Google Photos :: Not So Private

I thought I would give google photos another chance (probably it's third) it seemed pretty harmless. While I can see it is attempting to make sense of the mess. It just keeps making the mess bigger. At least the photo it autoloads it makes private, right, until you share them, right. Actually wrong all it does is use a 40 character code to make the photo link difficult to guess, this includes all the old photo from Picasa Web Album that you thought where safely private and only shared via a password.

Effectively there is a massive jungle of photos out there and your photos are sitting there in the wild. It is easy to test out (access a photo in google photos) there will be a long url name to access it (the name is a web link not a jpeg address by the way. Paste that into a file you write to a usb. Take the usb to a foreign computer you have not use and cut and then paste the url in a browser you have not used so It will not know your google ID. There is your photo! Other have noticed this issue.

This is a really big deal, A significant betrayal of my trust.

Whilst I intend to keep using google photos for my shared photos and images (mainly for my blog). I have already turned google photos off on my phone and I'm working through deleting a lot of photo from my google photos account.

And now for the BAD news

Unfortunately google is abandoning yet another photo product popular with users. Effective immediately they have formally notified that they no plans to updated (and support) the Nik software collection.

If you are a keen photographer, take RAW format photos and already have photoshop or lightroom, but don’t have the Nik software plug-ins yet, don’t delay download them now, they are free. They are popular because they are good.

I, like petapixel, once hoped that google supposedly an open source advocate, might make picasa, snap seed and the Nik tools open source and let keen users and photographers expand them. My cynical side feels google are squandering a lot of good photographic tools and abandoning the desktop/laptop/webapps space altogether to concentrate on capturing the mobile phone look-at-me-too eye’s (or their phone photo substitutes for seeing).

Stop it Windows 10 …before you go blind

I’m not sure why but I am getting an even uneasier feeling about an operating system that can update itself with asking me first. Today when I woke my my new spectre 2x from sleep mode I got the warning about the program wuapihost.exe (apparently a windows 10 program being blocked by the fire wall).

This is all a bit suspect, Microsoft security blocking a Microsoft program?

Looking at the microsoft community forums, shows there are a lot of “me too”s, but just jibberish and the typical “reboot” answer. Should I live dangerously? No the firewall block stays put.

Yet another Google favourite stumbles

It seems to have been at least two week since the last dissapointment with google. perhaps a recent record (actaully it was only 7 days I had to turn off the thumbnails in popular post on thr righthamd column of this blog) Ok it just seemed longer. Today I am woking in my studio which does use an old computer which is still running vista (and running a little slow but doesn’t give me the heartaches of the theoretically upgaded windows 10 machines). Its slow and stately, never misbehaves and fine for what I need.

However today I got the message that google will not be supporting chrome on Vista. This is a pity because using chrome across a range of computers and opeating systems was nice. What do I expect for free, obviously the confidence I once had in google is now almost none.

My only solution is to keep using the software tools google once brilliantly championed but now has lost interest in and hope there as no legacy, compatibilty or upgrade consequences to come.