Google has most of my email because it has all of yours (2014) • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by denton-scratch » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 10:06 AM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #339

denton-scratch wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but that seems to require that my bank and all my friends adopt some skanky modified DNS resolver. Is that right? How exactly does that benefit them? And the alternative you're suggesting is that they replace their OS, or adopt some mutant mail client? Few of my friends have ever used a proper email client at all . And which alternative OS implements this? And again, what incentive do my correspondents have to…

> How exactly does that benefit them? If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. > replace their OS or adopt some mutant mail client? No, there is nothing stopping MS or Apple from adding this functionality to their own systems. All it would take is for them to see increased demand for it. > not a proposal that has m…

> If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not.

OK; if the blockage is that authoritative DNS records are unavailable, this system could help. At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack. But most websites subject to DNS blocking just move to a new domain; TPB seems to manage. More generally, you could simply move your DNS hosting out of the reach of the problematic authority. Unless the website owner made the mistake of using a subdomain of e.g. a repressive CCTLD.

> IOW, if you are okay with the status quo, good for you.

I'm not OK with the status-quo; we know DNS is problematic. But you suggested that this system is simple ("All you need is..."). You didn't mention that (a) the problem it addresses is constrained to the blocking of authoritative DNS, nor (b) that no alternative mail client or OS actually exists.

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

#362

Post by thiht » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 10:15 AM UTC

kdtsh wrote: post #246

readsadhours wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People from the UK that had an .eu domain were unable to renew it after brexit.

This is a good reason to stick to .com and .net

You're being downvoted but this is actually good advice.

As someone who worked in domain names for 5 years, I often suggest to either use one of the historical gTLDs (com, net, info, org) or the ccTLD of your country if it's popular enough (.fr for France, .uk/.co.uk for United Kingdom, etc.)

Never use the ccTLD of a different country than yours, eligibility rules can change with very short notice. For .eu the notice was long enough but nothing guarantees it to be the case. Some trendy ccTLDs also have crappy infrastructure (.so of Somalia for example has provoked at least one outage for Notion.so).

Be very careful with newGTLDs, some of these are outright scam. There are some reliable newGTLDS (.app/.dev from Google for example, yeah, even though it's Google they have to play by ICANN's rules) but if you don't know how to determine the reliability of a newGTLD, just stick with .com/.net.

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

#363

Post by mort96 » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 10:17 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #323

tryptophan wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it utterly astounding that not a single government has started an email service yet for its citizens, with all the legal protections of actual mail and such. They wouldn't even need to run it, just create a legal category like "This account is officially registered to X and serves as a legal email account" that companies can apply for if they meet some standards.

First, why would they when they don't need to because private companies already provide it for free? Second, the government is now on the hook for not just failures and outages but all security and privacy breaches. So it's basically all risk and no reward. It makes sense governments wouldn't want to touch that.

Private companies provide it for free because they earn money from violating their users' privacy. They have proven incapable of providing a decent email service for free.

Which makes sense; "spend a lot of money providing a service for nothing in return" isn't a great business model.

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

#364

Post by OrangeMonkey » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

jkepler wrote: post #208

rglullis wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The "They" that did the fork only managed to do it because there was a majority consensus agreement to switch to the forked chain. If the majority refused to follow, there forked chain would have died or become a thing for the minority. Just like EthPOW vs ETH POS. Seriously, why is it that every discussion about crypto has the same bullshit talking points? Do you guys have a list of "standard basic list of BS ar…

Don't attribute to malice what could simply be ignorance. Right now, people need to pit in some serious time (upwards of 100 hours minimum) learning about true decentralized open technologies like bitcoin , so I think uninformed ignorance is far more likely than malice in almost all cases... unless the uninformed person stands to profit from his or her ignorance. I'm not sure Ethereum is anywhere near as decentralize…

You are right.

The most likely reason almost all of hackernews wants to do nothing but make fun of crypto and the people involved is they just don't understand it.

If only they invested the 100+ hours learning it like we did then maybe they would understand its value. I mean thats the only option - either its uninformed ignorance (which we think) or actual malice. There can't be a third option.

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

#365

Post by GekkePrutser » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 11:27 AM UTC

cglan wrote: 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…

I think email is ever diminishing as a communication medium because it's just so terribly broken. You can't verify the sender is who they say they are, you can't be sure that the recipient receives your message and is the only one to see it.

I don't use it for personal communication anymore. With some businesses perhaps but most of that has relegated email to a buggy notification service ("come check our portal for your message") because email can't be trusted with confidential data.

It still has an important role in the identity process but that's mainly for historical reasons. It's also grossly unsuited for that and I don't understand why open ID federation like OpenID never took off.

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

#366

Post by rglullis » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 12:13 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #361

rglullis wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How exactly does that benefit them? If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. > replace their OS or adopt some mutant mail client? No, there is nothing stopping MS or Apple from adding this functionality to their own systems. All it would take is for them to see increased demand for it. > not a proposal that has m…

> If your friends wants to access a website that has been blocked by some authority, they can with this system. With the status quo, they can not. OK; if the blockage is that authoritative DNS records are unavailable, this system could help. At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack. But most websites subject to DNS blocking just move to a new domain; TPB seems to manage. More generally,…

> At the cost of all visitors installing an alternative DNS client stack.

