Google Workspace Status Dashboard

johnwalker

When I wrote “The Digital Imprimatur” almost twenty years ago (published on 2003-09-13), I was motivated by the push for mandated digital rights management with hardware enforcement, attacks on anonymity on the Internet, the ability to track individuals’ use of the Internet, and mandated back-doors that defeated encryption and other means of preserving privacy against government and corporate surveillance. //

This time it’s called “Web Environment Integrity 1” (WEI), and it comes, not from Microsoft but from the company that traded in their original slogan of “Don’t be evil 1” for “What the Hell, evil pays a lot better!”—Google.

So, what is WEI? Let’s start with a popular overview from Ars Technica.

Eight years after Google Domains launched, and a little more than a year after it graduated out of beta, Google is "winding down following a transition period," as part of "efforts to sharpen our focus." That's corporate-ese for "We need to keep cost-cutting, so we're selling this business we just finished shaping up to Squarespace." //

However clean and orderly a transition the two companies try to emulate, the sale cannot help but further Google's image as a company that readily gives up on projects that aren't core to its advertising business, even those that have matured and would seem to encourage a tie-in with Google accounts. //

Goofball_Jones Ars Praefectus
13y
3,532
So, looking back at the Google Graveyard, it seems their ongoing philosophy is "if we can't totally dominate a market with a service, we'll kill the service". I mean, look what is left is just the major things they totally dominate. YouTube, Search, Email, and to some extent, Android. That's why it's a laugh-fest when they announce something new because we all know if they don't dominate the world with it within a year, they'll kill it off.

I picture in the future some service they come up with that will keep you alive well past the usual age of dying....only to kill it off a few years later, telling the people currently on it "you have 30 days to take care of your affairs and say goodbye to your family and friends. Thank you for supporting GoogleLife" //

cdd Smack-Fu Master, in training
2d
1
The $180 million Google gets from the sale doesn't even come close to covering the $226 million they paid Sundar Pichai in 2022 and only serves to erode consumer trust in Google's willingness to continue any of its products. If they need the money, why not just hire a cheaper CEO?

"The simplest way to keep a Google Account active is to sign-in at least once every 2 years." That's all it takes to be active. Google also lists a few examples of "activity" if you're already signed in:

Activity might include these types of actions you take when you sign in or while you’re signed in to your Google Account:

• Reading or sending an email
• Using Google Drive
• Watching a YouTube video
• Downloading an app on the Google Play Store
• Using Google Search
• Using Sign in with Google to sign in to a third-party app or service

Other "inactive" documentation on Google's support system lists 'Android check-ins' as a viable form of activity. So theoretically plugging in an Android phone would be enough to keep your account active forever. It also says paying a Google One storage subscription counts as "activity."

Interestingly, Google Photos seems to have its own entirely separate "activity" metrics that could result in only your photos being deleted. Photos requires visiting the Google Photos app or website, or uploading a photo every two years.

People who are already over the "inactive for two years" mark won't have their accounts deleted immediately. The Great Google Account Purge is officially scheduled for December 2023. Having your account deleted shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, with Google promising to send "multiple notifications over the months leading up to deletion, to both the account email address and the recovery email (if one has been provided)."

"Google consciously failed to preserve relevant evidence. The daily destruction of relevant evidence was inevitable when Google set a company-wide default to delete history-off chat messages every 24 hours, and then elected to maintain that auto-delete setting for custodians subject to a litigation hold," US Department of Justice antitrust lawyers wrote in a memorandum supporting the motion.

