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Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#81

Post by elif »

Grustaf wrote: post #30

When you put it this way, it's really quite remarkable how tenuous our hold is on even paid for digital services. There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways. When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab so…

Cars are also digital service platforms which can and do take away things. I am currently playing a safety score minigame to unlock enhanced driving features. If I pay $2000 my software will enable my minivan to have a 0-60 of a Ferrari. This is all premised upon a connectivity package I'm obligated to pay for but have been gifted for a year by the manufacturer.

To put it more bluntly, my eyeballs are watched by AI to make sure I pay attention enough to deserve the full use of my vehicle.. it's beyond punitive, it requires my positive behavior.

ALSO bonus, if I did something with my vehicle that resulted in losing my account, I would also lose access to my home electricity system.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#84

Post by pydry »

londons_explore wrote: post #55
moreira wrote: post #51

> 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'…

There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution. I'd love to have webmail on my own domain, hosted by someone else, and with ads on the side. Those ads should generate ~$20 per user per year (after all, they can be targeted based on emails I'm sending and receiving, and I'll be looking at them many minutes every day - the perfect combination for high revenue ads). With $20/user/year, there s…

Something like improvmx but, like $3-4 a month instead of $9 with just bare bones POP3 and SMTP for personal use only would suit me.

I'd like to self host data and webmail and pay somebody else manage the headache of delivering and receiving.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#85

Post by thfuran »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #57

Gmail itself is a scam. It took me a while to realize how fucked up this "free service" was. We've collectively ben pwned by Google, big time.

It might be a bad deal, but it's not a scam. The say they'll give you webmail and they give you webmail.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#86

Post by c-linkage »

mns wrote: post #40
Grustaf wrote: post #30

When you put it this way, it's really quite remarkable how tenuous our hold is on even paid for digital services. There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways. When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab so…

But you can't really download a car, can you? :) Joke aside, I think we are actually going in the opposite direction. Looking at the way Tesla wants/already does keep a score of your driving, maybe self driving cars in the distant future, I would predict that we are going in the wrong direction when certain people and groups will want cars to drive away from you back to their home base or your car to refuse to start…

This is because we work for businesses that are fixated on generating revenue and profits rather than on improving the human condition.

Since this is Hacker News I'm sure there will be some who can say the two are compatible, but it will only appear that way to the wealthy and the elites -- the rest of us will gain none of the benefits and will be seen solely as "customers" or "partners" from which revenue must be extracted.

One only need look at the transformation of business from selling products to selling services, changing a sales relationship into a rental relationship. For businesses operating key or critical technical infrastructures this is equivalent to a corporate "universal basic income", such as will never occur for the common man.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#87

Post by lkxijlewlf »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #59
londons_explore wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really needs to be a zero cost custom-domain email hosting solution. I'd love to have webmail on my own domain, hosted by someone else, and with ads on the side. Those ads should generate ~$20 per user per year (after all, they can be targeted based on emails I'm sending and receiving, and I'll be looking at them many minutes every day - the perfect combination for high revenue ads). With $20/user/year, there s…

Just a heads up you could use Cloudflare Email Routing to forward *@foo.com to foo@gmail.com for free It looks like Zoho might have a free plan too but I've never tried it https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html ImprovMX also does email routing for free along with webhooks and such

I use the free plan from Zoho and it's been solid. But... I have been using it for a while and it is my understanding that certain features I have (IMAP) are no longer in the free plan.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#88

Post by fdewnijfwg »

randunel wrote: post #45

Phone 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.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#89

Post by jka »

As an example, I think it'd be nice if eventually Spotify decided to offer wood-engraved machine-readable BitTorrent QR-code links to each of the albums you have in your profile; effectively available in perpetuity and on-demand by placing them into an appropriate reader with cached storage and Internet connection -- no need for huge capacity in either of those. The engravings could be available on a large delayed timescale to provide for healthy forestation and materials gathering.

Re: Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

#90

Post by crate_barre »

This is kind of the big issue with technical people not being involved on some civic issues. We might not be able to join the mass of people with every little political opinion on abortion, healthcare, education, etc, but we could outline very specific technical platforms that Congress needs to pass.

Case in point, any “free” service that can be used as 2FA authentication, or receive communication from at least one important life service (banking, your school, your job, etc) should fall under consumer protection. They must offer phone support and address any account closures and offer a variety of methods of retrieving the account/data. We got FINRA laws like this in finance.

^ That won’t change the world, but it would change one thing, that we all understand and can get behind. We could do stuff like this, and mobilize everyone.

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