161–170 of 360 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What router are you using? I would like to do this for my parents but I don't want a full blown pfsense box as a requirement.
Could you use PiHole and OpenVPN to accomplish what you want at your parents'place? https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/48zp16/pihole_and_v...
Forget scary. Let's talk about utility. Facebook gives you distraction but Google gives you information (YouTube, Google Search, GMail, Maps, Voice, Fiber, Project Fi, etc) and is more restrictive about how it lets partners use its platform to interact with users.
Google build genuinely useful products, and use the knowledge it gains about you to show (generally somewhat useful) ads, and generally stays out of your way.
Facebook on the other hand desperately tries to manipulate you into consuming as much time as possible on their platform at almost any cost, using lowest common denominator tricks.
Your ISP tracking your every move is scarier than all of them after the ISP privacy bill passed. At least Facebook and Google give you something for it and you can route around them if you desire. No routing around ISPs unless you use a VPN but even then they are blocking those. Broadband/cable/telcos capture everything you do and can now sell that information and do[1]. That bill was the pre-cursor to removing net n…
One of the few times a headline ends with a question mark the obvious answer is in fact: "yes" Google is evil. Facebook is worse.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and these views are only my opinion, etc. From my perspective, Google's goals are aligned with improving the world by offering information services. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate, basically all of the Other Bets, etc.--it's easy to imagine that the people behind them are more concerned with impact on the world than on generating profit or consolidating Google's power. To me, Facebook ha…
I turned down a job offer from Facebook because after a lot of thought I decided I couldn’t work at such a company. I didn’t even apply to Google because Google’s attitude towards privacy and data collection is just insane. Does the average person with an Android phone really know their location is being uploaded minute by minute to Google? Was asking if they want to “make Android better” really a good faith effort to obtain consent?
> From my perspective, Google's goals are aligned with improving the world by offering information services. Search, Gmail, Maps, Translate, basically all of the Other Bets, etc.--it's easy to imagine that the people behind them are more concerned with impact on the world than on generating profit or consolidating Google's power. > To me, Facebook has no such world-improving aspirations.
Again, come on. Clearly most Facebook employees and most Google employees are not evil moustache-twirling sociopaths. As grating as it can sound, Facebook’s stated goal of “connecting the world” is at least as valuable as “offering information services,” your idealized version of Google’s goal.
Let’s be realistic. I don’t think people should work at Google or Facebook, but I know that there are lots of factors that can go into choosing where to work, so I am hesitant to publicly say “haha, you couldn’t pay me enough to work at Facebook/Google!”
Seeing Google employees saying exactly that about Facebook is just laughable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why use paid privacy-by-policy systems (VPN) when you can use free privacy-by-design systems like Tor and i2p? In fact, even if you use a VPN browser fingerprinting is still an issue unless you use something like the Tor Browser.
two reasons: speed and security. Speed is self explanatory, security may not be obvious. I don’t believe Firefox to be on par with Chrome. It was years behind getting a sandbox, and doesn’t appear to have the engineering or QA focus on security that Edge/Chrome do.
You need to know that the Tor Browser disables a lot of stuff that Firefox has to lower the attack surface, and you can lock it down further using the Security Settings in the Torbutton.
Also you should look into a Whonix+Qubes OS setup, just because there's a sandbox doesn't mean you can't get hacked.
For speed: It's not really that bad for general browsing.
If FB goes down for one day it is a minor inconvenience. If Google goes down for one day, I am literally at a standstill. No Maps, no Search, no GMail, no YouTube, no Photos! I don't know how I will get through the day without these services :( As such, with Google, I am more than ok them using my data to target me ads since it does feel a mutually beneficial relationship.
Here Maps or OpenStreetMap
> No Search
I’ve switched to a mix of Qwant and DuckDuckGo, depending on question
> No GMail
I’ve been self-hosting all my mail for 4 years now, works fine thanks to simple solutions such as this tutorial https://workaround.org/ispmail
> No YouTube
This is the largest issue, but most of what I consume is either music or streams, and most of the streams are also on twitch, and the music is also available for sale on CD, or on Spotify.
> No Photos
I use seafile with automated upload and a custom-built photos UI frontend to provide a photo gallery for me, and to allow me to share photos. I use the tensorflow pre-trained example model for object classification to tag the images, it’s good enough.
For sharing other images, I’m building a custom imgur clone (GPLv3) https://git.kuschku.de/justJanne/imghost and https://git.kuschku.de/justJanne/imghost-frontend, example: https://i.k8r.eu/i/cXqmnQ
For most normal people, living without Google services may be complicated. But this is HN, we’re basically all software engineers capable of building our own solutions, and they don’t have to handle nearly as many edge cases. I don’t need to translate my image host into 108 languages, just english is fine (even if it’s not my native language). For people like us, it’s not that complicated to free ourselves of Google, and, in the long term, even self-host everything.
Forget scary. Let's talk about utility. Facebook gives you distraction but Google gives you information (YouTube, Google Search, GMail, Maps, Voice, Fiber, Project Fi, etc) and is more restrictive about how it lets partners use its platform to interact with users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not entirely true, you can use a vpn, but then you're placing trust in a vpn provider.
Why use paid privacy-by-policy systems when you can use free privacy-by-design systems like Tor and i2p?
I know Google is profiling me and harvesting my data. But it's not using me to harvest my friends information. I know Google is targeting ads at me - and they maybe AB tested. But those ads are from real companies or organisations - they aren't fake bots or astroturf groups algorithmically designed to tell me what I want to hear. I'm sceptically watchful of Google, I feel I have a social contract with them where they…
Hey Google, text Alice, Bob and Lisa I'll meet them at the cafe at 17:30.