Hard sell. There's a reason why the government has laws against monopolies. Especially when it comes to the internet, consumers tend to choose the best/fastest product over the most ethical one.

- Ubuntu is my daily driver OS, with Windows getting booted once in a blue moon to play some games

- Firefox for 80% of my browsing (the other 20% is Chromium on a Chromebook, which seems to run faster than FF even in an Ubuntu chroot with crouton)

- Thunderbird and a plain ol' IMAP mail server for email

- Maybe half of my messaging has moved to Signal

- Searx.me for web searches, sure I'm using the Google results more often than not, but at least my queries are anonymized, and switching to other providers is easy

I started a business on a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack, and I sleep better at night because of that. I gave our latest hire most of the same desktop software I use, and so far no major problems.

I'll grant you that the UI of some of this software is a little creaky, but I get by, and overall I'd say most of the nasty bugs we have to deal with in our toolkit are in closed source SaaS stuff.

Some notable unethical holdouts include occasional Skype/Hangouts calls, Slack, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Also a bunch of small-time SaaS products. But give me time.

That's not exactly a unique feature of this stack. Most web stacks are free and open source.

- The company supports or enables injustice or human rights violations - The company collects a lot of personal information and does creepy or obscure stuff with it - The company does not release the source of its products

Virtually all SaaS gets dinged because of #3, and in a perfect world we'd somehow replace them all with self-hosted, open source alternatives, but that's a tall order.

I'm not a zealot about any of this, I just make sure I set aside a little time aside every quarter to evaluate ethical alternatives. Legitimately "doing no evil" is absolutely a benefit I'll pay money for.

EDIT: Bit of a brain-fart. IMAP is just a client of a mail server. So to rephrase my question - what mail server do you use?

Also, having run an email startup in London, patching and anti-spam at almost any scale is nontrivial.

For volume mailing we use ESPs like Mailgun and Sendgrid. Occasional deliverability problems are a fact of life at those.

Popular, easy and cheap wins most of the time, even if it hides deferred costs like terrible security and engineering choices.

I realize this isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it is indeed possible to unplug your WAN connection and plug something else in instead. Amateur radio operators do this amazing and fun thing with self-discovering, self-linking mesh networks. Great fun to learn and explore!

A good starting point: http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/

  it is NOT a replacement for your home internet connection
    being an Amateur Radio network, it can only carry traffic that is allowed under FCC Part 97 rules
    several types of internet traffic violate these rules
  also, it is NOT a replacement for your home internet connection
  finally, it is N O T a replacement for your home internet connection
  and by the way, it most certainly CANNOT be used in any way with your business network

If you're impatient, you can skip the first 10 minutes and 40 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM#t=10m40s

When it becomes technologically possible to interface electronics into our brains, corporations will have almost unprecedented opportunities to do some really terrible things directly when the world becomes socially-pressured to be neurally-connected.

I say "almost" because the manufacturing of consent and desires exist now and it is popularly believed to "apply other people but never me," a direct connection has the potential to make this manipulation cheaper and stimulate the brain in ways a glowing screen looks like banging rocks together.

We are replacing things above TCP/IP like DNS, Certificate Authorities (CAs), how data is discovered, data silos, and dependence on remote servers for running your apps.

http://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf has more details.

I do use alternative search engines; however, look at the traffic on just about any website and you'll see Google ip traffic spewing in all directions. I'm quite confident that tracking still occurs, regardless of how I get from one site to the other. This can be locked down a bit, but not 100% and not without effort and maintenance.

You have fundamentally misunderstood how Google tracks your visits. If website uses AdSense, they track you, if website uses Google Analytics, they track you, or Google fonts or scripts or what ever, they track you.

This means that the problem is much larger and the solution is not very simple.

There are ways to prevent those requests, however. Install a chrome extension to block all adsense & analytics requests, fonts, etc. Black hole their IP addresses or DNS. There are plenty of concerted efforts to improve anonymity despite these issues (e.g. the TOR browser).

There are varying costs to these approaches but it's not impossible, or even that hard if you trust the Tor team more than Google.

I'm not saying there aren't additional avenues worth investigating, but that you nearly always have to decide how much efficiency/cost you're willing to pay for anonymity.

I did a test, beside IP address also User-Agent, Accept-Language and Referer headers were sent.

Perhaps not good for very precise finger printing but still more that you claimed and can be cross correlated with other requests with more precise information.

Google has claimed that they do not use this cases for tracking. One can believe this statement, or one can prefer to not do.

and from there:

https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?#fingerprintTable

It does not give you perfect match but is much more precise than just the IP address and with limited number of users would be probably sufficient to distinguish different users behind single IP address.

I then assumed that at certain moment this user can be uniquely identified (by AdSense, Analytics etc).

Then accesses to pages without active tracking but with links to Google fonts or other passive API can be still identified with high confidence given the access happens from the same network.

I do not know if such extra signal is interesting for Google, but it can be acquired. Also mind you that using an ad blocker is also a signal and can be assumed from the access pattern.

The same logic applies also to an user who uses ad blocking but still uses limited Google services.

Again I do not know how much Google finds this kind of signal interesting but it is possible to collect it.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Or did you mean, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time ...

This saying needs a caveat - sometimes, you can fool all of the people for enough time to complete your evil scheme.

It's more like: "You can fool enough of the people for enough of the time to complete your evil scheme".

My thoughts exactly. A truly new internet would require new pipes, not just another protocol layer.

Seems that it's just a matter if the most efficient structure being this way for both cases rather than us mimicking the workplace in the structuring of the Internet.

So you can get around the law...but only by risking the integration of something that should be kept secret into the organizational structure...which makes its way into your system. Most people aren't willing to cross that threshold.

So Conway's law is true for most people, just not all.

If you want to think about it from the adversarial point of view, you can say that all programs are designed to transform or destroy organizations; programs mirror organizational structures because people want to determine the "resonant frequency" of an organization and understand its "social vulnerabilities" in much the same way a physical structure has structural vulnerabilities.

I don't understand how this is dangerous. can you please give an example? I guess if you mimic more complex organization it may be dangerous.