Arrington reports that a G-mail archiver called G-Archiver, which backs up all of your Gmail emails to your hard drive, sends every user’s email address and password to the creator’s own email account, giving him access to all of their Gmail messages. And he observes:
That has led a number of experts to conclude that Google Apps can never be a real threat to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint. All of the sensitive business information of a company, if stored on Google’s servers, is just a password guess, or in this case what is effectively a phishing scam, away.
This reprises his earlier observation (which I amplified here) that “unauthorized document access is a simple password guess or government ‘request’ away.”
Looking down the horizon, I don’t see why it’s better to have computing and storage done remotely. Better security (for the corporation and individual alike) will come from owning and physically controlling your storage and computing. The winners won’t be the providers of computing in the cloud (think Google); it’ll be the ones who make the portable and easy-to-use devices (think Apple).
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.