I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS.
I can't support their shady practices anymore.
I recently moved to iPhone. Now I am not an iFan or so (and I am an Android developer at my day job) but what I like about it that there are couple of service centres in my city and I can actually go and talk to a person directly employed by Apple. Their reps are a phone call away and in fact I can just get a call from them in a few click, or send an email and a human being will respond to me.
I don't like robo bans. I think nobody does. I had really bad experience when Uber banned my account based on some false alarm and it took almost a week to get it revived. Just imagine a robo ban where there's possibly no remedy or in most cases no hopes to contact with an actual human being.
There are also very good paid hosts like https://mailbox.org/en (I moved to them as my third non-throwaway email address after I realised sdf.org can't be anything more than a site for hobby, chitchat, and nostalgia).
I hardly use Hangout now so there's little incentive in sticking with Gmail anyway. Office moved almost entirely to Slack (but it's still GApps mail and GDocs sadly) and friends and family to WhatsApp and Fb Messenger long ago. But this is risky too - Fb owns both. My effort to move them to something like https://signal.org has failed spectacularly (any tips on this? Or alternate services?). Some of them are on Telegram though, and some still on Viber.
So this is how tech-nerds revenge their nemesis.
The only ethical thing to do is technically (and morally) divest from google infrastructure.
I invite you to participate in OpenNIC, the democratic DNS root.
I'm guessing the same filtering support still exists, called Home Internet Security. [1]
One tool I have used in the past to benchmark DNS servers and choose is namebench. [2] It seems like the last releases were in 2010, but it worked for me even a few years ago (haven't checked after that).
Alex Kras has two blog posts that got a lot of traction early on that highlighted some issues with this trend [1] [2].
[1] https://www.alexkras.com/google-may-be-stealing-your-mobile-...
[2] https://www.alexkras.com/please-make-google-amp-optional/
(first hit on DDG.gg for '"amp" google')
Every question to Google is an answer for Google.
Just imagine losing control not only your email, but also every account that is tied to that email. Nightmare.
This could be countered by a separate forest of bots that looks for and identifies "mere eccentricity" (such as very heavy internet search use that will inevitably trigger many false bot hits re terrorism merely due to the law of averages.) But we're not that sophisticated yet, it would seem, judging by results. [Run to the patent office! First to file means anyone can steal this idea!]
Luckily, in this case, you won't be hit with a drone strike because you have an odd web site; but in other cases sudden death from the skies has been the result of bot analysis of mass intercepted communications targeting entirely innocent people.
Just to be clear, I actually rather like the idea of drone strikes on bad guys, just not idiotic-algorithm-triggered drone strikes, thanks so much.
> When people search, we believe they're really looking for answers, as opposed to just links. For many categories of searches (restaurants, game of thrones, code documentation, etc.), there is usually a specialized search engine (Yelp), content site or other source that does a better job at actually answering the searches than a general search engine does with just links. Our long-term goal is to get you Instant Answers from these best sources.
> To do that, we've developed an open source Instant Answer platform called DuckDuckHack, which allows anyone to propose and develop Instant Answers for DuckDuckGo. On the backend, we have a classification and relevancy engine that selects the best sources for a particular search and displays answers to you in real time, be it for recipes, products, images, and hundreds of other categories.
> In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we source from Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
https://duck.co/help/results/sources
EDIT: changed link to more elaborate FAQ one.
Don't mistype duck.co
If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.
Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.
I'd suggest that rather than the goal being to instantly leave this service or that the instant that they offend you, that you envision your policy as one of being ready to leave if you ever need to. The biggest key to that is having your own domain name and using that as your email address. Right now having your own domain is the biggest superpower you can have on the net, even with the events of last week. Honestly, pretty much everyone reading this from the US ought to own a domain name and be using it at least for their email address, even if it's purely delegated to gmail for the time being. They're too cheap to pass up the flexibility they offer.
Also, I'm not sure what you're referring to as Comcast MX, but if you mean a Comcast provided server, that's a huge privacy hole. If you mean your own server on a Comcast line, then your IP is leaked to everyone you email, which is also a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity.
I did say "even with the events of last week". It's the biggest stick you can get right now. It doesn't make you invincible.
"If you mean your own server on a Comcast line, then your IP is leaked to everyone you email, which is also a privacy hole since it ties your IP directly to your identity."
I don't email out much. Everyone I email is pretty much already going to know I'm me. Comcast already has arbitrarily large amounts of surveillance they can perform on me, sitting here worrying about my "outbound email hole" is a waste of time.
It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve either.
You have to spend a long time to build up a reputation to get places to mark your email as not spam. This is why many providers that allow you to do bulk email through them have multiple IPs and they only let the most behaved on their better reputation IPs.
