Matthew Tannin may have shut down his account, but Google keeps backups, and the company provided government prosecutors with "a CD-ROM disk... of Mr. Tannin's emails from November 20, 2006 through August 12, 2007," according to the New York Times. The prosecutors are trying to prove fraud in the collapse of two hedge funds, managed in part by Tannin, and have been helped along by his personal emails, one of which reads "a wave of fear set over me that the fund couldn't be run the way that I was ‘hoping'... And that it was going to subject investors to ‘blow up risk'."

Meanwhile, online tricksters reportedly protested Google's outing of the once-anonymous "Skankblogger," Rosemary Port. Lawyers have called Google "cowardly" for not fighting harder to protect Port's anonymity in a case brought by a woman targeted by Port's anonymous blog on Google's Blogger.com.

Google takes pride in its ability to retain data; Sergey Brin has an op-ed in the New York Times today holding Google servers up as more durable than the ancient Library at Alexandria. Meanwhile, every police department and district attorney's office in the country knows they can extract valuable data from the company. Google has little motive to fight much against these authorities. Not when it could be solving sexier geek problems like indexing books or launching real-time collaboration systems — and when it could potentially be minting billions on its next tech hit.

(Image via)

Yesterday news came that 10,000 Hotmail accounts had been compromised, but all of you internet snobs were like, "Hotmail? Haha, (some sort of internet snob joke about varieties of email, and which are cool and which are not)."

Well now your precious Gmail has also been compromised, the BBC reports. But, sayeth Google:

The firm stressed that the scam was "not a breach of Gmail security" but rather "a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers".

Stop being so dumb and you won't get "compromised," like that! Same advice dads have been giving to their daughters for years.
[Want more expert insight on this issue? Sorry, Ryan Tate's not awake yet.]

• Twitter. The microblogging service was many people's first alternate messaging system the last time this happened, in February, and the service has added tons of users since then. Direct message friends if your message must be private; attach images using Twitpic and even broadcast your temporary Yahoo or Hotmail address. Disclaimer: Works only until Twitter is inevitably brought down by people complaining about the GMail outage.
• Instant messenger. It's intrusive, compared to email, but Google's failure is your perfect excuse.
  
• Facebook: Sure, Facebook has a handy private messaging feature, but some people never check that. Write on your recipient's Wall; no message is remembered so well as one delivered in front of family and friends.
• Text SMS message. Pricey, but why not bill your employer, especially if he put you on a cheap-ass free Google Apps account in the first place (*cough* *cough*)?
  
• Print and FAX: This has the advantage of wasting precious hours of your employer's time. Bonus points for a "sent from my iPhone" tagline; double bonus points for cutting and pasting your recipient's last FAX underneath yours.
  
• Carrier pigeon: Sure, the Google snafu has made them hot commodities, but today's markup can't be more than, what, three, four hundred percent?
• Pick up the phone and speak to the person using your actual vocal cords: Ha ha, just kidding! As if.

We've exhausted our knowledge of alternate communication media. But we're sure you can come up with of your own; post them in the comments.

UPDATE, 5:34 PM ET: GMail appears to be back, as indicated in the comments.

(Pic via)

Meanwhile according to the Google Apps status dashboard, GMail wrestled with more confined downtime issues yesterday and sent out an alert this morning saying it expected to resolve that issue "in the near future."

Business Insider has a roundup of reactions from media people on Twitter.

Though the horror seems fresh every time, this has happened repeatedly in the past. And we survived! Some recent examples:

• Feb. 09: GMail goes down for 2.5 hours due to buggy caching code related to what was supposed to be "routine maintenance" in a European data center. Frustrated user create Google "fail whale" cartoons, based on Twitter iconography.
• Aug, 08: GMail goes down for roughly two hours, blames "temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly."
• Aug. 08. GMail down for 15 hours for some customers, including paying Apps customers.

UPDATE, 5:23 p.m. Eastern: GMail appears to be back, at least for several of us and many commenters.

