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Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

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

#191

Post by Estragon »

blumentopf wrote: post #74

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.

I had a similar experience recently. Hardly anyone seems to do that. I shouldn't be too surprised, I guess. I had never used gpg to communicate with humans up to that point myself. But I had imagined that all the cool kids did.

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

#192

Post by nupark2 »

Deadsunrise wrote: post #135
api wrote: post #92

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…

Would you pay for this? For the last 3 years I've been creating a platform for this kind of servers for a small spanish ISP. It has grown to 15 Openvz hosts. A rails app connects to the host to create the virtual machine. Centos is installed and configured with puppet. A rails app is installed in every server and used to configure the accounts, domains, etc. Postfix, Cyrus, IMAPS, SMTPS, POP3S, HTTPS, Sieve for filte…

The primary reason I won't outsource this service is trust. I don't trust anyone with that data.

Access to my email allows for resetting all my passwords, seeing all my contacts, and tracking literally everything about my day-to-day business and personal life.

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

#193

Post by nupark2 »

lukev wrote: post #17

1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point. 2. No open source webmail servers that I've seen come close to Gmail's functionality, and I don't have time to write one that is. 3. Even if there was/I did, I couldn't get the spam filtering to anything like Google's level even in theory since I don't…

> 1. Rich webmail is an absolute must for me. I use too many different computers from too many different places for anything else to be remotely practical at this point.

That's what IMAP is for. If these are computers you don't directly control, then I'd say any downsides of using gmail pale in comparison to the security implications inherent in your usage model.

[edit] Can't say I understand the negative downvotes. Maybe I inadvertently denigrated people's preference for webmail over mutt/mail.app/etc?

Regardless, the fact is that if you're utilizing webmail for remote e-mail access on shared computers, then there are much more significant risk scenarios at play than those of gmail.

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

#194

Post by jmsduran »

The article presents a fair argument, but the title is obviously flame bait.

Granted, I myself thought of setting up my own mail server, but the disadvantages quickly outweighed the benefits. If your argument is sheer privacy, unless you are hosting your mail on a physical machine at your house connected to your home ISP (which is pretty dumb if you want ~100% uptime), you will most likely either use a VPS or managed system under the control of yet another company, which privacy-wise is the equivalent of using Gmail anyway.

I'm sure setting up your own hobby mail server would be pretty fun and provide great deals of experience, but if you are doing so simply for data privacy or better up time, your point is moot, and you will probably be better off just using a provider like Google.

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

#195

Post by methodin »

I don't quite understand the constant articles about someone who is thumbing their nose at the "other idiots" who don't care about privacy. Is it not common knowledge that even if you never set foot online your private information has long been dispersed and used for much more than it ever should? We all should be more concerned with the places that we enter information that does not disclose how it is used in a friendly online location (banks, products, doctors office, grocery store etc...).

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

#197

Post by nupark2 »

icebraining wrote: post #175
count wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most ISPs will let you smarthost out via their upstream mail server.

Oh, right, I tried that too, they said they've discontinued that service years ago.

If you ISP provides SMTP for their e-mail (almost all do), then barring outbound From address filters, you can set up your SMTP server to treat the customer facing mail server as a smarthost.

The ISP doesn't need to do anything specific to support it.

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

#199

Post by statenjason »

nabilt wrote: post #40
chc wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A device that sits in your home and hosts your docs, passwords, bookmarks, contact list, and so on? It sounds like you've reinvented the PC.

Well I should have clarified. I want an always on low power appliance with an easy web interface to host important data for people that are not capable or too lazy to set up a server.

I purchased a SheevaPlug[1] a couple years ago. It's a plug sized ARM server consuming 5W max. It's been great for a low-power, always-on debian server. For the lazy or not capable user, there is the Pogo Plug[2], which was prototyped using the Sheeva. You plug in ethernet and a usb hard drive, and it gives you access from the PogoPlug site.

[1]: http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-k... [2]: https://pogoplug.com/devices

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

#200

Post by gnosis »

antics wrote: post #145
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...

Respectfully, no. The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system. One example is when the Hotmail team first enabled keyword filtering. When the spammers found out experimentally, they began injecting HTML comment tags into high-weighted words like "free", breaking the model. When the Hotmail team took steps to comb…

"The primary issue in spam filtering is not that we don't have training corpora, it's that spammers are very efficient at finding holes in your system."

Finding holes on sites like gmail and hotmail is actually much easier than on private sites, because the spammers no doubt have accounts on gmail and hotmail and can test what gets through and what fails and tweak their algorithms until their spam gets through.

Spammers don't have that luxury on private servers, so they have to spam blindly. So in this respect private servers have an advantage over gmail and hotmail.

On the other hand (as has been pointed out many times in this thread), gmail and hotmail have the advantage of advanced spam detection algorithms and virtually instantaneous feedback from millions of users.

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