Don’t Mess with The Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#351

Post by cowl » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:15 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #313

cowl wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it doesn't matter is they are established before or after. all it matters is that users have the choice and choosing these (and other) products over the Google provided ones. Google has bundled a form of messenger app since forever with its services. People just keep choosing other better ones. Google has tried 2-3 time to break into the social scene but even though Google Buzz was bundled with gmail it was not used.…

> it doesn't matter is they are established before or after. Yes, it does, that’s the entire point. Will we still see as much innovation in 10, 20 years? For that, this part is very important. > The simple fact of bundling is not a problem when there are choices. Google forbids OEMs from selling custom Android forks. That’s not choice. As said, both the EU and US consider this anticompetitive, and are investigating i…

Google forbids OEMs from un-bundling it-s other services not android. OEMs have the choice to build an Android with no Google service whatsoever like Amazon or some Chinese OEMs are doing. What they can not do is offer an Android while picking what google app they offer. Google apps are take it all or leave it for OEMs. for users they can choose to install what they like. I do not believe that I am more knowledged that Lawers but seeing already in plenty other examples that EU is more worried about businesses than consumers I can say that these is just another misuse of the antitrust rules.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#352

Post by taneq » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:18 PM UTC

smonff wrote: post #297

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.

Self storage is fine but does it guaranty long term documents safety? I am very sceptical about my ability of maintaining it on the long term.

Are you seriously less trusting of your own ability to drop a bunch of documents onto a USB drive every week or few than you are of a company which explicitly tells you they can shut off your access with no warning and no recourse for any reason?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#353

Post by jjnoakes » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

brongondwana wrote: post #302

x0x0 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ime: their spam detection is definitely inferior to gmail; I've had 2-5 false negatives per month (spam not detected) and a handful of false positives over 3+ years. Plus a payment notice from my student loan that fastmail absolutely positively refuses to believe is not spam not matter how many times I so mark it. I've had zero deliverability issues. edit: to be clear, the spam detection works well, and if you're goi…

"a payment notice from my student loan that fastmail absolutely positively refuses to believe is not spam" That's because it's not spam. I'm pretty sure there's a blog post coming soon about the difference between spam and "email I don't want to receive". If you just don't want to hear from a particular email address, the way to stop it is to put an explicit discard rule for that address in your Rules screen. Likely…

I think you misread the double negative?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#354

Post by paradite » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:21 PM UTC

kkarakk wrote: post #176

ryandrake wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up the sarcasm immediately but it's scary how many times I've been told (HERE, on HN of all places) that it's impossible to live a normal life without Facebook. As in: literally, with a straight face someone would claim they would have no contact with friends if not for Facebook and be totally serious about it. Kind of unbelievable but I've heard it multiple times.

i mean facebook gives you the means to provide alternate contact points(phone numbers) to your friends. people don't choose to use it coz of whatever reason deserve to be cut off-why wouldn't you want your friends phone numbers in your phone?

Nowadays the means of keeping contact information when making new friends is whatsapp or facebook. So yes, this would not be a problem for now, but it would be in a few years when mobile numbers become really obsolete (hopefully not).

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#355

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:23 PM UTC

chimprich wrote: post #339

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point one here is the BIGGEST. If you do nothing else, own your domain name, and forward mail to a service provider of your choice. In my case, I made my new email address forward to Gmail, and then started changing everything over to use my new address. Then, when I moved providers to FastMail, all I really had to do was re-point my domain name. Even if for some reason I lost my FastMail (pretty unlikely), I'd just…

> If you do nothing else, own your domain name, and forward mail to a service provider of your choice. Even this may not be sufficient. I had a domain name registered through my ISP (UKFSN). At some point I had a disagreement about payment with my ISP, who refused to discuss it. Instead of replying to my messages, they disabled all my domain records and my emails started bouncing. I think this was illegal (and eventu…

This is good advice too. I actually have my domain name and web hosting through different companies, particularly for this reason, if I have service issues or something with my web host, I wanna make sure I can switch web hosts or threaten them with the wrath of God or something, without worrying about my domains.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#356

Post by PuffinBlue » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #329

PuffinBlue wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing that has put me off Fastmail very recently, and indeed I moved to another provider (Runbox), is the loss of their Family plans. Requiring three accounts now for instance would cost $150 a year minimum for the size I would have needed and unfortunately because I needed to rearrange my old grandfathered plan to re-organise accounts I'd have lost my previous plan. Basically, Fastmail is good (very good),…

Fastmail killed their Family plan? Damn. I was going to move to them at the end of this year when my VM (where I currently run my mail) is up for renewal. But if I now need to buy several Standard plans instead, and get several gigabytes of storage I don't need, then that's less appealing. Runbox looks good. Any other suggested alternatives?

