[HN Gopher] What I Use Instead of Google
___________________________________________________________________
What I Use Instead of Google
Author : kmclean
Score : 258 points
Date : 2021-01-06 02:54 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kiramclean.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kiramclean.com)
| yeuxardents wrote:
| This is a business opportunity to provide services at a minimal
| cost for people. Say 1$ per month per service.
|
| Email - 1$
|
| Calendar - 1$
|
| Document Collab - 1$
|
| Each addon a calculated minimalist approach to each. I still
| recall what gmail was when it was invite only back in the early
| aughts. I would still utilize that gmail client. I do NOT need
| gmail as it is today. And I would certainly pay 1$ per month for
| that service.
|
| (E) For a minimal and basic interface, along with a low cost, I
| and certainly others that I know who are tech illiterate, would
| pay that low cost for simplicity + privacy.
| abawany wrote:
| Mailbox.org offers email, calendar, and some docs/storage
| functionality for 2.5E/m .
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Sounds like there's even a 1 EUR per month plan [1], with
| smaller limits.
|
| There's also Tutanota with a EUR12/year plan, offering a
| little bit less but with end-to-end encrypted email and
| calendars.
|
| [1] https://mailbox.org/en/services#e-mail-account [2]
| https://tutanota.com/pricing/
| maximente wrote:
| isn't this basically librem one? https://librem.one
| oarsinsync wrote:
| The pricing you're suggesting may not be commercially viable.
| That there exists paid alternatives today at a higher price
| point, when being sold as a dedicated service, suggests that
| anyone providing these services for free is doing so at a loss.
|
| They're likely able to do so because it entrenches their
| existing profitable businesses. It's unlikely that $12/year per
| account will be break-even, let alone profitable, as a
| standalone business.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah, these customers who care enough about this stuff will
| also drop you if you make the slightest mistake. And with
| $3/user/mo you don't have much margin.
|
| You'll get wrecked. But there's good business in it if I'm
| wrong. So I wish you good luck.
| karlzt wrote:
| Recommendations for good, helpful, non-toxic tools:
| https://goodreports.com/
| iou wrote:
| An extra degoogling
|
| Google Keep -> Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/)
|
| I tried a lot of note taking apps and liked this one for its
| simplicity (just markdown) and cross platform support. Then just
| store sync it all either via boxcryptor or nextcloud.
| XCSme wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion, I have been looking for a good note-
| taking app forever, this looks interesting!
| modeitsch wrote:
| is there a way to import all my google keep notes ?
| unilock wrote:
| Personally, I went from Google Keep to Standard Notes to
| NextCloud Notes, but the process is similar to go from
| Standard Notes to Joplin.
|
| There's instructions for how to transfer from Google Keep
| to Standard Notes here[1]. Then, export from Standard Notes
| via a "Decrypted" data archive[2], extract the plain text
| files from the resulting archive (I don't recall the exact
| path), rename them all from .txt to .md using zmv or a
| similar pattern-based file renaming program, and import
| them to Joplin as-is[3].
|
| You'll lose formatting, unfortunately, and probably other
| things like attachments and checkboxes -- I'm not entirely
| sure, as I didn't use any of the more advanced features of
| Google Keep.
|
| There's also instructions to go from Standard Notes to
| Joplin directly[4], bypassing plain text. That might
| preserve formatting and such.
|
| Your mileage may vary, as they say.
|
| [1] https://standardnotes.org/help/35/how-can-i-import-my-
| notes-... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/StandardNotes/commen
| ts/5sf0id/you_c... [3] https://joplinapp.org/#importing-
| from-markdown-files [4]
| https://programadorwebvalencia.com/migrate-notes-from-
| standa...
| comeonseriously wrote:
| > Maps - Apple maps
|
| HERE Maps is good.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| +1 HERE We Go, they also have an app and support the offline
| maps. Very handy. Basically, Nokia Maps.
| mattvot wrote:
| I did something similar a few weeks ago and found that
| https://rclone.org/ worked for me to automatically port Google
| Photos data to a Nextcloud instance with WebDAV. That being said,
| it cannot pull the original quality images, only the compressed
| version.
| vvanpo wrote:
| Perkeep devs built a tool to grab the originals:
| https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp#gphotos-cdp
| skinkestek wrote:
| I'm afraid Google will lock me out of my account if I use
| anything like this?
| jtbayly wrote:
| Why?
| vinni2 wrote:
| Every time I try to get out of google they (my colleagues) pull
| me back in. They share documents in google docs and google drive.
| I have no choice but to keep my google account.
| bdefore wrote:
| Would they accept you using a work-related Google account?
| vinni2 wrote:
| They don't mind which gmail account I use. I work at a
| university so we don't have gsuite. I guess it's a good idea
| to use a separate account for this but I don't want to create
| yet another google account.
| firecall wrote:
| I always make a "work" google account if the company isn't
| already using GSuite.
|
| Never use my own Gmail account for work. Or my own FB account
| for that matter!
|
| I don't need FB locking my account as it's connected to some
| clients dodgy FB ads :-/
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| You can create a "Google account" using a non-Google e-mail
| address. You still have access to all their services but you
| don't have to use them for anything other than accessing
| documents.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| "I'm sorry, I don't have a Google account (anymore?). Could you
| share it in a different way?"
|
| I have seen this work more than once.
| rakoo wrote:
| I personnally see work-related accounts as not mine. I'm in the
| process of de-googling myself, but I don't mind my company
| still using it that much because in the end it's not mine, and
| they actually have read and agreed with the Terms of Use. None
| of my personal info is reachable from my work email.
| ricc wrote:
| Keeping Google as a secondary/special purpose account should be
| fine. I would personally consider that as "already gotten out
| of Google".
| hairofadog wrote:
| Firefox Containers are extremely helpful in this regard. I put
| off using them for a long time because i thought it would be a
| hassle but it's super easy and keeps your work-related google
| activity segregated from the rest of your digital life. It also
| helps a lot with switching between google accounts; before I
| used containers I was constantly fighting with Google's account
| switcher, which more often than not just straight-up didn't
| work (it would either act like I had switched accounts but I
| hadn't, or it would put me into a sort of endless "which
| account do you want to use / enter your password" loop.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It's been really interesting to see the shift in ads and
| other things across the entire web when I forced all of my
| Google interactions to non-default containers. The amount of
| painful ReCaptcha interactions I've had has gone way up, but
| getting rid of a lot of the low quality "personalized" ads
| generally seems worth it.
|
| It was most useful for cleaning up the horror show that is
| YouTube recommendations if random YouTube videos from
| searches and chat recommendations don't get tracked to my
| logged in account. There's still a ton of noise in the
| recommendations engine and I will never trust auto-play
| again, but I'm having to block and/or report fewer channels
| and I don't automatically shudder just seeing the
| recommendations column show up above the fold anymore (though
| I still tend to prefer browser widths that drop
| recommendations below the video I'm watching because what a
| waste of space that is).
