171–180 of 267 posts
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This trumps all the other privacy arguments. If the government wants to read your email, it need not access it at the endpoints -- it already has access to it in transmission over the compromised backbone. You would need to encrypt your emails to avoid this.
Someone I know once told me crypto is funny because all you have to do is compromise the OS's socket implementation.
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Some more info... Email augments my life but does not control it. That's where the distinction is. Much as writing letters is a tool, so is email. If it went away, the world would not end for me and I intend to keep it that way. Availability? If mail doesn't get delivered immediately, thanks to the joys of SMTP, it will come later (when my ADSL line is back up). If it's urgent, someone can put mouth to phone rather t…
Can you _send_ emails from your ADSL line? Mine are rejected since I have a semi-dynamic IP address.
To add to this article: Why do people not use PGP or S/MIME? I've submitted my resume to a couple of people who posted in the Who's Hiring thread and checked for each of them if they have a PGP key submitted to the usual key servers (e.g. pgp.mit.edu). None of them had done that. Beats me.
Setting the privacy and security issues aside, I wonder why do so many self-respecting hackers use the Gmail web interface (instead of, say, fetching their mail via IMAP and use another client). Dedicated mail clients like mutt can be much more efficient (keyboard-driven) and are a lot more customisable (run macros, pipe mail through external commands, etc.). I wonder why so many hackers aren't put off by Google's "o…
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Can you _send_ emails from your ADSL line? Mine are rejected since I have a semi-dynamic IP address.
Most ISPs will let you smarthost out via their upstream mail server.
When people have to choose between usability, accessibility, and reliability VS security and privacy they almost always choose the former. My response to this would be "Why do self-respecting open source and security advocates refuse to do the hard work of making security and privacy easily available to everyone?" Laziness, disinterest, and fear of killing off lucrative security consulting.
There's no privacy in either case. Every single email passes in clear text through some ISP who may very well be storing copies of them. If you want privacy, you use PGP.
Disclaimer: I work on a "security" product.
1. Running a mail server is an unbelievable pain in the rear from an IT perspective. Note that by "mail server" I mean a good setup with spam filtration, webmail, SMTPS, IMAPS, etc. 2. Really good rich webmail. I personally use Mac Mail.app most of the time, but having that rich webmail is nice. 3. Filters mail at the server side. 4. Very good spam filtering... I post my gmail addresses on web pages with no obfuscati…
I disagree on most points... 1. It takes a few hours to set up, sure, but it isn't difficult – setting up a mail server on a *nix box isn't exactly uncharted territory, every possible aspect of it is documented to death on the web. And once it's up and running it takes practically no effort to maintain. Yes, even with spam filtering that keeps my inbox spam free, despite my address having been used in several public…
1. Setting up the mail server is not the issue. It's the ongoing maintenance to ensure close to 100% uptime so you don't lose any mail. Having worked as a sysadmin maintaining linux boxes for several companies, mail server maintenance accounted for the vast majority of the hours we spent working on servers. This doesn't even account for the hardware upkeep to keep RAID sets in good shape, tape backups, etc.
2. There is simply no open source project that offers a UI anywhere close to as good as gmail. Yes, someone could take on that project, but it will be years before they achieve a similarly polished result.
3. Sure you could roll your own filtering that would be more effective than gmail's, for you. Again, this is further work that you have to do whereas gmail "just works".
4. SpamAssassin is one of the great open source projects in my opinion. Combined with ClamAV you can get a really robust solution that works fairly well. However (afaik) it lacks the learning heuristics that gmail's huge body of data can provide to keep even the newest template spam out of your inbox.
This is not to say that I don't agree with some of your points, but in my opinion the OP has a valid perspective, which I suspect many IT people who value their own time will share.
So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups? Because we're lazy. you give away control over your personal data Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. Lots of pissed off users would tarnish Google's reputation and it's in their interest to avoid that. you put your…
You pretty much said what I was going to say, only nicer.
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There's no privacy in either case. Every single email passes in clear text through some ISP who may very well be storing copies of them. If you want privacy, you use PGP.
That's what I'm getting at. Have you tried using GPG? Most "security" products (or projects) have terrible usability. Disclaimer: I work on a "security" product.
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Yes, and if my data disappeared tomorrow, I'd be pretty pissed off. But since Gmail has a sort of critical mass, it would be likely that other people would lose data too. You're picturing some massive server failure, but not the more likely case of your Google account being disabled for any random reason, which has happened to more than a few people. As Gmail gains more users, you become that much less important to t…
I still believe the chance of Google losing or preventing access to my data is much lower than the chance of me accidentally screwing up my own server and finding out my backups don't work. It's a huge amount of work to get anywhere close to the reliability of GMail. You have to maintain the server, secure it, test backups, verify backups and deal with every security or maintenance issue that comes up. It's a trade-o…