Google "had a duty to preserve employee chat messages" starting in 2019 due to the litigation, the US motion said. //

"Amazingly, Google's daily spoliation continued until this week," the US alleged. "When the United States indicated that it would file this motion—following months of conferral—Google finally committed to 'permanently set to history on' and thus preserve its employees' chat messages." //

A similar motion for sanctions was filed by 21 states that are also involved in the litigation against Google. The motions came in a lawsuit filed in October 2020 in which the US and states allege that Google illegally maintains monopolies in search and search advertising through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices." //

All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had "put a legal hold in place" that "suspends auto-deletion." Indeed, during the United States' investigation and the discovery phase of this litigation, Google repeatedly misrepresented its document preservation policies, which conveyed the false impression that the company was preserving all custodial chats. Not only did Google unequivocally assert during the investigation that its legal hold suspended auto-deletion, but Google continually failed to disclose—both to the United States and to the Court—its 24-hour auto-deletion policy. Instead, at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.

The dispute is similar to an earlier one in the same lawsuit that involved Google's alleged practice of routinely CCing lawyers on emails even when no legal advice is being sought. In March 2022, the US and states asked the federal court to sanction Google for misusing attorney-client privilege to hide emails from litigation.

Searching Google for downloads of popular software has always come with risks, but over the past few months, it has been downright dangerous, according to researchers and a pseudorandom collection of queries.

“Threat researchers are used to seeing a moderate flow of malvertising via Google Ads,” volunteers at Spamhaus wrote on Thursday. “However, over the past few days, researchers have witnessed a massive spike affecting numerous famous brands, with multiple malware being utilized. This is not ‘the norm.’”

3. Lower the audio quality
   Some users suggest lowering the audio quality as the songs are buffering on the highest one (256kbps AAC). You can do that in the app settings and, hopefully, the issues will stop once you transfer to Normal quality. We understand that this shouldn’t be a thing, but it seems that Google still needs a lot of work to make YouTube Music a valid successor to Google Play Music. //

4. Disable Battery optimization
   Another possible reason for YouTube Music stopping mid-playback is the aggressive system app management. Some Android skins tend to kill the apps in the background to save battery. You can avoid this by disabling Battery optimization for YouTube Music.

If you are familiar with linux/unix then there is a simpler method using wget/curl.

Steps:

• Initiate download via takeout page in your browser
• Go to "Window->Downloads"
• Locate the download which is in-progress right now
• Right click + Copy link address
• From your terminal - wget '{url}'

wget is more stable. you can manually set timeouts.

Bonus: you can initiate this from a remote server. I have seen speeds upto 250 MBps from remote servers. Just be sure not to cancel the browser download before your wget finishes.

Thanks! As of 04/2022 this still works. :) I would recommend using screen if you are using wget on a remote server through ssh. – daco Apr 2 at 8:47

I would also add the use of wget this way wget -O customname "url" as wget, in my case, did not use the file name and just part of the url as the filename (which makes it hard to identify which file is which). – daco Apr 2 at 8:52

G Suite Customer Takeout: Bulk Download using Terminal

here are exact steps I took (on a fedora system) to programatically download my gsuite takeout from the bucket:

Install gsutil standalone

wget https://storage.googleapis.com/pub/gsutil.tar.gz

# tar xvfz gsutil.tar.gz
# cd gsutil

Connect gsutil to G suite account

To create a read-only token, use the command below: visit the browser to get an API token, then paste the API token back into the terminal. Later it asks for a "project-id", which can be any string apparently.

# ./gsutil config -r

Actually download the backup

Go to G Suite Customer Takeout [https://admin.google.com/ac/customertakeout], click on "Access Archive" and find the bucket id. In my case, this ID has the form takeout-export-123456abcdef-123456abcedf

To download the entire bucket recursively with rsync:

# ./gsutil rsync -r gs://takeout-export-123456abcdef-123456abcedf /tmp/

If you already have an OAuth2 access token, you can pass it in the "Authorization" header:

wget --header "Authorization: Bearer <your access token>" -O file "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/LONG_ID_STRING/export?gid=0&format=csv"

Unfortunately, that's the simple part. Getting an OAuth2 access token on the command line is more challenging.

You should first create your own project in the API Console or Cloud Platform console, which will give you your own OAuth2 client id and client secret.

