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Alternatives to Google Products

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Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#241

Post by MatekCopatek »

fb42 wrote: post #189
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Fastmail for years with a custom domain without a single problem. Amazingly great communications from the company too. Highly recommended but not free. (Less than $2/month though - so almost free.)

Does Fastmail have decent search that works on mobile? Gmail’s search is just too good. I’m currently using mailbox.org but it’s impossible to search for old emails that are not already downloaded to your phone. The only way is the use web interface and it’s annoying as hell.

They have a hybrid mobile app, it's not as smooth as a native one could be, but as far as I'm concerned search works perfectly.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#242

Post by Xylakant »

shawn wrote: post #238
chime wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a moderate resistFingerprinting setting? I don't mind my date/tz/language being known. There are 150m+ people living in my timezone who use en-US. I don't want my fonts, plugins, user agent, or detailed HW/graphics features (e.g. canvas/WebGL hash) being known. Those can uniquely identify me according to https://panopticlick.eff.org .

Those can uniquely identify me So does your resolution. And that's hard to mask because JS usually needs to know it. If you're not using the browser fullscreen, chances are that you're using a unique innerWidth+innerHeight. As unsatisfying as it is, the current best solution seems to be not to care about privacy most of the time, and then take privacy seriously when you do. Whonix is excellent for this.

The Tor Plugin sets the window sizes to predefined values that match various fullscreen resolutions. So there are options, but they all involve tradeoffs.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#243

Post by dmitriid »

ajross wrote: post #168
mattkevan wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. Heartbleed was present in OpenSSL for two years before anyone noticed. Many eyes make all bugs shallow, but if there aren’t enough eyes with the skills or the time then problems will remain deep, even for important software like this. Perhaps everyone thought everyone else had done the work?

Heartbleed was a very subtle security bug, the discussion here is about privacy violations. You think that detecting if, I dunno, mutt is secretly uploading your contact list is going to escape detection for years?

It will. IIRC HomeBrew’s integration of Goigle Analytics went unnoticed for almost a year, and only then they included an opt-out option (it’s still opt-in by default)

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#244

Post by geowwy »

bthrm wrote: post #62
deadcast wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed fastmail for many years as an alternative to gmail. I've never once had any issues with them and their UI has been very responsive. They also give you a MASSIVE list of domain names to choose from! ^_^

Unfortunately, Fastmail is very expensive.

$3/month is quite reasonable

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#245

Post by cyphar »

nemothekid wrote: post #190
throwaway13456 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>alternatives like Apple I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs. When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it. Given all t…

>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as we…

> I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple?

You shouldn't trust Intel either (see ME and all of the other negative-ring stuff that runs on their CPUs). But at the moment there isn't a strong alternative. AMD is somewhat better but still has similar issues. ARM is a mixed bag. RISC-V might save us but still isn't at the tape-out stage. OpenPOWER is possibly the only really usable option but software support is awful (if you've never had to deal with ppc64le bugs, you're lucky).

At least you have a reasonable alternative to Apple.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#246

Post by geowwy »

deadcast wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed fastmail for many years as an alternative to gmail. I've never once had any issues with them and their UI has been very responsive. They also give you a MASSIVE list of domain names to choose from! ^_^

I'm in the process of switching over to fastmail. I'm pretty happy with it so far.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#247

Post by dmitriid »

grumdan wrote: post #222
nemothekid wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as we…

Even if you don't inspect it personally, there's a greater community of people who don't get their paycheck from Apple who may be looking at the code. Regarding the Intel comparison, you have no choice but to trust them, but by using Apple products, you are trusting Intel and Apple, which is worse than just trusting Intel.

> who may be looking

may be

This is called faith

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#248

Post by throwaway13456 »

nemothekid wrote: post #190
throwaway13456 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>alternatives like Apple I would never trust Apple because they have consistently lied and cheated me - For instance, they throttled the speed on my iPhone, they hid the fact that my iPhone has more probability to bend and finally, as a cherry on top, they refused to honor warranty for a design flaw of theirs. When they realized they fault, instead of making a free replacement, they charged me $30 for it. Given all t…

>And you and I don't have access to the source code, so we have no idea what's going on on their servers Consider this: for 90% of the population, that is also true of any FOSS solution. I'm tired of the "you don't have access to the source code" argument. I don't inspect the microcode that runs on my CPU - why should I trust Intel and not Apple? And for a greater portion of the population, that source code may as we…

> doesn't...mining your data

This is my point. You simply don't know that. You have no idea what's happening on their servers. It's all proprietary. You have absolutely no evidence to claim that.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#249

Post by halflings »

> All they do is repackage mass corporate surveillance into convenient, free, trendy applications that suck up all your data. Your private data helps Google dominate the online advertising market.

Google has what I think are the most transparent and user friendly controls for visualizing what personal data is collected, and disabling it (most often per product, for ex. disable location history and YouTube viewing history, but enable personalized ads).

- For most of the products mentioned in the blogpost (YouTube, Search, ...), people can just go to MyActivity [0] and delete any data they want to. They can also disable data collection here. [1]

- Emails received in Gmail are no longer used for advertisement in other Google products, only used for Gmail ads, and features like searching your emails, spam prevention, parsing orders/flights/etc. to display them in the app. Also note that emails received in GSuite ("enterprise Gmail") were never parsed for these purposes. [2]

[0] https://myactivity.google.com/

[1] https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html

Important disclaimer: I work at Google [but only voicing my own opinions, as it goes], and only working there because I realize they are doing all they can to respect user privacy.

Re: Alternatives to Google Products

#250

Post by MatekCopatek »

After convincing myself to do this kind of a switch, I noticed the experience using open protocols (IMAP, CardDAV and CalDAV) on Android isn't perfect.

First of all, I had to buy a 3rd party app that does CardDAV and CalDAV syncing, because unlike iOS, Android doesn't support it natively.

Secondly, IMAP doesn't come close to what I was used to with Gmail. And I'm not talking about the lack of good global search, I mean the general responsiveness when reading emails. No matter which client I use (I currently settled on Outlook), things seem to load for a long time, sometimes freeze, etc.

Thirdly, all the Google supplied apps technically have support for other providers, but the Google account is clearly a first class citizen. E.g. adding/removing a generic IMAP account simply makes it appear/disappear from the sidebar in the Gmail app. You can never truly hide the Google account. You CAN disable syncing, but it will remain in the app and you can easily re-enable it accidentally if you just tap it in the sidebar.

Anyone have similar experience? What do you recommend? Are there any commercial clients with a better user experience? Should I give up and move to iOS?

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