Yale Delays Move To Gmail 176
Mortimer.CA writes "The Yale Daily News is reporting that the move to Gmail has been postponed. After further consultations with faculty and staff, the concerns raised 'fell into three main categories: problems with "cloud computing" (the transfer of information between virtual servers on the Internet), technological risks and downsides, and ideological issues.' In the latter category, 'Google was not willing to provide ITS with a list of countries to which the University's data could be sent [i.e., replicated], but only a list of about 15 countries to which the data would not be sent.'"
Re:Know what... (Score:5, Informative)
It's probably most of the countries. Google has their own highly-redundancy file system that spans thousands of servers and even different datacenters and locations. Even data that is deleted could remain in the system for 9+ months. I think it's highly possible all of the data travels around the world and is stored in several locations.
Re:Good for them (Score:3, Informative)
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=7190 [google.com]
If you run a search for "sarah sextapes found" and then realize you have too many e-mails and only one you want has an attachments, go back to the search bar (which still has your filter) and add "has:attachment", then click search again.
If you want to filter incoming e-mail, add options like "AND has:attachment" to the end of fields your already using. Such as From: "bill AND (has:attachment OR subject:more pr0n)"
Re:Know what... (Score:5, Informative)
I was just thinking the same thing. Our law firm is considering GMail as a possible alternative to Outlook/Exchange, and this is one question I know we overlooked. Most of our debate centered around a) loss of control over the data (Federal Discovery Rules), and b) privacy.
Re:So Cloud Computing is unsafe? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, they just print them out and leave them in the lobby.
Re:RAID (Score:5, Informative)
Sorta, Google call them shards.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-141569.html [zdnet.com]
Shards can be located by different masters and different masters are located in different locations according to the data type.
So I think Japan (That's where they just dropped their Asia - US cable after all, so it makes sense) has a "complete" replication of all Google data. Some data is also replicated to containers (YouTube etc) for hosting at major ISPs. So all email data would be replicated in non-realtime. If you request something that isn't in that DC it's located in the US or wherever is closest (I guess).
There are multiple "complete" copies on the east and west coast as well as European hub sites or directly connected to European hub sites.
If you ask for a citation, I can dig something up for you....
Re:Know what... (Score:5, Informative)
That would be correct, if you look at their BGP advertisements it would figure that Google would have to transit it's own data.
So if your request for data (YouTube video etc) isn't located in the DC that you connected to, they would have to transit that data across their own links. It would then make sense that they would replicate their own data over those same links during the night on that side of the world when the link is quiet.
Re:Know what... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Know what... (Score:3, Informative)
IANAL but if you then accessed / distibuted that in the US you could be in trouble. Given that your data wouldn't be re-assembled (And certainly not in your possession) till you accessed it in The Netherlands you should be fine. Aside from plausible deniability and all that.
Honestly, I would be more worried about the UK:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/24/extreme_pron_law_live/ [theregister.co.uk]
Re:Know what... (Score:4, Informative)
They might claim it, but that doesn't make it so.
Re:Know what... (Score:3, Informative)
When I hear that name, I think of an American magazine for teenage girls.
It's a Dutch magazine for men who like teenage girls.
Although, I'd wager that most of the "girls" have been around the track a few times since the last time that they were "teens" . . . or that anyone called them "girls," for that matter.
Some good concerns, but mostly FUD/ignorance (Score:4, Informative)
We're going through this same conversation at my employer (a higher-ed liberal arts university). This article came up yesterday in my team, and we had a bit of a discussion about it. Here's the email I sent out to the group about the article and Yale's decision. Hopefully this will help to clear up some of the misinformation in the article.