Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free Consequences can come at you fast or slow. If you’re a trillion-dollar company, you get to choose which, a bit, but you can never escape completely. Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and …
for forcing us to create unwanted gMail accounts that then took over our devices and fucked them up.
I have lost count of the number of times I have had my wife complain she has "lost" her emails when all that has happened is Android has silently switched back to the gMail account she had to have to work the phone. Which also fucks up her calendar.
And as one of the visually impaired users that finds great value in the basic voice assistances, she finds it impossible to correct.
And why was a gmail/google email account needed ? For their failed "Google Social" bid nearly a decade ago.
At least Amazon are quite capable of using your existing email address to work with.
Yes, it's all well and good saying that Google are operating 1.8B gmail accounts, but I wonder what proportion are actual used accounts? I have a gmail account because I have to have one on my phone. It's a work phone and the gmail account is only there because it's "essential" to the operation of Android and the play store. I don't think I ever use it as an actual email account, I've certainly never given it out as a point of contact to anyone. I'd have to go into the account settings just find out what the email address is, never mind what the password is. It may be written down in the little black book in the attic/computer room/man-cave :-) That's probably the same for a significant number of users.
I don't think Gmail costs a lot to maintain. Even with the ginormous number of accounts, storage is probably little compared to the black hole that is YouTube. And don't forget files are certainly deduplicated across accounts.
Google may have 99 problems, but Gmail ain't one.
I think that Google sucks but on the other hand, I have not received any malware email via gmail ...so my thoughts are about the managers, not the technical workers who seem to be doing a damn great job with gmail functionality! OK, so the complete elimination of risks is a good feature, making the Google data theft environment only a small side effect compared to the risks of opening a phishing email that appears to be Amazon refund details.
"I think that Google sucks but on the other hand, I have not received any malware email via gmail "
If a few spam emails aren't leaking through, you may have a problem. I've had issues with email going to a gmail account bouncing back at me due to Google not liking me that day. I wind up having to call the person I was trying to email to see if they have another account I can use instead. If you are using a gmail account professionally, why? It not only looks bad, you have no control over it. You own domain/website/hosting account is not that expensive and if you go with the right host, you can have all sorts of backend control options. I recommend staying away from Wix, Squarespace and godaddy. If you need to have a lot of handholding, hire somebody to maintain your online stuff.
If a few spam emails aren't leaking through, you may have a problem
Let me fix that statement for you. If you use Gmail (or Outlook, or any of the big players) then you DO have a problem. AFAIK, not one of the big players does email properly as they all make false promises. Let me expand on that ...
Suppose you had a snail mail service that gave a receipt for every package it receives - thus giving the sender an indication that it's been accepted for delivery. Now suppose, that mail service looked at every package and decided if it "looked spammy" - throwing away any that did. It doesn't tell the recipient so they don't know that they didn't get something. It doesn't tell the sender (remember those receipts saying "I've accepted this package for delivery" ?) that it's not been delivered. So the sender thinks it's been delivered, and the recipient is oblivious to its existence.
So I will say that if you use an email account from one of the big online providers, it's almost certain that you are not getting some emails - and some of those may well be important. You don't know you've not had it, and the sender will think you've just ignored them - that's great for business isn't it ?
OK, it's not for everyone, but I run my own mail server. It has to be an extreme event for it to silently discard an email - if it accepts it for delivery then it delivers it, if it's not going to deliver it (fails any of my tests for "spammy") then it doesn't accept it for delivery (not the same as sending a non-delivery notice). It's not hard to do it right, so I really can't understand why it's not an offering - other than most providers really don't g.a.s. and too many users don't understand what they are losing.
Not to mention, if you are in business, there are some "interesting" questions regarding GDPR compliance. Contrary to what the providers claim, at least with MS I'm fairly certain that you cannot be GDPR complaint using their service. US based company, US CLOUD Act - need I say more ?
To be fair to the big G, Gmail's spam filters have been in the high nineties for accuracy for me for some time. While I have seen twenty or so truly unsolicited emails in my inbox in the past couple of years, I could count on one hand the number of times I've seen an email that I wanted detected as spam in Gmail. Plus, I can get anything back if I really need to, even after the auto-delete. And if I want to disable the spam filters I can.
My old Hotmail (now Outlook) account, on the other hand, happily flings order confirmations, receipts, newsletters, and promotional emails that I've signed up for into spam and irretrievably deletes them after 10 days with no option to disable the filters — even adding a specific email address to the safe senders list can be a fool's errand.
