151–160 of 504 posts
The American legal system is so stuck-up and disconnected from reality it would be funny if people wouldn't be screwed by it so often. Lawyers are given way, way to much power and common sense seems to be dead. Lawyers are paid humongous amounts of money for simple tasks, while big companies can and will pretty much screw whoever they like.
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People get banned from Facebook every day for stupid reasons, whether it be Facebook's real name policy or otherwise, and I would encourage you and everyone else to keep alternate contact details handy for your friends. Maybe you should encourage them to get on Signal Private Messenger, so that you aren't SOL if anything happens to Facebook.
sorry, I was being sarcastic.
This is a big wake up call for me. I have everything in google: Drive, email, voice, docs, sheets, etc. I was actually about to sign up for Fi. The convenience of everything in one place is great. But I don't think I had quite thought through a disaster like this. With this article in mind, need to reevaluate. I guess either regular local backups and/or diversification of service providers would be a good step.
I think not using anything Google is probably the wisest move as they have made it very clear on numerous occasions that they simply do not care about customer service. The problem is, they're so damn convenient.
And this is the crux of the problem. "Oh, that'll never happen to me" until it does. I've been asked several times, "why do you go to the trouble of [hosting your own e-mail | not having the same mobile # on SMS as on Hangouts | using ownCloud instead of Google Drive | and other greatest hits]". Stories like this are why. They're not at all uncommon, they're a disaster for the people affected, and they're clearly not a wake up call for Google to get any better about their free-to-the-end-user services, so I've no motivation to change my practices.
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purcha…
This is a big wake up call for me. I have everything in google: Drive, email, voice, docs, sheets, etc. I was actually about to sign up for Fi. The convenience of everything in one place is great. But I don't think I had quite thought through a disaster like this. With this article in mind, need to reevaluate. I guess either regular local backups and/or diversification of service providers would be a good step.
1. Have your own domain name. You can change provider from Z to Y at the flash a DNS record gets updated. Email is designed as a federated service, but to be so your email _address_ needs to be too. 2. For files, use a cloud solution and have 2-3 computers updating their local copy (home PC, work PC, phone, small Pi box acting as server). I have a Digital Ocean box running ownCloud, soon to change to nextCloud. Put y…
Even if for some reason I lost my FastMail (pretty unlikely), I'd just repoint my domain to a new mail service, and I could easily recover all my other accounts. And of course, my email archive is backed up locally, so there's no risk of losing that.
This is a big wake up call for me. I have everything in google: Drive, email, voice, docs, sheets, etc. I was actually about to sign up for Fi. The convenience of everything in one place is great. But I don't think I had quite thought through a disaster like this. With this article in mind, need to reevaluate. I guess either regular local backups and/or diversification of service providers would be a good step.
Sooooo many accounts to switch over though, probably will take a few days...
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Not the OP, but I've been looking at Fastmail for a while to replace Gmail for a robust dedicated email service. I haven't felt the push to pull the trigger yet, until reading this article.
We (FastMail) are really nice people :)
This article might scare me enough into trying again anyway, but if I can find any replacement for reminders (Fastmail or otherwise) that's as nice to use I'll jump over so fast.
Is it legally enforceable for a company to dictate what you can or cannot do with a phone that you bought from them? Sure, the terms said whatever they said, but is it enforceable/constitutional? I mean, people sell their phones all the time for whatever reason.
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We also stalk you on... I mean, we read the same tech news sites you do. (I'm on third line ticket duty right now, so if you have something significantly more complex than RTFM, or an actual bug, you'll probably be talking to me this week) The most common cause of getting locked out other than you abusing your fastmail account is having your credentials stolen and used for spam/fraud, which is why we recommend 2 fact…
Here is another fastmail customer. Just curious how do you confirm identity? I don't remember setting a backup email.