Citind blogul unui amic am dat peste un alt blog pe care il redau aici in intregime. Because it really freaked me out..
09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0
Three days ago I blogged about how I was afraid of becoming too dependent on Google, since I’m using it for webmail and calendaring (through Google Apps for Your Domain), hosting my open-source projects and so much more. Well, just one day after that post Sil wrote about his troubles in trying to find a free/libre online photo gallery to use instead of Flickr. His post made me think about when did I start favoring convenience over principles, and at which point should I draw a line between the two.
For a long time I hosted my own mail server, using the fabulous Qmail Toaster for FreeBSD. For those who don’t know, the Toaster is a setup combining Qmail, Spamassassin, ClamAV, SquirrelMail, Courier, MySQL and other open-source tools in a scalable and secure mail server. For a few years I shared a server with a friend, which gave the convenience to create domains and email addresses on the fly for friends and family, and also for my parallel projects like Oceanografia.org and pydap.
As easy as it is, it still takes a lot of time to fix eventual problems, and to keep the system up-to-date. When Google first announced the Google Apps for Your Domain program, I saw it as an opportunity to convert my problem into a SEP (Someone Else’s Problem): 25 users per domain, 2 GB per account and a web interface for adminstration is all I need, and now I don’t have to keep the anti-virus database updated, or worry about spam filters. I requested an account when the program was still in ß and there was joy.
I eventually moved other services to Google: my jabber account is also hosted by Google (with my domain), and I moved my open source projects to the Google Code hosting — at least these two are still open protocols. I also created Google Groups for each of my projects, and I can say that I save a lot of time by not having to run my own subversion server or my own mailing lists. In fact, this is so convenient that I managed to move from a US$ 65/month (with discount for open source developers) to a lightweight US$ 8/month VPS running only Cherokee as my web server and a few WSGI apps through FastCGI like this blog.
With all that in mind, I read something today that made me step back: Google sent this guy a DMCA complaint notice for copyrighted material on his Google Notebook. The material is the title of this post, the string 09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0. What makes this particular string of hexadecimal characters so terrible is that it is the HD-DVD processing key for most movies released so far, published on the net by the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) a couple of days ago by mistake.
Now, I don’t know if this string can be copyrighted in the US, or if it’s illegal to publish it in the US — or even in Brazil, or wherever my VPS is located. I know that this is wrong, and I don’t want Google spying on my notes. So as of today I stopped using Google Notebook, and I moved the line a little bit closer to principles at the cost of convenience.
Gizas…Google is evil..