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Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
171–180 of 309 posts
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#172A couple of years ago I set up a mail server with my domain to forward everything to gmail. I now give everyone these addresses instead of my underlying gmail one. Yes, Google can still suspend my account for any number of reasons with little to no recourse. But this way I retain the ownership of the front door. If Google does do that, I can reconfigure my server to store incoming mail or to forward it somewhere else…
Why use social login at all when you can use email instead?
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#173Free services are fantastic, until they break. Or until you get banned. There's people who get their Microsoft banned for no reason, without notice. The reason is some kind of ML algorithm found (rightfully or not) CP in their data, which could have been some public Discord or WhatsApp group or could have been a troll beating the checksum mechanism (it exists for both the Microsoft and Apple one). Good luck getting t…
> Free services are fantastic, until they break. Or until you get banned. There's people who get their Microsoft banned for no reason, without notice.
It's not just free services. Big hosting providers are taking a similar approach. You might find one day that your VPS has been deleted or your entire account blocked if they have an issue with you.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#174> lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login I signed up to Quora with my Facebook account, back in the day. Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. I haven't used a social login since. In my case, it was fairly harmless, but it made me realise how dangerous social login is. Every time there's a signup, I look for "signup with email". It'…
> Deleted Facebook in 2013 and lost access to my Quora account, with no possible way to recover it. Did the same but lost my Spotify account. Needless to say, but I haven’t used Spotify since then..
I created my Spotify account back when they only had the option to create it with a Facebook account (or at least they hid the email option very well). Eventually I disabled my facebook account and realized that disabled my spotify too. I spent an hour or so with Spotify support to transfer all my playlists to a new account since they couldn't (at least back then) convert my account to be a non-FB account. So much time wasted. Never again.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, IMAP rather than POP3. I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more (or has been for at least a decade). The fetch approach has some significant caveats. Firstly, it introduces something like 5–10 minutes of latency before you receive messages compared with forwarding, so it’s not suitable for every purpose. If you’re accessing via the webmail, forcing a refresh may trigger remote fetch…
> Well, IMAP rather than POP3. I set this up a couple of weeks ago. I think Gmail only allows pop3 for email fetching, because I just couldn't get it to even try connecting to my IMAP. pop worked great though. The settings even lists "POP Server", not "Server", even if you choose port 143 or 993 > I don’t think there’s a single legitimate reason to use POP3 any more Well, pop was designed as a "download the messages"…
The main one I had in mind was POP3’s behaviour around deletion; my recollection is that if you don’t want it to work that way (and I think you might prefer not to in general, so you can be confident of having your own copy of everything), you run into practical performance, bandwidth and processing limits much sooner, because messages don’t have any external identity, so the receiver has to download everything every time to check if it’s seen it before. And you can’t just say “well only look at messages in this folder”—POP3 sees all, and that’s a problem.
But y’know what, I’m going to retract my comment for the case where you don’t want to keep a copy of anything. For most places, POP3 is generally unsuitable, but for this specific type of destructive server-to-server fetching, it’s reasonable.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#176Phone number porting is a thing due to regulation. I'm looking forward to having email address porting legislation, one day. For full porting, there's a long road ahead, starting with regulating domain names, which email addresses depend on. However, as long as the domain name _de facto_ remains in the possession of the original provider, this is technically possible, already. Email address porting might even be poss…
How would you even solve porting without breaking legacy systems? You can point the MX records to another provider's server (or your own), but porting single email addresses won't really work.
You could easily oblige forwarding. You cannot shut someone out and then not allow them a) a backup of all data noe unavailable and b) and auto forward to an email of their choice.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#177I'm curious about blockchain solutions for this.
Public blockchains have potential to be part of the solution. Imagine the following:
- Decentralized file hosting using IPFS
- Decentralized login using ENS / Ethereum Name Service
- Email service gives you a UI on top of your data, plus an outbound server for relaying to/from non-blockchain email accounts
Overall, you end up with portable data thanks to IPFS, and a login through ENS to whatever UI you want to use/pay for.
This seems like a win to me. Haven't seen anything yet that pulls this together but the pieces are there. Maybe someone here wants to prototype it.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#178happy to be corrected on this anecdata, but it seems to me that the common thread among nearly all (i can't say with certainty, all) of these locked-out-of-Google disaster reports is that the victim was using a free Gmail/Google account as one of the central cog in their digital life/social/single sign-on to personally-vitally-important sites/services.
pay google the 12 bucks or whatever per month to get a paid account, with actual service people you can call on the phone so if something bad happens, yes you can raise a merry stink about it.
become an actual customer! it really works
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Limited rentals are actually banned unless you have a very specific reason (you plan to occupy the flat yourself, you plan to renovate extensively or the flat is meant for temp workers - so no extensions and much shorter intervals) in Germany as well.
This is misleading. I moved to Germany last year and there's a whole secondary market - much bigger than I've seen in any other country, in sublets. While you officially need anmeldung (city registration) to live anywhere in Germany, there are at least as many sublet apartments without anmeldung available as official rental apartments on the open market. They're usually a good deal cheaper too. Lots of people (immigr…
I don't think it is misleading, it is simply a different class of problem. And as you said yourself, in most cases these subleases are not actually legal.
Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume a similar issue existed for telephone numbers. Was it wrong to require that they be portable?
When you dial a number, you generally look up the owner of the number range in a list, then initiate signalling contact with them. They may take the incoming messages, or they may point you towards another network the user can be reached on (i.e. if they have ported their number) In essence, in the regulated telecoms space, the number block owner retains responsibility for routing to the new network after a number po…
And did all Telecom providers have the ability to do that sort of forwarding before the statutory requirement to allow numbers to be ported?