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Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

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Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#51
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you offering to pay for them to host their own streaming solution and volunteering to handle technical support for users who have trouble with it? This gotcha-game is tiring. People don't have to like Amazon to realize that they and YouTube are the only practical game in town for free live streaming.

Debian manages to do global streaming for DebConf every year using only libre software and VMs running Debian at cloud providers. Seems like this is their setup using ansible: https://debconf-video-team.pages.debian.net/ansible/simple_s...

DebConf does host their own HLS streams. (They use video.js, which was started by the cofounders of my former employer Mux; I'm pretty familiar with it.)

I don't intend to suggest that it's impossible by any means; I've done it recently for a project of my own. But it's work, and it's expensive work, and it becomes a question of quality of experience. They make compromises to do their own hosting; bandwidth is always a little bit scarce and DebConf's live streams are 2Mbps @ 720p as a max rendition. For their audience, that might be fine. For others, it's not, and a good way to drive viewers away. I don't have an intuition as to whether the EFF's target audience feels that way, but their overlap with the free-software set isn't complete and wanting their live streams to look roughly competitive with everybody else's isn't unreasonable; how you look and the reliability/QoE of your stream does impact credibility.

The second tine of the fork is user accessibility. "It's just Twitch, everybody uses this" is a powerful argument for that accessibility if, unlike DebConf, you can't reasonably expect everybody to read a man page if there are problems.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#52

">I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence. I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email" if you want to retain control or privacy over correspondence, email is a horrible medium because by design anything can be forwarded, shared and copy&pasted trivially and this is done all the time. One guy is enough to leak an entire email chain. Good rule for email is, tre…

What medium are you thinking of where messages can't be copy & pasted?

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#53
Is the fact that the sender and receiver of an email both have a copy surprising?

IIRC, no emails from Hillary Clinton's server, for example, were ever leaked from the server, but the public saw them because one of her regular correspondents had his email compromised.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#55
post #26

Having your own email/domain isn’t about privacy. Email has become essentially the key to almost everything in modern life. If I lose access to my email I lose access to basically everything I own and it would be a massive hassle to switch emails. Banks, schools, apps, etc. Often times these services won’t even let you change to a new email if you don’t have access to an existing one. Some use email as 2factor. It’s…

Go through that exercise of ditching that email. You will find out the 2-3 things you need absolute plan a/b/c for. Seriously, reset your email password to something you can never remember and write it down and have someone hold it for a month (don’t tell them what is it, tuck it in an envelope). Let your mind run circles around your fears and you’ll find out how little that email account owns you. Freezing one credi…

More applicable TBH with e.g. Facebook, but I generally agree...

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#56
Unless the e-mail you send is either encrypted with something like PGP or whatever, or else you send it directly from your machine your friend's SMTP server, using TLS, then the operator of any SMTP forwarding host in between could have your e-mail, not to mention someone just snooping traffic.

Speaking of encrypted e-mail, if you send that to a gmail user, then Google only has the fact that that user received an e-mail of a certain size from you on a certain date. People who are paranoid about which data warehouse has their mail should be using encryption.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t own a domain name you rent it. If you ever forget to renew it or you are unable to renew it for some reason then it becomes available for anyone else to register. At that point the new owner can receive all your email and potentially access any accounts which use that email as 2FA. I’m not saying you should never do this but it’s not a silver bullet.

yep cos of Covid namecheap sold my domain to a squatter who now wants $10k for something i've renewed for years for $12. That was so shitty coming back round to reality and everything broken. Still upset about it. To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always.

> cos of Covid namecheap sold my domain to a squatter

Can you elaborate? As a Namecheap customer, this is concerning.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#58
post #26

Having your own email/domain isn’t about privacy. Email has become essentially the key to almost everything in modern life. If I lose access to my email I lose access to basically everything I own and it would be a massive hassle to switch emails. Banks, schools, apps, etc. Often times these services won’t even let you change to a new email if you don’t have access to an existing one. Some use email as 2factor. It’s…

> Who hosts your email matters less

With my own domain being hosted by Google Legacy Workspace or whatever they call it, I've been wondering about this, and wondering if there has there any evidence of Google cutting off an entire domain randomly.

To deal with that possibility I've been thinking what the easiest and most reliable way of providing a "failover" for my domain's mail is.

Has anyone dealt with this successfully?

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#59
post #47
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I have been a donor for a long time, so yes, technically I am paying them. And your second statement is false; other orgs have successfully had online gatherings on BBB, for example.

"Online gatherings" as in 1:M live streams, or "online gatherings" as in "pack everyone into a WebRTC room and hope it holds"? Because Twitch and YouTube do the former and I don't see anything in BBB that natively emits HLS or DASH. I see plugins that will talk to an RTMP server, but that leaves a very long row to hoe. 1:M live streaming is very, very difficult to get right--it's is why video providers can charge so…

Its not really the streaming persay its this is TV broadcast tech running over IP.

Its a networking problem, not a software issue. You will have to change the format or be independently wealthy to compete, 1:M will always by nature be a matter of outsized resources on the transmit versus receive side.

Re: Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014)

#60
post #26

Having your own email/domain isn’t about privacy. Email has become essentially the key to almost everything in modern life. If I lose access to my email I lose access to basically everything I own and it would be a massive hassle to switch emails. Banks, schools, apps, etc. Often times these services won’t even let you change to a new email if you don’t have access to an existing one. Some use email as 2factor. It’s…

Is it known that domain registrars are better than GMail in this regard? Not asking sarcastically, but I had my domain taken over by registrar(not released to public, just registrar took control of it) after few week of notice when auto renew failed to charge my credit card, and my credit card was working fine elsewhere. Also many registrar like Namecheap cancelled subscription for Russian customers during this invas…

But what's the alternative? Does SMTP even work without a domain? I dipped my toes in this far enough to connect a custom domain to a mailbox hosted by bluehost so I don't know too much but I always seek to separate from Google et al wherever possible. I thought the buck stops at DNS and domain registration though, short of like, that gnu internet project I vaguely remember, what's the alternative?
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