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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#431

Post by lloeki »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #429

This is why Apple and Google will eventually become horrible evil companies. I won't do anything to piss off Google or Apple because my life is stored in their ecosystems. This, they can get away with being shittier than AT&T. The financial loss I would sustain if Google locked me out would be substantial. The emotional loss if Apple locked me out would also be substantial. My entire personal life is basically in iCl…

> My entire personal life is basically in iCloud in some form or another.

True enough, only for me it's just not stored only in iCloud, (something that is cumbersome to accomplish with Google services). If I get locked out of my iCloud account, everything (that matters) is right there locally on my Mac.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#432

Post by ocdtrekkie »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #364
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…

> ownCloud, soon to change to nextCloud Why the switch? A quick look at both hasn't resulted in a clear winner in my mind.

The founder and most of the development community has moved to NextCloud. ownCloud is mostly the old corporate people maintaining status quo, from what I understand.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#433

Post by jdietrich »

Larrikin wrote: post #363
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

Is there any good way to automate this monthly

There are several commercial solutions for G Suite backups including SpinBackup and Backupify.

https://spinbackup.com/products/google-apps-backup/ http://www.datto.com/backupify/google-apps-backup

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#434

Post by claudius »

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'…

Couldn’t you import the Mbox archive in Thunderbird/Claws-Mail/something and then copy the mails to whatever cloud provider you wish to use?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#436

Post by beagle3 »

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.

mbox format is horrible, because if the irreversible "From" quoting it requires. And as an "editable" format (e.g. If you want to delete an email in the middle of it), it is perhaps the least robust possible.

Maildir is ok. Mbox couldn't be retired early enough.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#437

Post by wccrawford »

Roboprog wrote: post #164
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.

Yeah, that was going to be my question. (if) I bought and paid for your phone, why do you give 2 shits about what I do with it? Of course, maybe the answer is "we sell the phones at a loss, and you are only supposed to get one, so we have a tentacle around you". Who knows...

It may also be that they were preventing scalpers.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#438

Post by nilved »

jdietrich wrote: post #425
nilved wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rule Zero: Never rely on a URL that you don't control. Use your own domain name for your e-mail addresses. Use your own domain name for canonical links to content. If you control the URLs, you do not depend on any one provider. You do not own your domain name. It's better than using google.com, but your domain name can be stolen or seized just as well.

Domains can be stolen or seized, but somehow the internet still manages to function. If you're not doing anything silly or shady, domain names are extremely durable. They're certainly more durable than an e-mail address or a subdomain on someone else's domain, more durable than a phone number or a street address. If you can choose only one identifier by which people can contact you, there is no better choice than a d…

Your definition of "silly" or "shady" might not be congruent with every other person's. com domains have been seized for a variety of reasons. However, them being stolen is much more likely. As a security-inclined person, the domain registrar is the first thing I would target as an adversary. Very often they don't have 2FA; and once you have access, e-mail follows.

It goes without saying that this is only a small part of a bigger picture; using your own domain name is a good idea, but not a perfect solution.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#439

Post by joshstrange »

jasim wrote: post #400
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…

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault - backs up your gmail account to a local db, and lets you restore it to another account.

I'm a huge fan of GmVault. I backup all my email accounts with it to a home server that syncs my mailboxes over to Dropbox as well. Pretty painless to setup and very reassuring to know my mail is safe.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#440

Post by tracker1 »

I think I'd be really in deep sh*t if this happened to me, I have all my domains under google domains now, not to mention the vast majority of my email/contacts/sheets etc are all google managed... even with a dump, it would be excessively difficult to move/recover my accounts on other systems tethered to my gmail.
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