I have the spare time and the smarts to be able to learn and run my own mail server, but when I eventually de-Google it will still probably be with a big online provider. Like it or not, if you have access to a lot of data from people reporting spam then you can spare everybody the pain of doing it themselves. I think given what email actually is — an extremely dated hodgepodge of protocols held together with a wish and some gaffer tape — getting the receiving server to give a "not accepted for delivery" rejection for an email based on the current preferences of an individual mailbox might not be the easiest thing to do.
While we might be inclined to use email when we want to "put something in writing", and while emails are certainly admissible in court, nobody should really regard them as truly reliable for the purposes of proof-of-delivery/read receipts. Just like with your snail mail analogy, you have to make certain compromises and exercise a degree of trust — if you truly wanted to know that something had been delivered, the only absolute option you have is to deliver it yourself in person.
Where do I start? I guess the first paragraph...
If you have the misfortune to work for a company using Gmail with guessable addresses, and you make the mistake of advertising your current employer on LinkedIn, guess what? I average at least two blind recruiter emails per day that I cannot block. Clearly, they have paid G off to deliver these emails. That, by itself, makes the experience substantially less than acceptable.
Email is neither dated nor a hodgepodge of protocols. Certainly, it shows its age, but if idiots did not INSIST on displaying inline HTTP, no only would I LOVE YOU have remained an urban legend, but the space in our mail boxes would be substantially reduced as well.
Of course, email is not a reliable transport, and anyone who doesn't understand that is an idiot. It was never designed as such, however. So what?
Of course, email is not a reliable transport, and anyone who doesn't understand that is an idiot. It was never designed as such, however.
On the contrary, It was expressly designed to be reliable. A core principle is thot when an SMTP server accepts an email, it promises to deliver it to a mailbox or pass on that responsibility to another system, and notify the envelope sender if it can't do either.
Accepting email but neither delivering it nor notifying the sender - usually because it "looks like spam" - is the violation of the above that makes it unreliable. "Backscatter" favours not accepting email that will not be delivered (or forwarded).
(I didn't downvote, for the record.)
You have no idea how many junkmails get blocked not just before they hit your tertiary "spam" folder that you can actually see, but actually most of them at layer 3 of the IP stack when they open a socket on an incoming Gmail SMTP server that recognizes the IP from the other 3 million spam attempts it just tried to deliver and cancels the connection before it tries to even say "HELO".
I'm like you - gmail account for phone/tablet, Hotmail (yes, I'm
that old) for everything else.
I do use the gmail account though - for sites and people I have to deal with reluctantly. Create an user account to access a webite for a one off? Nope! Sign up with Google instead and empty the inbox every few months!
My two rather old Google accounts (one for the Play Store, one for the discontinued Reader) are both of the form google_something@mydomain.com. It never occurred to me when making them that it was compulsory to also pick an @gmail.com address, I thought that like with every other service that required an email for verification you could use the address you were already using. Perhaps it is the case now? It sure wasn't back in the day...
It's still not 'compulsory' to have a gmail (or any other googly a/c), although Google may pretend that it is.
In practice there is a simple work around:
when setting up your phone ignore the request to setup a google account;
enable installing apks from 'external' sources;
install the f-droid apk
from f-droid install 'Aurora' which enables anonymous access to the Playstore, and Bob is your gender nneutral relative.
(experiences with Pixel phones may differ)
NOTE: this is not a guaranteed solution, Google periodically attempts to stymie this avanue of access, but I've been using it for years with only two or three very brief interruptions in service.
NOTE: this is not a guaranteed solution, Google periodically attempts to stymie this avanue of access, but I've been using it for years with only two or three very brief interruptions in service.
Interruptions may become more frequent as others are doing the Aurora thing now. Up to now I've used f-droid & Aurora too but my latest phone is a murena one running /e/ os (thanks for the review Reg!) and that has it's own app for anonymous play store access. Google could take that as time to try harder at blocking anon access.
OTOH regulators do seem to enjoy getting their teeth into Google (long may that last). G used to publicly argue that if you didn't stay logged into the store you might miss updates and get pwned. Technologically that is a bollocks association and I think we have the regular hassling they get to thank for such specious arguments fading. So it could get easier to use the play store anonymously, time will tell.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/murena_e_foundation_phone_test/
Don't forget Youtube. When Gaggle bought Youtube, they shitcanned all the Youtube accounts and forced everyone to get a gmail account.
That screwed up my gmail account so much, I moved to a paid service. My gmail/google account is just for Google Maps and my Android phone now, and the actual gmail app is disabled.
Also (and it just did it again today) Google Contacts likes to randomly "link" contacts where it mashes several together into one contact. You can unlink them, but like all things Google doesn't like you to do, That Is Quite A Process.
