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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#281

Post by Asooka »

Mithaldu wrote: post #46
relics443 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps they needed to suspend the account immediately to cover themselves legally? Besides most things at Google are automated. It's likely that a human didn't actually press the button that suspended the accounts.

I don't care about technical justifications, i was talking about morality and humanity. Google is still a company composed of humans, but a few people in there seem to lack a certain amount humanity. Please do keep in mind: They digitally killed people here in something that looks like pure and petty spite from Google. Some of these people might have relied on their gmail account for their livelihood. (Think remote f…

Even if Google is staffed by humans (it is), they have to act in-line with their job description. So long as their internal policies are the way they are, Google the company will lack humanity. And you can't change the internal policies because that's against shareholder interests.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#282

Post by setq »

joe563323 wrote: post #279
Rotareti wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why I stick to OSS like Linux, Thunderbird, nextcloud, etc. as much as possible. I got locked into a closed source platform once and it was a pain to get out of it. I will never let it happen again.

And for email ?

The parent poster is correct and it's a good assertion. I'm doing the same thing, even though I'm using Windows as a base operating system, primarily for convenience at this point in time.

Email is very portable if you keep it in a place you control. You're pretty much just paying for a collection and caching service if you use POP3/IMAP and store your important folders locally. That is portable in a couple of hours between hundreds or thousands of different companies who operate standard protocols.

And then there's the possibility of running your own MX with postfix/dovecot etc if you really want.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#283

Post by kuschku »

ucaetano wrote: post #253
kuschku wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a few you're missing indeed. Many ISPs give out a domain name and email service for free with internet contracts — you can set it to redirect to gmail until you need it, then just switch it over. Tada, problem solved.

Until your ISP closes your account for whatever reason.

That’s why you use a trustworthy ISP.

My current ISP, for example, is actually a local company providing datacenter colocation and consulting services to the state’s government and local and national companies, but they also run a small ISP as side business.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#284

Post by kuschku »

cowl wrote: post #269
kuschku wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google only has about 85% marketshare in phones, 96% in Search, still problematic. And Producer rights are affecting Consumer rights. Without a free market, we're all worse off — the only justified monopoly is a governmental one.

Key word here is "phones". 85% of phones is still less than half of all users seeing as mobile just surpassed desktop use sometime in 2015. And no, producer rights are not affecting consumer rights since this is a free market. I don't care how many Russian search engines or vertical product marketeers go out of business. They are going out of business because they are not offering a good enough service and I don't wa…

> If google had the power you are fear-mongering about we would not have FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

All of them were started before Google even started competing with them.

Show me a company started after Google had already established a presence in a market that’s either competing with Google (and having a positive prediction) or that has thrown Google out of the market at all.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#285

Post by rsp1984 »

1. Don’t mess around with Google or any company that you simply can’t live without.

I know a better rule: Organize your life and data so you don't depend on a company.

Many people forget that Google isn't some sort of official service provided by the government but a public for-profit company that's largely guided by shareholder value maximization. While there's no doubt that the latter has big advantages over the former in many areas, there's a lack of public education on this matter. People (unfortunately including me) trust Google with so many kinds of personal data, it's scary.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#286

Post by tankenmate »

detaro wrote: post #234
perlpimp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going on a tangent, there should probably be a set of universal backup formats that can be advertised as being somewhat portable. So that, if you need to can take your mail and other online business stuff elsewhere if need be. Beyond this article a user might start working for some place that does not allow external app use, but they can bring their data with, to be loaded onto the service. I guess like github and gi…

With e-mail, as long as you have IMAP support you can relatively easily download all your mails and upload them to another server. Just takes a while if you aren't good at cleaning out old stuff. There even are companies offering that as a service if you don't have a fast internet connection, only a mobile device or ...

Or you can use imapsync; make sure you get the latest version from github as the version that ships with most Linux distros is really old. As it is written in Perl you can run it on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It handles one way sync in either direction and two-way sync. It copies all the flags and whether emails are marked read etc.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#287

Post by Asooka »

relics443 wrote: post #88
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously trying to argue the current ToS situation is reasonable? Seriously?

I'm telling you a fact. A ToS is legally binding. Outrage, and wishing it weren't so won't change that.

5¢ have been deposited to your Google Wallet.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#288

Post by Kenji »

Some people had family photos saved in their drive that are now lost. It’s the 21st century version of losing priceless mementos in a house fire.

...I feel no pity for them. That's what backups are for. Real backups. Like, on HDDs that you have in your hands. It has never been cheaper to back up data than today.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#289

Post by staticelf »

brongondwana wrote: post #75
a3n wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail. I'm just a regular (paying) customer, not a business or anything. I've opened a small number of tickets, one or two of the RTFM variety. I've always got a human response and satisfaction, even a "here, let me RTFM that for you." I can't imagine being locked out of my fastmail account for anything other than abuse of my fastmail account . Or not paying my bill.

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…

Can you clarify what this means:

"Flexible tamper-proof data retention policies with unlimited archiving space" - from the pricing page.

I am considering to switch to Fastmail, seems nice!

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#290

Post by kamd »

x0x0 wrote: post #180
brongondwana wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any modern phone should be able to run a TOTP client. For my own FastMail account I have a TOTP client on my phone plus two Yubikeys, one I carry with me and one that I keep at home. We require all our staff use 2FA because emails from us get the magic green tick :) So yeah, if I have my phone, I have a 2FA option already without SMS. I normally use the Yubikey because it's super easy.

How do you use a yubikey on your phone? Or did you mean in lieu of totp on your phone?

If you have a Yubikey NEO and a phone with NFC, you can store the TOTP secret on the Yubikey instead of the phone, and use the phone purely as a screen with a time source by opening Yubico Authenticator app and touching the Yubikey to it to generate codes.
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