Hacker News Reader

We need to follow Richard Stallman in his obsession with ehtics. "Sorry mate, I find FB/Google/Skype/etc. unethical, so I won't get in touch with you using this, let's better stick with email, phone call or meeting in person".

Which is, maybe, the reason nobody knows or cares about Richard Stallman and his ideas beyond us tech folk.

He is also a bit of a windbag. He likes to change words because the semantics don't suit his world view. Additionally, his rants are very alienating. The man is a genius in a lot of ways, but he really misses the mark on a lot of things.

That is a dilemma, isn't it? I also don't think it's the most useful or practical way to accomplish a goal.

Pots isn't open source...

Yeah I struggle to think of corporations more "unethical" than ATT and VZN.

How about Volkswagen?

I've heard stories from multiple people older than me about ATT physically entering people's homes (typically when their husbands were at work) because they had "illegal" extensions.

It's an open protocol and there are open source implementations of the technology. I can use asterisk to set up a phone system and have numbers routed to me from a provider. It's the same as the Internet in that regard.

It's like saying email isn't open source because it has to have a connection to the Internet to be useful.

No, we just need to stop trying to solve social problems with technical solutions.

Domain getting stolen by a registrar? That's a crime, treat it like theft, there ought to be some justice for that theft.

Big business doing something awful/scandalous/inappropriate? Change the laws, and work to persuade people that it ought to be societally unacceptable to violate those laws.

I see this a lot on tech-oriented forums, that you can "fix" social problems with the right kind of code, or you can get out of legal repercussions with the right set of legalese, and really, no, stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.

Treating business and law like a black box, or something to be worked around, as though there were sufficient cleverness to solve everything without engaging with larger society, well, no, that's not gonna get you anywhere.

This doesn't have to be an either/or.

> stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.

So you effectively agree that solid ethic opinions help fighting this. Then why you started your comment with "No, ..."? :)

This is a gestalt response, but leonroy, I hope you don't mind if I put it here. You are talking about what I want to talk about: solving a problem. ...

Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.

Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email?

Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!"

Sounds like a utility to me.

The law isn't always right. Times change, for example.

I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account.

If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change!

The USAmerican Congress does have a history of designing rules to serve the common good and forcing tech giants to play by those rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934

One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society.

Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process.

Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives.

This kind of thing is what Government is FOR.

Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.

> Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.

That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way.

I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc.

https://todoport.com/index.html

In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider.

It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least!

Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services.

I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.

I have wished from the beginning that Twitter was a protocol, and not a business. (I wonder if Twitter investors wish that? :)

Fastmail et al. show that you can run a business on a protocol, even if it won't necessarily make you a unicorn.

This was a subject of large debate roughly 6-7 years ago at Twitter, back when Ev was CEO. This was before advertising existed on Twitter (except for a banner ad in Japan). At the time there were many strands to the debate but the tldr rolled up into three ways of being -- closed Twitter, the one that looked like FB then and Twitter today, open Twitter, the one Twitter looked like then without all the API restrictions and developer community difficulties and probably still with ads, and finally -- for lack of a better term -- Internet Twitter, which would be a federated service much like Diaspora has ended up working.

It was very hard to imagine how Twitter the company would make enough money to justify the investments it had taken by that point if Twitter the service looked more like Diaspora. You on,y have to look at Diaspora today to see that it's not obviously meeting the mission that Twitter serves today.

One interesting aspect of this is you had people like Alex Payne voting with their code in the form of the API and later with his feet after the company was clearly going down the ad-supported route (and hiring a lot to support that model -- you need to build a large amount of revenue-oriented infrastructure in that world). The API then had to be pulled substantially back because it didn't fit the revenue model, something the developer community still hasn't forgiven Twitter for.

It's amazing to me how much of what looks like corporate BS can be traced to individual personalities and their debates, or the echoes of their debates.

[to be clear, all of what I've outlined can be gleaned from media reports, books and presentations about Twitter over the years. While I am an ex-employee, this history is available to anyone who either was paying attention back then or has a small amount of investigatory skillset.]

If Twitter were an open protocol, I'd probably have had some interest in using it, but as a closed proprietary business service, it seems completely uninteresting, and I've never signed up or really paid any attention. Why would I want to let some random company own my communications like that?

Hm, I've spoken to gmail's lead developer for imap many times over the years and never detected even a hint of hostility. What have I missed?

He doesn't run the business, just the pipes.

His/her superiors.

Aren't you saying that despite the observable part of the moon being rock, the unobservable part is cheese?

I'm saying that while the technical lead may not be hostile towards IMAP, the "higher ranks" may decide it's not a business priority anymore and ask to get rid of it.

