Amazon’s desktop-centric Cloud Drive syncing. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Amazon has quietly joined the ranks of cloud-based file syncing services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The company’s Amazon Cloud Drive — previously limited to a rather primitive web-based interface — now offers desktop file syncing tools like those found in Dropbox.

To test out the new Cloud Drive syncing, grab the new desktop app for Windows or OS X (sorry Linux fans, currently there is no desktop client for Linux).

Once you’ve installed the new Cloud Drive app, you’ll find a new folder on your drive — drop whichever files you’d like to sync into that folder and they’ll automatically be sent to Amazon’s servers. You’ll then have access to them on any computer with Cloud Drive installed and through the Cloud Drive web interface, though what you can do with files in the web interface is extremely limited.

It’s worth noting that the Cloud Drive app requires Java. As our friends at Ars Technica point out, that means users with newer Macs will be prompted to install Java as well (the Windows app comes with Java bundled).

There’s also no mobile apps for any platform (there is an Android Photo app, but all it does is send photos from your phone to Cloud Drive). In fact, while Cloud Drive will sync files between desktops, beyond that there isn’t much to see yet.

Part of the appeal of any web-based sync tool is ubiquitous access, not just via the web but in your favorite mobile apps as well and in that space Dropbox clearly has a huge lead over Cloud Drive.

Amazon offers 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free, with additional storage available at roughly $.50/GB, which is down from the $1/GB price back when Cloud Drive first launched. That’s on par with SkyDrive’s pricing and roughly half the price of Dropbox. In this case though — at least right now — you get what you pay for. Amazon has the makings of a Dropbox competitor but it still has a lot of catching up to do.

Your calendar, now part of your search results. Image: Google

If you’d like to participate, head on over to the signup page and add your account.

Once that’s done, just log in to your Google account. You’ll then be able to search Gmail, your Google Drive documents and now your Google Calendar appointments directly from the Google search page (or from within Gmail).

The Google Calendar integration doesn’t just add appointments, it also features support for natural language queries. For example, type “what is on my calendar today” and you’ll see the day’s agenda. More specific queries work as well; to find out when you’re meeting someone, just type “when am I meeting” and the person’s name.

Note that the personalized search trial is still only available to U.S. users with @gmail.com addresses (Google Apps accounts are out of luck for now). If you opt in and decide you hate it, you can always go back to the sign up page and turn universal search off.

Google+ Sign-In on Fitbit.com. Image: Google.

Google has announced a new feature for Google+ — third-party websites and applications can now offer sign ins through Google+.

The new Google+ Sign-Ins are essentially Facebook Connect for Google+, allowing you to not only sign-in to sites that support it, but also bring your Google+ profile data with you around the web.

The new Google+ Sign-In service will make it easier to share content from third-party sites (and within mobile apps). Exactly who will see the items you share on Google+ depends on the level of access you grant to an app, but in general you can share data with specific people on Google+, certain circles, or no one.

Here’s Google’s description of the actual sign-in process:

If you sign in to Gmail, YouTube or any other Google service, you can now use your existing credentials to sign in to apps outside of Google. Just review the Google+ permissions screen (outlining the data you’re sharing with the app, and the people who can see your activity), and you’re all set.

Google+ Sign-Ins aren’t just for web apps either — Google is pushing them for mobile apps as well. Starting today, when you sign in to a website with Google, you can install its mobile app on your Android device with a single click.

Google is also claiming that, because you can choose who to share things with, that it will mean less “social spam.” The Google+ Developer Blog even calls out Facebook’s “frictionless” sharing by name, saying “Google+ doesn’t let apps spray ‘frictionless’ updates all over the stream, so app activity will only appear when it’s relevant.” Of course one person’s “relevant” content is another’s spam, so take that claim with a bucket or two of salt.

Items you share from sites and apps using Google+ Sign-In show up as a slightly different “interactive” post in your friends’ Google+ stream. Clicking on these items will lead them to the app where they can listen to or buy or review the item you shared.

If you want to add Google+ Sign-In to your site or app, head on over to the new developer site and read through the documentation.

Under Construction. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age may be the best Tumblr blog we’ve seen, posting screenshots of old Geocities pages for a nostalgic look at the early web, back when everything was “Under Construction.”

