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Comment by theWatcher37 | Hacker News Reader

This type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely.

I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS.

I can't support their shady practices anymore.

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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.

> I've even switched myself off their DNS

So this is how tech-nerds revenge their nemesis.

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.

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

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

Well, which is why he loathes it

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

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

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/

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>

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

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

https://www.ampproject.org/

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

What is the benefit of not using their DNS?

Presumably to not supply them your domain usage stats.

Not giving them this information.

Every question to Google is an answer for Google.

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