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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#401

Post by jdietrich »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #391
jdietrich wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wouldn't actually call Mbox a standard. Thunderbird supports it, but I'd argue it sucks as a way to escape Gmail, because no competitor to Gmail supports it as an import method. In fact, even Gmail itself can't import from Mbox. It may be a standard in that it's defined somewhere officially, but it's not really a standard in the definition that it's commonly used. As someone who has nearly completed their GExit, I'…

There are several tools available to convert from Mbox to proprietary mailbox formats.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#402

Post by csomar »

dvirsky wrote: post #321
ryporter wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the phone's terms did state (according to TFA): “You may only purchase Devices for your personal use. You may not commercially resell any Device, but you may give the Device as a gift.”

That's exactly my point. I'm critiquing their policy.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#403

Post by distances »

icebraining wrote: post #392
distances wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm myself using a non-profit email redirection service as my main e-mail address. They do not provide an email box, just the redirect, so they can keep the service lean with a very modest one-time fee for new members. This allows me to change the actual e-mail provider when needed. I already moved (successfully) away from Gmail, and I'm currently considering moving again as the spam protection of my current paid-for…

How does it work for sending, though?

Sent via the email provider, but I'm using clients that can set a custom "From" and/or "Reply-To" header fields, containing of course the redirecting address.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#404

Post by notheguyouthink »

setq wrote: post #396
notheguyouthink wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would prevent Camlistore from the same model? I guess if you're gone, the server might not be running properly, and they wouldn't know how to start it and etc. Ya? That's fair. I wonder if it would be worth it to write some type of camlistore extraction tool. Eg, plug in a USB, autoruns a script which mounts a blob store as a fuse FS. Hell, the blob store could be packed with the USB.. a sort of way to backup Ca…

Some interesting ideas but I've got to ask: What if the ABI breaks, the CPU architecture changes or the project gives up at some point in the future? Ergo, I prefer to leave just the data. The data is hard enough on its own: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13367398

I mean, the data is still there, fwiw. I'm not sure how generic bitlocker is, but i imagine i have to have a tool specifically tailored to decrypt the bitlocker data.

With Camlistore it's one level extracted. You'd need a tool to decrypt and scoop up all the chunks for a given file - but you could write that in Bash. The Camlistores blob store doesn't do anything fancy (that i recall! i could be wrong), it's just a bunch of json documents with the file contents in them.

Though, Googling it now, it looks like BitLocker comes with Windows, so i can see why you like that. Your family doesn't need any tool, it's built into Windows. Not sure how that works with OSX though.

> What if the ABI breaks, the CPU architecture changes

Totally valid - but i could throw what ifs all day long. What if your family isn't on Windows? Here[1] is what i got for OSX (no idea if it's accurate).

Though this does raise a good point - while a binary is nice for dependency free solutions, having non-bin solutions might be nice too. Eg, a Pyhton solution included is likely to work on all operating systems. The user has to of course install Python, which is bad. A platform specific solution (bash or dos) might be handy too.

Binarys only would indeed be potentially bad, you are correct, thank you!

> or the project gives up at some point in the future?

Well in my proposal, the project is irrelevant. The exporter is already made. As long as the user can run one of the compiled binaries they could access/export it fully (in the concept, of course)

[1]: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/239714/open-bitlock...

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#405

Post by icebraining »

distances wrote: post #403
icebraining wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it work for sending, though?

Sent via the email provider, but I'm using clients that can set a custom "From" and/or "Reply-To" header fields, containing of course the redirecting address.

Thanks for your answer. What about DKIM? Are you forgoing it, or do your clients have support for signing the emails?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#406

Post by stegro32 »

throwaway98237 wrote: post #142
kajecounterhack wrote: post #120

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…

If you watch an old tech talk re: Google disaster recovery topic, the Googler explains that a user's info is never fully deleted because it's too expensive to do so given back-up duplication is processed multiple times in multiple locations and sometimes over multiple technologies. In other words, cancel your google account today and your data may be "deleted" but it's really, as in actually really , still on magneti…

I also remember that talk. I haven't verified by watching again, but if anyone's interested I suspect this is the one: https://youtu.be/eNliOm9NtCM

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#407

Post by bronson »

alistproducer2 wrote: post #102
throwaway76543 wrote: post #15

I recently made a decision to stop running my own mail server, figured it was long, long overdue to pay someone to handle my email for me. Stories like this are why I didn't pick gmail for this service, which would have otherwise been my first choice.

Can I ask what your email stack was? I'm working on a project that's a cross between TOR and bit torrent to provide free (encrypted) email to the masses that doesn't monetize data. I've been on a crash course of all things email lately.

Switched from maintaining my own server to mail-in-a-box a year ago. Being able to collaborate with others saves a lot of admin time.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#408

Post by kevin_b_er »

taneq wrote: post #166
DavidWanjiru wrote: post #145

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.

I would have thought the Doctrine of First Sale protects you legally (as in, they can't sue you for reselling a phone), but I don't think there's any legal protections on provision of a service. Bottom line: Never rely on a corporation.

The doctrine of first sale is dead. It died to the copyright cartels. You own nothing where a copyright is involved. The copyright maintains ownership of the device, not you.

The courts may have once done something about books with shrinkwrap agreements forbidding sale, but the same does not apply to software or things containing software.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#410

Post by setq »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #404
setq wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some interesting ideas but I've got to ask: What if the ABI breaks, the CPU architecture changes or the project gives up at some point in the future? Ergo, I prefer to leave just the data. The data is hard enough on its own: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13367398

I mean, the data is still there, fwiw. I'm not sure how generic bitlocker is, but i imagine i have to have a tool specifically tailored to decrypt the bitlocker data. With Camlistore it's one level extracted. You'd need a tool to decrypt and scoop up all the chunks for a given file - but you could write that in Bash. The Camlistores blob store doesn't do anything fancy (that i recall! i could be wrong) , it's just a…

Bitlocker is quite specific but tailored to where everything already is. None of my children or my wife are OSX fans. I can't find a better cross platform solution if I'm honest - if there was one I'd be there. TrueCrypt was used before I used bitlocker and we know where that ended. Bitlocker works on OSX pretty well with this: http://www.m3datarecovery.com/mac-bitlocker/

Will mull over your ideas; there are definitely things to be gained and there's always tradeoffs that need to be considered.

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