Google (and basically every other reputable email host _and_ every "independent" email host) are blocking mail from services that host cheap compute power. A lot of Azure and GCP email traffic would likely be blocked, not just Digital Ocean.
If you want to start an email service, use something that isn't a known platform for spammers.
Edit: of course you will need to download and keep the emails by yourself if you don't want to lose access to them, but that's much easier than handling a whole server.
That has always been the trick. Running the mail server is easy. Having your email show up in other servers is "hard". Right now, with so many users using GMAIL, using gmail is a huge boon to not being marked spam (Google is way less likely to market a @gmail.com email as spam compared to say a @aol.com email).
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126?hl=en&vid=0-107...
Also, I personally host at home and have Comcast business internet. I have a 5 IP block of which one is a mail server. I have occasional internet outages and more frequent power outages, but it's been fine.
However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.
Doesn't sound like an accident.
Google is not a human facing company, you're most likely conversing with a bot even when you don't think you are.
In reality, all big dotcoms hire legions of human 'reviewers' in cheap countries distanced from the civilized world
The answer is quite obviously "no," and that doesn't cut it for people need rely on services like these for their everyday workflow. We wouldn't consider "accidental" AWS downtime acceptable, so why will we accept it from Google?
Although as I write this it occurred to me, you would likely loose all your contacts and calendar unless they were backed up prior...
It might have changed a bit after Joe Rogan's podcast but to be honest, most people outside of Canada probably have no idea who Jordan Peterson is.
He's getting a lot of support from the right, the center (e.g. Joe Rogan) and from many on the left such as Sam Harris as well. In all cases, it seems to be for free speech issues. He seems to hold a deep opposition to political extremes, though it's hard to tell what he favors other than free speech since his videos meander into mythology and literature so much.
But because of his "brave" fight against the bill, he's become a hero to alt-right and other people worried about transgendered people forcing everyone to use pronouns, and this is a lucrative market to attract. So lucrative that he now gets over $40,000 a month through Patreon alone for his classes, where he praises Carl jung, criticises post-modernism, the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation
He's also a regularly featured on r/badphilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/64rg9i/jorda...) while there is a good discussion about him on r/AskPhilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/673zy2/dr_jo...).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnIAAkSNtqo
As mentioned, his employer's lawyers did think so. The Adversarial Model (legal system) doesn't consider that some parties come to other conclusions. It would be ill-advised to listen to "experts" that are not part of a case, taking the advice of pundits* or other unconnected parties is not compelling evidence of legal finding.
*It's primarily in the US, that the mass media promotes education pundits as corroboration in legal matters.
You can't argue that "white privilege" hasn't infiltrated culture. An alarming amount of people have openly disparaged white people when talking to me, even though I am white myself.
If you're not white, it's almost socially acceptable to say "fuck white people" in cities like SF, NYC, and Chicago. I think it's horrible and I think Peterson is right.
I'm sure Google, CloudFlare, PayPal etc will be shutting down that blatant hate speech too.
If they want to do that, it's their right. But I will purposefully avoid companies that ban any hate speech. I've already cut ties with Google and it feels great.
You've got a chance of being struck by a meteor whenever you leave your house (and also while being in it). Do you solve that problem by staying inside? No. You go outside and take those odds. The chance that you'll be mistakenly shut down by a mistake is minuscule. Google has proven in the past to be a reliable way to do things like whistleblowing and hosting questionable content. The fact that one or even a dozen users get banned doesn't invalidate Google's history of keeping a _vast_, _overwhelming_ majority of even their free users safe.
Unless you work at Google and are privy to internal information, how could you possibly know that? The only reason you're hearing about this case is because the account holder is a university professor who lost a long standing Blogger site—used at his school and linked to by the NYT—and then the story made it to the front page of HN.
It's overwhelmingly likely that the vast, vast majority of people who lose access to their Google accounts never make it onto your radar.
It's an estimate, not an exact figure.
I certainly am. That rat might be rare, but the system that allowed it to go out isn't one I can trust implicitly.
Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very disturbing how Google shuts down accounts without warning or a reasonable resolution process. They did this to a Canadian psychology professor earlier this month (and then silently restored access after Joe Rogan picked up the story).
I'm extremely loathe to wean myself off of Google's products, especially Gmail. But I can no longer really see it as a safe place to have verifications of all my other accounts sent with all the risks of automated flagging, technical error (which cost me my pre acquisition YouTube account when they forced everyone onto Plus), and their increasingly aggressive security / account recovery mechanisms that ask for information such as the exact month a decade old account was created.