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Ask HN: Gmail account security

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Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#671

Post by vault »

lucb1e wrote: post #322
mekoka wrote: post #311

Those of us who move around quite often can attest to how frustrating the security of online services has gotten. It can get even worse if you provide a phone number for "added security" and find yourself in a different country with a different phone. I've witnessed a few fellow travelers getting locked out of accounts because they couldn't access the SMS sent to their home phone number and the app was ignoring the c…

I know the pain of the internet with borders. Paypal phone support literally told me to close my Dutch account and open a new German account so that I can use paypal in Germany. If you can login to paypal from abroad, that is a bug according to them, you're not supposed to be able to login from abroad (like when on holiday) and need to make a new account instead. (I currently start a VPN into NL every time I need to…

PayPal is just as bad. After I moved country, I forgot to log in into my old PayPal account for months, and I've never been able to log in again, even having the right password, the same phone number, everything.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#672

Post by klabb3 »

eru wrote: post #659
klabb3 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Papiere, bitte." (Just fyi. Mangling the German [sic] doesn't detract from your post.) Thanks! > Not sure being corporate centric makes this problem any worse? If you had other kinds of organisation, you'd still have to deal with abuse and fraud? I think it's definitely not unique to big corps, but an emergent property of a distributed and homogenous system of self interested agents, probably. It feels very game t…

> I think it's definitely not unique to big corps, but an emergent property of a distributed and homogenous system of self interested agents, probably. It feels very game theoretical, at least. What's clear is these systems are becoming ubiquitous rapidly. Not sure the homogenity is necessary? To an extent, the market delivers what people are demanding. For most people, Google's package of cheap or even free services…

> Not sure the homogenity is necessary?

Oh, nice catch, I actually meant to write heterogeneous.

> I'd bet that more people lose their local data than get locked out of Google?

Probably. There's definitely some low hanging fruit/middle ground though. We desperately need to have ownership of the address itself, so we can transfer to different providers. Either with your own domain, or a domain provided by a truly neutral party, similar to phone numbers.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#673

Post by ihateolives »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #618
steelframe wrote: post #445

Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales. They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only h…

It's pretty crazy to think about the fact that your email is de-facto your online identity, as it is the universal second factor that is used as a fallback if other login mechanisms fail. An email service is two things: a global name user@emailprovider.tld, which is really your online identity, and an email service that hosts the SMTP, IMAP and DNS services required for the identity to function. People are willing to…

> Because email addresses are practically a requirement to function in society, I think they should be a public service. Everyone should have the right to get an email address controlled by a public service institution which guarantees you that you can move between service providers as you please.

In some countries it has already been for a long time, for example Estonia gives everyone by default an email address that is tied to their national ID and you can forward mail from that address to any provider you want.

Edit: Anybody barely uses it though because usually there is no need. But it's there in case you want to use it.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#674

Post by minusSeven »

steelframe wrote: post #445

Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales. They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only h…

>I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." That experience underscored that notion for me.

But this isn't true for all of us, google provides support through paid programs and sells services to other businesses. This is more of google specific problem.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#675

Post by heavyset_go »

friedturkey wrote: post #391
parhamn wrote: post #67

They also do this thing now where they block [1] smaller browsers (even ones using the latest version of chromium) under the guise of security. According to their docs they're fighting MITMs by generally disallowing any browser they can't identify (so the big few). If you're not on a whitelisted browser by Google, you can't log in (effectively, use) any of their properties. This feels very anti-competitive to me. Not…

Google sometimes blocks me from searching using Firefox, saying it’s “suspicious activity” and sending me into captcha hell that always rejects my results after several screens for no reason. It’s incredibly transparent as to what they’re doing. That Google became the most anti-consumer company out there is pretty disgraceful.

In the same vein, check out what Bing did when I searched for "Firefox" with Edge[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28517187

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#676

Post by Dylan16807 »

WithinReason wrote: post #655
logicallee wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(edited) If you don't mind sharing, what is the bug? - My comment originally read as follows, 2 people downvoted it. >I work at Google and recently tried to file a bug about the calculator embedded in search. It was dastardly difficult to find how to file the ticket. It took me maybe an hour. A better system for filing tickets internally and for filing and triaging tickets from external users would be a tremendous as…

You just found a bug in Google Calculator. You wrote "calories" but Google is giving you the answer in "kilocalories". If you change "calories" to "kilocalories" the answer doesn't change. I wonder how many times in the past has it given you the wrong answer without you noticing?

That's what people mean by calories, it's not a bug. It even labels it precisely!

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#677

Post by gquiniou »

rssoconnor wrote: post #463
dddddaviddddd wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my email to Fastmail this week in the wake of the Google Apps announcement. Having your own domain is great since your email becomes provider-agnostic. While Fastmail had a great import tool, I could have transferred my Gmail myself from backups. I'll be ready to do the same if Fastmail goes under or is no longer competitive.

I've heard this from a several posts this week. Genuine question: since maintaining GSuite is expect to cost $6/user/month and Fastmail costs $5/user/month, do you really find the $1/user/month in savings worth the trouble of moving email providers and losing Drive/Docs etc.? I'm planning a move too, but Fastmail's price doesn't strike me as competitive enough compared to Google's price. Amazon WorkMail is $4/user/mo…

Fastmail is doing only email and has been doing it for a long time. I simply trust them more to care for their users and for me it is worth the price.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#678

Post by durnygbur »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #565
steelframe wrote: post #445

Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales. They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only h…

>about how he paid Google something for some service >I'd frequently tell my co-workers, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." it seems even if he did pay he was the product, which frankly jibes with my experience of paying for things at Google.

If you pay for it, you simply like it like this.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#679

Post by graderjs »

dleslie wrote: post #502
graderjs wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is why Amazon is playing the long game with their obsessive focus on customers. I don't know how that really plays out where the rubber meets the road but that's what Jeff bezos always keeps talking about.

It plays out with Amazon absolutely crushing Google when it tried to be a consumer marketplace, and even trouncing Google at providing web infrastructure services. If, somehow, an antitrust ruling split ads from the rest of Google the non-ads remainder wouldn't last more than a few years.

Not sure about that... It could be a blessing for the tech community if that happens. Let's consider 3 parts: Ads, Cloud and Labs. Alphabet could fund Labs as research arm (basically what it is anyway, with all the exploratory projects) and could like see a revival of the golden days times of Bell Labs, Xerox Park, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Gmail account security

#680

Post by laserlight »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #586
steelframe wrote: post #445

Once upon a time I worked at Google. I returned to Austin to visit old friends and took the opportunity to visit the Google office there. The Googlers sitting around me were primarily corporate sales. They weren't getting any corporate sales calls at all as far as I could tell, but there was one extremely irate user who was locked out of their GMail account and was repeatedly calling them because they were the only h…

Even when you have paid Google products that come with support, it is really awful. They once asked me to submit a business case justifying how answering my support question benefited Google. Just a simple clarification of something in their documentation. I was already under pressure to migrate to Office360, I stopped fighting after that. My employer is a huge AWS user and Google is constantly chasing us with a trea…

> Google is constantly chasing us with a treasure chest of free credit to migrate

The only item in Google's business playbook...

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