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Comment by CapmCrackaWaka | Hacker News Reader

You know, for a while this seemed like a non-issue for me. I was naive. I just told myself "a company wouldn't do something like that, that's not how this stuff works". Boy was I wrong. 15 years ago I had nothing but glowing admiration for these large tech companies, now I avoid them at all costs. I pay for Kagi instead of using Google for free. I deleted my amazon account, and now just shop at normal retailers. It's not like the price is much different. I sold my Kindle, and just buy my books from Barnes and Noble. Oh, Netflix only has season 2 of Mr. Robot? Guess I'll just pirate that. I got rid of my Nest cameras (Google COMPLETELY ruined that product) and use Blue Iris locally now. Everything these companies touch turns to poison.

Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.

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The convenience is great, but I agree. Age has taught me these giant tech companies cannot be stewards of knowledge. The public library system is incredibly important, and under political attack, alas that is a separate discussion. Regardless paper books are a great equalizer. Or companies accepting and ditching DRM. Regardless I have zero moral problems removing DRM from my book libraries on Kindle, etc.

It’s not just the giant companies. I had good experience with YI cameras from Kami and so I purchased about 7 of them. Suddenly they decided to go to a subscription model, and sent me an email

“After years of growing, we are at the point that our systems can no longer support free 6 second video storage for all our users”

I proceeded to remove the cameras and replaced them with on site NVR. After I did this I receive another email-

“ WE ARE SORRY.

Due to a system error, we sent you an email by mistake expressing that we will no longer support free 6 second video for the Yi/Kami Home app. Do not worry, you will still have this feature.”

Too late. I also find myself moving away from subscription based types of experience whenever I can, where the company can just remove feature or content at will. I wonder if there is a name in marketing circles for this behavior.

In my mind, I stay away from subscriptions if there are any physical assets or up-front costs involved. Kagi is a good example of a reasonable subscription model. Up-front costs are where companies can really screw you and take advantage of the sunk cost fallacy. That's where I got screwed by Nest. I spent $400 on their cameras, which worked great until Google bought them. After that, no more free storage, the AI automatic object detection went to absolute crap, I have constant authentication issues where the original Nest account and the Google account keep signing each other out, and now I'm stuck with these cameras.

Hi, I also have a Kami camera, and was entertaining the idea of going off the path with maybe an alternative provider, or just a self-hosted solution. Could you let me know about your new setup?

I was wondering if these cameras are locked-in with the Kami cloud vendor solution, or they use a standard protocol thus trivial to move to another provider, or just something in between those two extremes...

I went to the 4k wired nvr, by Lorex. Upgradebale self hosted etc. it came with 9 or 10 cameras but I only installed 5

Ah yes, “system error”.

I'm sorry, this person stumbled and happened to land with their chest directly on the tip of my knife which I was holding in my hand.

I dropped gmail for fastmail when google originally threatened to drop the grandfathered g-suite plans. Has worked great for me.

Ugh I tried to get off of Gmail and went to Kolab. That did not work for me at all. The formatting abilities were severely lacking. Maybe I'll try again since I've spent so much energy on this rant at this point.

I successfully migrated to ProtonMail using a strangulation pattern.

I set up a forwarding policy from GMail -> Protonmail. Whenever I would receive a forwarded email, Id go to the sender and update my email address. After about 6 months the only email coming from my Gmail account was spam.

Then I turned off my forwarding policy and noticed something: I don't really get spam anymore. I don't know what it is about Gmail but it receives several of orders of magnitude more spam than any of my other email accounts. To drive that point home, to crack down on spam, I setup my own domain on protonmail and configured a catch-all. Now everyone gets their own email address (like homedepot@mydomain.com). It lets me reverse track who is sharing my personal info with who for marketing purposes. Turns out: in the 5 years I've been using Protonmail I've had two cases of someone sharing my email address. I had assumed all my spam was from people sharing my email - turns out it was just a Gmail problem.

If your experience ends up being the same as mine, the time you save not dealing with spam on Gmail will cover your migration costs.

This is a great idea. I've been wanting to move off gmail for years, I'll try this. Thank you.

I can confirm what this poster said about their business emails not actually getting shared around, but that spam just all goes to gmail... I did a very similar setup and got similar results, but I'm using FastMail, though I'm sure protonmail and mailbox.org would work for this, had I chosen them as well.

Sending decrypted information over an encrypted line makes it relatively much easier to reverse-engineer the private key. If Google has, say, the contents of an email via GMail, and surveillance over the transmission line that carries the encrypted version of that, they would have not much trouble cracking your Protonmail key. It's unlikely that they would gain access to Protonmail's secure servers, but if they can surveil traffic going into and out of Protonmail's servers, they can decrypt the messages they know the keys for. They own more than a few installations and high-throughput (e.g. undersea) cables and it doesn't seem far-fetched to assume they have built systems for extracting information from the massive bitstreams, especially considering all we know about NSA surveillance programs.

fastmail is great. wish they had a platform for docs and sheets

I moved to Zoho from Gmail.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...

I went to privateemail + k9. It's been fine.

> for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps

In many cases OSM-based solutions like Organic Maps or Mapy.cz are good enough (though for car navigation Google Maps is still clearly better).

I'm pretty sure Mapy.cz have their own proprietary data.

Terrain shape model is from elsewhere, but I bet that it is SRTM.

In Czech Republic they use data outside OSM, but last time I checked it was entirely/mostly data released by government of that country.

Roads, buildings, hiking trails, landuse, paths shops outside Czechia are from OpenStreetMap.

Can you give example of anything that is "their own proprietary data"? So far I have not noticed anything like that outside Czechia.

In the Terms and Conditions, they list various different sources and give restrictions on what you can do with them. For example, it's illegal to make screenshots of 3D maps.

https://licence.mapy.cz/?doc=mapy_pu

> Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.

Organic Maps.

Migadu or Fastmail.

You're not "stuck" with anything.

Uh, Organic Maps has live traffic?

Where do you think the data for that live traffic comes from?

RMS: "Right to Read" - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

qwant is way better than google

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