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I used to be an SRE on Google Enterprise - I ran the Admin panel you see in the article, and worked on Docs infrastructure. I endorse this message. It's import
by GauntletWizard 7y ago
I used to be an SRE on Google Enterprise - I ran the Admin panel you see in the article, and worked on Docs infrastructure.
I endorse this message. It's important that people understand how the technology they use works. Yes, Google Docs are stored in a format legible to the company. There were tool such that they could be included in legal holds or subpoenas. There were no access tools that Google or Googlers could read those documents directly, but they absolutely were included in legal discovery tooling. You should be aware of that fact, just as you should be aware that your enterprise can read (and include in response to subpoenas, etc) your e-mail.
Since the article mentioned TOS Violations as a potential threat vector, I'll also share an interesting anecdote: Journalists using Google Docs were one of our worst headaches. It was not uncommon for journalists to put Google Docs links, or internal links, into stories - It got used as an image sharing service a lot. At one point, there was insufficient (read: No) caching on some of the Google Spreadsheets "Graph" features... and the NY Times embedded an image generated by such into their homepage. The mechanism that prevented that from taking down all of google docs was the same one that prevents abuse. Documents with poor sharing properties are likely to trigger anti-abuse mechanisms, and get that TOS message in response. It's not personal, and quite frankly - I'm in agreement with the message, because while not intentional, it is abuse.
- aaomidi 7y agoThis sounds like you guys aren't doing your job correctly. You're literally serving a text file with a browser based editor, this doesn't need tremendous amounts of caching. If you can't handle the traffic a news article might bring to a google docs document, then you probably shouldn't be pushing for google docs. I can't believe I'm having to say this to someone who used to be an SRE at Google, but this is literally YOUR problem to solve.
- joshuamorton 7y ago> You're literally serving a text file with a browser based editor, this doesn't need tremendous amounts of caching. Serving anything dynamic at thousands of QPS requires a lot of caching.
- aaomidi 7y agoAnd if you can't pull it off, stop pushing everyone to use the cloud and your services.
- judge2020 7y agoThe point is that Docs is a tool for collaboration on writing, sheets for collaboration on spreadsheets, etc. Unless you get a contract with Google to use it as such, these services aren't meant for hotlinking or adding dynamic content to your website or article.
- privateSFacct 7y agoThough they have actually gotten pretty good for these uses now. I imagine they have something that adds a cached layer - I sometimes get a due to high volume reduced functionality message for the open shared popular items (rather than just an access denied).
- ValentineC 7y ago> Serving anything dynamic at thousands of QPS requires a lot of caching. QPS = queries per second?
- Klonoar 7y agoThis is needlessly aggressive and a bit ridiculous - unless you've worked on Google Docs specifically (and I'll assume you haven't, since most people would disclose in this case if they had), you have no way of knowing the unique challenges for both engineering and scale they'd have dealt with. I'd bet good money it's nowhere near as simple as "serving a text file".
- dang 7y agoCrossing into personal attack is not cool on HN and we ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart when posting here? We'd be grateful.
- Someone 7y ago”Yes, Google Docs are stored in a format legible to the company.” I would think that’s practically unavoidable if you want to support sharing of files and, in particular, concurrent editing.
- judge2020 7y agoIt's definitely not impossible to make collaborative end-to-end encrypted docs-like app, but it would add a lot of friction if you needed to be online, and on a computer that already has view access, to approve giving access to another person.