PloarisMail is pretty 'barebones' on the face of it but works well:

https://www.polarismail.com/

Zoho is actually very good too but they (like Gmail) enforce IMAP connection limits, so it you have a lot of folders etc or use mobile clients like K9 that open a connection per folder then you can get errors very regularly.

The above is true for Zoho on the free plans anyway, but it may be different for the paid ones. But the free ones have pretty much all you could need if you don't run into the high number of IMAP connections issues.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/

If you have enough accounts to make it worthwhile I think Rackspace is supposed to be very good, but last I looked you needed a minimum of 5 accounts (I only had 4) so it didn't work out:

https://www.rackspace.com/email-hosting/webmail

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#357

Post by tdkl » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:28 PM UTC

brongondwana wrote: post #293

Loic wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Email with IMAP, you have the wonderful offlineimap tool[0], I have been using it for years, you can easily perform a maildir format[1] backups of all your email accounts. [0]: http://www.offlineimap.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

Agree - Maildir is a pretty good format, because it's just RFC822 (5322 these days, but who's counting) files with weird filenames. mbox format isn't too bad either. Calendar data you can mainly download as .ics files. Addressbook data is somewhat trickier, a directory full of VCARDs is probably the gold standard.

Yep, .vcf is pretty nice, also stores the contact image inside.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#358

Post by cookiecaper » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

perlpimp wrote: post #185

setq wrote: post #170

First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control. Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened…

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…

Legally, you're at the mercy of the provider to supply these. Most third-party applications that would provide effective backup solutions could be construed as illegal under the CFAA, as long as the ToS includes boilerplate forbidding automated or proxy access (and almost all do). Even without such a ToS, courts can and have held that merely visiting a page can constitute a copyright infringement based on the momentary copy stored in RAM being unauthorized, and specific notification that the company no longer wants you contacting their servers would also cause any future access to violate the CFAA, more or less regardless of the text of the ToS.

There was a company called Power Ventures. They made it easy to export your Facebook data. They never stored anything the user didn't have a copyright interest in (that is, they only stored the user's own data, like their profile pictures and status updates). Nevertheless, Facebook took them to court and shut them down. The company had trouble retaining a lawyer after the shutdown (and companies must be represented by a member of the bar -- pro se is not allowed) and ultimately, the founder was held personally liable for $3 million in damages.

That's what happens if you look like even a remote threat to a major technology incumbent.

We need to fix our tech access laws.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#359

Post by aRationalMoose » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:32 PM UTC

This is a cautionary tale for those who buy solely into one eco-system. I know the convenience makes it tempting, but they control everything and if you do something they don't like, even unknowingly, you'll pay a price. Amazon too, has been known to blacklist folks, without warning and with only one chance to appeal.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#360

Post by setq » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 1:46 PM UTC

croon wrote: post #349

setq wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually a difficult problem. Then I divided everything I have data-wise into two buckets: stuff I can't afford to lose, stuff I can. It's now simple. Also I mandate that 'everything is a file'. Turns out the former is only around 22Gb of mainly code, documents, videos and photos. The latter is 250Gb of music, films etc. The latter goes on a NAS with a mirror on the laptop. The important stuff lives on the lap…

> It's now simple. ~> A handful of manual steps you need to remember to do. The only offsite you have is at your parents, and is only "uploaded" every 6 months. Isn't it just better and easier (at least long term) to just use duplicity (or equivalent) and sync your NAS to any backend (Drive/Onedrive/Dropbox/Hubic/etc)? And then just use your NAS as your "true" storage? Then it'll just run until your configuration cha…

Yes that 6 months window I decided is ok for me. It might not be for you. If my house burns down, my car burns down and I end up in hospital, losing 6 months of data potentially isn't a major issue.

If you make it a conscious scheduled process you know it's working.

I'm a relative expert with duplicity (I run a whole pile of stuff in AWS that uses the S3 back end for backups) and it's not a solution I really entirely trust. First you incur the wrath of configuration i.e. the initial ramp up to get it working, then there's the monitoring overhead which isn't trivial as it isn't the quietest bit of software known to man, and finally we have the complexity perspective which introduces a lot more code, network transport etc.

Plus it is horribly buggy, particularly with incrementals, metadata and corruption. The same is true with Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox which I have used.

Edit: comedic timing perhaps, but since I wrote this post I've just got a duplicity failure to deal with...