Cutting Google out of your life (2019)
github.com
github.com
I also remember reading somewhere on HN that the creators of Protonmail have some dubious ties (and work in the same office) to a shady European data collection agency. Can't find the link atm.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21680293
Interestingly, u/protonmail's contributions is littered with comments trying to defend ProtonVPN against such allegations here on HN. I guess, user paranoia is the bane of privacy-as-a-service upstarts.
Re: Zoho:
As a Zoho user myself, I must point out that though India isn't 5 eyes or 9 eyes, it has some of the most restrictive laws in terms of Internet freedom and is a surveillance state.
> This is not correct as far as Proton is concerned and easily verifiable. ProtonVPN is 100% owned by Proton Technologies AG (Switzerland) which also develops ProtonMail and is not affiliated or owned by any other company.
Russia is also famous for its cadre of crack Salisbury cathedral appreciators.
This was not always the case. It might not be the case now that Russian companies scan for this stuff, but why risk it?
It doesn't matter what service you use. No email is private, I don't care who they are.
p.s. - I'm a paid fastmail user.
I wonder if the Monero Message System is still being developed. It would solve the metadata problem.
If you’re sufficiently paranoid, the only thing you can say for certain is that there isn’t much you can truly trust.
There's (mostly) no reason for Joe Bloggs to want to protect themselves from a well funded state actor but they may want to prevent themselves being locked out of Google services because some bot triggered a threshold.
What's permitted is to build something that targets a particular person in such a way that it cannot possibly affect another person's security.
The example I use (though IANAL) is that a request to backdoor WhatsApp's encryption would not be permitted under the law. However I think that pushing an update that checks for a particular person's hard-coded phone number and forwards messages to law enforcement would be permitted.
The law in question: http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214...
The reality is, for my accounts, I get more spam in gmail than in FastMail.
About 1 out of 15/20 emails that get flagged are legit. Most are newsletters I signed up to and don't particularly care about, but they're still not spam.
From Wiki:
"In newer versions, the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed. "
However, I’ve found Fastmail search, spam filtering and user interfaces to be great, on par or better than Google for all my needs.
One aspect of poorer performance with Fastmail has been boot up time on mobile though. The iOS app doesn’t appear to cache anything offline, so without a connection you can’t do anything, and if the connection is slow, app startup and display of mail hangs while waiting for whatever initial web requests the app makes to complete.
Nonetheless, I’m very happy with the purchase.
Using Apple’s iOS apps will give you better integration with the whole Apple ecosystem, Fastmail‘s app has better integration with a few of their specific features
The biggest advantage of using Fastmail’s app is that searching emails is MUCH faster and flexible
On my Air or Linux workstations, I always use the Fastmail web interface, it’s better than a mail app, unless I’m doing something specialized - then it’s Mutt or even Gnus.
You can be logged into Fastmail from several computers simultaneously and processing email. It’s seamless, there is never a conflict. I believe they use Cyrus IMAP.
I migrated to a self-hosted Nextcloud, which I love - wonderful client software and very flexible customizable. I didn't have any difficulties setting it up, it all seems very polished and quite mature.
I have found nothing that comes close to replacing Google Maps yet, but I hope that OSM has a bright future.
Fastmail too is insecure by being run out of Australia - a strident member of the 5 eyes.
Another great thing is I'm no longer worried of suddenly losing access to my mail account, because an algorithm deems me not worthy for using a "wrong" browser, setting etc. and we all know that you can't talk to real people at Google so the account will be lost forever.
Grabbed a special offer back then, 10 years/XX GB for something like $99 total, including all the domains i can think off and all the users i want. Compared to what was available at the time it was super cheap, and it has had like 99% uptime since.
Latest offering, free of charge, is a Nextcloud account for user/calendar/notes syncing.
I also had to dig around to see where they're based. According to: https://mxroute.com/policy/
> "MXroute LLC is a Limited Liability Corporation in the state of Texas. All services provided by MXroute may be used for lawful purposes only. "
Not a dealbreaker to me, as I am a native Texan by birth, but might be an issue to someone looking to avoid 5-Eyes.
