More on SpyMac, and its self-love
My last post on SpyMac still gets a fair amount of traffic from search engines, so I figured I would bring up the topic again (SpyMac is in the news). Due to Google announcing Gmail, SpyMac figured it would be cool to give out 1GB of email storage to its members.
If you took all Mac sites and rated them on a scale of “shady-ness”, SpyMac would be at the top. Besides calling it’s spattered collection of PHP scripts a “platform” or “operating system”, the site has a faux address at the Empire State Building listed as its home. Not to mention SpyMac is really based in Germany but co-founded from Canada. Just for fun, they are known to steal stories nearly verbatim from Mac news sites and act like it’s their right. Even more fun, their news feed is almost RSS but starts with SpymacNewsChannel version=”1.0″ so it won’t work as RSS. You could call that stealing nearly verbatim too, as they never mention RSS, but we won’t go that far.
And then we have the flutter of stories about the announcement from a few days ago. The site that launched out of a completely faked story back in 2001 called “iWalk” is now being called a Mac web host that has only been around a year. Sadly that’s probably just mistakes by press people who are too lazy to ask questions. I know how that goes, so we’ll give them a pass on that.
For as much code as SpyMac has written, it’s really ugly around the edges. Try logging in and you’ll get a white page with bold verdana redirecting you. Access something when you aren’t logged in, and you’ll see the same. The PHP is all in different files sitting on the main file index. No nice mod_rewrite action to have URL’s that lack cruft. No modular “platform” that can be seen.
When SpyMac realizes that 10,000 kids decided to load up a gig of email for kicks, we should see quite a show. Drives start dying and investors get cranky. Google is cashflow positive and has a track record of knowing how to scale to infinity. SpyMac can’t buy an advertiser and is only famous for lying. Who would you trust with your data?
For me, I’ll load up 1000MB of my favorite uncompressable junk email, 250 MB of my favorite compressed music, and whatever else I can find to take up my piece of the pie. I encourage you to do the same. I’ll even show you how to set up crontab to make sure that you use that data nightly.
Too bad no one has come up with an email to webdav conduit that would allow us to use it as cheap storage. In fact, that would be pretty sweet…
My big concern would be what they’ll do with your confidential data. First, do they really do a good job securing it given the other technical issues that you’ve pointed out? Second, if they go bust, I’m sure they’ll sell your private info in an auction.
Yea, but then you’d have slow buggy storage :).
I trust a billion dollar company to not screw things up more than a company that has all unknown investors and no business plan.
SpyMac could 404 tomorrow and no one could do anything. There isn’t a real address, no real records. It’s all faux. Google can’t leave. They are legally here, and we know it.
Yes, but from all the articles I’ve read, Google is practically run by a bunch of children (check slashdot). Just think about all of those young men rolling around in billions of dollars, and all they have to do is sit and cash their pay checks. I’m more worried about someone hitting the wrong button over there.
James, look at their job openings. You need a masters degree to wash the floors. They may have young blood, but they know what they are doing. The co-founders were smart enough to go get a CEO who knows a thing or two. The thing is, we don’t know about Spymac.
Good point.
Can’t say that I see a reason to test the spymac servers “to destruction” as suggested.
If they can provide a useful service, great, let them!
Spymac sucks! My Spymac weblog has apparently been deleted, no word or warning. Also, it is impossible to get answers from the “people” in “Tech Support” on the site. Screw you, Germans!