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > The amount of painful ReCaptcha interactions
|
| I've found that clicking the Headphone icon and
| transcribing the few words makes this a much less annoying
| experience (especially as a non-American [1]). It also
| seems more forgiving of errors, though the audio is pretty
| clear anyway.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25226805
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I have resorted to that more than once at this point. I
| consider that part of the "painful" as I may not always
| have speakers at the ready and/or at certain times of day
| feel a need to take the time to plugin headphones so as
| not to bother neighbors/etc. I also suspect given how
| many bots have moved on to using that themselves that
| those are going to get nastier and worse "soon" too.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| I've been looking for something like sync.com but free and
| opensource. Does such a thing exist?
|
| I'm planning on setting up my own nextcloud server, and they also
| have their own file manager system (Nextcloud Files), which is
| great for keeping files in sync across devices.
|
| And although it's nice to edit a text file that's stored on a
| cloud server from any of your devices, I want to be able to use
| more powerful desktop applications to edit/organize other files.
| e.g. beets for music, digikam for bulk organizing the directory
| structure of my photos. Darktable for editing photos.
|
| Does anyone know of a workflow that lets me do all the
| organizing/editing on a desktop, but still keep it all in sync
| with my other devices via a cloud server?
| cik wrote:
| I use your workflow - but back (some of) my data up in O365. On
| linux, I use insync (closed source) to sync my O365 as needed.
| Insync allows me to select (within a folder) what sub-folders
| to mirror. It's pretty perfect.
| comex wrote:
| If you're just looking for personal sync (as opposed to
| collaboration), Syncthing [1] is a common recommendation,
| though personally I've had better luck with Unison [2].
|
| [1] https://syncthing.net
|
| [2] https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
| wtmt wrote:
| Could you please expand on why or how you had better luck
| with Unison and why syncthing wasn't adequate?
| executesorder66 wrote:
| Thanks, I already use syncthing for some stuff, and it's
| great.
|
| However I should clarify: One of the reasons I want to move
| my data to a cloud server is that I am running out of space
| for more hard drives on my PC.
|
| So syncthing will work for editing stuff on my local and
| syncing the changes with my cloud server. But I don't want to
| store all my data on cloud _and_ on my local PC. I want
| something where it is usually stored on the cloud server, but
| where I can bulk edit/organize the data selectively on my
| local machine.
| depingus wrote:
| I use OneDrive for work. The desktop app has "Files-On-
| Demand" (enabled by default). It keeps everything in the
| cloud until you click on a file. Then it downloads a local
| copy and keeps it in sync with the cloud. You can also
| manually designate files to "Always keep on this device" or
| "Free up space". You can take space saving even further
| with Storage Sense in Windows 10. It can delete local
| copies of files that haven't been used for a designated
| amount of time (Never by default).
|
| Is Microsoft better than Google? Probably not. I don't know
| of any open source or self hosted solution this robust. You
| might want to consider getting a NAS; which lets you mount
| a network share on your local PC and use your normal file
| manager.
| wtmt wrote:
| Do you have local (non-cloud) backups? If yes, that's
| great, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend a cloud-only (or
| a single backup) approach to storing important data.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| I currently have backups on some external drives.
|
| But I plan on also doing backups with blackblaze or
| somewhere similar.
|
| My plan for the cloud server is just to have a central
| place to access all my (and my wife's) files from any
| device. But then my problem is, as I mentioned earlier,
| how do I bulk edit/organize those files using desktop
| software?
| rakoo wrote:
| It feels like you're looking for something like git-annex
| (https://git-annex.branchable.com/). I've never used it
| but read a bit about it, here's how you would use it:
|
| - Install git-annex on your cloud
|
| - Tell git-annex that you have a remote there
|
| - Do your stuff on your local drive, push to the cloud
| when it's done
|
| - If some of the files are not needed locally, tell git-
| annex to drop them from your local drive. git-annex knows
| that there is another copy in a safe storage
|
| - If you want to work on some files you don't have, ask
| git-annex to transfer them to you.
|
| The manual steps might be a bit tedious, so git-annex
| also has an assistant mode that is a good-enough copy of
| dropbox (https://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/).
| See the archival walkthrough, that seems to fit your use
| case (https://git-annex.branchable.com/assistant/)
|
| (I have more or less the same need, but haven't committed
| to doing it just yet)
| [deleted]
| marci wrote:
| SSHFS?
|
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
| use-...
| vin047 wrote:
| I've been looking for something similar too. I've no
| experience with either, but currently eyeing Seafile
| https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ or OwnCloud
| https://owncloud.com. OwnCloud seems perfect, but quite
| pricey for a cloud-provided instance. Seafile looks good,
| but there's no cloud provided option unfortunately (i'd
| rather not self-host).
| wtmt wrote:
| > Maps - Apple maps
|
| If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps
| available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That
| could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed to
| the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few countries
| and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and works more
| on).
|
| > and still a little YouTube (anonymously in a Firefox container)
|
| If a Firefox Container is an option, then I'd rather prefer
| Startpage to DDG for search. Most of the time, I end up
| performing the search on DDG at least twice (the second time with
| a bang command to go to Startpage or Google) or I have a
| heuristic that DDG won't help and just go to the other search
| engines.
|
| > DNS - Cloudflare DNS
|
| Others to consider are Quad9 (9.9.9.9) and NextDNS (if you want
| ad and tracker blocking lists to be configured at the DNS level,
| sorta like a Pi-Hole, but on the cloud).
|
| > I feel like I've won a lot by doing all this. I own my data
| now, so Google can't arbitrarily take it away from me, which
| gives me peace of mind. I'm no longer part of their ad ecosystem,
| being tracked all around the internet and having my attention
| sold to the highest bidder.
|
| The "Google can't arbitrarily take it away" is a good argument,
| but "I'm no longer part of their ad ecosystem, being tracked all
| around the internet" requires a lot more effort than just
| avoiding using google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com, etc. I'm not
| saying that the current transitions are useless, but that there's
| more to it.
| kmclean wrote:
| > requires a lot more effort than just avoiding using
| google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com, etc.
|
| Yeah this is fair! I don't want to give the impression that
| this is all it takes to get Google to stop stalking you. But I
| do think it at least helps. I found a lot of the chatter in the
| de-googling community to a bit purist and defeatist at times,
| but maybe I went too far the other way, here. I want to
| encourage people to do the same without thinking it's all
| hopeless or doesn't make any impact because Google's gonna get
| you one way or another, but I also don't want to paint an
| unrealistic picture, as if this is all it takes to wash our
| hands of Google's reach.
|
| I updated the post to reflect this.
| LUmBULtERA wrote:
| I would probably use Apple Maps more if I could download maps
| for offline use as I can with Google Maps.
| dopu wrote:
| I never use the DDG results when looking for something. People
| on here will sometimes say that the results are as good as
| Google, but it's just not true in my experience. I would switch
| completely to Startpage, but I value the !bang feature too
| much. So for general searches, everything is prefaced with !sp.
| It's just muscle memory now.
| fpoling wrote:
| I have found runnaroo gives often nice results especially on
| technical topics. Combining with DDG removed the need to use
| Google.
| rayrag wrote:
| > If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps
| available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That
| could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed
| to the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few
| countries and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and
| works more on).
|
| Try https://satellites.pro/plan/world_map# - you can switch
| between Apple Maps, OSM, Mapbox, Google Maps, Yandex and Esri
| seszett wrote:
| I wonder how they do that, that doesn't look like a use case
| that Apple is OK with.
|
| But anyway, I didn't realise how bad Apple Maps was. It's
| miles away from OSM and even from Google Maps, at least in
| the places I looked up in France (so not like in remote areas
| of Mali or the Amazon forest).
