St 18 září 2013

While reading blogpost by Karl Dubost of Mozilla I was again irritated by the quotation Karl used which mentioned Google’s claim of the universal access to the world knowledge. I have replied in probably not the best way on Twitter and lead Karl into confusion on what I wanted to say.

I am one of the co-maintainers of almost dead project jBrout. In order to make the communication around the project at least more lively, I have created GMane group for it. In order to make the group complete on Gmane, I have also tried to export all messages from the Google Group for jBrout only to find that there is no way how to do it. Data Liberation Front is completely mum on the Groups and I found that new JavaScript-only design of the web pages preclude any script to scrap those messages. So much for the universal access when even Lynx cannot open these pages.

When I was writing last year about the problems I have with Google, one Google engineer seemed offended by my despect towards Google’s lack of openness. However, if I am not mistaken, there is still no offline Gmail support for non-Chrome and I haven’t heard anywhere else about plans of creating one. And offenses towards the open Web still continue: not only my petty problem with Google Groups (although, didn’t Google named itself a steward of all Usenet content?), but also ActiveX^H^H^H^HNaCl proprietary technology which seems to sneak silently into their platform, weird state of Google Hangout (yes, XMPP S2S communication as of today still works, but for how long? I don’t see any Google’s commitment to the open standards anymore), breaking OpenID delegation (actually, I may be wrong on this one), and some others.

Concerning Google Groups I have also found this post which seems to follow the same logic as I am poorly trying to express.

Update: After comments on this post, I have actually managed to create a script for semi-automatical scraping of Google Groups

Category: computer Tagged: google ourcloud liberation identity privacy xmpp