News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by servercobra on Sunday February 23, 2020 @04:38PM (#22399720)
Google has been about the same for me. I went from total Google fanboy to migrating a lot of my life away from them and advising others to do the same.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by fma on Sunday February 23, 2020 @05:47PM (#22400091)
Thinking about doing the same to diversify where my private info gets sucked up. Who do you use for email?
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by ckrailo on Sunday February 23, 2020 @07:37PM (#22400629)
The folks that created Rails are looking to compete on email soon...

https://hey.com/

There's also more encrypted providers like https://protonmail.com/.

Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by lotsofpulp on Sunday February 23, 2020 @05:53PM (#22400124)
I’m not the person you responded to, but I use fastmail and migadu.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by stilley2 on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:16PM (#22400258)
+1 for fastmail
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by x0x0 on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:46PM (#22400414)
also +1 for fastmail.

(I say this as a longtime user, and this is not meant to be damning with faint praise). Their email is best of class outside of gmail. It even beats in certain ways: It syncs faster. It's not made by a surveillance company. As a paying user, I've gotten very competent tech support. They have very good privacy controls re: image loading. They seem to permanently grandfather rates, which is nice.

Downsides: their label system is, to someone who really likes gmail, not as good. Calendar syncing on Android with their preferred sync app breaks every couple of months until you hit resync. Fastmail is in Australia, and I'm not sure the impact of Australia's police assistance laws.

Same: They support u2f.

Their product has improved a lot in the 5 years I've been using it, and is very worth the money. I think it's critically important that there exist high quality alternatives to google services, so that's a nice secondary reason to pay them.

Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by aerique on Monday February 24, 2020 @08:15AM (#22403706)
In the case of Fastmail I don't know what you mean with "their preferred sync app" but I've used CalDAV-Sync in the past and now DAVx5 (because it's easier to use (used to be DAVdroid)) and I've never had these problems you mention.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by x0x0 on Tuesday February 25, 2020 @11:17AM (#22414377)
caldav flakes for me regularly. Frequently on Nexus and HTC versions of Android; less frequently (but still every other month) on my Pixel.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by gpanders on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:54PM (#22400454)
If you have a domain name registered, sometimes your registrar will offer built in email. For example, I have a domain registered with Gandi and they provide a free email service.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by rezgi on Monday February 24, 2020 @04:52AM (#22402818)
https://startmail.com is pretty decent, affordable, and based in the Netherlands (so, better privacy than US/5 eyes countries)

Too bad they don't offer calendar services with their email though. It's really a choice I can't fathom.

Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by randallsquared on Sunday February 23, 2020 @08:15PM (#22400801)
I'm not the person you replied to, but I use AWS Workmail.

Ironically. :)

Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by mav3rick on Sunday February 23, 2020 @05:08PM (#22399868)
No non tech person is going to use Duck Duck Go.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by servercobra on Sunday February 23, 2020 @05:44PM (#22400072)
I'm not even using Duck Duck Go. But that doesn't mean you need to use Gmail, Google Maps, Android, etc etc.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by ratww on Sunday February 23, 2020 @07:16PM (#22400540)
After moving to Germany I met quite a few non-tech people who ditched Google for DDG: artists, musicians, accountants, translators.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by mav3rick on Monday February 24, 2020 @12:22AM (#22401873)
You can still fallback to Google from the DDG UI
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by wyre on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:09PM (#22400208)
I don't work in tech or do any programming and I use ddg.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by chiefgeek on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:11PM (#22400222)
Why not? There is zero difference between it's interface and that of Google search.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by iamaelephant on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:20PM (#22400283)
Because of the search results.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by int_19h on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:45PM (#22400409)
Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by QuinnWilton on Sunday February 23, 2020 @06:59PM (#22400475)
Even so, the deteriorated results I get from Google tend to be better than what I get anywhere else. I have DDG set as my default engine, and frequently need to fallback on Google.

I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.

Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by FalconSensei on Sunday February 23, 2020 @08:22PM (#22400840)
Unfortunately, there's no way DDG could compete with Google without any tracking/history as google has.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by ProZsolt on Monday February 24, 2020 @01:01PM (#22406482)
Once I had great Google Fu. I could find really niche topics. Currently, it's completely useless for that. If it's not something that many people want to find, you cant find it.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by int_19h on Monday February 24, 2020 @05:29PM (#22409128)
You can still pull it off, but it requires copious quoting to ensure no substitutions or removals from the query.
Re:Which of these Amazon Prime purchases are real? by wruza on Monday February 24, 2020 @03:44AM (#22402569)
Reevaluating this statement yearly is a good practice for an enlightenment.