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Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

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Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#451

Post by tjpnz »

Hello71 wrote: post #390
jjoonathan wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiding = post is invisible to you and everyone else Gaslighting = post is visible to you, and unbeknownst to you, invisible to everyone else

gaslighting also doesn't mean lying, or cheating, or fraud. it involves some of these things, but that doesn't mean that all hiding and lying is gaslighting. to quote wiktionary: To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance. The verb sense derives from the 1938 stage play Gas Light, in which a hu…

>To manipulate someone psychologically such that they question their own memory, perception and sanity, thereby evoking in them low self-esteem and cognitive dissonance.

I suspect a lot of people caught up in "shadow bans" already have a tenuous grip on reality in the first place. What a disgusting, mean spirited and wholly pointless thing for them to be engaged in. Why couldn't they just tell said individuals they've been auto moderated or banned? It's not like it will result in additional support being required - Google already make a point of ignoring their users.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#452

Post by prox »

panic wrote: post #269
geza wrote: post #157

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejec…

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse.

I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure,

I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#453

Post by adrianN »

dragonwriter wrote: post #420
panic wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.

To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#454

Post by stanislavb »

prox wrote: post #452
panic wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse. I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure, I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really n…

Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day.

The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#455

Post by alasdair_ »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #405
panic wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing. You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.

It depends how highly placed they are (and how much money you spend/ make them).

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#456

Post by alias_neo »

pvg wrote: post #330
alias_neo wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm all for enforcing strong privacy rules, in fact, I stopped using PB very quickly after trying it for the first time, because of the _feeling_ of a lack of privacy/security it gave me (based on no actual evidence), so I'm not defending PB. That said, calling Google heavy handed is an understatement, and there have been several cases which have made it clear that kicking up a fuss online and being big enough to get…

I didn't call it 'heavy handed'. I'm just correcting your assertion that PB didn't have unnecessary and overly-broad permissions. This is in their writeup.

Oh, I understand your point. I was calling Google heavy handed.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#458

Post by harha »

geza wrote: post #157

I definitely feel for the author - the Chrome Extension team has been growing increasingly developer-hostile recently. My own open-source extension HabitLab ( https://habitlab.stanford.edu/ ) that I've been maintaining for the past 3 years is going to be removed in 2 days (got a 14-day removal notice for permissions even though all permissions it requests are used and needed, and every update I try to submit is rejec…

While the notice probably comes from some automated system resembling authoritarian governments as described below, it looks like your extension would be undesirable to Google's business model and metrics they would want to optimize anyway. I hope you can find a different platform to run the extension, it seems more friendly than the screen time features in Apple.

I haven't used Chrome since I've left Google and would recommend everyone to move to an alternative non-Chrome-based browser for a more balanced ecosystem. All the bad behaviour can be avoided when companies actually need to look after retaining users and taking care of not so frequent cases and I hope better business practices can come up without the need for government intervention.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#459

Post by xvector »

manigandham wrote: post #448
znpy wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true. I was part of a student association when I was an university student. Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube. One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why. We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal. In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by…

This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.

Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces.

Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#460

Post by danShumway »

stanislavb wrote: post #454
prox wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse. I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure, I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really n…

Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day. The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)

I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam.

With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit.

Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original address. So if you're signing up for a dogwalking service, you can create an alias for `ilovewalkingdogs@fastmail.com`, and then if you start getting spam to that address, you know where it came from, you know that there's no chance your real address will be reverse-engineered from your alias, and you can auto-reject or sort everything to that address into a separate folder without affecting any of your other emails.

I have separate email aliases I distribute to friends and family members so that if I ever run into a doxing situation or for some reason need to go nuclear on my email, I can turn everything off except for them. I also have my email linked to my own domain of course, but when I sign up for most commercial services, I use @fastmail.com aliases. That way I know that there's no way for those services to track me across accounts/websites via my personal domain name.

And everything gets organized in the same inbox, same account. I consider it to be a killer feature.

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