> Not a dealbreaker to me, as I am a native Texan by birth, but might be an issue to someone looking to avoid 5-Eyes.
It's email. Any pretense of avoiding 5/9 eyes is already moot. Any conversation has at least 2 participants, and since 50+ percent of the world population runs on some kind of hosted email (Gmail/Outlook/Yahoo/whatever), anything you send has a high probability of passing through 5/9 eyes anyway. It doesn't make much of a difference if you look through the "from:" or "to:" headers.
The only way to be safe from 5 eyes is encrypting all the contents in your mailbox, either through GnuPG or using Protonmail/Tutanota.
Only a con for Zoho email is IMAP is no longer a free option, but we do lots of subscription for clients which is quite smooth so far.
I've largely cut out Google, but still occassionally use YouTube, Maps (usually through a 3rd party), and very rarely search.
For me, StreetView and the huge library on YouTube are just too useful to completely give up, and, unfortunately, I don't know of any alternatives making headway in those areas.
there are obvious downsides to plastics, google and TV. that excising it completely is extremely difficult if not impossible in the modern world does not diminish the positive effects of reducing consumption.
In fewer cities and increasingly hard to find in the interface (because a lot of it is growing out of date, and it is in general more rare than Street View), Bing Maps also has a really cool best of both worlds "Bird's Eye view" taken from helicopters in daylight at a particular distance and an isometric-esque angle chosen to provide a strong amount of detail. I've found that be extremely useful for picking up a neighborhood-worth of landmarks in a glance for navigating a space by foot or car. It really is a shame Microsoft/Bing stopped advertising it so heavily as a competitive advantage and have let its prominence in the UI disappear to the point where finding it is a labyrinthine task, but unlike the mythical minotaur, I know it still exists (for now).
I don't know what to do about YouTube. I keep hoping that they've made the non-Premium experience so bad that enough of the people I follow might move to better platforms, but so far network effects win again.
Here in Colorado, for example, Bing Maps doesn't cover anything in the western half of the state, not even larger cities along the interstate, like Grand Junction. Meanwhile, Google has Streetview imagery for practically every paved road in the state, and even a lot of forest service roads in the middle of the mountains. I know that's not a big deal for most people, but it's a huge use case for me to help plan bike trips.
And Bing doesn't cover much, if anything, outside of the US.
Also would the advertising industry then be like oil/petrochemical complex?
Fun anecdote: Google is very smart, because I've been a paying customer of YouTube for a long time they gave me a Google Nest Mini for Christmas free of charge. And it fills another niche which I can't really find a meaningful alternative for: Speech to text hardware/software which can be connected to my smart home (which is cloud free until now). They really do press the right buttons because I'm thinking of connecting this thing to my home. And then they can listen to everything I'm doing, which is not cool, but then I already have the device and so on ...
If something abhorrent from Apple comes to the forefront then I'll happily switch back to self-build + Linux + self-hosted services, but for the time being I'm content.
On the flip side, I've done everything I can to eradicate Google from my life and will continue to do so.
Another problem is that it's as closed as googles eco system so I don't know what they're doing behind the scenes anyway, if it's not free software then what's the point switching from google to apple?
Also, as a new owner of an Apple Watch (had to back out of Fitbit now that Google bought them, sigh, and this was the most interesting option), the Siri integration with the Watch is fascinatingly better than I'd expect and made me much more interested in using Siri more than I had before. The Dick Tracy-ness of talking to an assistant on your wrist is amusing/fun in general, of course, but so far I've been impressed with the range of both the microphone and speaker for a wrist-worn device, and you don't have to do the Dick Tracy style arm raise (though of course, that doesn't necessarily stop you from wanting to; the amusing long tail impact of old pop culture).
(I'm a pragmatist and don't hold closed ecosystems against them. I am on the side that Apple seems more clear about seeing me as a customer than a product or a black box source of data, and that's more than enough reason for me to switch to them over Google [though in my case I was switching from Windows Phone, RIP].)
