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Don’t Mess with The Google

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Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#291

Post by baybal2 »

candiodari wrote: post #273
baybal2 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blatant violation of the First Sale doctrine. Class action lawsuit incoming in 3..2..

I think the legal theory behind this would be that you have agreed that Google can terminate your account for any reason. Furthermore, they're not preventing you from reselling your phone at all - just deleting your account. Not "deleting your account if you do resell it" just deleting your account. First sale simply means they can't sue or get you arrested. They can do anything else with you, and refusing to do any…

>never use your main Google, or Facebook, account for anything, not even buying a Google made phone, or buying Facebook ads for your own company, just never ever do that, so that at the very least, the pain is spread.

Be easy :) . I have 6 facebook accs for 5 of which I forgot passwords, 4 google accs out of which 3 got permalocked because sms confirmations simply never go through to half of Russian numbers, and I think 5 Paypal accounts all of which got blocked because "hey, you are the guy whom we blocked last year! you dared to register again? unforgivable!"

Yes, don't keep things online, you will be better off

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#293

Post by brongondwana »

Loic wrote: post #257
perlpimp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going on a tangent, there should probably be a set of universal backup formats that can be advertised as being somewhat portable. So that, if you need to can take your mail and other online business stuff elsewhere if need be. Beyond this article a user might start working for some place that does not allow external app use, but they can bring their data with, to be loaded onto the service. I guess like github and gi…

For Email with IMAP, you have the wonderful offlineimap tool[0], I have been using it for years, you can easily perform a maildir format[1] backups of all your email accounts. [0]: http://www.offlineimap.org/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir

Agree - Maildir is a pretty good format, because it's just RFC822 (5322 these days, but who's counting) files with weird filenames. mbox format isn't too bad either.

Calendar data you can mainly download as .ics files. Addressbook data is somewhat trickier, a directory full of VCARDs is probably the gold standard.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#294

Post by brongondwana »

staticelf wrote: post #289
brongondwana wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We also stalk you on... I mean, we read the same tech news sites you do. (I'm on third line ticket duty right now, so if you have something significantly more complex than RTFM, or an actual bug, you'll probably be talking to me this week) The most common cause of getting locked out other than you abusing your fastmail account is having your credentials stolen and used for spam/fraud, which is why we recommend 2 fact…

Can you clarify what this means: "Flexible tamper-proof data retention policies with unlimited archiving space" - from the pricing page. I am considering to switch to Fastmail, seems nice!

At a techinical level it means we take a copy of each incoming and outgoing (assuming you send via our web interface or via our SMTP servers) email and dump them into a separate folder in a separate account on our server which your admin accounts get a READ-ONLY ACL to, so you can see the messages, but can't remove them or modify them.

Unlimited is a bit buzzwordy, because we do have sending and receiving rate limits, so you can't grow the archive user faster than that.

Also if you go over about 850Gb of data right now you will make me very sad because I don't have facilities for splitting users yet, and we segment users across 1Tb partitions. I'm hoping nobody hits that point before I've got sharding inside users working - but worst case I spin up new hardware with larger individual partitions and put the user there :)

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#295

Post by ucaetano »

kuschku wrote: post #283
ucaetano wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until your ISP closes your account for whatever reason.

That’s why you use a trustworthy ISP. My current ISP, for example, is actually a local company providing datacenter colocation and consulting services to the state’s government and local and national companies, but they also run a small ISP as side business.

>they also run a small ISP as side business

Which means their small ISP business is something they wouldn't mind so much getting rid of, along with your account.

The point is, you'll always depend on someone else. Your data will always flow through someone else's network. The cloud is someone's computer, and the internet is someone's cable.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#296

Post by brongondwana »

josephb wrote: post #247
a012 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will Fastmail have CDN? I'm currently in Vietnam and latency to Fastmail isn't good (250ms RTT), as I connect to server that's located in US. While my home's internet service might be worse, so I hope Fastmail servers are closer.