(Image: by Yoav Shapira)

There was a certain raffish charm in Google's "beta" fetish. Six months ago, nearly half of its products carried the geeky monicker, meaning "not ready for prime time." Google was charging real money for premium versions of some of the products, but most people didn't pay. So whenever the system went down, the company could shrug its shoulders and effectively say, "things happen."

Now Google will have to issue slightly more abject non-apologies. On the bright side, all of those people who have been waiting to adopt GMail once its out of beta can now sign up. Get ready to finally see some "@gmail.com" addresses in your inbox! (Ahem.)

It transcends all words? Maybe at Google it does, but at Valleywag it only rolls downhill.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch worries Mail Goggles is a hoax — fair enough, since Google developer Jon Perlow didn't explain how to find it unless you already know where it is. Typical engineer. To test-drive Mail Goggles, login to a Gmail account. Click Settings in the upper right corner, then click Labs at the far right. Mail Googles is halfway down the Labs page in alphabetical order. That alone should serve as a sobriety test. (Photoillustration by Digital Inspiration)

The terms of service for Google's popular email product Gmail contains the same language as the Chrome TOS mentioned above, but it's also got this Orwellian gem tucked in it:

Google reserves the right (but shall have no obligation) to pre-screen, review, flag, filter, modify, refuse or remove any or all Content from any Service.

Not that Google is actually going to stop you from sending that dirty email about sex and drugs to your dirty friends, but they could.

Facebook is the Internet's most popular photo-sharing site. Which, according to Facebook's terms of service, means Facebook could be a very profitable stock photo firm if it wanted to be.

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

The terms of service for YouTube also say that uploading anything onto the site gives them license to do whatever with it. More obnoxiously, YouTube also says that even after you delete content from the site, they're allowed to keep it forever:

You understand and agree, however, that YouTube may retain, but not display, distribute, or perform, server copies of User Submissions that have been removed or deleted. The above licenses granted by you in User Comments are perpetual and irrevocable

My favorite obnoxious terms-of-service clause is in the license for AOL's instant messenger client. You're only allowed to use AIM for lawful purposes, so no pinging your friends about smoking up or scalping tickets. Also, turns out you can't say dirty words or obscene things over the service, which probably means most people can't talk about their bosses, last night's overtime loss, or that girl in fourth period:

You May Use the AIM Products for Lawful Purposes Only. You may use AIM Products for lawful purposes only. You may not post on or transmit through community areas (e.g., message boards, chat, e-mail, calendars, instant messaging products) or other means any material that (1) violates or infringes in any way upon the rights of others, (2) is unlawful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, vulgar, obscene, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable, (3) encourages conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, (4) gives rise to civil liability, (5) violates any policies posted in any community areas or (6) otherwise violates any law. You also may not undertake any conduct that, in AOL's judgment, restricts or inhibits any other user from using or enjoying the AIM Products, including without limitation the community areas.

Both Mozilla's terms of service for Firefox and Microsoft's EULA for Internet Explorer 7 don't have these weird clauses.

As is typical of things associated with Google, these outages were the subject of much public commentary.

What are the Googlers are trying to say here?

The implication is that Googlers would be happier if we all didn't talk about their services going down. It's a typical geek reaction — "Stop yelling at me long enough for me to fix the problem!" — but it's downright offensive to paying customers.

And there's the problem. Google's not used to having paying customers, other than advertisers, on whom it relies for 99 percent of its revenues. Its business model has long been to provide services for free to Web users, and pay the bills with ads.

The letter to Google Apps users goes on to claim:

While we're passionate about excellence, we can't promise you a future that's completely free of system interruptions.

The latter part's a truism — systems inevitably go down. Ex-Googler Sergey Solyanik disagrees with that first part. In a blog post explaining why he returned from Google to Microsoft, the development manager wrote:

Google as an organization is not geared — culturally — to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications. The culture part is very important here — you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

Which is exactly why Google would just as soon not have "public commentary" about its outages. They don't just suggest Googlers aren't as supremely competent as they'd like you to think. They don't just suggest Google's Web-computing infrastructure isn't as world-changing as the pundits think. The breakdowns raise larger questions about Google's culture, business strategy, and management. And Google can't afford those questions.

