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Expunging Google

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Re: Expunging Google

#81

Post by chmike »

When I registered on Quora by using my GoogleId, I was very surprised to see Quora asking me to send an email invite to all my Android phone contacts. Google handed over all the emails of my Android phone contacts to Quora ! Is this what I get from using Android and synchronization ? I didn't see an opt out of that.

I'm now waiting for Ubuntu phone, while hoping that they don't try to monetize it using similar abuse of monopole. The Ubuntu desktop spam still hurts.

Also, when connecting to my Youtube account, google ask me regularly to use my real name and there is no button to reply just no and don't ever ask me anymore!

Google is lowering the barrier for competitors ! Same thing for Twitter and Facebook.

Re: Expunging Google

#82

Post by magicalist »

emilis_info wrote: post #78

Switching to Firefox will not save you. I recently found out that Firefox sends a request to safebrowsing.clients.google.com for every page I visit. I found out how to disable it, but it wasn't straightforward and there were still requests sent to Google for other things. Safe browsing is in Firefox Preferences "Security" tab under "Block reported attack sites" + "Block reported web forgeries". Search for "goog" in a…

sniff the connection rather than jumping to conclusions (and especially before telling people to disable a safety feature of their browser).

Safe browsing does not send the addresses you visit over the wire. The protocol was very carefully designed to be both fast updating and not expose any information about the sites you visit.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/phishing-protection/

https://code.google.com/p/google-safe-browsing/wiki/Protocol...

edit: just to save time for others parsing the protocol page, and it's been a while since I've read it, so someone please correct me if I have this wrong, but Firefox (and Chrome, and maybe others, not sure) stores a local set of the first 32 bits of the 256-bit hashes of all the sites currently marked as hosting malware or whatever. Your browser pings fairly often to get an updated version of this set of sites.

When you visit a page, the canonicalized name of the page you're on is hashed and the first 32 bits are compared against the database of prefixes. If there is a collision (I believe there are usually a few hundred thousand entries of the 2^32 available hash prefixes), only the first 32 bits of the hash of the page you're on is sent to google, as a request for the set of full hashes of malicious pages that begin with that prefix, which allows for the final, very much local, check.

This saves a bunch of time and bandwidth, and lets you get a last minute double check that the page is still bad with no one able to work out what page you're actually on.

Re: Expunging Google

#83

Post by gcb0 »

cageface wrote: post #70
duncan_bayne wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I strongly suspect that very few people would be willing to > pay what it would cost to build and run a service like > GMail without ads. What do you think the problem would be? I'm using Fastmail now, and not missing anything from Gmail. All for $50 / month.

I tried Fastmail last year and maybe my impressions are out of date but it can't compete on features at all. The web interface is stone age compared to gmail, search is far slower and less sophisticated, spam filtering was not as good etc. No native apps are available for mobile. Fastmail isn't bad but I don't consider them to be in the same league.

Zimbra was a good alternative, but yahoo bought it and crapped it out

Re: Expunging Google

#84

Post by lobster_johnson »

dannyr wrote: post #79
lobster_johnson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with Google at the moment is the centralization of many popular services into one corporate entity. Video, search, email etc. are all now in the hands of, mostly, Google. With so few viable competitors, you get a de-factory monopoly as well as insane growth. The centralization itself is the problem. Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass…

So are you saying that if we don't count the innovation that Google has been doing, Google is not innovative at all. Btw, here are some Google products that it continues to iterate: Google Maps YouTube Android Wallet Google+ Go AngularJS Shopping However, if you don't want to count these ones, I guess you're right that most of Google's services have stagnated. #sarcasm

No, I'm saying that Google is innovating very little. Indeed, it's primarily innovating in areas not related to the web (which the article is about).

Search, Maps,YouTube have not evolved much the last few years; the last true innovation was Street View, and the last truly useful addition to Search was the fact database integration. Android is basically just following in Apple's footsteps. Wallet I don't know anything about, so I can't comment, Shopping looks to me like it's still the terrible old shopping search that isn't useful for anything. Google+ is basically a reimplementation of Facebook.

Go may have been created at Google, but it's really the work of Pike and Thompson; according to insiders, the internal language at Google is still mainly Java and C++; and I wouldn't call it innovation, exactly, since there is nothing innovative about neither the parts or the whole; rather, it's a very incremental evolution of the general-purpose computer language tradition of C plus Oberon/Modula.

In other words, your sarcasm is wildly misplaced, sir.

Re: Expunging Google

#85

Post by aray »

Regardless of where you stand on this issue, this is (to me) why being able to export your data is a first class requirement of a service. For these listed, there's takeout: https://www.google.com/takeout/

Backing up your online data from services should be just as common (and practiced) as backing up harddrives or important information. You decide which services you want to use, but give yourself the flexibility to move if and when circumstances change.

Re: Expunging Google

#86

Post by bdowney »

ok_craig wrote: post #8

I still think this is all ridiculous. Stopping support for a product that uses a certain standard doesn't mean you're against that standard, unless you're a conspiracy theorist. You can argue that they're against certain open standards if you want, but the canceling of Reader isn't actually evidence of that. Simultaneously putting effort into G+ is also not evidence of that. It's not even symbolic of that. It is only…

Google has made several mistakes re social products but it's definitely not against the open web. There's a lot of internal criticism every time one of these decisions is made but, at the end of the day, upper management gets to do whatever they want.

I've never met anybody at Google how was happy with the way G+ is being handled or liked Vic Gundotra. A lot of us rather he'd go back to Microsoft.

Re: Expunging Google

#88

Post by vidarh »

ok_craig wrote: post #15
lobster_johnson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with Google at the moment is the centralization of many popular services into one corporate entity. Video, search, email etc. are all now in the hands of, mostly, Google. With so few viable competitors, you get a de-factory monopoly as well as insane growth. The centralization itself is the problem. Success like this does not breed innovation. Aside from some novel extra-Internet projects like Glass…

I can get behind your first paragraph, which is basically just saying that as a consumer you like to support variety and a dynamic market by using services from multiple providers. If that's you're goal, that's a reasonable enough justification for me. However, that's not a reaction that would come as a direct result of one product cancellation (because it is a proactive, not re active perspective), and my comment is…

He is not claiming an opposition to open standards, but that open standards are secondary, and will get thrown under bus if it conflicts with the primary goal of making money, and that it seems Google believes social in general and Google+ is the way to make more money, and that this puts open standards at risk.

Reducing your dependency on Google's support for open standards then becomes prudent.

Personally I'm sticking with a number of Google services, but I'm also taking precautions (backing up my data; my primary address is on my own domain so I can move away from Gmail easily if I want to (don't think they'd close it down, but they certainly can - and have - made changes that I find detrimental; I only stick with Gmail now because of a number of tweaks using Minimalist, for example)

It's not so much that Google has become horrible, but that they've taken a number of steps to be "less good" than what a lot of people have come to expect and depend on. They're on their way to being "just another company" instead of anything special.

Re: Expunging Google

#89

Post by ernesth »

olalonde wrote: post #87
zobzu wrote: post #25

For maps you may want to try here.com It's not bad - faster than gmaps too

Hmmm Laval shows up before Montreal... I think I'll keep using Google Maps for now.

Google Maps has its share of little cities showing before big ones. I currently see a Digoin on the map of France whereas Saint-Étienne, Clermont-Ferrand, Bourges (or Laval) do not appear...
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