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's pretty shocking. I checked near some Apple commuter
| stations (where they presumably have employees living and
| actively using the service / have access to good data) and
| noticed it was missing entire parks and roads.
|
| The situation on other countries is much worse though. Some
| countries are missing entire islands. In Mongolia, they
| don't have province (aimag) borders, and some provinces are
| even missing labels for their capitals! Worse, there's
| sparse recognition of district (sum) labels, but some of
| them seem to have recognized the sum centers as distinct
| towns, butchered the transliteration, and then marked them
| before the aimag capital, as happened with "Hovsgol"
| (Khovsgol), Dornogovi.
| rconti wrote:
| I finally got around to installing a PiHole, and it blew my
| mind that the default behavior was to use an upstream resolver.
| I had never imagined that the countless folks more privacy-
| oriented than myself, would tolerate this.
|
| After reading up on it, okay, I get that those upstream
| forwarding resolvers will be faster due to being geographically
| distributed and having a huge number of users (== very current
| cache), but man. Seemed to be defeating half the point.
|
| I'm using the supported Unbound config now, but.. still
| surprised it's not the default.
| throwaway0x00ff wrote:
| It's more complicated than that: using unbound is basically
| trusting your ISP with your DNS data (it's not encrypted so
| it can MITM). Using an upstream resolver doesn't necessarily
| mean you give up on privacy.
|
| It may actually be more private to use a public resolver
| (with DoT or DoH of course) that will know your IP address
| but maybe not directly tie it to your identity (like an ISP
| does). Also, imo they generally have better privacy policies
| than ISPs (not that I trust those but still).
|
| The next more private options include using DNS over Tor or
| Oblivious DNS (https://blog.cloudflare.com/oblivious-dns/).
| Those options are better for privacy, but I don't see them
| are default (at least for now) as they imply some slowness
| (Tor) or are more opinionated (ODNS).
|
| Even after all that, your browser will leak the SNI header in
| clear-text (eSNI isn't popular yet) so your ISP can still get
| the precise name of the site you want to visit.
| reaktivo wrote:
| Apple Maps is available on the web, DDG uses it for it's own
| maps
| oauea wrote:
| Where? I went to https://www.apple.com/maps/ and clicked
| "Open Maps" but that just brings me straight back to that
| same page with no map in sight, just a lot of pictures of
| idevices.
| hairofadog wrote:
| "DDG" in the parent comment refers to DuckDuckGo, for
| example https://duckduckgo.com/?q=New+York%2C+United+States
| &t=iphone...
| oauea wrote:
| Yes I know what DuckDuckGo is. The comment also said:
|
| > Apple Maps is available on the web
| rrdharan wrote:
| They're probably referring to
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkitjs which
| is what powers the DDG integration.
|
| Anyway it is the case that the only way to browse Apple
| Maps via the web (AFAICT) is via an integration like DDG:
| https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-use-apple-maps-
| right-in...
|
| So yeah saying it is available on the web feels a bit
| disingenuous, but it is, kind of, indirectly.
| oauea wrote:
| Ah, that is bizarre. But I've never understood Apple.
| Thanks for explaining.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I was going to mention this too. However, to be fair to the
| parent commenter, Apple Maps on the web is only a recent
| development, it lacks a ton of the features of Google Maps on
| the web, and its world-wide coverage isn't great. There's
| also the fact that there's no direct web interface for it, so
| if you were going to tell someone using a browser to "just
| use Apple Maps", they would have to jump through some mental
| hoops to find a way to do that.
|
| All that said, I'm optimistic and hope they move in that
| direction.
| lights0123 wrote:
| It looks like their only price tier is "free with your
| Apple Developer subscription" or "contact us"--I wonder if
| their terms allow you to use it with e.g. Mapbox GL JS 1,
| which is much better than MapKit JS.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps
| available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices.
|
| I too actually want to use certain software from Apple, I just
| refuse to use it on Mac as me and the Mac WM keep talking past
| each other :-)
| ivanche wrote:
| > The "Google can't arbitrarily take it away" is a good
| argument, but "I'm no longer part of their ad ecosystem, being
| tracked all around the internet" requires a lot more effort
| than just avoiding using google.com, youtube.com, gmail.com,
| etc. I'm not saying that the current transitions are useless,
| but that there's more to it.
|
| This becomes much easier with uMatrix + uBlock Origin
| extensions for Firefox!
| yuribro wrote:
| > If Apple were a different company, it would've made maps
| available for use on web browsers and non-Apple devices. That
| could also help in a more rapid improvement of maps as opposed
| to the mostly-useless state it's been in (except for a few
| countries and regions in certain countries that Apple likes and
| works more on).
|
| If apple would have done that (for Maps and other services),
| how would it be different than Google?
|
| Google offers these services for free to the end-user and
| generates revenue from ads.
|
| Apple is using these services to sell more hardware devices,
| and generates revenue from there.
| [deleted]
| t212 wrote:
| Startpage is now owned by System1. It's an Adtech company. I
| personally know some people who work/worked there and they do
| not recommend using Startpage for privacy reasons anymore.
| tomxor wrote:
| I understand this, yet recently switched to startpage anyway
| due to massive captcha fatigue... Startpage will block you
| occasionally if you search at too high frequency, but it
| never gives captcha and blocks _way_ _way_ less than google
| presents captcha. Captcha has gradually rendered Google
| completely unusable to me due to being stuck on mobile
| internet or public wifi+VPN... both of which causes
| continuous captcha unless you allow them to track you... it
| 's basically a ransom - let us track you or no search for
| you.
|
| I like DDG, but for many things it's still not good enough.
| ericholscher wrote:
| We're trying to build a competitor to Google ads, targeted at
| developers: https://www.ethicalads.io/
|
| As developers we understand the most how privacy is violated
| across the Internet. If we can't contribute to the change in the
| ecosystem, we don't have much hope for the rest of the industry.
| iou wrote:
| > GoogleDNS -> CloudflareDNS
|
| It's better for sure, just from trying a couple (OpenDns,
| cloudflare, quad9) I really love the offering from nextDNS
|
| https://nextdns.io
|
| It somewhat smashes together the features of pi-hole and opendns
| with the features like DoT or DoH as you get in cloudflare
| buildbot wrote:
| Seconding NextDNS, it's well worth the price for the features
| and privacy. And not having to administer a piHole, which was
| always slightly unstable for me.
| dusted wrote:
| I'm all for getting out of the cloud, but moving from one
| company, to multiple other companies seems to have achieved
| nothing but diversify and multiply the amount of terms you've had
| to agree to (they will all tell you the same thing in the end: if
| they block your account, or lose your data, it's your problem).
|
| The only real solution is self-hosting[1], which is becoming a
| bit difficult with email these days.
|
| [1] No, a rented server in some datacenter is not self-hosting,
| self-hosting is when you can walk into a room and point to the
| box that stores your mail.
| dusted wrote:
| Down to -1 now, I take that as a clear sign that someone does
| not want to think too much about just how bad our situation has
| become :) (or they're trying to sell a SaaS and therefore need
| me to be wrong), nice :)
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| It's amazing how this place is called "Hacker" News and
| downvotes opinions that are not mainstream enough or not
| corporate-friendly enough.
|
| You are right that self-hosting means that your data sits on
| your devices, and this should be made possible to most users
| without having to pay 3rd party services, buy domains, pay
| for VPSes and learn to manage servers.
|
| (edit: hah, the downvotes are coming already!)
| oauea wrote:
| > a rented server in some datacenter is not self-hosting
|
| It is though. Don't be elitist.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have wasted a lot of breath trying to convince people that
| the right way to go is to have one physical data center, and
| put all redundancy and edge networking in the cloud.
|
| One of my fears is that as soon as you outsource hardware
| maintenance, then employees who were good at this sort of thing
| lose much of their value, either in their own head, or in the
| group consensus. They start to wander off to work for other
| companies, and you quickly lose critical mass. Once that
| happens, the quality of advice you get for architectural
| proposals degrades, and your number of stupid design mistakes
| notches up considerably.
|
| These people also provide a lot of your 'informed consumer'
| qualities. They can explain why you shouldn't have to pay $1000
| a month for a service.
