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Dear Googles: Stop asking

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Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#141

Post by MichaelGG »

StavrosK wrote: post #40
selectodude wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel somewhat dirty saying this, but I'm a fan of Office 365. Exchange support, fantastic customer service, and I feel like if I'm paying money, I'm actually the customer. NSA's got all my shit anyway, at this point. If I can find an equivalent product that doesn't have the .gov down their throats, I'll jump ship tomorrow. But for now...

I just got an idea: The hard part about setting up your own email server is, by far, ensuring deliverability. New/dynamic addresses tend to not be trusted by other mail servers, so that is really the most "dangerous"/time consuming part. So, why not do the following?: * Set up your home server to accept email. If it goes down for a few hours, hey, pretty much every mail server will retry for a few days, so you're pre…

How does this prevent the NSA from reading your email? Your outbound email will be unencrypted in general. If your inbound server only accepts TLS, then you're going to have a hard time receiving email, right? Or do I wildly misunderstand the state of SMTP encryption?

It seems to me that until DNSSEC becomes widespread, there isn't secure way to mandate TLS. (OK you could come up with some hack using HTTPS, like check https://domain.com/smtpsettings for each domain to determine if TLS is required.)

Of course running your own server does prevent wiretaps being implemented by Google, or retroactive access to your mailbox. But it's hardly "keeping your email safe from the NSA".

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#142

Post by aragot »

simias wrote: post #65
zaraflan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never forget that you are not the customer, you are the product.

That's just silly, Google can't afford to alienate its users, whether you consider them customers or products. This phrase is becoming a meme.

Don't forget that Internet is the new television. We've built empires of television channels (including all the commercial football clubs) for the only sake of planting advertising inside each other's homes.

With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages.

But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve.

And Google will fill perfectly in the middle.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#143

Post by MichaelGG »

shittyanalogy wrote: post #14

The whole phone number thing is an attempt to solve a very hard problem. Most people have terrrrrrrrrrrible password practices. Absolutely abysmal. And they are keeping extremely sensitive data inside their email as well as using their email address as the key to accessing many other websites and pieces of sensitive data. Think about how screwed you'd be if you lost access to you email address. Now think of how many…

You're right that in general this helps, and most of Google's account security energy is going towards helping average users deal with basic security. Microsoft offers a similar option (you must choose to use a phone, or a secret question, I think).

But interestingly, phone auth changes as your account becomes more valuable. If your Google account unlocks everything you have, then a targeted stealing of your phone number gives the attacker everything.

If the target is leaving the country without roaming for a few days, an attacker might even get the number flipped back before they return. A non-security conscious victim, upon return, might just wonder how they forgot their password, reset it again, and move on. (That's another reason why Google and others remind you when you last changed your account settings.)

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#145

Post by sp332 »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #43
alextingle wrote: post #10

I was all enthusiastic about G+ for about 5 minutes - until they wouldn't allow my wife to sign up without giving them her phone number, and proving that it was hers by accepting a call from them . Just who the fuck do they think they are?? There is no way I could suggest my friends and family sign up to such an intrusive service, so I quickly deleted my own account. It's an absolutely stunning achievement to create…

Wait wait wait, so your issue was that she'd have to accept a call? As in, have to talk to someone? As in, perform one of the most basic human interactions that is part of what makes us human? And that offends your senses to the point that you consider it intrusive? How antisocial are you? Who do you think YOU are that you can't have a simple chat with another human being. Are you the king of England? Le Roi? Is Goog…

It's not about chatting. At most a computer will call you up and you type some numbers into it, then it hangs up on you.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#146

Post by sp332 »

ams6110 wrote: post #61
fakeanon wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some people it is harder. I deleted my personal Google accounts a while ago. Our school e-mail is Gmail. When we visit Youtube after logging in for Gmail, you have an account, just not a channel. A little box telling you about the updated comment section keeps popping up. There is not a great danger to what they are currently doing, but it is annoying.

Use incognito mode for YouTube.

You still have to log in to comment on or even "like" a video. It's also harder to find the videos you want without being able to see your subscriptions.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#147

Post by RexRollman »

vinhboy wrote: post #21

I don't mind the annoyance of Google+ for my personal account. But they really fucked things up when they forced the integration on my Google Apps for Business (terrible name by way -- why not "Google Business Suite"). Now we have clients pissed off because they can't share images in their organization without opening Google+. This HAS to stop.

Google is an advertising company. All they really care about is building profiles on users and using it to sell ads. That's why you have a ton of unwanted integration, Chromebooks that can't create user accounts without Google's permission, and a Chrome web browser that default to sending a ton of info to Google.

I still use Google Search but I got rid of my Google account, got rid of the Chromebook, moved my email to Fastmail, and moved to Firefox for browsing.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#148

Post by hiyou102 »

brownbat wrote: post #127
supergauntlet wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because Vimeo decided fairly early on that they weren't going to be YouTube. They remove stuff like gameplay videos, which means no lets plays, but that also means no low quality lets plays. Thus if you find a link to a video on Vimeo there's a good chance there's some semblance of quality. Especially if it's a gaming video, because they do allow machinimas. They fostered that artsy niche and in the process beca…

I'm surprised the uploaded video services haven't fragmented as much as news aggregation. There are a dozen news + comments that all have a slightly different threshold for what stays on the site, determined by the tastes of the community. Why haven't more video sites emerged with a similar ethos?

I'm assuming it's because hosting a video site is still a very costly venture and the fact that many content creators started on YouTube. Since the bulk of their views are on YouTube they aren't going to move, especially if their livelihoods are at stake. Also, the difference between YouTube and news sites is that the both the content and the and the aggregation is happening on the same site. That means that they are tied to each other which ties the user there as well.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#149

Post by chronic25 »

msabalau wrote: post #132
zaraflan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never forget that you are not the customer, you are the product.

There is nothing magical about being the customer. Paying money doesn't stop anyone from creating a multi sided market that makes you the product. As anyone who subscribed to a magazine, purchased season tickets to a cultural organization, or seen an ad on an Xbox can attest. Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?

Yes, why not? It's not hard to make a new account.

Re: Dear Googles: Stop asking

#150

Post by chronic25 »

sbuk wrote: post #122
css771 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem comes from the fact of treating Google+ like any other social network like Facebook. Google+ is supposed to be an identity layer for all of Google. The fact that they have status update posting, etc is secondary. Google would like to assign a face, name and phone number to every Google account. And why is that? For various reasons. A face and a name is very valuable for targeted ads. And a phone n…

If that's the case, why not be up front about it?

Amen.
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