I don't have the inclination or resources to set up my own email server. I know that there are paid email services, but I've had that hotmail account since 1998, I can't be arsed to change it now.
The only "cost" I can see so far, is that when I use a browser or mobile to access it, I get a junk email from MS - easily deleted but doesn't show up on my mail PC client.
What "costs"? I've nothing to hide, I know emails are not that secure, if I'm sure MI5 and GCHQ really wanted to read them, they could. I use Whatsapp for secure stuff
I don't see why you got downvoted? I've had a hotmail account since mid-1990s, and it has survived all my other, paid and free, email accounts. Sure, I was 'exposed' to ads when I used hotmails via browsers, travelling round the world, but at home I set it up via mail client, and even when I do access it via browser, all the ad-blocking extensions do a nice clean-up job. Sure, there's this scanning of content of my mails which has bothered me, but then, but other than trivial daily bits, I communicate all my vital business affairs via other means that offer enough protection to make me believe I'm safe, from anything and anybody. (enough & make believe, I can't expect better, realistically).
I considered whatsapp for 'security', briefly, then I realized it's a fad, and when facebook announced they're buying, this solved the poser for me. I use Signal instead, though being cynical I don't have much faith in 'Swiss' and 'you're privacy is our topmost priority', etc. I only hope that not being whatsapp, they're not the first target. Though, given they're favoured by journalists, etc, they're just near the top.
Hell, like no doubt many folks here, I had public BITNET SMTP and UUCP bang-path email addresses before AOL was a thing. (Well, at least before it had that name. AOL's precursor firms go back to 1985, and as a relatively young Reg reader I confess I did not have public email then.)
I had a PSInet SMTP email address around the time AOL created the aol.com domain, but I have no idea what it was anymore, so I can't claim to still use it. I think the oldest email address of mine that still shows up anywhere other than archived Usenet posts (where you can find my ibm.com address) is one from Newsguy.
(That's plenty of info for anyone who's curious to dig up most of my online life, but since I post under my real name it doesn't matter much. I imagine anyone here who's curious will guess that I'm not the "Michael Wojcik" who's a former Chicago alderman, or the New Jersey school principal, or some guy who was on Dancing with the Stars.)
Basically a new iPhone includes an Apple ID, email, 5GB cloud storage, photo backup, whatever. Easily paid through the hardware and part of the cost.
(And I know iPhone users who rather lose photos than pay 79p a month for 50GB storage. When they paid 800+ for the phone).
I pay something like €250/year for FreeBSD based webhosting, and that includes command line access, email facilities and 1TB of SSD storage that I have barely touched. So even though the iCloud thing is cheap, I won't use it, also because my data lives in a country with less government enthusiasm for ignoring people's right to privacy and better enforcement of the laws surrounding it.
That said, I am happy Apple is adding encryption to it although I suspect it has more to do with saving money. Well implemented cryptography means that serving them a demand for data is a pointless exercise - doing it right is literally the only legal get-out clause that actually works.
> And I know iPhone users who rather lose photos than pay 79p a month for 50GB storage. When they paid 800+ for the phone.
Possibly because they're afraid that, once they sign up, they run the risk of being tricked into paying a much higher bill somehow. That's why I don't buy any paid Android apps, no matter how cheap: I do not want to risk handing a working payment card to Google Play. If there was some way I could take my phone to the nearest corner shop and pay for an app there without Google getting my payment method, I would be far more inclined to pay for low-cost apps than I am now. I expect some iPhone users are the same: the app or subscription itself might be cheap, but handing over the payment method is perceived as high risk.
No, it’s definitely because they are too cheap to pay 79p a month. And there is zero attempt to trick you into paying more, you get an email with the bill every month, and if somehow you managed to sign up for more, you can reduce it at any time.
Apple isn’t cheap, but they will always tell you what they charge.
"I do not want to risk handing a working payment card to Google Play."
I'd much rather send the money directly to the author and download the app from their web site. I only have a couple of apps on my phone and I did send money by post to the author of one after I had used alternative means to get the program. Got a nice email back since I sent 1.5x the amount and included a complimentary note on how well it works for me. Most apps are so cheap that paying 2x is still only a tenner. I'd rather send cash than expose a digital source of funds if I can.
"If there was some way I could take my phone to the nearest corner shop and pay for an app there without Google getting my payment method, I would be far more inclined to pay for low-cost apps than I am now"
I've never bought any of them so I might be wrong, but aren't the google play vouchers you can buy at any supermarket or electronics store exactly what you describe there?