|
| I've seen this play out a couple of times. It's too slow to be
| called a train wreck. It's like watching erosion take out
| beautiful house. You can enjoy it for a while, but eventually
| it starts to sag and then fall apart. Slowly at first and then
| all at once.
| CobsterLock wrote:
| Is getting your mail sent from your own e-mail server past the
| GMail and Outlook spam filters trivial? I always hear about the
| aggressive spam filters that these providers have which makes
| it hard to set up your own server. Not saying it's not
| possible, but I am assuming it is somewhat difficult to set up
| and their is probably some maintenance that goes along with it.
| So much so that paying for a provider makes sense. As long as
| my subscription is the only revenue stream, I see no issue with
| using a "cloud service" to run email for my custom domain.
|
| I'm willing to be the other services have similar situations
| where you might as well just pay someone to do it for you. $160
| to not have to maintain a server room seems like a nice deal to
| me.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > they will all tell you the same thing in the end: if they
| block your account, or lose your data, it's your problem
|
| Still there's a huge gap between "might do that according to
| the contract" and "does so on a regular basis and is well known
| to have no official way to appeal".
| dusted wrote:
| There's also a huge gap between the number of proton mail
| users and gmail accounts, percentage-wise, it'd be
| interesting to see how many percent of gmail/protonmail users
| has problems and. I'm sure we will see the most silly
| examples from gmail, we have to, because they have the most
| users, and so the greatest chance of hitting strange edge-
| cases.
|
| And with edge-case, I don't meen technical ones only, but
| also customer-support ones.. If you've got support for many
| more people, then more people are going to have a bad
| experience, and even more likely that someone has a rare (in
| percent of total experiences) terrible one.
|
| I'm the one entirely against any cloud stuff, I just don't
| buy the argument that other providers are necessarily better.
| The bigger you are, the more interactions you do with your
| clients, the more likely that you will mess it up big-time
| for some of them.
| ajdude wrote:
| This is ultimately what I ended up doing, with one caveat: I
| have mailinabox running on a VPS in a local datacenter.
|
| If my ISP wasn't so aggressive with sending mail, I would've
| just self hosted on my own computer.
|
| However, mailinabox also comes with nextcloud, and it works out
| of the box with exchange activesync, allowing me to basically
| mimic gmail's syncing of calendar/contacts/etc. I made the
| switch about a year ago, it took registering two domains (one
| for the actual mail server and one for <lastname>.com) and
| paying for the VPS, plus all the overhead of initial
| configuration, but it has been smooth sailing since. My email
| is happily firstname@lastname.com to the public and
| private@mailserver.tld for private stuff- it even supports the
| firstne+string@lastname.com.
|
| At the end of the day, this is probably the best someone can
| reasonably do. Then it's just ddg and Apple Maps.
| duffyjp wrote:
| The fact you were able to register your lastname as a dotcom
| is incredibly fortunate, especially if that was a recent
| registration. Mine has been a marketing agency since 1995.
|
| I ran my own business email for a while in a DigitalOcean
| VPS, but it was a huge pain. I did it all by hand though, I
| should give mailinabox a try.
| bluGill wrote:
| I got lastnamefarm.com there are plenty of variations on
| that theme to go around. My last name is common enough that
| if I had thought to get it in 1993 I would have sold it by
| now anyway.
| dmytton wrote:
| Moving large numbers of files - like the 50k of Google Photos the
| author mentions - can be done using https://rclone.org. Set up
| Google Photos as a source and then use the copy command to move
| it to a different location[1]. There are a lot of different
| commands which work with many different cloud storage systems
| e.g. sync everything one way locally to a backup, mount a FUSE
| filesystem, do two-way sync, etc.
|
| [1] https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_copy/
| darkfirefly wrote:
| If you want to save Google Photos, use Google Takeout to
| download it. It allowed you to download all of your google-
| related-data, including photos.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| Beware that using rclone with google photos may result in lower
| quality images and missing metadata. Below is taken from the
| rclone website:
|
| Limitations
|
| Downloading Images
|
| When Images are downloaded this strips EXIF location (according
| to the docs and my tests). This is a limitation of the Google
| Photos API and is covered by bug #112096115.
|
| The current google API does not allow photos to be downloaded
| at original resolution. This is very important if you are, for
| example, relying on "Google Photos" as a backup of your photos.
| You will not be able to use rclone to redownload original
| images. You could use 'google takeout' to recover the original
| photos as a last resort Downloading Videos
|
| When videos are downloaded they are downloaded in a really
| compressed version of the video compared to downloading it via
| the Google Photos web interface. This is covered by bug
| #113672044.
|
| Source: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations
| budafish wrote:
| As others have said Google Photos backup via RClone has some
| caveats, mainly not downloading at original quality. Google
| Takeout does solve this but but in weird hierarchies.
|
| I stumbled on a new project which simulates a browser download
| using a headless Chrome Developer tools session[0]. Looks
| interesting, supports continuation and can be ran on a cron
| job. Worth a look.
|
| [0] https://github.com/perkeep/gphotos-cdp
| weetniet wrote:
| Also, see Jake Wharton's Docker GPhotos Sync [0] for a
| containerized version of this tool. Unfortunately, this
| method seems to be the easiest way to automate a backup at
| full quality.
|
| [0] https://github.com/JakeWharton/docker-gphotos-sync
| mceachen wrote:
| > Google Takeout does solve this but but in weird
| hierarchies.
|
| Surprisingly, the Takeout split archives can contain partial
| contents for a given folder or album. If you extract
| everything into a single merged root, you'll see both the
| sidecars and images in the same directory.
|
| If you're on macOS or Linux, you can do this by mounting the
| tarballs with ratarmount and skip the extraction step.
| Details and links here:
| https://forum.photostructure.com/t/archive-file-format-
| compr...
| dhimes wrote:
| Google's gotten weird. Yesterday I was doing some keyword
| planning and got a negative (-) cpc and cost. I looked everywhere
| to try to determine what that meant and didn't find anything.
|
| They have online chat support, so I tried that. I got routed to a
| sales rep who called me on the phone and who, after taking all my
| information while basically ignoring my question, finally heard
| me. She didn't know the answer.
|
| She sent me a support link which was the same one that routed me
| to her. I told her this and all she could say was she was sorry
| and she couldn't help unless I was ready to launch a campaign.
|
| I honestly don't think she knew anything. I'm suspicious that
| these are indy workers getting routed prospects by Google. I
| don't know. The whole thing was sleazy.
|
| Years ago when I managed to get someone on the line she stayed
| with me until my problem was solved. And this wasn't even a
| problem (or maybe it was? wouldn't be the first bug I found on
| their site). I was just asking a question.
| modeitsch wrote:
| I planned a google ad campaign with a 200 TOTAL budget. A
| google representative helped me setting up the account, after 4
| days she calls me back and said that my ad is doing very well,
| And it's already holding at 800$. Till now google didn't give
| me back my money with claiming that I don't have prof. They are
| not willing to listen to there own phone systems recording's
| because they know that I'm right. So basically WE ARE NOT THE
| CUSTOMER WE ARE THE PRODUCT
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| How's the legality of recording a call if the other party
| does that as well?
| cj wrote:
| If there's a message that says "This call may be
| recorded..." then I would consider that to be adequate
| consent for either party to record the call, not just 1
| party.
|
| But IANAL.
| tjoff wrote:
| In a lot of places it is legal to record a call as long as
| one of the parties (that is yourself) is in on it.
