This story caught e eye this morning, Oxford University made a decision to block Google Docs on the campus network at least temporarily for security reasons. Â You can read the article for why Oxford made this decision, the key though is how they see Google’s response (or lack thereof) to Phishing attacks running in Google Docs
Unfortunately, you then need to wait for them to take action. Of late that seems typically to take a day or two; in the past it’s been much longer, sometimes on a scale of weeks. Most users are likely to visit the phishing form when they first see the email. After all it generally requires “urgent†action to avoid their account being shut down. So the responses will be within a few hours of the mails being sent, or perhaps the next working day. If the form is still up, they lose. As do you – within the next few days, you’re likely to find another spam run being dispatched from your email system.
I personally use Google docs (personally not professionally) but the lack of response, or knowing when they will respond to a security incident is pretty scary.
I find that I have files stored in a number of places these days, Google Docs, Dropbox, Amazon S3, box, and Picasa to name a few. Â A while back I came across Otixo which allows me to access all of them in one place, and move files between the services all from one dashboard. Â Here is how Otixo explains their service:
Otixo also supports WebDAV access to your account, allowing you to see all your configured services as a mapped drive in Windows, great for uploading or moving files between services.
Join me for live coverage, comments, and photos from Sean Poulley’s LotusLive Cloud Collaboration Strategy session . Feel free to post your own comments or questions, I will do my best to respond.
You might recall back in December I was the lucky recipient of a Google Chrome CR-48 Notebook. I have been using it quite a bit and it has some really good points among them:
Instant on
Great battery life (8-10 hours of use per charge easy)
Full Keyboard ( not the biggest deal in the world, but nice)
Built in WiFi, and 3G (100 MB free and pay as you go plans)
Light
Based on all this at one point I thought it was almost the perfect Lotusphere machine. Where it is lacking is in two areas.
1. The CR-48 has very limited USB device support, it can not read my camera, or any of the card readers that I own, so there is no way to upload photos.
2. No local storage – again this is really about photos, I take a bunch of them at Lotusphere and I really don’t like to trust them for an entire week on an SD Card. With the CR-48 there is no way to back them up locally or mass upload them to Dropbox or something similar.
So while I have other devices coming with me, my Lenovo S10 Netbook will be making the trip again this year, it is about the same weight as the CR-48, a drop heavier, and decent battery life, but adds a lot in functionality that I need.
All that said, I am sure the USB device support situation will improve over time and as Chrome netbooks hit the market, not sure what if anything they would do about small amounts of local storage. I also believe that unless they bring them to market cheap (I mean less than $100.00 cheap) they won’t even make a dent in the surging tablet market.
I also think a year from now this would not even be a discussion, and tablets will have (even) more apps, and I would not even be looking for a full laptop of any sort for additional functionality.