Next, from the Google OAuth2 Developer Playground at https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground/, you could then get an access token (and more importantly, a refresh token) with offline access, for the scopes https://www.googleapis.com/auth/spreadsheets (and probably https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive), using your Client Id and Client Secret under the "OAuth 2.0 configuration" (it's the Settings icon - the little gear in the top right), by checking "Use your own OAuth credentials".

After you've added your client id and client secret, you can work through the steps on the left to ultimately get an access token and the refresh token.

G Suite Customer Takeout: Bulk Download using Terminal
Building on repertor's great insight, here are exact steps I took (on a fedora system) to programatically download my gsuite takeout from the bucket:

Install gsutil standalone

wget https://storage.googleapis.com/pub/gsutil.tar.gz

 # tar xvfz gsutil.tar.gz
 # cd gsutil

Connect gsutil to G suite account

To create a read-only token, use the command below: visit the browser to get an API token, then paste the API token back into the terminal. Later it asks for a "project-id", which can be any string apparently.

 # ./gsutil config -r

Actually download the backup
Go to G Suite Customer Takeout, click on "Access Archive" and find the bucket id. In my case, this ID has the form
takeout-export-123456abcdef-123456abcedf

To download the entire bucket recursively with rsync:

 # ./gsutil rsync -r gs://takeout-export-123456abcdef-123456abcedf /tmp/

Apple's Safari web browser has more than 1 billion users, according to an estimate by Atlas VPN. Only one other browser has more than a billion users, and that's Google's Chrome. But at nearly 3.4 billion, Chrome still leaves Safari in the dust.

It's important to note that these numbers include mobile users, not just desktop users. Likely, Safari's status as the default browser for both the iPhone and iPad plays a much bigger role than its usage on the Mac.

Still, it's impressive given that Safari is the only major web browser not available on Android, which is the world's most popular mobile operating system, or Windows, the most popular desktop OS. //

According to the data, Chrome has approximately 3,378,967,819 users, while Safari has 1,006,232,879. In a very distant third place is Microsoft's Edge, at 212,695,363. Firefox is hot on Edge's tails in fourth at 179,084,244.

The blog post claims that Edge only just overtook Firefox for the third-place spot in the past year.

Click this link to stop your GSuite account from being shut down! We're serious. //

Google finally launched a solution for people with "legacy" GSuite Google accounts. After initially threatening to shut down free GSuite accounts if users didn't start paying for the service, Google has completely backed off. Once users jump through some sign-up hoops, Google will allow their ~16-year-old accounts to continue functioning. You'll even get to keep your email address. //

The deadline to opt out of an account shutdown, which has changed several times now, is June 27, 2022. If you don't complete this opt out by June 27, you will be automatically billed for Workspace. If you don't have a card on file and don't opt out, your account will be suspended on August 1 and shut down.

The automatic enrollment and billing, without explicit user consent, is one of the wilder parts of this story. If you don't closely follow the tech news scene, there's a good chance you won't know this is coming, and you will either suddenly be billed without your consent or find that your Google account has suddenly stopped working.

For a company whose key business pillar is convincing users to store vast amounts of data on its servers, playing games like this is a bizarre decision. At least it came to a reasonable conclusion.

Export your organization's data
Super Administrators can export their organization’s users’ data to a Google Cloud archive. Most Google Workspace data can be exported. For details, go to Data included in your export. However, deleted user data is unavailable for export, unless the data was subject to Google Vault retention policies.

If you prefer that your users download their own data, refer them to Download your data. Make sure Google Takeout is turned on.

Naturally, this move led to a huge outcry outside (and apparently inside) Google, and now, the company seems to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement. First, Google is launching a survey of affected G Suite users—apparently, the company is surprised by how many people this change affected. Second, it's promising a data-migration option (including your content purchases) to a consumer account before the shutdown hits.

Billions of emails saved with Gmvault since its creation.
Backup and restore your gmail account at will.