|
| That is, you can't record a call between two other people
| but you can always record a call that yourself are
| participating in.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Careful with this one. In the US, while most states "one
| party notification states" and operate as you describe:
|
| > Eleven (11) states require the consent of everybody
| involved in a conversation or phone call before the
| conversation can be recorded. Those states are:
| California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland,
| Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire,
| Pennsylvania and Washington.[0]
|
| Recording without all parties' permission in these states
| is at least a misdemeanor.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=one+party+notification+st
| ate...
| RealStickman_ wrote:
| I would think that the employees are aware their calls
| are being recorded if the company announced that to me
| beforehand. That should be permission enough for me to
| record the call as well.
| idownvoted wrote:
| As an aside: As more and more techies repeatedly fail to decouple
| their digital belongings from Google's infrastructure, it should
| become clear how strong the lock-in effect of cloud services is
| in general and in particular their proper UX.
|
| EG.: one of gmails main selling points always was the ,,available
| anywhere" web interface and its quick, and useful search.
| mcwoods wrote:
| Problem is on the phone side. There is a duopoly; Apple or
| Google. Neither is great. We should be able to have control over
| this, as it is increasingly being the way in which the majority
| of the public have access to their information (photos, docs,
| etc).
|
| Same on the desktop we have MS, Apple.
|
| Yes Linux (variations) are available on both, more so on desktop,
| but not a real possibility for most consumes.
| logicchains wrote:
| I try to use Bing for all my searches (set it as the browser
| default), but at least a third of the time I end up needing to
| open Google and search there instead. Anyone got any tips for
| getting better results out of Bing? It doesn't help that when I'm
| using a VPN, searching for an English term often causes Bing to
| deliver a bunch of results in the native language of the place
| the VPN is located, rather than in English.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Makes sense to try duckduckgo or startpage? My Bing using
| experience was extremely bad for all non-tech, maybe except
| sport.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > My Bing using experience was extremely bad for all non-tech
|
| Do you mean it's good for tech searches? That would be good
| news, because those are pretty much the only searches DDG
| uniformly performs badly on, for me - the only searches where
| I know that a `!g` would improve the results significantly.
| Perhaps it should be a `!b` instead now, I'll try it out.
| s5ma6n wrote:
| I have the same bad experience with DDG and it is so slow. I
| found Bing relatively better and it is constantly improving
| with new features.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Maybe 2021 will be the year when I give Bing a real chance?
|
| (I was simultaneously deeply impressed and worried last
| year when a colleague of mine showed that Bing also returns
| results from company intranets if they are set up correctly
| and you are signed in to Bing with your work account.)
| FabHK wrote:
| DDG can be localised to a country in a drop-down menu on
| the left above the results.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| If you sign in with a Microsoft Account, Bing does a bit better
| at guessing which language/locality you want results in, and a
| few other related things.
|
| Of course, at that point you are just trading opt-out Google
| tracking for opt-in Bing tracking, and that may defeat some of
| the reasoning behind why you are using VPN for those searches.
| I find Bing ads and Bing tracking far less problematic and
| insidious than Google's, so it's an interesting trade off, for
| sure. One interesting part of the trade off that Google doesn't
| match (neither opt-out nor opt-in tracking) is "Microsoft
| Rewards" where Bing gives you a small cut of tracked ad fees in
| "rewards points" (like credit card/frequent flyer "mileage"
| programs) that you can redeem for things like gift cards. Sure,
| it's a cynical loyalty grab, but at least for me it shows that
| Microsoft still prefers to be a product company at the end of
| the day and is a little less likely to fall into the evil opt-
| out only panopticon tracking ad direction that Google has.
| Obviously other people's opinions vary, and many are loathe to
| trust Microsoft, but it's an interesting trade-off to be aware
| of.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| The quote and plus search operators are your friends for that
| last third. I don't think Bing tailors its search results as
| aggressively as Google does, so you sometimes have to be more
| explicit with domain-specific searches.
| Netcob wrote:
| That little downtime recently that in some places looked like
| Google had deleted my account got me quite a shock and made me
| re-evaluate my dependence on Google too.
|
| For anyone looking for a simple self-hosted file sync system I'd
| recommend Seafile though. It has delta sync (like Dropbox) and
| great performance. I finally switched to it after years of
| increasing frustration with Nextcloud, which has none of these
| things.
| zan5hin wrote:
| Instead of Google Analytics look at Matomo. Since you are self-
| hosting Nextcloud, standing up a self-hosted Matomo instance
| won't be difficult. https://matomo.org
| cosmotic wrote:
| If you have to use Chrome for selenium; use a docker container
| https://hub.docker.com/r/selenium/standalone-chrome
| kmclean wrote:
| That's a good idea! I hadn't thought about using docker.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth, drive,
| chat, meet, and a bunch of things.
|
| Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's
| marketing and you're falling for it. ProtonMail doesn't have
| stellar record for privacy (or any Swiss company in general).
| There has been several discussions about this on HN, and
| otherwise where many have compared email services and rated their
| privacy claims. FastMail seems to be the worst of all. Migadu
| seems to be good but an extremely bad value for your $.
|
| Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're
| commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services.
| Don't let any marketing fool you.
|
| I'd rather be in iron clad hands of Google's engineering and
| security practices than a 30 people company with no fricking clue
| about security. This is often not part of the discussion.
| throwaway9d0291 wrote:
| > Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded. It's
| marketing and you're falling for it.
|
| At the very least, if you use providers other than Google, you
| can decentralize it. You can give one company your search
| history and a different company your emails. Even if both
| companies are equal to Google in terms of privacy, you still
| end up with better overall privacy because tehy can't join the
| two datasets.
|
| > ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy (or any
| Swiss company in general).
|
| Can you back that up with some references? I live in
| Switzerland and Swiss data protection law is certainly better
| than American.
| wtmt_arn wrote:
| Crypto AG, Omnisec AG, etc. It seems to be common pattern for
| spy agencies to "whitewash" their operations via a swiss
| company, making them look neutral and wholesome and
| trustworthy...
|
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/second-swiss-firm-allegedly-
| sol...
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I'm not sure why wtmt_arn's comment is dead... it's correct
| [deleted]
| wtmt wrote:
| _> Google is such an insane value. $5 you get GSuite, auth,
| drive, chat, meet, and a bunch of things.
|
| ...
|
| > Stick with Google. It's not fashionable but a bargain. You're
| commodicized on the internet unless you run your own services.
| Don't let any marketing fool you._
|
| You also don't get any useful customer service for that $5. I
| know companies that charge less but provide customer service.
| So what you value isn't what others may value.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| That's one of the drawbacks of Google in general. I think if
| you want to buy Ads and have a big account with them, perhaps
| you can talk to a human.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Also if you are a big cloud customer.
|
| I know, I consulted for one.
|
| That said, it wasn't reliable.
|
| One day: two sw engineers onsite, we recreated the problem,
| they went back to yake care of it.
|
| Another day: what seemed like a student from a third world
| country on a very cheap helpdesk asking irrelevant
| questions instead of reading the description.
|
| Another day again: answer by "head of <something>"
| acknowledging the issue and pointing to a fix coming <at
| some specified time>, only IIRC the fix didn't arrive, at
| least not at the time that person said.
| ajnin wrote:
| How much do you value your online life ? Put all your eggs in
| one basket and you allow yourself to be locked away from it at
| the whim of some unknown algorithm, with practically no
| recourse. A strike on your account (maybe a Play Store upload
| or some vague TOS violation) and you may be locked out of your
| mail and the auth that you use for everything. You'll end up
| adapting your behavior, consciously or not, to avoid angering
| the giant. Spreading the risks, and taking back control, seems
| the level-headed thing to do.
|
| And the concept that there is only a single company in the
| world that knows a thing about security seems deluded to me.
