Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by balladeer on Monday August 21, 2017 @07:54PM (#15068739)

This is why I have been religiously adding my first-name@outlook.com and mail@my-personal-domain as recovery emails or primary email wherever possible on the Internet. Effort is to try and keep email on my own domain as primary and hopefully move off Google ecosystem completely.

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.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by avip on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:21PM (#15067521)

> I've even switched myself off their DNS

So this is how tech-nerds revenge their nemesis.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by theWatcher37 on Saturday September 02, 2017 @03:13AM (#15154744)

Damn straight. Their DNS is yet another ingress point for their spyware empire.

The only ethical thing to do is technically (and morally) divest from google infrastructure.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by chrshawkes on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:40PM (#15067178)

I loathe AMP. Biggest piece of crap coming out of Google in a long time.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by gaius on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:33PM (#15067625)

Well, it wasn't designed with your interests in mind. You are the product, remember.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by mcgarnagle on Monday August 21, 2017 @05:44PM (#15068093)

Well, which is why he loathes it

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by ancarda on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:33PM (#15067619)

Any suggestions for alternatives to 8.8.8.8? Is OpenDNS any good?

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by bmn__ on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @04:53AM (#15070685)

OpenDNS is neither Open nor DNS.

I invite you to participate in OpenNIC, the democratic DNS root.

<https://opennic.org>

<http://enwp.org/Alternative_DNS_root#OpenNIC>

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by newscracker on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @02:32AM (#15070208)

I used to use OpenDNS several years ago (before it was bought by Cisco), but also faced some issues not directly related to the DNS service and stability. OpenDNS allowed people to create accounts and specific blacklists/whitelists. That, when combined with the OpenDNS app (same user account) that would run on the users' computers, would tell OpenDNS which sites to block for which source IP address (the user's) even for those with dynamic IP addresses from their ISP. Being on a connection with a dynamic IP address, once in a while I'd get the IP address of someone else who had the OpenDNS filtering setup and hadn't run the OpenDNS app or it somehow failed to report back (or the time between the periodic pings from the app with the IP address update). When I used OpenDNS servers during those times, I would get blocked out of sites and get weird custom messages that those users had setup. The only solution was to create an account myself on OpenDNS, run the OpenDNS app on all my systems, and trigger an IP address update back to OpenDNS from the app if at all something didn't work.

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).

[1]: https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/

[2]: https://code.google.com/archive/p/namebench/

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by peterwwillis on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:49PM (#15067756)

4.2.2.[1-6] is easy to remember, but IIRC they don't want people to use them anymore. Here's a list of harder to remember addresses: https://www.lifewire.com/free-and-public-dns-servers-2626062

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by metalliqaz on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:14PM (#15066940)

Sorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by joatmon-snoo on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:22PM (#15066998)

AMP, as pushed by Google, is essentially Google re-hosting a pared-down, mobile-friendly version of your site.

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/

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by metalliqaz on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:31PM (#15067107)

Thanks much, I was wondering how AMP made him suspicious of google.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by nailer on Monday August 21, 2017 @07:35PM (#15068665)

Essentially Google only allow Google-hosted AMP content in their search carousel. You could create an AMP (or otherwise fast) page on your own CDN and Google won't show it unless it's on their domain.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by FuriouslyAdrift on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:22PM (#15066994)

Accelerated Mobile Pages It's a weird accelerator thing for mobile. I've never quite figured out its use case except to hoover up more metrics for Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by amrrs on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:08PM (#15067422)

The use case is simple: Transcend through adblockers and show ads in mobiles. Mobile users primarily use adblockers because websites suck their data and also speed. AMP ensures faster content delivery and lite data and also comes with ads.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by nailer on Monday August 21, 2017 @07:36PM (#15068668)

Doesn't explain why they don't allow you to host AMP pages on your own domain and still be in the search carousel.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by jszymborski on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:19PM (#15066977)

https://www.ampproject.org/

(first hit on DDG.gg for '"amp" google')

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by robteix on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:21PM (#15066992)

I'm not the parent but I'm sure they mean Accelerated Mobile Pages[0]

[0] https://www.ampproject.org/

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by jwong_ on Monday August 21, 2017 @03:18PM (#15066973)

> The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) is an online publishing format, created by Google

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by bhnmmhmd on Monday August 21, 2017 @05:34PM (#15068041)

But remember that in countries where certain sites are censored, AMP provides an easy way to access the restricted blogs/websites. Maybe the most important of these websites is reddit.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by fweespeech on Monday August 21, 2017 @06:02PM (#15068182)

I'll admit I still use them but only on my own domain as a non-free account. Its just not safe w/o any kind of support channel.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by throwaway613834 on Monday August 21, 2017 @04:49PM (#15067754)

What is the benefit of not using their DNS?

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by alexknvl on Monday August 21, 2017 @08:11PM (#15068805)

Presumably to not supply them your domain usage stats.

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Re:Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His S... by biafra on Tuesday August 22, 2017 @04:52AM (#15070682)

Not giving them this information.

Every question to Google is an answer for Google.

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