That will be a requirement only until the bigger players don't integrate this directly. Nothing stopping Cloudflare/Google/OpenDNS to provide integration with ENS.

Anyway, you make it sound like this is just a niche required by a few dozen people. The Brave browser is used by 60 million people already and can handle .eth TLD (and other TLDs from unstoppable domains) natively. It is not a big of a deal as you are making it out to be.

> More generally, you could simply move your DNS hosting out of the reach of the problematic authority.

Or we can build a system where we do not have to play whack-a-mole just to use a service?

> You didn't mention that (a) the problem it addresses is constrained to the blocking of authoritative DNS,

I said that is the most obvious benefit, but I didn't say it was constrained to that. Look up again at the top of the thread: people are getting shut out of "reputable" registrars established in "democratic jurisdictions" without recourse.

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

#367

Post by rglullis » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 12:19 PM UTC

throwaway_ocr wrote: post #360

rglullis wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. The "They" that did the fork only managed to do it because there was a majority consensus agreement to switch to the forked chain. If the majority refused to follow, there forked chain would have died or become a thing for the minority. Just like EthPOW vs ETH POS. Seriously, why is it that every discussion about crypto has the same bullshit talking points? Do you guys have a list of "standard basic list of BS ar…

The thing I don't understand is the concept "majority" in the crypto space. There is no way to prove that one person doesn't control the majority of the voting power. If I own a large portion of the supply split across several hundred wallets and I vote one way, smaller owners may be influenced by the appearance of hundreds of votes being cast one way vs the other. We see this in the real world, where some people are…

Voting has nothing to with the consensus mechanisms to determine who is allowed to choose what block is appended to the chain. Why are you bringing up "voting" into the discussion here?

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

#368

Post by joshspankit » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 1:07 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #306

PaulHoule wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘Make both of us rich’ is exactly what we’re afraid of.

What are you afraid of, really? People that can make innovations? My point was that the reason that people are doing all this work on the blockchain because no other solution has been shown to be better. Anyone that says "blockchain is not needed for that" should at least provide a better solution, or say "I actually prefer to keep the status quo".

I’m not the OP, but I think there is a very real concern that a single person or single group of people who create the “new better system” can significantly drain the resources of everyone else.

We actively see this all the time on smaller scales (credit cards, global franchises, FAANG), but the idea of someone doing it at a larger scale should make us hesitate.

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

#369

Post by ajross » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #335

ajross wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Third, do you understand that even if one single entity had that much power to launch an attack of the network, it would not be in their interest to do so? If that were true, then why was the Ethereum network attacked and forked last month? I think what's happening here is that you've confusing "blockchain consensus" with "not evil", because you trust the giant faceless organization making decisions about the futur…

> Ethereum network attacked and forked last month What?! What attack are you referring about? What fork are you talking about? Please, provide actual information instead of throwing around sites that are clearly just helping you to confirm your biases. > you've (sic) confusing "blockchain consensus" with "not evil" because you trust the giant faceless organization making decisions Not really. The thing that I care ab…

> What?! What attack are you referring about? What fork are you talking about?

Wait, really? On September 15th, someone attacked the Ethereum blockchain and stole all the value, handing it off to this other coin. Our coins are still there, but per current markets they're only worth 0.47% of the value they should have. I can't believe you missed that.

Now, obviously you think that's different. And that this giant act of fiat by a centralized operating body was a GOOD act of fiat by a centralized operating body. But it was still a giant act of fiat by a centralized operating body, which points out that the kind of "self-sovereignty" you believe in doesn't exist. You are and will always remain solvent at the whim of the people running the economy you're part of. That's simply the truth.

The difference is that you trust the ETH cabal where you don't trust email providers. And I think that's misplaced.

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

#370

Post by Ajedi32 » Mon, Oct 24, 2022, 2:18 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #199

rglullis wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you know why there are still some people that still take "web3" seriously. It's the only system where you are not at the mercy of some external entity to be always benevolent. Seriously, ENS and Handshake alone should be enough of a reason to silence all of those who keep repeating "but blockchain has no real world applications".

And that's why web3 frustrates me to no end. Decentralized services were common in the "old" internet, web3 just takes than and adds a layer of ponzi and speculation on top of them. If bittorent was invented today you'd have to buy into some pyramid scheme to use it. Beyond that having a trusted third party does suck for some things, but at least it means that I have a recourse if something goes wrong. With cryptocra…

The problem with decentralized systems that don't include a currency component is that there's no extrinsic incentive to contribute anything to the network, only to consume.

BitTorrent suffers from this problem; they even have a term for it: leeching. It's managed to survive despite this purely off of the generosity and goodwill of a community of dedicated users, but if BitTorrent were to ever have its eternal September moment I suspect the problem would quickly be felt rather acutely.

With other systems like decentralized cloud storage[1] or decentralized DNS[2] where (unlike with BitTorrent) there are no inherent practical limits on how many resources a single user can consume, the consequences of not including a currency component would be even more severe.

As for the "no recourse" problem, that's inherent to the very idea of self-sovereignty. Yes it's a weakness with decentralized systems, but it's also their greatest strength.

[1]: https://sia.tech/

[2]: https://handshake.org/