| junon wrote:
| This is the most deluded and blatantly incorrect comment I've
| seen on HackerNews to date.
| skinkestek wrote:
| You forgot how they'll also helpfully remove services that you
| could otherwise end up spending your valuable time on:
|
| - Reader, possibly to make room for Google+
|
| - and then Google+
|
| - etc
|
| You also forgot how they'll ban you from accessing your own
| paid account, and there won't even be a sham trial or even a
| kangaroo court, just an automatic death sentence for your data.
|
| Seriously: Google has _earned_ the distrust they are now
| facing. They have dug this hole
|
| - one shady tactic at a time
|
| - one let down at a time
|
| - one deal with China at a time
|
| - etc
|
| until even former fan boys like me become happy every time I
| see Google in hot water.
|
| @Googlers: nothing against most of you as individuals. Hope you
| get well paid and good jobs when Google has to cut. (Except
| those who think it is OK to use search as a playground for
| wacky AI experiments, those who implement rules to punish
| logged in Firefox users with Captchas etc :-)
| pixxel wrote:
| > ProtonMail doesn't have stellar record for privacy
|
| Customer here. What have I missed?
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Saying folks that are privacy conscious 'deluded' is a bit of a
| stretch as well as assuming their reasons for deciding.
|
| You list a bunch of services Google provide for that $5 and
| yes, no doubt you can extract good value if you want to use all
| those things, and also don't mind relinquishing privacy for the
| content you choose to put on there. FWIW Gsuite is more like
| $7/m where I am.
|
| For me personally, you can list those bunch of things and gmail
| is the only really useful, day to day tool - mainly because
| their spam filtering is better than most. Essentially that's
| where the only value is, for me.
|
| Also bear in mind Google's history of retiring products, hardly
| 'iron clad' reliability.
|
| For me, their lack of privacy ethos compounds the problem of
| them having a monopoly on search, and to a large extent
| information discovery. That, alongside their huge reach in how
| they can gather information on people to aid advertising, via
| Chrome, Android, DNS, analytics... that huge list. Sleep
| walking into a society where a handful of large corps know
| everything about you isn't necessary.
| [deleted]
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Folks that are privacy concious are equally deluded.
|
| This is the kind of nonsense comment that ends up being used as
| the moral justification engineers need to build these privacy
| invading services.
|
| People are entitled to their own privacy, end of story.
| benzoate wrote:
| My reason for not using google services goes beyond privacy. I
| also do not want to contribute to or reward Google's monopoly
| practices
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Office 365 (or Microsoft 365 or whatever they want to call it
| today) is also good value. ~$5/month gives you more or less the
| same as Google where it comes to email/calendar and 1TB of
| OneDrive cloud storage. It can go even cheaper at ~$2/month for
| just basic email (on the "Kiosk" plan) if you don't need cloud
| storage and just need hosted e-mail.
|
| Regarding your counterpoint, I disagree. It's not about
| ProtonMail claims of encryption or security or anything, it's
| just that their business model is to be selling hosted e-mail
| services and not advertising, and they have no incentive (nor
| the technical expertise in-house) to read your e-mails for
| advertising purposes. Furthermore, ProtonMail and all these
| other services only get a part of your data, so even if they do
| use your data nefariously, it's better for each one to misuse a
| separate chunk of it than for one entity to have _all_ of it.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > it's just that their business model is to be selling hosted
| e-mail services
|
| Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google GSuite
| have better privacy than free accounts?
|
| Another counterpoint to my original post is - you can call
| someone at ProtonMail, can't do that with Google.
| izacus wrote:
| > Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google
| GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?
|
| Yes, the GSuite data is separated from non-GSuite and is
| goverened by a different ToS. This includes this data not
| being used for advertising, conforming to different
| deletion requirements and more. Check out the GSuite ToS
| for details, we looked into this awhile ago.
| madhadron wrote:
| > Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google
| GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?
|
| Yes. If you read the terms when you sign up to pay them
| money for GSuite, it says that your data in not used for
| advertising, targeting, or any other analytics. Basically
| the minimum terms for a large organization to be willing to
| entrust their internal data to Google.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > Does anyone know if pro/business accounts with Google
| GSuite have better privacy than free accounts?
|
| Officially, I'm sure they claim that G-Suite data is not
| used for any advertising purposes. However, just like I
| wouldn't trust an alcoholic with guarding a warehouse full
| of booze, I wouldn't trust this promise especially
| considering they intentionally violate the GDPR with a
| misleading, obnoxious and non-compliant consent form for EU
| visitors.
|
| Furthermore, even if we assume G-Suite data itself is not
| used, what about general data collected by Google services?
| For example, a lot of their properties have Google
| Analytics included - does being logged in a G-Suite account
| automatically opt you out? What about YouTube (when logging
| into a G-Suite account you briefly get a redirect to
| accounts.youtube.com presumably to set a session cookie)?
| Etc. Given that Google is an advertising company, I can see
| it being easy for them to collect data they shouldn't, even
| because of an oversight (such as forgetting a "if
| account.is_g_suite" check, or legacy code predating
| G-Suite) as opposed to any malicious intent.
|
| Not using Google means you don't have to interact with
| Google _at all_ unless you explicitly want to and aren 't
| exposed to any of the aforementioned risks.
| cbradford wrote:
| Agree. It is unlikely that google adheres to their ToS,
| it is more profitable to violate them and if you get
| caught do the usual "oops, our bad" like Facebook does
| regularly.
| rmuratov wrote:
| What's so wrong with FastMail?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Some info here: https://drewdevault.com/2020/06/19/Mail-
| service-provider-rec...
|
| There was another highly voted post on HN that compared all
| services (except Migadu) just last month, I can't find it.
| Klonoar wrote:
| They're presumably concerned about FastMail being in/from
| Australia.
|
| The thing is, if you're concerned about a state agency, you
| have bigger issues. If all you're after is "I don't want to
| give Google my money", FastMail is pretty good - and to boot
| they're one of the few with a still working push notification
| certificate for Mac Mail.app users, I believe.
|
| Email is a lost cause. Just choose the one that sucks the
| least, and don't do important things on it.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| > don't do important things on it.
|
| How do you accomplish that? In my experience every single
| service on the internet relies on email for account
| creation, password recovery and general identity
| verification.
|
| I'm not saying that's good, only that it's the current
| state of affairs.
| Klonoar wrote:
| I'm rolling my eyes at your comment. Come on now, you
| know what I meant.
|
| Email is like getting mail in your postal box. It has no
| real protections except for people saying "yeah, I won't
| read your mail". Thus, if something is important enough,
| don't use it for that.
|
| If you really need to do something privately there are
| better equipped avenues; if you're worried about
| tracking, it doesn't matter because
|
| - any service mailing you will try to track you
|
| - if you email with anybody from Google/MSFT/etc, your
| email is on their servers anyway.
|
| It's a lost cause. It has been for some time. Keep a
| strong password on it and 2FA and such, but otherwise,
| it's not worth the time to care about.
| bluGill wrote:
| Right, so don't do important things on the internet. Good
| advice in general.
| melomal wrote:
| Or people are just sick of being shown ads on everything
| Google. Sure $5 you get X, Y, Z but you also get 000's of ads
| pumped at you constantly. Even though you pay for that access
| you are pretty much opening up all of your inboxes etc for
| crawlers to scan for your likes, dislikes etc.
| higerordermap wrote:
| GSuite subscription excludes you from most of it, to be fair.
| robenkleene wrote:
| This comment should not be this highly rated on Hacker News.
| The entire content of this comment is: I read a bunch of stuff
| somewhere that said all these alternative companies are bad.