Also, a bit more hassle to set up, but you can get virtual credit cards that are single use
"I've never bought any of them so I might be wrong, but aren't the google play vouchers you can buy at any supermarket or electronics store exactly what you describe there?"
That might protect your payment method, but you still have to open an account and log in to the Play Store. With gift cards, I often wind up with a certain amount left that I can't use or forget I still have.
sadly, just about all paid apps are channeled through google or amazon. I tried to buy osmand paid version, but I'm not happy to link it to either my amazon account or google email (yes, I have both, sadly, though hardly ever use them). Well, in that case, support told me to fuck off and die (I'm afraid this is how we do it). And I get this, why build your own bank to get rich, much cheaper to use one that's out there. But I hate google and amazon too much to give them any share of my money.
"Perhaps Apple did a clever thing deciding that the free forever emails weren’t after all. Before the problem grew."
I was mad when Apple dropped the free accounts. I had f__kmicrosoft@mac.com. I didn't use it much, but it made people laugh when I gave it to them and it was easy to remember. (I used all of the letters, btw)
tl;dr - MS employee grumbles about still having to support obsolete, nonstandard IE functionality that people were still using when it was MS that had abused their market position to lock users into those nonstandardisms in the first place.
Reminds me of a few years back when some MS engineer was whining about having to continue supporting lots of archaic nonstandard cruft in newer versions of Internet Explorer because people still had the temerity to be using systems that required it and hadn't been updated.
Yeah, that'd be the same nonstandard shite your company introduced to IE from the late 90s until the mid-2000s when it was abusing its dominant market position to kill off competition and didn't give a toss about web standards. Quite the opposite, it was quite happy to embrace, extend and extinguish when it suited *them* to lock everyone into IE and its non-standardisms.
And they got what they wanted, everyone used IE, plenty of stuff was written that required it- and assumed everyone used IE anyway- and this was entrenched for years until Firefox came along and finally broke its monopoly.
Most big websites had the resources- and motivation- to spend on redesigning their sites, but plenty of smaller systems didn't (*) and that's why IE required fallback and stupid compatibility hacks for older websites (**) for years on end after MS started- slowly- moving towards universally-accepted web standards.
So now MS were whining that people were still using the functionality *they'd* locked them into- and *wanted* to lock them into- requiring?!
Expecting sympathy for that was the height of hypocrisy.
(*) Even today as MS are trying to kill off IE, I'm *still* supporting a system from the mid-2000s that was written (not by myself) on the assumption it would be running under IE. Some bits have been rewritten so that it's usable under Chrome, Firefox et al, but not always as conveniently.
(**) Even Edge contains an IE compatibility fallback mode which- in conjunction with the existing IE fallback behavour- mostly works with the system I mentioned above. But there's still one issue with a printer that can't be fixed because that aspect of "IE" can't be configured within Edge.
GMail should morph to Tox : have individuals store their email data on their own devices. GMail addresses are already unique ID, after all. They could call it a privacy update : no more trawling through everyone's lives. Of course... they won't. :/
And Alexi should morph to Mycroft. Invest a bit (more) in the Open Source, and divest the responsibility.
The critique wasn't about whether to use Google, but about whether self-stored mail data was going to work for the general user. I run my own mailserver, and it's a server. It's online at all times to receive data, stores it there, and I have to pay for it. Running that off a desktop isn't feasible, and a lot of people don't have the expertise to do that. Whether you use Gmail or not, it's likely to keep using servers rather than self-hosted on clients.
In order to do it, you will need:
1. A desktop that you intend to run all the time, taking on that power cost.
2. A desktop that you don't expect ever to have problems that would interrupt your service, meaning that using it as your own desktop where you might damage something or even need to reboot isn't a great idea.
3. A network connection that stays on at all times, including when you're not there.
4. Your ISP to give you a dedicated address which you can host stuff on on your residential contract.
5. Some equipment such as a UPS to automatically recover from power failures.
6. A plan for what you'll do if your power or network goes down when you're not there.
7. The technical ability to run the mailserver software.
A lot of people are missing one or more of those. My ISP doesn't let me run whatever servers I want. I don't have a plan for dealing with a downed network connection if I'm traveling, but I'm also not willing to let my email become unavailable until I come back. I could manage the rest of it easily enough, but these problems cause me to use a server located somewhere other than my house. The general public is likely to lack even more of these items.
Personally I pay Mythic Beasts three quid a month for basic web hosting just to use for my email. Catch-all redirection means one mailbox but effectively infinite number of addresses, blacklisting specific addresses is easy, webmail is available and the performance just blows tsoHost out of the water. I spent a good part of last year moving people's accounts from tso to Mythic, and with the same mailbox running in different Firefox tabs for the different servers the difference in performance was "enlightening".
