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A Change to Google Code Download Service
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI love how they always talk about "abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently" and the "desire to keep our community safe and secure". Whether it is about downloads or about disabling XMPP federation. This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures. I mean, what won't you do for the children? For keeping our community safe? What, you don't want this measure? It seems you aren't a team player then.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures I would say that whether or not it is in fact true (and the question you don't address even indirectly of whether, if the stated problem is true, the response is proportional) is more important than whether or not bad actors have used somewhat analogous claims when they were false as pretext for restrictive measures. Every legitimate justification for action has been used, at one point or another, by some bad actor to justify some bad act.
- jlarocco 13y agoWow. Your sense of entitlement is astounding. Google's taking away a minor feature of a completely free "product", and your response is to compare them to bureaucrats in the USSR? Feel free to use something else.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoI don't use many Google product but yeah, I do feel entitled to mock them for Politburo-style decision process and rhetoric. I sit with a bag of popcorn watching them ruining their image.
- skore 13y agoYou may not be wrong, but the contrast you draw is still unnecessary and annoying.
- motters 13y agoDownloads are hardly a minor feature. Having a downloadable package makes it significantly easier for users to try open source software. The average user is very unlikely to want to compile from source.
- jlarocco 13y agoGoogle Code (and GitHub) aren't for average users. They're developer tools. Download links belong on the project web page.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Google Code (and GitHub) aren't for average users. They're developer tools. Google Code has a number of features -- not just downloads, but also wiki, etc. -- that, while not intended to replace a user-centric site separate from the developer site Google Code is intended to provide, in practice facilitate projects using it that way.
- anonyfuss 13y agoPeople do publish open-source developer tools -- for developers. They even publish binaries for those developers.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Downloads are hardly a minor feature. Having a downloadable package makes it significantly easier for users to try open source software. While it has a set of features which may have made it usable for this use, I don't think Google Code was ever really intended to provide user facing web sites for open source projects, it was designed to provide developer facing project sites.
- BarkMore 13y agoGoogle Talk supports XMPP federation and has done so since January 2006. To deal with an onslaught of spam, Google disabled incoming subscription requests for a short time. During this time, all other XMPP federation features continued to work. Hangouts does not use XMPP, but it's a feature that they didn't implement. It's not something that they disabled.
- mey 13y agoWhile Google has not announced an actual EOL of Google Talk, you can no longer download the desktop client and the Android application tries to directly upgrade to Google Hangout. From a systems perspective, they have basically prevented anyone new from getting on Google Talk. I am expecting an EOL announcement at some point, as they are otherwise making it hard to get into. See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.talk https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... and http://talk.google.com http://talk.google.com
- BarkMore 13y agoYeah, Google Talk will probably be included on the third spring cleaning list. When Google drops support for XMPP federation, it will be because they are killing an entire product. It will not be because they are disabling a feature.
- mietek 13y agoDid you really just compare Google to a totalitarian regime responsible for millions of deaths?
- guard-of-terra 13y agoNeither late Soviet nor contemporary Russia are responsible for millions of deaths. Any meaningful number of deaths anyway. They're just boring and insincere.
- davidrudder 13y ago"Due to this increasing misuse of the service and a desire to keep our community safe and secure, we are deprecating downloads." What misuse? Did I miss something? Lots of pedo-porn or something? Or was it simply people using Google code to transfer pirated files?
- marshray 13y agoAny time you serve raw user-supplied files from * .[your site].com you take on some risk. Older browsers in particular just love to treat everything under the same second level domain as coming from the "same origin". Browsers even have a hardcoded list of country codes and exceptions to prevent "example.co.uk" from setting cookies for all of "*.co.uk". It's a total security mess and ICANN is not helping the situation by selling new gTLDs.
- a3_nm 13y agoErr... Google can just use a custom domain (e.g. "googleusercontent.com" that they already use) to serve user-supplied files rather than stopping the service altogether, so I guess this is not the issue here.
- marshray 13y agoDo you have any idea what it takes to (securely) bring up a new domain at that scale? Hint: Take a look at the Subject Alt Names on some of the Google SSL certs sometime.
- denzil_correa 13y agoabuse with a significant increase in incidents recently You mean to say people using Google Code to share porn, copyright material etc. when they can actually do so via other more effective means?
- dragonwriter 13y ago> You mean to say people using Google Code to share porn, The abuse reports I find from doing a search seem mostly to be that and malware, yeah. > when they can actually do so via other more effective means? I don't think Google really cares if people currently abusing Google Code's download hosting could do the same thing easier elsewhere or not, they care that they are doing on Google Code, and consequently are consuming Google staff resources (and, hence, $$) addressing the resulting abuse reports.
- zmmmmm 13y agoThat's crazy. Google can't tell the difference between legit downloads and "abusive" material? Google Code projects are already tied to a Google user account, what difference does it make if that user puts their abusive material on Google Drive instead of the downloads section of Google Code? There are tonnes of code hosting sites going back as far as SourceForge and none of them ever came up with something like this. There's something extremely weird about Google making this kind of developer hostile move. Why would I use Google Code now when there are any number of alternatives that have no problem with hosting downloads? It's like they are trying to drive us away. I hope it doesn't hint at Google Code being on the "sunsetting" list in the future.
- notimetorelax 13y agoIt doesn't look like they were improving it either. I guess with Google it means only one thing...
- asb 13y agoGitHub also made this move a while back (so it's not completely unprecedented), though I agree it's massively inconvenient.
- zmmmmm 13y agoThanks .... I must have missed that github did this too (been a while since I tried to post a download there, but I have a number of active Google Code projects). I wonder if it gives them some kind of safe harbour from the copyright industry. Perhaps a Google Code download is a "download from Google" vs a Google Drive download being a "download from that user".