|
| There are no links to sources, there's no evidence presented,
| there's nothing to dispute. There's no substance to this
| comment.
|
| Hacker News has a bias towards Google because Google offers a
| bunch of services for free that are useful to HN's audience, so
| HN users would rather not have reasons _not_ to use Google
| services, which is why comments like this get upvoted, despite
| their lack of substance.
| croissants wrote:
| > Hacker News has a bias towards Google
|
| There are multiple threads every single week that get
| hundreds of upvotes for criticizing Google. I think Hacker
| News is heterogeneous enough on this that "bias towards
| Google" is an overstatement.
| robenkleene wrote:
| Fair point. I can't edit the comment anymore, but if I
| could I'd say _some_ HN users are bias.
| cbradford wrote:
| Here is a similar write up on how to exit google
|
| http://www.scorchedweb.com/uncategorized/exit-the-goolag/
| jerheinze wrote:
| Using YouTube with Firefox Containers is in no way anonymous.
| Instead try to use it with the Tor Browser (also checkout the
| Invidious project).
| paulcarroty wrote:
| No way, Google constantly blocks TOR with tons of their
| captcha.
| jerheinze wrote:
| That's why I mentioned the Invidious project which is a
| YouTube frontend. Also solving the ReCaptcha is for most of
| us not an insurmountable task, it's definitely worth the cost
| if you want some real privacy.
| nurusr12211 wrote:
| I prefer using the best technology over endless virtue signaling.
| Dirlewanger wrote:
| Ok, Google.
| spamuel wrote:
| I'd take a technology hit to break from Google, but the
| McMorality of the author was certainly nauseating.
| nine_k wrote:
| Research prototypes are usually very haphazard and have a ton
| of rough edges.
|
| But this is how you try making something new to eventually
| work, and maybe even become the polished "best available".
| nurusr12211 wrote:
| These articles are not about supporting a new or better
| product. It's always around virtue signaling because google =
| bad... she says it right there in the second paragraph.
| Hitton wrote:
| I don't care about virtue signalling, best technology is
| worthless when google's legendarily horrendous customer
| service/algorithms can screw you at any moment. So for me:
| GMail, GDrive, GCP, etc. are too risky; even though I use
| Firefox because of its customizability I could use
| Chrome(based) browser; GMaps and Youtube are fine; I use
| neither Google's nor Cloudflare's DNS, they have too much of my
| data as it is anyway and frankly speed difference between DNS
| providers is negligible; only time I don't act completely
| rationally is good ol' search - because I'm worried about
| google's monopoly I try to use/support an alternative.
| FabHK wrote:
| Good recommendations. To minimize Youtube tracking, I use the
| fantastic `youtube-dl` to get the movie (or only audio) locally,
| then keep it or discard it as the case may be.
| tmpUserA wrote:
| As far as I understand, to track users, website use : IP,
| Cookie/LocalStorage, Fingerprinting.
|
| I wonder if youtube-dl really helps ? It doesn't change the IP,
| you can refuse/clear cookies in your browser, and for
| fingerprinting, isn't scraping via youtube-dl make you even
| more unique among other regular browser users ?
| JAlexoid wrote:
| Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the face.
|
| OSM would be a better solution.
|
| If only an email service as good as Gmail existed anywhere on
| this planet :(
| bribri wrote:
| I'm running Amazon WorkMail for $5 a month under my own domain.
| It's very bare bones but it does what I need.
| klodolph wrote:
| When was the last time you used Apple Maps?
| zingplex wrote:
| Isn't OSM a major data source for Apple Maps?
|
| Edit: I checked, the OSM wiki actually has a page about it [1]
|
| [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the
| face.
|
| After doing some basic A/B testing (checking Google Maps, Waze
| and Apple Maps for routing guidance) and establishing that
| Apple Maps has been giving me earlier arrival times through
| different routing guidance (and actually delivering on that
| earlier arrival time, by means of actually using it), I've
| determined that's less likely to be true, _if_ you 're in a
| city that has been refreshed recently.
|
| Combined with the (potentially anti-competitive) use of private
| APIs on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, enabling the phone
| lockscreen to always display routing guidance, and the watch to
| provide haptic feedback for routing guidance, Apple Maps has
| become a superior experience as far as driving goes.
|
| This is all _if_ you 're already a sucker in their eco-system,
| and happen to live in a city they care about, which I am.
|
| EDIT: At the same time..
|
| > Moving to Apple Maps is basically stabbing yourself in the
| face.
|
| If you're taking this from the perspective of moving from one
| megacorp to another, rather than quality of service, then yes,
| there's basically no difference here. Apple today is claiming
| to care, in a similar manner to Google's old mission statement
| of "dont be evil". Apple have been pretty clear that their
| interest in your privacy only extends as far as lip service
| goes, given the lack of E2E encryption on iCloud storage for
| the majority of your data.
|
| 2 decades ago Google was "don't be evil" and here we are today.
| Where do we think Apple will be in a decade or two from now?
|
| So yes, in that respect, don't stab yourself in the face, and
| don't use any megacorp products.
| cageface wrote:
| We techies like to believe that we can find technical
| solutions to these problems but I think this is misguided.
| Even for a very technical user completely untangling yourself
| from FAANG is a lot of work and a massive inconvenience. And
| if this kind of privacy is really only available to a small
| technical elite then how much good is it anyway? Privacy is
| only really valuable when it's accessible to everyone.
|
| Respect for user privacy is going to have to come from
| regulation.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > If only an email service as good as Gmail existed anywhere on
| this planet
|
| Office 365, which is Microsoft Exchange under the hood?
| jlelse wrote:
| I use Here WeGo for maps and I'm quite happy with it.
| blisterpeanuts wrote:
| When it comes to technology, people prefer one-stop shopping.
| Google's email, mapping, mobile OS, search, calendars, video,
| photos are all free and best-of-class or at least good enough to
| be satisfactory to 80% of the people, who think they're getting a
| bargain even as they put more and more of their personal
| information in Google's hands.
|
| It seems as though there's no way to break this voluntary-
| monopoly. Waze came along with brilliant innovations like BLE
| devices monitoring traffic in underpasses etc. (my company makes
| some of the devices they use) and finding best alternative
| routes, and an innovative UX, so Google simply bought them,
| problem solved.
|
| There's a whole menagerie of alternatives to Youtube, but they're
| like ants next to an elephant. And of course, Youtube itself was
| bought by Google; they've advanced it technically, but it was
| better in the old days, less censorship and better remuneration
| for creators.
|
| Like a lot of other techies, I've switched to DDG for searches
| and I don't really miss Google search. Probably I use !g about
| once or twice a month.
|
| It seems to me there's lots of opportunities to improve on
| Google's offerings; Apple seems uninterested in competing head-
| to-head aside from its mobile phone OS, but there are still
| innovations out there waiting to be discovered. Perhaps some here
| will be among those future billionaires, giving us better
| alternatives to The Goog which in my opinion has gotten a little
| too big for its britches.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Apple seems uninterested in competing head-to-head aside from
| its mobile phone OS,
|
| I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple keep nibbling at Google's
| software business as it transitions more fully to an added-
| value services model. Little moves like Apple Music on android,
| Apple TV+ on Android-based TVs... One could see a similar play
| occurring with fitness, books, and maybe even maps in the
| services-centric Apple future.
| rurban wrote:
| Re Firefox vs Chrome: On Fedora chrome is unusable with newer
| video formats, you have to use Firefox. Which is better in all
| aspects.
