Software licenses and the guarantees they come with are not only often incomprehensible to most people, the guarantees themselves usually guarantee nothing at all. Software and online services are often delivered ‘AS IS’. We’ve often read stories about how if software companies had to live up to the same standards as any other company, the software we all use would be dramatically more reliable, while also speculating on how bad cars would be if they could be sold on as ‘AS IS’ basis.

Google took some 30 hours to respond to the publication of the latest Gmail breach, and complained that the teenage bug discoverer should have contacted them first to give Google time to fix the problem before ‘everyone’ knew about it.

I guess software fixes take time to write, but 30 hours gives anyone the ability to run a zero day attack, if they know what they’re doing. I certainly wouldn’t know how without searching the Internet to find out, but it’d probably take me a lot more than 30 hours to get it all working. Of course I’m not interested in personally hacking anyone’s computer (other than, I suppose, my own), so I don’t spend much time, if any, on the topic.

There is also speculation that spammers have known about this flaw for some time, and have been potentially harvesting millions of legitimate Gmail addresses.

Google also had a different set back with Gmail in the last week – a very small number of users logged onto Gmail only to find that their email was deleted, potentially irretrievably. Google claimed that less than 100 users worldwide were affected.

Still, all of this shows us how fragile our data can be, especially when hosted online. If you do host online, whether as a private individual or as a company, you need to make sure that you have backups on your own computer, and if you really care about your data, you need to make backups on removable storage, like a CD, DVD, tape or portable/external hard drive from any number of companies out there.

Life online is insecure. Just like life in the offline, real world. If you step onto the street without looking where you’re going, your last thought might be ‘hey, what’s this bus doing on top of me?’.

The only things we consumers can do is to ensure we have good backups of all our data, and to check that the services we use (whether online, or on our PCs) have a simple and easy to use backup and restore function. We also need to let companies that offer software-as-a-service know that we expect the highest levels of service and quality from them, whether free or paid, and especially if as a paid service, if they want us to trust using their services.

And one of these days, software companies have to get real about providing proper warranties and guarantees. I’ve no idea when that day will come, but just as Microsoft recently extended their Xbox 360 warranty from 90 days to 1 full year, all software companies will one day have to change their tune, provide quality of service guarantees and warrant that their software will do what it says on the box, and not take the ‘AS IS’ route.
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