The sniffy mea culpa:

From: Google Apps Team
Date: Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 6:44 PM
Subject: August SLA Credit for Google Apps Premier Customers

We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have. We had three outages - on August 6, August 11, and August 15. The August 11 outage was experienced by nearly all Google Apps Premier users while the August 6 and 15 outages were minor and affected a very small number of Google Apps Premier users. As is typical of things associated with Google, these outages were the subject of much public commentary.

Through this note, we want to assure you that system reliability is a top priority at Google. When outages occur, Google engineers around the world are immediately mobilized to resolve the issue. We made mistakes in August, and we're sorry. While we're passionate about excellence, we can't promise you a future that's completely free of system interruptions. Instead, we promise you rapid resolution of any production problem; and more importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem.

Given the production incidents that occurred in August, we'll be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so there's no action needed on your part.

We've also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that we're doing to make things better:

We're building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:

A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that's iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don't have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we're working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.

A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it's important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we'll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.

In cases where your business requires more detailed information, we'll provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information:

a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;
b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;
c. actions taken to solve the problem;
d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; and
e. time line of the outage.

In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, we'll support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team.

Once again, thanks for you continued support and understanding.

Sincerely,
The Google Apps Team

37signals recommends the Hollywood Launch. Release a few hints until the big day, when people flood your site, sent by blog coverage. What happens: They bring the site down. They discover some big bug. You bring the site down for everyone because there was a syntax error. Everyone misunderstood what your product does because your front page wasn't clear enough. They all think it's stupid. The traffic is gone. Hardly any of those users come back.

What you should have done all along: the Gmail Launch. Have users from day one. Give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback. Let them invite their friends. Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. Codes protect against a premature slashdotting. Iterate. Take off the code requirement. People will come across it and become real users. Then build buzz. Have some kind of news hook. With Reddit, we switched from Lisp to Python. Start marketing.

(Photo by ioerror)

To combat this problem, Google released a new feature for Gmail that lets users login and use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but it's not automatic. Here's how to set it up:

1. Log in to Gmail and click "Settings."
   
2. In the General tab scroll down to "Browser connection."
   
3. Make sure "Always use https" is selected and save changes.

Seems kind of odd that Google wouldn't set this up automatically but, hey, at least you can access your email — unlike those Apple dorks, right?

Apologies for taking up your time but the only thing I found at all interesting in the following TechCrunch story was the picture of Gmail Labs product manager Keith Coleman. The guy is cute as frak.

No apologies necessary, Francis! He's also been at Google since at least 2005, so do the math on his stock options. Any volunteers to take up Coleman's 20 percent time? And any other nominations? (Photo by Mark Hendrickson/TechCrunch)

What we hear from Googlers is that supervisors are cracking down on use of 20 percent time when employees' main projects are behind schedule. A sensible management move, but against the spirit of 20 percent time, which was meant to liberate creative employees from meddling middle management.

As well, Googlers are finding it harder to get their side projects approved. A mess of side projects — Google This, Google That, Google Whatever — launched and then ignored by users, led Google to tighten up the criteria for what Googlers can work on.

The end result: Ideas like Gmail Labs. Googlers can innovate, but only in tiny sandboxes; on core products, not on big new ideas. Only Larry and Sergey, and their favored minions, get to dream big dreams about overturning the telecom industry or revolutionizing the world's energy infrastructure, or whatever the founders' power-mad geek fantasies are this week.

Which means Google is increasingly just another company. And 20 percent time? A dressed-up version of the office suggestion box.

Delivered-To: jlgolson@valleywag.com Received: by 10.78.198.2 with SMTP id v2cs346280huf; Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:22 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.142.88.20 with SMTP id l20mr5814001wfb.72.1204147941025; Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:21 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <> Received: by 10.142.88.20 with SMTP id l20mr9735271wfb.72; Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:21 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <00504502c79604472a8a48285026d3b@googlemail.com> From: Mail Delivery Subsystem To: jlgolson@valleywag.com Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:32:21 -0800 (PST)

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David, thinking of coming down to New York next week. Meet for a cup =20
of coffee?

—

Jordan Golson
Valleywag — Gawker Media
jlgolson@valleywag.com

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