- dragonwriter 13y ago> I wonder if it gives them some kind of safe harbour from the copyright industry. FWIW, when I search, I see quite a lot of abuse reports for malware; this may have little to nothing to do with the copyright industry (against whom they already have a safe harbor for user-submitted content due to the DMCA.)
- Wilya 13y agoWhat were the size limits for hosted downloads (they say some limits exist, but no numbers in the FAQ) ? I could understand if they provided too much space for free that they would want to deprecated that in favor of Google drive.
- conroy 13y agoAs a developer of open-source, downloadable software (a video game), the removal of download sections from source hosting websites (GitHub, Google Code) is really frustrating. Instead, I either have to commit my binaries to a repository, or host them myself of S3. Edit: Yes, I know that many free options exist and I plan on switching to one of them soon. I just wish that I didn't have to use another service for a common task associated with software development.
- trentmb 13y ago... or use bittorent...
- vy8vWJlco 13y agoFor that matter, with BTSync I can share my project's git repository with a read-only "secret" (identifier, like a magnet link) and cut out google code/github, etc, all together (now, if only there were a foss version).
- brondsem 13y agoSourceForge still supports downloads and provides pretty good stats around them too. You can put your OSS file releases on SourceForge and keep other project stuff (code, tickets, etc) elsewhere if you want. Under Admin, Tools, you can pick and choose which SourceForge tools to use or not, and even add external links to project resources on other sites Disclosure: I work for SourceForge
- Kerrick 13y agoOr dream host's Files Forever. You pay once to put them up, and then they can be downloaded for free by anyone.
- andfarm 13y agoAlso gone for unrelated reasons, sorry: https://files.dreamhost.com/ https://files.dreamhost.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- motters 13y agoThis makes little sense, and seems like Google moving to distance itself from the open source community. Without downloads it's extremely unlikely that the average user will be able to try running an open source application. Especially for the larger and more popular projects with multiple dependencies the prospect of compiling from source can be quite daunting especially for anyone who is not a software developer.
- rasterizer 13y agoBefore someone veers into a misguded USSR analogy (too late: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5753890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5753890) note that Github also disabled downloads months ago: https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads Seems like it's a pain point for code hosting services.
- piokuc 13y agoBitbucket doesn't have this problem.
- c0nfused 13y agoBitbucket will have this problem. Anyone giving away free file hosting eventually runs into this problem. Google just happens to also have drive to fall back on.
- piokuc 13y agoWe'll see if Bitbucket takes these kind of drastic measures. Anyway, I don't understand one thing: why is it safer to let developers host the download files on their drive? What's the difference, really? Nobody could upload the files anonymously, could they? Perhaps it's just a way to 'encourage' people to use the drive?
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Anyway, I don't understand one thing: why is it safer to let developers host the download files on their drive? What's the difference, really? Drive's intended use case and sharing model may support dealing with abuse reports more efficient (for instance, it might make it practical to shift a reported file to non-publicly-shared after receiving an abuse report but before confirming that it contains malware.)
- mh- 13y agoI think the problem comes with a significant userbase
- piokuc 13y agoI don't really know the numbers of projects hosted on bitbucket and Google Code but it's true that it's often the case that the underdog (say Bitbucket in this case) offers the best value. Apart from the downloads they also offer free private repos.
- wfunction 13y agoIs it just me who smells BS? Why hasn't this happened to SourceForge?
- zwily 13y agoMaybe SourceForge makes enough off the bajillion ads they host on download pages to make it worth it?
- dsl 13y agoSourceForge doesn't host any of the downloads. They depend on donated mirrors. http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Mirrors http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Mirrors
- marshray 13y agoBecause something else happened to SourceForge instead.
- Siecje 13y agoI don't care where you have to host the files. It should be easy for a user to download your code, plain and simple.
- tiziano88 13y agoThis is not about the code, just binaries or other kinds of download
- rpicard 13y agoI don't really have much of an opinion on the news itself, but I'm curious how they decided on January 14th / 15th as the cut-off date. It seems sort of arbitrary.
- rurban 13y agoI especially chose code.google.com over github. After the SourceForge troubles I thought, this is a big company, which will not go away soon. I can trust them hosting my repos there. In comparison to github. But unfortunately github turned out to improve their stack constantly in contrast to googlecode, and now it seems they are also turning down downloads, though that would be a feature that is much cheaper for them to support than for github. It's minimum support cost, their bandwidth is free and almost unlimited. bad bad bad. I start to regret my decision. Though really, binary downloads for open source projects make not much sense nowadays. Compile from source or leave it to a distro.
- raylu 13y agoBinary downloads are often important for Windows projects, though.
- rurban 13y agoSo, if windows users cannot deal with open source they should get it from closed source. The binary distros do exist. mingw or cygwin even have graphical UIs. Not a googlecode problem. I hate to provide binary dll's for lazy windows users. windows compilers are free nowadays.
- anonyfuss 13y agoNot everything belongs in a distribution. You have a short-sighted view of what open source is and how people consume it.
- raylu 13y agoA lot of these aren't Linux/POSIX projects so mingw/cygwin don't solve the problem. It could be as simple as a python project that needs to be bundled in exe form or a .NET project.
- rurounijones 13y agoMaybe confirmation bias but it seems every article I see about Google these days is either: A) How Google is shutting down / degrading yet another service. B) Crazy things Schmidt says. C) Google Glass Could be doing better on the PR front Google.
- rgo 13y agoI wonder where they're going to take the Go downloads page to: https://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list https://code.google.com/p/go/downloads/list