| 0x53 wrote:
| I did something extremely similar:
| https://mallocate.com/blog/removing-google/
| powersnail wrote:
| > I suspect means it [DDG] would be a perfectly fine replacement
| for most people
|
| I suspect otherwise. DDG is as good as Google in certain topics,
| especially programming-related topics. But otherwise, not so
| good. Sometimes, it feels like it simply has indexed less pages
| than Google.
|
| But I still use DDG as much as possible, only !g when the results
| are unsatisfactory. I don't know how much it actually help DDG,
| though, since it doesn't seem to get much better over the past
| few years.
| Retric wrote:
| IMO, their general results are close enough my preference for
| DDG's UI is a major factor. Where Google wins is better parsing
| of math and conversions. ex: "37 * 5 gallons in liters"
| matwood wrote:
| As has been mentioned many times, the problem (if you want to
| call it that) with DDG is that it does not personally tailor
| results. Google is great at deciphering what I mean because it
| has data on me. DDG doesn't have this data, so how I search
| needed to be tweaked. I rarely have need for the g! anymore.
| marlowe221 wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious about this and would like to use Google
| search less than I do now...
|
| Would you mind sharing a few tips (or pointing me in the
| direction of some tips) for better DDG searches?
|
| I love the concept and philosophy of DDG but the search
| results I get could definitely be better!
| happymellon wrote:
| Localisation as well. DDG lets me pick the UK but almost all
| results are US centric.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| My experience is that DDG still isn't as good as Google
| historically was, but Google itself has actually gotten worse,
| to the point that they're now about the same.
|
| The main problem seems to be that Google will no longer surface
| anything that isn't on a major site, so even when you know that
| the thing you're looking for exists, it can't find it.
| Obviously this also implies that it's missing a ton of stuff
| you didn't know existed but would have wanted to see.
| kmclean wrote:
| Yeah I agree.. DDG has limitations, but I find the first 2
| pages of Google are almost entirely ads now (either literal
| paid ads or posts full of ads and affiliate links). The whole
| SEO racket has incentivized all the wrong kinds of
| optimization.
| kenhwang wrote:
| That's what I noticed as well. I didn't switch over to DDG
| because it was better, I did because Google just got much
| worse and so cluttered with ads and knowledge blocks that
| were wrong more often than not.
| idiocrat wrote:
| > Google will no longer surface anything that isn't on a
| major site
|
| I like this search engine very much. It has all the
| "alternative" stuff.
|
| https://wiby.me/
| duffyjp wrote:
| Wow, it's amazing how fast a website can be without 2MB of
| silly Javascript frameworks. I did a search for "Weather"
| and got a result for my local weather in ASCII form. This
| is right up my alley.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > DDG is as good as Google in certain topics, especially
| programming-related topics. But otherwise, not so good.
|
| Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite (as I
| mentioned in another comment here). In general searches, DDG
| and Google return about equally good results, with 10% of the
| time DDG doing better and 10% of the time Google doing better.
| With programming-related searches, Google is pretty much
| guaranteed to return better results for me. Doing the Advent of
| Code 2020 was the first time in months that I had to
| consistently do `!g` re-searches, because DDG results were
| significantly worse.
| mgh2 wrote:
| I will suggest a more balanced and practical approach:
|
| All of Google's unethical practices are supported by its
| advertising business, so the only replacement I will consider is
| the search engine, but even here there are no good alternatives.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25614705
| mro_name wrote:
| Chapeau, good move. Your honesty is impressive.
|
| IMO paying money and thus enabling humane businesses to thrive is
| key.
| bluGill wrote:
| Has anyone compared all the photo alternatives? I need a good
| place to store my family photos and share with my wife.
|
| Email and search are easy, email is standard so anyone can do the
| same features more or less. Search has no lock-in so you can just
| try whatever. Photos doesn't seems to be either, and I don't
| personally want to invest the time to try them all.
| kmclean wrote:
| I'm curious about this, too.. I'm trying out a couple of
| different ones now, but Google photos is pretty hard to beat,
| especially its semantic searching. Also I know there are loads
| of them I haven't tried yet.
| uniqueid wrote:
| The thing this article doesn't cover is that while you can (and
| imo _should_ ) make all these changes, Google will _still_ track
| much of what you do online.
|
| The internet is rotten with linked media, amp pages, blogs, and
| ads hosted on Google servers.
|
| If you want off Google, you should use something like Pi-hole to
| lessen that. Since it's DNS level only, I imagine even that won't
| make you invisible to Google.
|
| This was a great read, but Google has a million other ways to
| collect data about you, against your will. That deserves a
| mention.
| kmclean wrote:
| Yeah this is a fair point! I found the rhetoric in the de-
| goggling community to be a bit purist and defeatist at times
| and I'm more of a "better done than perfect" kind of person,
| but I also don't want to be unrealistic about Google's reach or
| suggest this is all it takes to escape it. I updated the post
| to reflect these thoughts. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
| uniqueid wrote:
| Cheers. I enjoyed reading your post. The amount of research
| you put into it showed.
| eating555 wrote:
| I've checked Linode. Why it's price is much lower than others
| like AWS, Azure or GCP? Because of some drawback?
| import wrote:
| Linode has a fixed price strategy and focused on being a VPS
| provider.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Cloud providers like AWS are more expensive because what they
| provide is a completely different set of services and
| guarantees, so their value [and cost] is much higher.
|
| There are actually much cheaper VPS providers than Linode.
| Check out lowendbox.com for deals. I've had a Linode for years
| and it's completely underwhelming for the cost. I'd try out
| multiple different cheaper VPS providers instead, maybe even
| use multiple for redundancy at the same cost as Linode.
| bserge wrote:
| It's the other way around, AWS/etc are more expensive. Linode
| is just a VPS provider, and it's been great for me for the past
| 6 years. There are cheaper alternatives, though.
| itsnot2020 wrote:
| Well their offering is much simpler than that of AWS, Azure or
| GCP. I've been using them for over 5 years now without any
| issues, it's often the case that you get what you pay for but
| Linode do a very good job for their price point (yes they've
| had their issues but so have Gandi, Digital Ocean, ... any
| other competitor).
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| Interesting to see what others use. I'm a bit curious about using
| CloudFlare's DNS though.
|
| If you take a stand against Google's societal impact, why switch
| to CloudFlare? CloudFlare's 'content neutral' stance enables a
| lot of hate speech and other, more disgusting material.
|
| It seems odd to have ethical concerns about Google, but not
| CloudFlare.
| kbelder wrote:
| Because I think censoring hate speech can have a worse societal
| impact than being a neutral host. CloudFlare is, from my
| viewpoint, behaving more ethically.
| kmclean wrote:
| I haven't done as much research about CloudFlare. I generally
| appreciate their views on privacy and the internet, but I have
| heard some really sketchy things about the way they route
| traffic and what you're describing sounds worrisome for sure!
|
| I find it extremely hard to be an ethical consumer these days
| and honestly just get burnt out learning about all the horrible
| things people and companies with lots of money get away with,
| so I need to pace myself and take it in manageable doses. I
| will spend some time learning about Cloudflare this year.
| glial wrote:
| I am against censorship but also don't support companies who
| actively promote hate speech via recommendations. I'm ok with
| anyone having a blog but not OK with FB/Google creating
| conspiracy theory rabbit holes to drive engagement. This is a
| distinction I wish more people made.
| johnmpage wrote:
| Your list neglects a huge data vacuum, scooping up your personal
| data: the Android OS on your phone, which Google develops. My
| recommendation to replace: eOS by the eFoundation
| (https://e.foundation/)
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > Maps - Apple maps
|
| I can't find Apple maps in the play store. Is there another
| alternative?
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