I don’t know if that’s possible with the other players. None of them have showered themselves in glory but Apple’s track record has been generally positive.
- how to build a smoker and smoke fish in it - how to butcher a pig - how to DIY motorized roller shades and integrate them into HomeAssistant - a video walk through Hebron - how to make a sabich
and so on and so on, but perhaps I'm just bad at searching for videos? I do it like that:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+make+a+sabich+-site%3Ayoutu... -
If this is a concern to you I encourage you to read about hardware-implemented wake words to get a better understanding of how is that the microphone is only recording when you trigger the device. This has alleviated the concerns of a number of people I've spoken to about this. If you concern is about accidentally triggering the wake word and being recorded when you did not intend to be, can't help much with that, but it seems like something of a niche concern.
If you trust Google to only activate recording when you say a wake word, why not just send a stream of your audio data and trust them to delete it? If you're trusting amoral corporations whose entire business is selling your data with access to a bug in your house, just go the whole way.
Everything else is blocked with pihole/uMatrix/pf. Been this way for about six months now. Occasionally I still youtube-dl from a server and scp the file locally.
https://hcaptcha.com/ is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA.
It's privacy focused (supports privacy pass), and is fair: webmasters get a cut for each captcha that is solved correctly (they can choose to directly donate it to a charity of their choice), hCaptcha get a cut for running the service and a customer will get their images/data labeled.
Do you have the scale that human moderators are infeasible? (Not do you "wish to have". YAGNI suggests add it when you have that scale, not before.)
Do you need that form to be publicly accessible?
Are you requiring multi-factor authentication already? Can you or should you?
Can you use a spam filter? (Are you sure your process isn't already going through half a dozen email spam filters anyway?)
Do the simple tricks not work for your use case? (CSRF tokens, "honeypot fields", form name/ID obfuscation, dumb simple weird rotating required fields like "2 + 2 =?")
There was daily contact form spam coming from tor exit nodes. Only flaw is that it always sends the message within 7 seconds. That is faster than a human could get to the form and type a meaningful message.
So I was able to avoid blocking tor exit nodes by adding this timeout. This has solved the issue, for now.
Requiring JS execution by only accepting JSON stopped the lazier bots.
At first I got passive-aggressive about it. I would purposely fail the ReCaptcha and then contact support to tell them it wasn't working. They'd always provide a workaround. But then I realized it was easier just to stop giving them my business. For me personally, so far it really hasn't been any kind of big inconvenience.
Seriously. Google can use this as marketing for why people love Google so much.
Perhaps when discussing Google or Facebook, we should put that in context and mention that they are some of the world's most transparent major tech companies.
Seems that using Google takeout is your best bet.
If you're in the EU, I'd love to see them try and hold your data hostage as of May 2018. Was this before that time / outside of the EU?
The iOS app needs photos access because it is less a Google Photos client and more an alternative Photos app with Google Photos syncing/integration. I think it would not be ideal to use it if all you want is to export data.
(Disclaimer: I currently work for Google.)
Unfortunately that’s partly Apple to blame, as for the longest time it was an all or nothing permission, no option for write only access.
Are you talking about the inferred bit from other sources like phone location history? My experience may have been different because I paid Google for extra storage so that I could store the original versions of all my photos (For those that don't use Google Photos, Google offers "unlimited" lossily compressed photo storage but counts original quality photos against your drive quota.)
The json data is what they display in the UI, not a verbatim copy of the metadata, but the photos have the original metadata embedded in them.
I'm happy if your files weren't put through a blender!
This one's scary from an infrastructure perspective. Way too many websites depend on Recaptcha, and an outage would be somewhat painful. There aren't tons of competitors, so with Google's penchant for killing services, it puts things at risk.
Cloudflare, being the Internet security company that it is, I believe, should roll out its own captcha or equivalent solution, even if only for the traffic it fronts. They kind of have got all the tools in the bag to make a splash with such an offering.
Really, they're worse. If Cloudflare decides you should not be, you're not allowed to use the internet at all. The last thing we need is to give them even more power.
