Live data from Hacker News

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

mako.cc

61–70 of 400 posts

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

#61
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…

Basically 1:M, or N:M with N It works relatively well on a beefy BBB instance. Jitsi from my experience craps out on low-bandwidth scenarios, but I've attended BBB meetings of respectable size with no issue.

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

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure if this was added after your comment, but in the second line of their post jamiek88 said

> To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always.

One can infer that the credit card did not auto-pay, the domain expired, and Namecheap immediately resold the domain to a squatter rather than first reaching out to jamiek88 to confirm that the non-renewal was intentional.

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

#63
And that's why services like Tutanota (https://tutanota.com/) and Proton Mail (http://protonmail.com/) offer the option to send password protected / encrypted email to third-party. This can be used to prevent Google or Microsoft from spying on your emails as the actual email is never sent to their server. Yes, sharing passwords beforehand can be a pain. But even if you SMS / message them the password, or just put hint to it in the subject - "the pass is your phone number" or "the pass is your fathers name" - it still creates an additional barrier for Google or Microsoft bots to index your email. While we may not be able to do this for every email, we certainly can do this for personal emails. This process also creates awareness in your social network, when they ask you why you are using such convoluted methods to send them email.

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

#65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No post body was provided.

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

#66
post #31
post #3

I remember when I was horrified that apps would ask for (or not…) all my contacts. But then I realized most people on my contacts probably wouldn’t say no so someone could easily use that information to guesstimate my contacts by using everyone else’s contacts.

Did that realisation make you less horrified?

> To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

Frank Herbert

/s/mortality/your information is all over the internet/

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

#68
post #9

For me, owning my own email domain is far more about control than privacy. I currently use some MX and SMTP trickery to forward all of my email to Gmail, effectively using Gmail as my 'email client' - but because the domain is mine, I can change that without too much headache, unlike if I were just using an @gmail.com address.

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.

Making sure that your domain registration is always current is not a difficult thing, though. You can register for fairly long periods of time, and set up multiple alerts to manually renew long before it expires.

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

#69
The popularity of ChromeOS in US schools means millions of kids require Gmail accounts (since ChromeOS requires sign-in the OS to full use).

It's probably true to say that almost every school kid in the US has been captured by Google's embrace.

The 'tech community' have little to say on the matter. In fact, developers are more likely to defend Google rather than question unprecedented levels of data collection.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cos of Covid namecheap sold my domain to a squatter Can you elaborate? As a Namecheap customer, this is concerning.

I'm not sure if this was added after your comment, but in the second line of their post jamiek88 said > To this day I have no idea why the card didn't pay as always. One can infer that the credit card did not auto-pay, the domain expired, and Namecheap immediately resold the domain to a squatter rather than first reaching out to jamiek88 to confirm that the non-renewal was intentional.

Pay a bit more annually to a reputable DNS company. For example, I initially whet with GoDaddy, until about ten years ago when I read that they were shutting down people's domains simply upon a "we're investigating thisbperson, kill their domain" letter from the US Marshals (a Federal police force). Around the same time I heard about easyDNS in Canada, and discovered that they will only ever seize one of their customer's domains if they receive proper papers from a court---i.e. a search warrant. I like that they're committed to rule of law rather than politically motivated deplatforming.
Post reply on HN