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Comment by owens99 | Hacker News Reader

> Sick of Company X and the way their business treats employees? Shop elsewhere, remembering that it won't be as convenient with fewer choices. Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you, remembering that they probably can't pay as much for great engineers.

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.

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I don't know, the alternatives are getting better. Maybe not consumer grade, but usable, especially for a developer. For the past few years I've made a reasonable effort to use ethical software as long as it doesn't make my job too hard, and here are the results:

- 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.

> 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

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

Why do you consider "small-time SaaS products" as "unethical", if I may ask? They may be "potentially unethical" since you don't know exactly what they are doing with your data, but it's not for certain.

he said a "bunch of small-time SaaS products", not all of them.

This is a deliberate oversimplification, but in order of most to least concerning, these are flags which get raised in my brain most often. If they get raised then I consider the company's ethics questionable and when time permits we evaluate alternatives.

- 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.

So are you hosting your own IMAP server? If so, have you any problems with your emails being filtered out as spam?

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?

This reminds me of that "hackproof" box BBC reviewed that was a Raspberry Pi that couldn't update itself.

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

For personal mailboxes we're running exim on a managed VPS with a dedicated IP at a small hosting company. They have very diligent customer support and appear to keep their IP allocation clean, as we've never had problems with our emails being filtered as flagged as spam. They generally handle patching and configuration when we ask them to, or assist us when we want to do it ourselves.

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

Yeah, that's a good point. The funny part is that it's the very consumer choice we champion that eventually leads to a total lack of consumer choice. We choose the best, they're rewarded, they dominate, choice disappears, they're free to stagnate without repercussion.

It's a feedback effect of consumer choice with corporate oligopolization and monocultural cost-optimization.

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

Combatting this, though, seems to be one of the fundamental problems with combatting corruption. If there is a bottleneck in value, then the controllers of that value can demand something of greater aggregate value in exchange for access to it.

Dunno about this. Duckduckgo has become my default search engine at this point for ethical reasons. I just bought a new Linux laptop to replace my surface, and have just about severed all ties with MS/Apple junk at this point.

Outside of programmers, I don't know anyone who takes the time to do this. Be careful of the Malkovich Bias--the assumption that most people who use the internet use it like you do. Most people don't give a second thought to Google and Facebook selling their data... or in insert most countries in the world their government watching and censoring them.

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