Get started with Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals for homeschools

This article is for homeschools in the U.S. If you aren’t a homeschool, go to Qualifications for Google Workspace for Education.

Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals provides free business features to K–12 and higher education institutions and homeschool co-ops.

More tools, more time: A new productivity option for homeschoolers

Homeschool state organizations and co-ops: you asked, and we listened.

Previously, Google's "G Suite for Education"—a collection of productivity and collaboration tools geared towards educational organizations—was only available to accredited schools.

But a number of homeschool co-ops wanted to offer this to their families, and reached out to us for help. So HSLDA worked with Google to open up its G Suite for Education to homeschool organizations. Your co-op can now take advantage of the wealth of productivity tools offered in the Suite. . . . it's voluntary, and best of all, it's FREE!

Here's what you need to know.

If you are a state or regional homeschool organization that wants to participate, please contact HSLDA to set up an account. You can email us at GroupServices@hslda.org or call us at 540-338-5600.

If you are a local homeschool co-op that wants access to Google's G Suite for Education, please check the list below to find your state or regional homeschool organization. You will receive a verification code, which you can use to set up an account on G Suite's website. Your co-op must have a website to use G Suite.

Newly unredacted court filings show that Google may have leveraged its end-to-end control over the auction-driven display advertising market to unfairly funnel revenues away from publishers and competing advertising exchanges, and back to itself, to the tune of $250 million in annual revenue dating back to 2013.

The crux of this alleged manipulation involves Google publicly stating that its auction system used a second-price model, when in fact it may have actually been using a third-price model — at least when it suited Google. //

Many in the publishing and advertising industries have suspected foul play on the part of Google for years, and those suspicions increasingly appear to have been valid.

As we recently detailed in a 25,000-word article, Google's messaging history is one of constant product startups and shutdowns. Thanks to a lack of product focus or any kind of top-down mandate from Google's CEO, no division is really "in charge" of messaging. As a consequence, the company has released 13 halfhearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011. If Google has anyone to blame for the iMessage's dominance, it should start with itself, since it has continually sabotaged and abandoned its own plans to make an iMessage competitor.

Messaging is important, and even if it isn't directly monetizable, a dominant messaging app has real, tangible benefits for an ecosystem. The rest of the industry understood this years ago. Facebook paid $22 billion to buy WhatsApp in 2014 and took the app from 450 million users to 2 billion users. Along with Facebook Messenger, Facebook has two dominant messaging platforms today, especially internationally. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack in 2020, and Tencent's WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, is pulling in 1.2 billion users and yearly revenues of $5.5 billion. Snapchat is up to a $67 billion market cap, and Telegram is getting $40 billion valuations from investors. Google keeps trying ideas in this market, but it never makes an investment that is anywhere close to the competition. //

Google once had a functional competitor to iMessage in the past, called Google Hangouts. Circa 2015, Hangouts was a messaging powerhouse, which in addition to the native Hangouts messaging, also received SMS and Google Voice messages. Hangouts did group video calls five years before Zoom blew up, and it had clients on Android, iOS, the web, Gmail, and every desktop OS via a Chrome extension.

As usual though, Google lacked any kind of long-term plan or ability to commit to a single messaging strategy, and Hangouts only survived as the "everything" messenger for a single year. By 2016, Google moved on to the next shiny messaging app and left Hangouts to rot. //

Despite Google's whining about iMessage, it seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today, Google messaging is the worst and most fragmented it has ever been. As of press time, the company runs eight separate messaging platforms, none of which talk to each other: there is Google Messages/RCS, which is being promoted today, but there's also Google Chat/Hangouts, Google Voice, Google Photos Messages, Google Pay Messages, Google Maps Business Messages, Google Stadia Messages, and Google Assistant Messaging. Those last couple apps aren't primarily messaging apps but have all ended up rolling their own siloed messaging platform because no dominant Google system exists for them to plug into.

It is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015