Based in AU I'm further away than that by latency. As a fastmail web interface or mobile app user I don't notice the latency. CDN for unique items like mail probably doesn't offer tons of gain for the additional complexity.

We tried using CDN for static files (interface javascript and such) for a while, but we found that it didn't really give much benefit. The faster connect times got eaten up in the second SSL negotiation required for a different hostname. And it meant fun and games with content security policies or giving a third party SSL certificates that were inside our domain, so it was a wash. We decided the benefits didn't add value.

And yeah, our core dev team is in .AU, so we know all about the latency. It's really not a big deal once you sync up the first time - all the static artifacts are cached and the dynamic data is loaded in the background, often before you need it.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#297

Post by smonff »

Rotareti wrote: post #276
setq wrote: post #170

First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control. Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened…

That is why I stick to OSS like Linux, Thunderbird, nextcloud, etc. as much as possible. I got locked into a closed source platform once and it was a pain to get out of it. I will never let it happen again.

Self storage is fine but does it guaranty long term documents safety?

I am very sceptical about my ability of maintaining it on the long term.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#298

Post by brongondwana »

x0x0 wrote: post #182
sundvor wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. :) Reading this in the context of this thread made me setup my own trial account, with a new domain name. As soon as those MX records propagate, I'll be good to test it for a while. Wish you had a dark theme, that'd be my only feedback for now (Stylish also works). Appears to be very fast, but of course, my account is 100% empty.

ime: it stays very fast, even with 1.5k emails in inbox, ~30k emails / 2.5G total in various folders. Also, changes propagate faster even than gmail. If you have your inbox open on 2 computers and move an email out of your inbox on one of them, you'll see it replicated in near real time on the second computer. I don't know how they do it, but it works really well.

You can know how we do it if you like:

https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/02/dec-3-push-it-real-good...

and how we do the initial load as well:

https://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/15/dec-15-putting-the-fast...

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#299

Post by sundvor »

x0x0 wrote: post #182
sundvor wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. :) Reading this in the context of this thread made me setup my own trial account, with a new domain name. As soon as those MX records propagate, I'll be good to test it for a while. Wish you had a dark theme, that'd be my only feedback for now (Stylish also works). Appears to be very fast, but of course, my account is 100% empty.

ime: it stays very fast, even with 1.5k emails in inbox, ~30k emails / 2.5G total in various folders. Also, changes propagate faster even than gmail. If you have your inbox open on 2 computers and move an email out of your inbox on one of them, you'll see it replicated in near real time on the second computer. I don't know how they do it, but it works really well.

Interesting, thanks for that. I'm up and running on my own domain after waiting for the domain name server to transfer from Bluehost where I registered the domain. I did start out doing manual configuration until deciding I might as well use Fastmail's; their DNS config page is rather nicely laid out.

Was very easy in the end, but must admit I had forgotten just about everything I once learned about DNS. As such it was nice to get a little refresher.

EDIT: I would probably have gone for Google Apps / G Suite if not for this article. So, yeah, hope it served Google well to freeze those accounts with no warning.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#300

Post by brongondwana »

ansgri wrote: post #252
aristidb wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMS is not very secure, there have been quite a few stories of people losing digital access due to an attacker just calling Verizon and taking over their phone account.

That's in the US. In other countries things may be more secure. In Russia I barely can make any changes by phone because they verify so much info. Forwarding will certainly require an in-person visit to the carrier office. So I guess it's better to leave the choice to the user, with an appropriate warning text. —Another happy Fastmail customer

There's the other side of it, which is that SMS delivery is awfully unreliable in many places, and it's a frustrating experience for everyone. We can fire off the SMS, but if it fails to reach you it's an expensive and time consuming support headache for us, and a shitty experience for you.

A Yubikey costs less than a year's FastMail service.

So no, we're not leaving this choice to the customer sorry, SMS sucks for too many reasons to consider adding back.

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