Gmail will be restored for everyone very soon, says Google

By Jeffrey Van Camp March 1, 2011

If you are one of the .02 percent of Gmail users that logged into your email account on Sunday and found that all of your mail was missing, Google says it’s “very sorry” and will have the problem fixed as soon as possible. In a blog post, Ben Treynor, Google’s vice president of engineering and site reliability ‘czar’ apologized to users affected by a bug that crept up when Google updated its storage software. The bug deleted all online copies of Gmail data Google had for as many as 30,000 users. Luckily, the search giant keeps a spare backup of all its data offline.

“To protect your information from these unusual bugs, we also back it up to tape,” said Treynor. “Since the tapes are offline, they’re protected from such software bugs. But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds.”

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The bug was first reported by on Sunday when a number of scared users posted on the official Gmail forums. Initially, Google claimed that about .29 percent of users were affected by the bug, but has since reduced that number to .08 percent and finally to .02 percent. There are about 150 million Gmail users, so a bit of quick math tells us that there are roughly 30,000 people suffering from email loss at this time.

Stay strong, affected Gmailers. If your emails aren’t already back, they’ll be arriving back in your inbox shortly.

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Report: Google is testing a complete redesign of Web-based Gmail

google testing complete redesign new features web gmail thumb

Detailed by Geek.com recently, the development team that works on Gmail is internally testing a simplified layout of the Web-based version. With more similarities to the mobile interface, the new Web interface, as seen in the screenshots, has been created with responsive design in mind. For those that are unfamiliar, responsive design mean that a site will automatically position elements on the screen based off the screen size. Basically, someone viewing the interface on a 1080p 24-inch monitor or a 10-inch tablet will have the same experience.

On the left side of the screen, Google appears to be transitioning to "fly-in" menus to select different folders or various inboxes. On the right side of the screen, Google has added a quick access menu at the bottom to quickly start an email as well as a Hangouts option at the top to launch into chat with an email contact. In the middle of the screen, Google has positioned all recent emails. The additional width of this layout will likely allow for longer subject lines. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a position for Google Adsense in this layout, a element of the current Gmail interface.

Computing

Google researchers say hacking attacks on journalists are likely state-backed

journalists likely targets state sponsored digital attacks say google researchers morgan marquis boire

A report from a pair of Google security engineers claims that 21 of the 25 largest news outlets in the world have been attacked by hackers that were likely either working for governments or carrying out the attacks in support of them, according to Reuters.
Shane Huntley, who released the report at a Black Hat conference in Singapore this week with co-author Morgan Marquis-Boire, says that journalists were "massively over-represented" in the overall pool of people who were victims of such attacks. For example, Huntley mentioned that Chinese hackers penetrated one "major" Western news outlet using a carefully-written questionnaire that was emailed to that organization's staff members.
"If you're a journalist or a journalistic organization we will see state-sponsored targeting and we see it happening regardless of region, we see it from all over the world both from where the targets are and where the targets are from," Huntley said.
Part of the problem is the lack of attention paid to security by news organizations. "A lot of news organizations are just waking up to this," said Marquis-Boire. However, individual journalists are taking steps to protect themselves and their sources, even as their organizations lag behind.
"We're seeing a definite upswing of individual journalists who recognize this is important," Marquis-Boire said.
Considering the volume of people that have used passwords as simplistic as "123456," we're not terribly surprised that a lack of focus on the issue of security has been at the forefront of the problem.

Computing

Got Gmail? You can now save attachments directly to Google Drive

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We're pretty sure you've done this dance before. You have Gmail attachments you want to put up on Google Drive, but you first need to download them to your machine and then upload them to your Google Drive account. Rinse and repeat. This is a huge annoyance if you're uploading lots of files, but much like the Lindy Hop and the Harlem Shake, this dance will soon be a thing of the past, according to an official Google blog post.
The blog post, which was written by Scott Johnston, Director of Product Management, states that with a new update to Gmail that is currently being rolled out, users will be able to save attachments directly to their Google Drive account from emails that contain them. When you open emails in Gmail after the update hits, any attachments in that email will contain a preview image of those attachments. By simply hovering your mouse pointer over one of these preview images, you'll get two options: either download to your machine or save directly to Google Drive. Clicking on a photo or document will bring up a full-screen version of it.
Though the Google blog post makes it seem like the feature is currently available to all, Johnston says later on in the post that the update to Gmail is rolling out "over the next week." So, sooner or later, the days of you having to download attachments just to upload them to Google Drive will be history.