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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#361

Post by prebrov »

rdtsc wrote: post #97

> he people affected don’t have access to Gmail, Google Drive, Google Voice, or anything from Google. They don’t have any access to gift cards, bills, travel confirmations, work documents, etc that were saved in their Gmail accounts. Yikes. That is scary. A large part of my online life is tied to Google. I was even debating getting a Project Fi phone too. Because well it is convenient and cheaper, but it would mean s…

Yeah, that's why they don't want to run countries (be a government) - legitimacy of political power comes with a social contract, fluid and quite vague, unlike TOS.

Violating it often ends up in bloodshed and revolutions.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#362

Post by zhte415 »

dom96 wrote: post #325
zhte415 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I foresee a slight chicken and egg problem here. Registering a domain requires an email address, so it seems that I would need a third-party email address anyway.

Bootstrap and go from there.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#363

Post by Larrikin »

jdietrich wrote: post #346
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…

We do have those formats. Mbox for mail, iCalendar for calendars, vCard for contacts. They're all IETF standards. Google provide data export from nearly all of their services in standard formats. Where no established open standard exists, they provide clean HTML or JSON. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

Is there any good way to automate this monthly

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#364

Post by VyseofArcadia »

zhte415 wrote: post #139
hn_user2 wrote: post #110

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…

> ownCloud, soon to change to nextCloud

Why the switch? A quick look at both hasn't resulted in a clear winner in my mind.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#365

Post by Viper007Bond »

ryandrake wrote: post #157
hn_user2 wrote: post #110

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've got a domain name and an E-mail address on it that forwards to my gmail account, but I find out of laziness I usually end up directly specifying my @gmail.com account when signing up for online services. It might be time to slowly start switching over to using my personal account, so, in case I'm ever banished from gmail it's simply a matter of pointing my forwarder to a different E-mail provider. Sooooo many ac…

When you update email addresses, I'd strongly recommend having a catchall and then theirdomain@yourdomain.com. Makes it easy to see where spam comes from, and more easily delete it.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#366

Post by 7Z7 »

simonh wrote: post #246
cowl wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bundling a browser with the OS that had 98% of all user share at the time. neither Apple not Google come anywhere close to that market domination with their iOS or Android systems. Also the case was much more broad that just the browser it was for software that runs on the OS. Antitrust is not just about what a company does but mainly about what other alternatives are out there. In Microsoft's case there were no othe…

I accept Microsoft followed many predatory and anti-competitive practices. They were a nightmare and deserved a good anti-trust kicking. But hammering them for bundling a browser was just plain stupid. If they didn't bundle a browser, how would people download a competing browser? You'd have had to get hold of a browser on CD somewhere and install it manually just to use the internet. How would that have been an impr…

By bundling competing browsers

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#367

Post by Kristine1975 »

pmlnr wrote: post #303
smonff wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have a home server, which is then mirrored to a rented server. Anything critical and entirely irreplaceable goes onto blu-ray disks, because I can't accidentally delete those; though those are kept at home as well, which is not ideal. So: 2 backups, from which one is off-site and archives, just in case - this should keep you going for a while with self storage.

>Anything critical and entirely irreplaceable goes onto blu-ray disks, because I can't accidentally delete those

There's bit-rot though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Decay_of_stor...

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#368

Post by lmm »

smonff wrote: post #312
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…

The way Google made us used to transform an email box as a storage and backup place is terrifying. Sending 2Mo attachments become a norm[1] and lots of people consider having their life stored there. It just seem not sustainable. If you would do this with paper in the past, your place would just be full of junk. Our cloud life is an horrific stack of garbage. We just don't need most of the things we store, keeping ev…

> [1] Yes I know storage is cheap, but then forget about ecology and climate change control, I have no proof of this but can't believe that all the Google servers of the world don't have an impact, even if it seems quite clean

This is ridiculous reasoning. The best (though imperfect) proxy for the climate impact of a given service is how much it costs. If Google is giving away the service for free, it can't be costing them a lot of energy to run (or alternatively it's producing a lot of value for them).

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#369

Post by Mikho »

The same Gmail block happened to me circa 2010 without any explanation. It just stated that I "may be violated one of the service policies". Lost all data and access to every service that I didn't remember password for. Since then:

1. Use my own domain for email w/ Google apps to be able to reset it to different mail provider fast if something happens w/ Google access. Office 365 allows to use own domain--while paying for Office and cloud anyway why not connect own domain to the service.

2. Never use Facebook etc to authenticate anywhere--the same thing could happen w/ Facebook access. Access to services should not be directly connected to social activity. Now always password and email so access to a service could be easily recovered via email.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#370

Post by tdkl »

ryporter wrote: post #263
csomar wrote: post #241

Most people are missing the important piece here: The terms of service is preventing you of doing whatever you want with a physical product you bought. The F!. You bought the phone with full retail price. You didn't break any laws (as far as I understand it). Why does Google has a say on what you can do with "your" phone. 2018: You can't sell your phone (as a used phone). 2020: Google Drone picks up user phone from h…

Google doesn't have a say on what you can do with your phone. Google does have a say on what you can do with their service. These people were clearly trying to game the system. Google caught them red-handed and has now exercised their rights.

Services aren't tied to a specific phone. That's the whole point of being "services".
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