* Report on Google Desktop Search
Everybody has a different style for organizing their lives.
One of my friends has an office that to me resembles an archaeological dig. There are drifts of magazines in layers reaching back into the distant past; horizontal filing results in piles of opened and closed books all over the floor; tiny notes scrawled in minuscule handwriting on torn-off backs of Christmas cards from 1987 litter the space around his keyboard.
In contrast, my workspace is ridiculously neat. I have two 19-inch flat screens arrayed ergonomically in front of my ergonomic keyboard, which I use while sitting on my ergonomic kneeling chair. I almost never use paper; everything I do is electronic. I’ve even written a paper on how to organize your disk drive (see https://www2.norwich.edu/mkabay/methodology/osiod.pdf > ) so you too can be obsessively neat. One of my friends laughed at me when he noticed that I sort cash in my wallet by denomination (at least it’s not by serial number); others – including myself – chuckle because the shirts in my closet are arrayed with equal distance between the hangers.
These differences in tolerance for chaos or in (neurotic?) desire for neatness clearly extend to one’s computer desktop. For example, one of my dearest friends has something like a hundred icons scattered all over her desktop; I have two (My Computer and the Recycle Bin). All the other shortcuts that I use frequently are neatly (of course) arranged on two shortcut bars.
Well, enough of this amateur psychometric analysis. Let’s look at a tool that can help everyone, from the freeform free spirit to the neat freak: the Google Desktop Search (GDS) facility. You can find information about GDS at: https://desktop.google.com/about.html
Basically, it is a very fast, dynamic, constantly running indexing service for almost all the files on our computer disk, built on the same technology that many of us depend on for Web searching. Not only does it find files, it also finds e-mail messages, at least in Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express. Unfortunately, it does not index PDF files; however, people with the full Adobe Acrobat product can index all the PDF files on their disks quickly and easily using the integrated indexing function in that product.
I have been using GDS since Oct. 22 and have had no problems with it at all. It does exactly what it claims, does not get in the way, and does not appear to violate my privacy in any way.
One of my colleagues has promised to put a sniffer on his Internet connection to watch GDS when it transmits “non-personal usage data and crash reports to Google” as one of the options permits (you can, however, forbid even such innocent-sounding communication). I’ll let you know if he discovers anything awful.
In the meantime, Jon Callas, the CTO / chief security officer at PGP, has written an excellent article about the controversy over GDS in his “CTO Corner” at: https://www.pgp.com/resources/ctocorner/gds.html
He analyzes some of the consequences of using GDS in conjunction with encrypting disk drivers such as his company’s PGPDisk. He also provides a good list of articles from the trade press presenting arguments for and against GDS from a security perspective.
Callas is worried about indexing encrypted disk drives; indeed, my experience with GDS is that it does store a cache with copies of the original files. I know this because the index finds pointers to documents that I deleted weeks ago. Indeed, the cache is so good that it almost serves as a form of well-organized automatic backup facility. However, if you’re original files are encrypted but the Google files are not, the cache is clearly a violation of your security plan.
One possible solution may be to install the product onto your encrypted drive; maybe this will localize the cache to the encrypted drive. If you mount the drive automatically, this arrangement should not interfere with GDS. However, I don’t know if this solution will work because I haven’t tried it yet.
Another solution may come from those nice people at Google: after all, they’ve done wonders for us so far.
Disclaimer: I have no relation whatever to Google and I don’t own any of its stock.
