Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#261

Post by michaelcampbell » Tue, Feb 07, 2012, 2:01 AM UTC

there wrote: post #15

aiurtourist wrote: post #8

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…

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…

> 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 them.

"more than a few" is probably still in the ten-thousandths of percentage points if that. Some can't, but I can live with those odds.

And as Gmail gets more users, I'm guessing the odds get even better, particularly with so many of these new users being tied to Android. Google has a lot tied up with making sure things don't go south.

And then there's services like backupify.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#262

Post by michaelcampbell » Tue, Feb 07, 2012, 2:04 AM UTC

sdfjkl wrote: post #239

drhowarddrfine wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think a "maximize the buck" move by Google would be to start rooting around in your personal drawers?

All it takes is one idiot in middle management that thinks "who's going to notice if we just ...". Like the recent Mocality case.

Which was rectified within a week, no?

I don't doubt you; this may eventually happen, but for the meantime, I'm trusting them (over my ISP, anyway), with my email and backing up/saving the stuff that warrants it.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#263

Post by peawee » Tue, Feb 07, 2012, 4:24 PM UTC

etherael wrote: post #208

peawee wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone I know once told me crypto is funny because all you have to do is compromise the OS's socket implementation.

Is that before or after you write a gui interface using visual basic to track an IP address? :/

To be fair, this is a guy who does hardened, embedded RTOSes. In the normal world implementation, of course crypto matters.

Sometimes I need to take off my "all software sucks and I hate everything" hat before posting :-/

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#264

Post by alanh » Tue, Feb 07, 2012, 11:36 PM UTC

coopdog wrote: post #139

pyre wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could always mooch off of Gmail's spam filtering... Use SpamAssassin in conjunction with a gmail account that is only used as an attempt to attract as much spam as possible. Then just download the spam folder over IMAP and use it to teach SpamAssassin...

Gmail's spam filters are so good because they have a network effect going though, I doubt one spam folder would achieve much, you need a much bigger sample of all the spam than one account could ever attract

Pretty sure you are making some unwarranted assumptions here – other commenters mention that SpamAssassin can download updates to itself regularly, so you aren’t starting from scratch with a completely untrained Bayesian algorithm.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#265

Post by bwarp » Wed, Feb 08, 2012, 10:35 AM UTC

tennineten wrote: post #254

bwarp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - it's very simple: contacts.txt - in order of surname, firstname Surname, FirstName, Primary telephone number with code, Email address so: Joe, Bloggs, 02033345545, joe@bloggs.com I only keep a single number for people, but you could extend it to two numbers if you want. cal.txt - latest dates at top of file: 2012/02/02 16:00+ What to do # time specific event 2012/03/03 --:-- Someone's birthday # all day event W…

Thanks for the information. Do you enter birthdays every year? Or just use sed or something to update the year? If you delete everything after the date, I guess you never need to refer to old appointments?

If it's a birthday, I actually manually add the birthday's next occurence to the appropriate point in the list. It helps keep the dates in mind as well!

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#266

Post by tonyarkles » Wed, Feb 08, 2012, 8:47 PM UTC

joejohnson wrote: post #253

tonyarkles wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a curiosity, what is "a decent amount"? $5/mo? $10/mo? More?

I would probably pay $200-$300/year, so maybe $15-25/month if this hypothetical service could completely match gmail in features.

I'd be really curious to see what Google makes off the advertisements served up in Gmail, compared to this price.

Re: Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

#267

Post by kahawe » Sun, Feb 12, 2012, 11:29 PM UTC

Niten wrote: post #184

aethr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in my experience, OP has it right. 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 g…

I do value my own time, and I'll say it again – post setup, I really spend no appreciable time keeping my mail server running. My VPS provider handles all hardware issues (with zero downtime in the last two years), backups consist of a nightly cron job and require no manual intervention, and the last time I touched my Postfix configuration was over a year ago. "Rolling my own filtering" consists of placing a single m…

You are missing a very critical point: either you need to rent a virtual or real server and spend time configuring and maintaining it - or you could try and dare to run your mail server from at home on some linux box which will open a whole can of worms...

So gmail gives you an easy and free alternative and you can just sign up and access mail via web, pop3 and especially IMAP, which made it superior to pretty much every single other webmail when they launched that feature - and I believe that is still true today, most free webmail providers don't give you free IMAP. You are "paying" by giving away your private information but evidently, people prefer it to setting up their own mail servers.