Google management is neither unobservable nor unobserved.

Judging by the actions of Google's people in IETF, any feature that's used by paying mail customers seems to have management support. Management seems to like income, as far as I can tell.

The effing rotating TLS keys. You missed that?

Cite RFC?

Back when I set up a client to pull from Gmail it would break twice a year: when the changed their TLS cert, and when the later changed it BACK.

My conclusion at the time was that they wanted to keep the percentage of users of the IMAP service below some value, and every time the jerked the config around, they'd see a dip in the graph on their end. My setup is currently non-functional. The maintenance cost was too high. Mission accomplished.

Note: now that I think about it, maybe the cert rotation issue was on (e)SMTP, not IMAP. Same diff.

Why did changing the TLS cert break things? Were you pinning it in your client?

I don't remember. Oh, it was this: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.genera...

But what that doesn't show is that they then changed it back, and forth... for a while. It was just a UX issue that only affected computer literate people. THE BEST KIND. :(

I remember when some combination of Gmail features* enabled me to upload my old mbox with years of personal email into my GAFYD account... emails from before Gmail publicly existed. And now I could SEARCH them! The future was bright.

I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)

* access external pop3 account and auto-rewrite message headers so messages would be associated with my gmail address even though they were originally delivered to a different domain... Brilliant.

>> "I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)"

Sorry I'm being a bit thick, but did this happen, or does the emoticon at the end mean it's hypothetical?

Did not happen. Hopefully it's even less than hypothetical.

In addition, what Google claims is an "SMTP server" does surprising things in violation of the relevant RFCs, in furtherance of Google's business models:

http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/

That blog posting is from 2012, so I think it's surprising that its author clearly hadn't read RFC 4409, published in 2006.

The first paragraph about message modification is: "Sites MAY modify submissions to ensure compliance with standards and site policy. This section describes a number of such modifications that are often considered useful." From is typically modified to comply with SPF and/or DKIM.

RFC 4409 is obsoleted by RFC 6409 (Nov. 2011), which is the one I refer to. The sections therein on header rewriting do not allow the modifications that Google makes to the From: header, which can, as I point out, lead to mismatches of personal names and email addresses and falsification of sender identity, with all the easily foreseeable damage that may result.

6409 contains the same wording: "MAY modify submissions to ensure compliance with standards and site policy" and gives examples.

The sections on header rewriting are essentially examples of what the document describes as "modifications that are often considered useful", they're not an exhaustive list. The only MUST NOT rule that concerns email address rewriting is about destination addresses.

Is it your opinion that a reasonable interpretation of 6409 is that a submission agent may falsify the sender of an email? Or create false associations between personal names and email addresses?

No RFC rule prevents that, and as far as I know no RFCs even try to define what constitutes a true or false association between a personal name and an email address. But RFC 6409 gives site policy unrestricted permission to allow or deny that.

(Well, almost unrestricted. The results have to be syntactically valid.)

I don't think your interpretation of the RFCs is natural or remotely reasonable; in fact it leads to absurd consequences. We'll have to leave it at that. I stand by everything in the article.

I've seen IMAP certificates changing back and forth, too.

There's an explanation of this phenomenon that doesn't assume malice: there are N (> 1) servers with different certificates, and you're not hitting the same one every time.

I'll elaborate a little.

The impression I have formed is that gmail will have whatever features google's gmail-for-businesses product needs. If a considerable percentage of customers (ie. the ones who pay per month and user) use a particular feature, then that feature stays and is maintained.

Does not the ol' Don't-Be-Evil corporation owe it to society to maintain features that support the common good?

I know from my experience in hwops that plenty of people on the corp domain DO believe that they are working towards a better world--and that making more money will only accelerate progress towards that goal.

The question is: are they wrong? Has Google lost its way?

Let's look not just at this IMAP issue but also at the OP as we ponder that.

XMPP is even better example than IMAP.

Rumour had it that they tore down the federation due to an unmanageable spam wave. Something about friend requests from spam puppets. I've never heard details. Has anyone else here?

Closed platforms come with a risk of censorship. Open platforms come with floods of spam and phishing attacks.

Fundamentally life is about trade offs. For most people closed platforms are the better choice.

Luckily, everyone's happy to come to the compromise of doing nothing and letting the dominant paradigm figure out what should happen, because that's such a great solution. /s

> Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.

But they cannot, at least not for a foreseeable future. Both are used in enterprise environments, who would flee the first platform in droves which would disable IMAP/POP3.

And even if they'd both disable IMAP, people would write adapters.