Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 182 posts

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#91

Post by Kye »

tyingq wrote: post #72
elagost wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fastmail is great, but as this list is supposed to be "privacy focused", Fastmail (company from Australia) is not a good alternative. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

Yandex might be a niche choice, if your main worry is "5/9 Eyes". Free, even to bring your own domain.

Some of what I want to send and receive by email might be considered illegal in Russia, so that's a hard no. I don't trust Russia's legal system to interpret the law in my favor. Does, for example, this email receipt for a book about a bi football player figuring out his sexuality count as propaganda? I wouldn't risk it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#92

Post by CharlesW »

iamaelephant wrote: post #89

> News > r/news - Includes both USA and International. > r/worldnews - International news. Typically excludes news specific to the USA. > Most country/state/provine subreddit's act as local news hubs as well. Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.

> Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.

Have you used them? These are mainstream subreddits, and the stories aggregated there aren't substantially different than the stories linked to to the similar Google News categories.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#93

Post by kortilla »

godelski wrote: post #37
hardlianotion wrote: post #19

Looked at the site. Not sure I understand what flagging the services as 5-eyes, etc. is supposed to mean. Perhaps - sponsored by 5-eyes (that seems to miss the point) - prevents spying by 5-eyes? This seems strange also. Clarifications welcomed.

The idea is that if you operate a server in -eyes territories then your data is not secure. I'm not sure I buy this argument though. We've seen companies just not hold onto data, be served, and release "sorry we got nothing". AFAIK you don't have to create backdoors for the NSA. Canaries are legal. You don't have to store data. So listing if a service is from a -eyes country misses the point really. Point being if th…

Canaries are mostly useless though. If someone notices a canary hasn’t been updated, they’ve already been compromised and it’s too late.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#94

Post by nallgate »

steelframe wrote: post #51
mikedilger wrote: post #40

ReCaptcha is about the only google product that I still have to use... some 15% of websites I use eventually make me reCaptcha. Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.

You don't have to use ReCaptcha. You just elect to do your business in another way or with another company. For example, I was a lifelong member of a regional bicycling club until they started trying to force me to solve ReCaptchas whenever I'd need to log in to their web site, and they stopped accepting membership dues and event registration fees by a check in the mail. That was easy enough: I stopped giving them mo…

I myself am not a fan of signatures personally. Why would I allow just anyone to see my name written in unique way? What a flagrant violation of my privacy rights! Any time someone wants me to sign something, I don't use the service. A regional company wanted my signature to use their service. At first I was pretty passive aggressive about it, I sent them a drawing of stallman holding an emacs shield and a lisp sword for the signature, but eventually I realized I could live without electricity from the main grid if I just relied on fire. Honestly, it hasn't really been an inconvenience.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#95

Post by amelius »

dmoy wrote: post #74
amelius wrote: post #67

Is there a websearch benchmark which actually shows objectively how good all these alternative search engines such as DDG are? How do we know which one is better, and how much worse we are off by using alternatives?

There are benchmarks, but they're probably closely guarded secrets of the various search teams out there. So not very useful public benchmarks, no.

Perhaps you are right, but still difficult to believe that nobody at a university or in open-source built something like this.

It's the thing I would start with if I wanted to design a search engine.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#96

Post by sjwright »

Kye wrote: post #91
tyingq wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yandex might be a niche choice, if your main worry is "5/9 Eyes". Free, even to bring your own domain.

Some of what I want to send and receive by email might be considered illegal in Russia, so that's a hard no. I don't trust Russia's legal system to interpret the law in my favor. Does, for example, this email receipt for a book about a bi football player figuring out his sexuality count as propaganda? I wouldn't risk it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law

Do you fear the Russian legal system though? Are you really doing anything so controversial that you’d motivate Russian Intelligence to care about a foreigner?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#97

Post by sjwright »

elagost wrote: post #43
dempedempe wrote: post #29

I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also rememb…

Fastmail is great, but as this list is supposed to be "privacy focused", Fastmail (company from Australia) is not a good alternative. https://www.wired.com/story/australia-encryption-law-global-...

Privacy from whom though? I’d contend that more than 99% of people reading this would, in all honesty, consider their adversaries to be non-state actors—marketers, hackers and identity thieves. For the less than 1% of us for whom their adversary is a state actor, I would contend that any implementation of SMTP is non-viable, period.

If you’re sufficiently paranoid, the only thing you can say for certain is that there isn’t much you can truly trust.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#98

Post by Nextgrid »

lucb1e wrote: post #68
cycloptic wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I've never noticed that. I don't try to access google or youtube directly through Tor. I just use those programs.

Wait, you can get around IP bans (Google certainly has a CAPTCHA on anyone trying to access Search from a Tor exit node IP address) by using a different client? Like, the check is client-side? That seems odd.

Presumably the captchas are only on the YouTube UI itself and not on the API endpoints that provide the data.

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#99

Post by Kye »

sjwright wrote: post #96
Kye wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of what I want to send and receive by email might be considered illegal in Russia, so that's a hard no. I don't trust Russia's legal system to interpret the law in my favor. Does, for example, this email receipt for a book about a bi football player figuring out his sexuality count as propaganda? I wouldn't risk it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law

Do you fear the Russian legal system though? Are you really doing anything so controversial that you’d motivate Russian Intelligence to care about a foreigner?

My concern is automated systems. YouTube videos get demonetized and cloud storage gets shut down because of automated copyright enforcement. They shut channels down and delete videos for the kinds of things I worry about, too.

This was not always the case. It might not be the case now that Russian companies scan for this stuff, but why risk it?

Re: Cutting Google out of your life (2019)

#100

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

dempedempe wrote: post #29

I'm surprised to see that Fastmail is not listed as a Gmail alternative. I've tried it, Protonmail, and Zoho as replacements. IMO, Fastmail has the simplest interface and best suite of tools. I had trouble setting up an alias with Protonmail. Fastmail provides very clear instructions for this right on the app. Zoho was cool in that it lets you use a custom alias for free, but it just felt too cluttered. I also rememb…

I am a very happy Fastmail customer. The one thing I wish for is more feature parity with Google Calendar, such as setting daily agenda emails.

However, I’ve found Fastmail search, spam filtering and user interfaces to be great, on par or better than Google for all my needs.

One aspect of poorer performance with Fastmail has been boot up time on mobile though. The iOS app doesn’t appear to cache anything offline, so without a connection you can’t do anything, and if the connection is slow, app startup and display of mail hangs while waiting for whatever initial web requests the app makes to complete.

Nonetheless, I’m very happy with the purchase.

Post reply on HN