simple security

Read on Slashdot that someone had created a virtual filesystem for windows using GMail. That means that your spare GMail account space is going to show up as a separate drive under 'My Computer' and then you can upload/download files and use it pretty much as any other filesystem.

I downloaded the executable and installed it. It works pretty much as advertised. I even saw a new GMailFS drive under 'My Computer'. Tried to upload a couple of files, create a directory, delete a file and everything works perfectly fine. Heck, even the installation was super smooth - under 60 seconds.

How does Google get impacted? Well, they created GMail so that they could serve you ads side by side your email conversation. They make their moolah from ad revenue. Any attempt to bypass that mechanism is going to draw their attention. Sooner or later, they are going to stop/thwart these kind of attempts that want to capitalize on the 1 GB of space offered by Google. But this is the second cool hack, based upon using GMail as the filesystem, that I come across in the past 1 month. Sure, GMail hacks are gaining momentum.