For a brief time in the early ’90s Geocities was the web. And, for all its shortcomings, Geocities did nevertheless usher in much of what makes the web great — that anyone can create nearly anything.

The One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age Tumblr project is part of a Geocities research blog by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied. The Tumblr portion consists of automatically generated screenshots from the massive torrent of old Geocities homepages rescued by the Archive Team back in 2009. For posterity’s sake each post also carries the original URL (which obviously goes to a 404 page) and the date the page was last modified.

With Geocities long since deleted from Yahoo’s servers, browsing through One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age is as close as you’re likely to get to a trip down Geocities memory lane.

Image: Mark Rain/Flickr

Further complicating the matter, services routinely, and quietly, update their terms so that even if you did read the ToS that existed when you signed up, you might need to reread it several times over the course of using a service.

But now you can use Docracy’s new Terms of Service Tracker, which does the hard work for you. The service is essentially a GitHub for ToS agreements — a way to see changes over time and keep track of earlier versions. Docracy’s ToS tracker compares versions and highlights the changes so you can quickly see which rights your favorite services have recently subtracted from (or occasionally added to) their ToS agreements.

Whenever Docracy detects a change to a site’s ToS, it’s posted to the site. There’s an RSS feed you can subscribe to, though currently it’s a firehose feed of everything, with no easy way to filter by sites you care about. Docracy also says it will be tweeting changes that are “interesting, scandalous, or just plain funny.”

While ToS agreements may be confusing, users are beginning to take more of an interest, as evidenced by the outrage surrounding Instagram’s ToS changes. Instagram is hardly alone in that regard though. Docracy has a few other highlights, like Squidoo, which removed some comedic language from their policy, but also “removed guarantees that they would never spam their users or disclose personally-identifying information.” And then there’s Geico, which recently decided maybe it will save your data and sell it to third parties. Unfortunately there’s really no shortage of examples. Check out the site for the latest changes.

If your favorite service isn’t in the list, let Docracy know, the site is still expanding its coverage. And for those who would like to know more about what a ToS agreement means, check out ToS;DR, which we covered earlier.

This is not an Octocat. Image: GitHub.

The change means that you can easily get to a list of all your Gists by heading to https://gist.github.com/<username>/.

Gists, which started off as a simple way to dump and share snippets and short pieces of reusable code (something akin to the older Pastebin), were recently upgraded to be full-fledged Git repos behind the scenes. That means Gists are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as Git repos, complete with diffs.

Now that Gists are considerably more than just Pastebin-style code snippets, it makes sense to offer users a quick and easy way to get to their Gists from anywhere thanks to a memorable URL.

The newly personalized Gists come with an automatic URL redirect. So if your Gist used to live at https://gist.github.com/4731290 it will now be redirected to https://gist.github.com/luxagraf/4731290. As some GitHub users point out on Hacker News, there’s a flaw in GitHub’s system that means anyone can register a numeric username and cause a Gist to redirect to the wrong page. Hopefully GitHub will fix that in the near future..

Inspectocat says “never store private stuff in public places.” Image: Github

GitHub has temporarily shut down some parts of the site-wide search update it launched yesterday. As we mentioned in our earlier post, the new search tools made it much easier to find passwords, private ssh keys and security tokens stored in GitHub repos.

GitHub hasn’t officially addressed the issue, but it appears to be blocking some of the security-related searches that were posted earlier in this Hacker News thread.

GitHub’s status site also says that “search remains unavailable,” though in my testing searching worked just fine so long as you weren’t entering words like “RSA,” “password,” “secret_token” or the like.

Most of the passwords and other security data exposed were personal — typically private ssh keys to someone’s server or a Gmail password — which is bad enough, but at least one appeared to reveal a password for an account on Chromium.org, the repository that holds the source code for Google’s open-source web browser. Another reportedly exposed an ssh password to a production server of a “major, MAJOR website in China.”

Unfortunately for people that have been storing their private security credentials in public GitHub repos what GitHub’s search engine revealed is nothing new. Google long ago indexed that data and a targeted site:github.com search will turn up the same exposed security info, which makes GitHub’s temporarily crippled search a token gesture at best.

If you accidentally stored sensitive data on GitHub the most important thing to do is change your passwords, keys and tokens. After you’ve created new security credentials for any exposed servers and accounts then you can go back and delete your old data from GitHub.