I also find it unlikely that they move away from Google's recaptcha since they seem to have an unlimited, unrestricted (can be used for any domain) recaptcha API key that they heavily rely on for the "captcha" challenge website owners like to use.
The real purpose of it is to get free human labour classifying images their ML can’t handle. Why are there so many asking you to find squares with cars, or pedestrian crossings do you think?
For instance it is using: - google servers for connectivity check - google server for ipV4/ipV6 check - google NTP servers - google DNS servers - google search engine by default and all the default apps like calendar etc. are fully oriented against google services.
I think LineageOS should definitely be considered from removal, though it's a nice project and a great playground for ROM hackers.
I can't directly answer your question about a comparison, though. I know I looked at several alternatives before signing up, but I don't remember exactly why I chose it over the others.
To use your own domain, I’d recommend other services that are a lot cheaper than Fastmail, focused on privacy and are not in the Five Eyes (but may be in Fourteen Eyes). Check out mailbox.org, runbox.com and lastly, Migadu for a fixed price for unlimited mailboxes/storage (prices are based on outgoing mails sent per day).
The extension is still worth running, though, as some sites I visit have a perfectly fine HTTPS version, but don’t redirect to it (some even serve HSTS header there).
Notable about the list is the absence of anything from Microsoft. I cannot (will not, truth be told) do without Office and Exchange.
Are all the items in that list free?
Finally, I hope to see affordable and credible, non - Apple alternatives to Android some time. Still on Windows Phone which to this day has a better UI and UX than Android. But no WhatsApp does suck pretty hard.
Anyway I'm Google free too but always looking for better alternatives, so thank you for this list.
It’s difficult to recommend anything without knowing why you prefer MS Exchange, but there should be options depending on your needs.
So far I'm yet to find a convincing candidate, but if someone here can recommend one such phone, that doesn't require my bothering with rooting, and that is expected to be maintained, I'd really appreciate it.
Well, I guess I can get an iPhone if I ever get really serious about ditching Google, but for now I don't hate them enough to move on from Android.
I'm very happy with it. But I read so many stories about people getting banned by google. Recently someone got ban because they used Apple Card. I'm a bit worry about getting block by google photos as well.
Anyone know something that cheap as google photo? Basically it gives everyone in family 1TB
- sponsored by 5-eyes (that seems to miss the point) - prevents spying by 5-eyes? This seems strange also.
Clarifications welcomed.
I'm not sure I buy this argument though. We've seen companies just not hold onto data, be served, and release "sorry we got nothing". AFAIK you don't have to create backdoors for the NSA. Canaries are legal. You don't have to store data. So listing if a service is from a -eyes country misses the point really. Point being if the service is secure and follows best practices or not. Something isn't secure because it is located in Switzerland.
Or am I missing something?
How do we know which one is better, and how much worse we are off by using alternatives?
So not very useful public benchmarks, no.
It's the thing I would start with if I wanted to design a search engine.
I haven't used it so I can't speak to its niceness.
Make sure to set STNOUPGRADE=1 in the environment though to disable the RCE that it gives the developers.
We've been building a simple and reliable phone for professionals though are used for personal communications as well since our pricing is very affordable at $10/mo per user or number.
We've just recently launched our web app in beta (launching officially soon) so we're now at feature parity with GV and beyond since we've really invested time into creating a fast and modern service that works seamlessly.
Would love your thoughts!
I’m confident that Google can’t do anything genuinely shitty with my data without also pissing off millions of people more powerful than myself.
> r/news - Includes both USA and International.
> r/worldnews - International news. Typically excludes news specific to the USA.
> Most country/state/provine subreddit's act as local news hubs as well.
Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. Try to look for news sources a little more diverse than Reddit, please.
Have you used them? These are mainstream subreddits, and the stories aggregated there aren't substantially different than the stories linked to to the similar Google News categories.
I'm not saying it's better or worse than Google News but people should know the place's bias and bring a healthy dose of salt and actually read the articles. I'm only viewing it as a list of things that happened.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/ek3ean/undermini...