Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

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?

Doesn't sound like an accident.

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...).

So this is how tech-nerds revenge their nemesis.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I certainly am. That rat might be rare, but the system that allowed it to go out isn't one I can trust implicitly.

Alas, the long term cost of being opaque is lost trust. I much rather have Google give a straight answer. Especially when there is publicity around a case. That way a lot more people would see that Google actually is mostly really reasonable, and that there is another side to the story.

He apparently has worked for both Obama and Trump.

P.S.: I do have a Riseup email account that I barely use for some specific areas of activism.

But you can back up virtually all data hosted with Google through Takeout.

https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

These are all put into either a zip, tgz or tbz. The different archive formats have different max download sizes. Looks like the tbz has a 50G download size limit.

Edit: OK, so I'm dyslexic. False negatives are arguably more problematic, because they attract more attention.

"We have so many zillion customers that we're forced to use bots for customer service" and "Only one out of a zillion customers has this kind of problem" would seem to be mutually exclusive.

Edit: We call them "non-paid" obviously.

At least for the "free" Gmail, as of two months ago (June 2017) Google promised to no longer scan email content. That change is coming in the near future. [1]

[1]: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...