171–180 of 182 posts
Well, this long list is certainly a nice reminder that Google is going to be a permanent part of most peoples' lives for ... forever. Seriously. Google can use this as marketing for why people love Google so much.
This reminds me of people trying to cut out plastics from there life. This is hard because plastic is cheap, convinient, useful and it's embedded in every product in modern life.... Just like Google
I don't see the problem. There's still privacy benefits to be had by cutting Google out of your life 90% of the time, or even 75% or 50% of the time. I've largely cut out Google, but still occassionally use YouTube, Maps (usually through a 3rd party), and very rarely search. For me, StreetView and the huge library on YouTube are just too useful to completely give up, and, unfortunately, I don't know of any alternativ…
In fewer cities and increasingly hard to find in the interface (because a lot of it is growing out of date, and it is in general more rare than Street View), Bing Maps also has a really cool best of both worlds "Bird's Eye view" taken from helicopters in daylight at a particular distance and an isometric-esque angle chosen to provide a strong amount of detail. I've found that be extremely useful for picking up a neighborhood-worth of landmarks in a glance for navigating a space by foot or car. It really is a shame Microsoft/Bing stopped advertising it so heavily as a competitive advantage and have let its prominence in the UI disappear to the point where finding it is a labyrinthine task, but unlike the mythical minotaur, I know it still exists (for now).
I don't know what to do about YouTube. I keep hoping that they've made the non-Premium experience so bad that enough of the people I follow might move to better platforms, but so far network effects win again.
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Siri can control your smart home and doesn’t phone home (any more). You can hook it up with a raspberry pi to control just about anything, including generic zigbee devices.
Does the voice recognition work hands free? On phones the microphones were never good enough to be used in the pocket or from a different room and I don't want to hold my phone in ma hand just to turn on the lights. Another problem is that it's as closed as googles eco system so I don't know what they're doing behind the scenes anyway, if it's not free software then what's the point switching from google to apple?
Also, as a new owner of an Apple Watch (had to back out of Fitbit now that Google bought them, sigh, and this was the most interesting option), the Siri integration with the Watch is fascinatingly better than I'd expect and made me much more interested in using Siri more than I had before. The Dick Tracy-ness of talking to an assistant on your wrist is amusing/fun in general, of course, but so far I've been impressed with the range of both the microphone and speaker for a wrist-worn device, and you don't have to do the Dick Tracy style arm raise (though of course, that doesn't necessarily stop you from wanting to; the amusing long tail impact of old pop culture).
(I'm a pragmatist and don't hold closed ecosystems against them. I am on the side that Apple seems more clear about seeing me as a customer than a product or a black box source of data, and that's more than enough reason for me to switch to them over Google [though in my case I was switching from Windows Phone, RIP].)
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I try to avoid services which use ReCaptcha as much as I can.
What do you replace it with?
Do you have the scale that human moderators are infeasible? (Not do you "wish to have". YAGNI suggests add it when you have that scale, not before.)
Do you need that form to be publicly accessible?
Are you requiring multi-factor authentication already? Can you or should you?
Can you use a spam filter? (Are you sure your process isn't already going through half a dozen email spam filters anyway?)
Do the simple tricks not work for your use case? (CSRF tokens, "honeypot fields", form name/ID obfuscation, dumb simple weird rotating required fields like "2 + 2 =?")
Still no replacement for Google Voice. Which is my one indispensable app.
We've been building a simple and reliable phone for professionals though are used for personal communications as well since our pricing is very affordable at $10/mo per user or number.
We've just recently launched our web app in beta (launching officially soon) so we're now at feature parity with GV and beyond since we've really invested time into creating a fast and modern service that works seamlessly.
Would love your thoughts!
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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.
Still no replacement for Google Voice. Which is my one indispensable app.
Have you checked out OpenPhone (www.openphone.co)? We've been building a simple and reliable phone for professionals though are used for personal communications as well since our pricing is very affordable at $10/mo per user or number. We've just recently launched our web app in beta (launching officially soon) so we're now at feature parity with GV and beyond since we've really invested time into creating a fast and…
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What do you replace it with?
In a lot of projects lately where I've seen ReCaptcha used or requested I've replaced it with YAGNI [You Aren't Going to Need It]. It's a "what's your threat model?" question for Bots. Do you have the scale that human moderators are infeasible? (Not do you "wish to have". YAGNI suggests add it when you have that scale, not before.) Do you need that form to be publicly accessible? Are you requiring multi-factor authen…
There was daily contact form spam coming from tor exit nodes. Only flaw is that it always sends the message within 7 seconds. That is faster than a human could get to the form and type a meaningful message.
So I was able to avoid blocking tor exit nodes by adding this timeout. This has solved the issue, for now.
Requiring JS execution by only accepting JSON stopped the lazier bots.
Is there something like Google Drive / Dropbox that allows you to use cloud storage with local encryption, that has nice OS integration on desktop and mobile?
I use iCloud
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I don't see the problem. There's still privacy benefits to be had by cutting Google out of your life 90% of the time, or even 75% or 50% of the time. I've largely cut out Google, but still occassionally use YouTube, Maps (usually through a 3rd party), and very rarely search. For me, StreetView and the huge library on YouTube are just too useful to completely give up, and, unfortunately, I don't know of any alternativ…
Bing Maps has a street view equivalent that covers most cities, at least in the US somewhere close to a margin of error difference to Google in terms of cities covered. In fewer cities and increasingly hard to find in the interface (because a lot of it is growing out of date, and it is in general more rare than Street View), Bing Maps also has a really cool best of both worlds "Bird's Eye view" taken from helicopters…
Here in Colorado, for example, Bing Maps doesn't cover anything in the western half of the state, not even larger cities along the interstate, like Grand Junction. Meanwhile, Google has Streetview imagery for practically every paved road in the state, and even a lot of forest service roads in the middle of the mountains. I know that's not a big deal for most people, but it's a huge use case for me to help plan bike trips.
And Bing doesn't cover much, if anything, outside of the US.