Given that Git, the version control system behind GitHub, is specifically designed to prevent data from disappearing, deleting your sensitive data takes more than just the Git command rm. GitHub has full details on how to get your sensitive data off the site. As GitHub’s instructions say, “if you committed a password, change it! If you committed a key, generate a new one. Once the commit has been pushed you should consider the data to be compromised.”

GitHub’s Octobi Wan Catnobi. Image: GitHub

To help you find exactly the wheels your project needs, code hosting giant GitHub has announced a new, much more powerful search tool that peers inside GitHub repositories and offers dozens of filters to help you discover the code you need.

The new search further cements GitHub’s place as the go-to source not just for publishing, but also discovering, code on the web.

While GitHub’s new search lacks the web-wide reach of more general code search engines like Google’s once-mighty Code Search (now a hollow shell of its former self), it’s likely to return more useful results thanks to some nice extras like the ability to see recent activity and narrow results by the number of users, stars and forks.

GitHub’s advanced search page now supports operators like @username to limit results to just your repositories (or another user’s repos), code from only one repository (repo:name) or even code from a particular path within a repo. You can also limit by file extension, repo size, number of forks, number of stars, number of followers, number of repos and user location.

While the advanced operators make a quick way to search, there’s no need to memorize them all. The new advanced search form allows you to craft your query using multiple fields, while it displays the shorthand version at the top the page so you learn as you go.

Under the hood GitHub’s new search is powered by an ElasticSearch cluster which live-indexes your code as you push it to GitHub. The results you see will include any public repositories, as well as any private repositories that you have access to.

The GitHub blog also notes that, “to ensure better relevancy, we’re being conservative in what we add to the search index.” That means, for example, that forks will not be in search results (unless the fork has more stars than the parent repository). While that may mean you occasionally miss a bit of code, it goes a long way toward reducing a problem that plagues many other code search engines — the overwhelming amount of duplicate results.

GitHub’s more powerful search has turned up one unintended consequence — exposed data. It’s much easier to search for anything on the site, including, say, usernames and passwords. As it turns out many people seem to have everything from SSH keys to Gmail passwords stored in public GitHub repos. There’s a discussion about the issue over on Hacker News. The ability to find things like exposed passwords isn’t new, but the new search tool does make it easier than ever. Let this be a reminder of something that’s hopefully obvious to Webmonkey readers — never store passwords or private keys on a public site. And if you find someone doing that, do the right thing and let them know.

For more details on everything that’s new in GitHub’s search page, head on over to the GitHub blog.

Image: Karin Dalziel/Flickr.

Google’s Cloud Platform tools are now available on GitHub. The move to GitHub will make it easier for developers already using GitHub to get started with Google’s various Cloud Platform offerings.

Thus far most of the repositories in Google’s GitHub account consist of code samples and projects related to offerings like App Engine, BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Storage.

The Google Open Source Blog says that most of Google Cloud Platform’s existing open source tools will be migrated to the new GitHub organization “over time.”

For now though you can get started building apps on Google Cloud Platform just by forking one of the demo repositories and tweaking the code to fit your project. Sample apps like the guestbook demos for Python and Java, along with the OAuth 2 helper apps, make a good place to start if you’ve never built anything on Google’s cloud platform before.

Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

The company sent out an email this week informing Windows Live Messenger users that the service will be going the way of Clippy. Instead users (and their contact lists) will be migrated to Skype, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011.

As with most service shutdowns, expect this one to be bumpy, especially given the relatively short notice and the fact that Skype lacks a number of features Messenger offers, including controlling a remote screen, custom emoticons and offline messages. There are already numerous threads on the Skype community forums complaining about the features lost in the move to Skype.

But thus far, complaining hasn’t stopped the transition. To get started making the switch you’ll need to download the Skype client app and then login using your Microsoft account. From there you should have access to all your Windows Live Messenger contacts. If you’re already a Skype user as well you can login with your Skype account and link it to your Messenger account.

According to Microsoft’s FAQ, between now and the cutoff date, Messenger will continue to work as it always has, though you’ll see a banner encouraging you to download Skype (provided you’re using a newer version of Messenger). If you click the banner and follow the install instruction Messenger will be uninstalled after Skype is ready to go.

After March 15, you’ll no longer be able to sign into Messenger.