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Comment by corpdrone2021 | Hacker News Reader

corpdrone2021

I realized this when Microsoft started reading the emails and attachments in my office 365 account, and having Cortana "helpfully" suggest various to-do items from them.

The degree to which this seems to be the case has me convinced that the only way I will actually have any control of my data is if it's on a hard drive in my physical possession. And frankly I don't have time to maintain my own IT infrastructure.

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I was mortified by Cortana auto-extracting todos from private emails but my father in his late 50’s said it was neat and very useful for him. So it goes.

I have always found it pretty helpful when Gmail would add reminders and calendar events by scanning emails so I can see it.

When it is locally done, I find it hard to see what isn't too like. That is, if I open an email and it asks if I want to make a reminder or add it to my calendar, that is cool.

When I see that several emails I have not opened are already on my calendar, I am less happy about it.

That can still be done locally, no? You don't have to open an email for the phone to retrieve its contents.

I meant locally to be in my sight.

That said, I'd also assume that full emails are not sent to my device until I open them, unless I setup something.

I don’t really see what’s different, honestly. They’re moving it from one system they control to another, big deal. Plus who says I even saw the original e-mail?

If they have given a side channel to impact my calendar, that will cause issues.

Sure, for many folks this will be fine. But it seems an unnecessary denial of service attack vector that needs more engineering to protect than makes sense.

I would guess in the many years they've had this they've had to iron out some issues, but allowing you to receive e-mail at all is a denial of service attack vector.

True. But it is only a denial of your email service. Allowing it to leak over to other services is not good.

You could think of them as different facets of the same service, like Exchange.

Long term this is definitely something I want from my personal AI assistant, filtering out all kinds of annoyance/tedium from my life, so I totally understand how your father could like it. The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.

> The difference for you and I right now is that we don’t view the AIs as personal enough and thus don’t trust them.

I don't trust them because I know that they're reporting to their real bosses, who aren't me. If I could have a personal assistant that was completely local and under my control, I'd begin to get interested in them.

The reality has changed a lot about self hosting. Looking into it might surprise you.

Self hosting e-mail? With the trust issues you get with small mail servers these days, I've got better things to do than worry if that job application ever reached their inbox.

There’s more pragmatic ways to self host, other than configuring everything from scratch.. including email.

Lots of tools and suites like Zimbra and Mdaemon that can self host mail just fine.

Outbound delivery can use a service as well.

Look for options and possibilities and they can be found. Look for reasons not to do something and those will be found too.

You're saying self-hosting is easier now than in the past?

Having done self hosting and and coming back to it after a 10 year break.. much easier.

One example of not setting everyone from scratch..

IaaS/Paas: Install Proxmox from USB.. 10 minutes from boot to web interface to your own local linode/digital ocean. Redundancy, setup 2 and link them. Disaster recovery, put it off site. Backups, connect it to one of a few built in options.

Network/infrastructure: deploy docker images for VPN (algo), firewalls (pfsense), dns (pihole), proxy (traefik, etc). It can remain an appliance that can be configured to self update if needed.

Storage: make storage into an appliance that you set and forget with a nas.

Next spin up your services/packages. Things like turnkeylinux is a nice way to try out things.

There is a nice self hosting community on Reddit if you’re interested for folks who have setup homelabs.

With the exception of outbound mail, I absolutely think it is.

I feel like the rule for these kinds of features goes like this: if it would be fine and useful for a self-hosted version of the app to do something then it's fine if a cloud-hosted version to do it as well.

If you don't like that o365 is scanning your emails for todos and potential calendar events but it would be a non-issue on your Mail-in-a-Box then you have a problem with MS not the scanning.

Precisely this. I think this is why these discussions always blow up. A lot of commenters talking past each other about the tech that is pretty awesome. I've loved the idea of a personal assistant since I saw the movie Cherry 2000. However, I don't want MS or Google in charge of it. I'm in the process of setting up home automation and I'd like to eventually get to some AI driven processes but it needs to stay in my house. It makes me sad that the tech exists but I can't trust it's purveyors. I'm gonna have to figure it out myself.

It irritates me to no end how Microsoft keeps updating their programs to make them be "helpful". I literally NEVER want their suggestions, I just want their programs to get out of my fucking way so I can do my work.

One of a thousand Microsoft "papercuts" that drove me to Linux. Admittedly it ain't Windows, but that's pretty much the point. After enough years of daily little Windows annoyances built up, the fact that Linux was not Windows was worth the learning curve to me.

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