the site is currently offline, i just turn it off as a personal preference)
  • IP Geolocation: OFF
  • Browser Integrity Check: OFF
  • Hotlink Protection: OFF

Yeah i disable most of the features, dont get me wrong if you need it or its good for you, please turn it On, still the only feature i really cant live with is the Basic Security Level for the reasons i already ranted about hehehe, but hey, freaking thumbs up for Cloudflare its free and it works pretty damn good, my only real gripe is with the security warnings, i would prefer pure blocking than any kind of  warning, the more transparent and white-label the better and im really waiting for their announced new pricing scheme to see if i can get a few pro accounts for a couple of my sites, but even so Cloudflare isnt perfect, well damn if it isn’t pretty close.

The End of User Generated Content

Tech

Expanding on my rant on the changes on Google App Engine and Google’s culture around exploiting developers (and don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of companies that do this, Google isn’t the only one), now i see this Howcast announcement that they decided to focus on their own productions and that the user generated videos were going to be deleted and that reminds me that its not just developers, also users are used and then left out, more and more i think if you want to do something awesome or want to share your pictures or videos or content you have to host it yourself, do it yourself, depending on third parties is a major flaw, one more and more people regret.

I do understand that business change and decisions have to be made, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do it, for users if you are changing or closing down, please provide backups or alternatives to the users owned content, make it as easy as the service was!

If you are making tools for developers, think hard about what are you giving and their expectations, don’t make a product and promote it as something and then change the rules later on, don’t provide API’s and then change your mind when there are thousands of products that depend on those API’s (yes Google but Twitter too).

Nowadays even though i still use a lot of products, i create less and less content for other companies, if i create i own the platform as well..

4Kun! Halloween Competition

Update

Yay we are starting a quick and dirty competition on 4kun imageboard, best picture, best halloween picture and just a random draft, with prizes, yay, so come on over and get your feet wet on the very first 4Kun! Scary Halloween Competition ^_^ and by the way have a Happy Happy Halloween!

Google Adsense is Ridiculous!

Reviews 1 Comment

This shit keeps getting worse, talk about monopoly, i follow google adsense rules to the letter and i still keep getting the “review of your account we found that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program policies”, the fact is that im always in compliant, but since there is no recourse with Google, there is no one on the other side, i have no choice but to NOT use Google Adsense on that site, its silly, stupid and arrogant.

Why? Cause they give you no choice! and i quote “Your AdSense account remains active. However, if we continue to find problems, we may disable your entire account. Therefore, we suggest that you take the time to review the rest of your network to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance with our policies.”, the sites in question, are pretty big sites, galleries, blogs and directories, there is no adult content or linking to adult content, but Google decided that it links to Adult sites!

What? what are the urls of these sites that Google considers to be adult sites?

Who? are these sites, it could be any comment on the blogs/galleries or site on the directories, this is the 4th site that was found in “violation”, well last time i checked the internet is all about linking, then all the fucking internet is found in violation of google adsense policy! they dont give a fuck, they change the rules in the middle of the game all the time, im a tiny client on their list, but ill tell you this, I keep finding myself getting more and more stressed with Google’s bullshit and that has consequences, not today, but some day.

New Site! Eleito

News

Eleito is on its second incarnation, the first version was a bit to sparce and boring, and i wanted Eleito to be like a mixture between a political news blog, but also a good source of news and information around politics in Portugal, so now its a popurls like portal with all the news from all the parties in Portugal (if you are on a party that is not there, just contact us), as well as news from the major news sources, joined with our own editorial and in the future we will make more in depth articles.

Ohh and for short news bits we have our own twitter account, you can check it here eleito por todos.