I would say that No 7 is a show-stopper to 99.99%. And it's not just the set up, which you could, technically speaking, copy blindly from the internets. But troubleshooting, you need to know... a bit more, across the board. People don't have patience for that. I mean, people don't have patience to go to browser settings and change permissions to download a zip because it's blocked and ohmygodwhatcanidonow (yes, chrome). Too much hassle, too complicated, CAN YOU SEND ME THE FILE SOME OTHER WAY?! That's the approach, and google and others provide a pretty feeding container, no need to go out there in search of food, among big bad wolves, where a gentle shephard guides you to instant bliss.
and the only difference between running a desktop 24x7 instead of running a server 24x7 is......
If you are running Linux then it is not a cost difference and the configuration will be no more complex so basically you are running a server just with a few missing functions
"and the only difference between running a desktop 24x7 instead of running a server 24x7 is......"
The difference is that "desktop" implies a machine you're using as your personal computer, doing other things, and server implies something you've set up for this task and possibly a few others, with the goal of a more stable system. The shape of box the hardware's in doesn't matter too much. In my summary of the tradeoffs, I specifically mentioned that a desktop is going to be inside your home network which is probably less reliable than you need and that you may be doing other things with it that impede the system's uptime.
IMAP is also a long-established protocol which allows you to keep email centrally...
Not if you are called Microsoft...
We're removing the ability to use Basic authentication in Exchange Online for Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), POP, IMAP, Remote PowerShell, Exchange Web Services (EWS), Offline Address Book (OAB), Autodiscover, Outlook for Windows, and Outlook for Mac.
We're also disabling SMTP AUTH in all tenants in which it's not being used.
Feel free to use only one, but don't expect others to do so. Being able to read my email on a phone when I'm out is useful. Being able to read it later on a laptop when it's more important is also useful. I'll continue to use multiple ones, but you aren't required to do that.
"I'd much rather go back to the days when I don't need 5 damn devices."
I don't and do just fine. I don't even "do" text. If somebody doesn't feel it's worthwhile to make a voice call, it's likely a waste of my time. If they need to send information to me, I ask them to use email and let me know I have mail if there is a time constraint. My biggest issue is that Text takes too much time and I can't be doing anything else. What would be a 5 minute voice call becomes a 30 minute back and forth. As soon as I plunge my hands back in the dishwater, they'll send me another text. I do have an assortment of computers in my office, but I count the whole of the office as one device. My tablet remote controls my DSLR and Drone, that's it other than my photo portfolio.
I've had Twitter, I've used Text, I've picked up the phone was past business hours. At a point where I saw I was getting less and less done, I figured out that being so connected was eating up all of my time. When I comment here, it a nice break and I can do it when I have some time. Nobody is demanding a response from me at 11pm when I'm rolling into bed. At least not in a way that I'm going to notice.
I'm kind of the opposite. I'd rather get a text that I can check at my leisure than a phone call that demands my attention RIGHT NOW no matter what else I'm occupied with. And yes, voice mail is a thing, but voice mail tag is way worse than texting.
POP doesn't force you to delete messages from the server after reading.
It's true that email readers commonly do that by default, but you can turn it off and access the same account from as many devices at you like. Whether your email provider offers enough storage is a different matter.
-A.
It does, but I had the misfortune to use that and won't again. I had a PDA in the mid-2000s, the kind that had WiFi (802.11B) but no cellular connectivity. It had a mail client that only supported POP. Therefore, my choices were as follows:
1. Download all the mail currently there to the PDA, with delete from server enabled, then handle it all there. Using a computer later was a pain.
2. Download all the mail to the PDA with delete from server disabled, and then have to deal with it all again on the computer when I used that. Nothing synced information about which messages I'd deleted, moved, responded to, etc. I used it, but as soon as an alternative became available, I stopped.
The problem with IMAP is different clients rarely seem to agree on things like how to sort mail, how to mark it as read, how to flag it, etc. These things are only sort of standardized, so they end up fighting each other. I always had trouble when I used multiple IMAP devices on the same account.
I suppose it depends what you are doing, but as I understand it, IMAP is not supposed to deal with things like sorting for display, and in my experience it deals just fine with read / not read. Each client has separate settings for sorting, which seems to me like a good idea because what works on a large desktop monitor isn't necessarily ideal for a small mobile phone screen.
I have used several clients across desktop, laptop and mobile, though these days I'm pretty much standardised on Kmail and k9mail. If a new email comes in I get a notification, pretty much simultaneously on both. Read the mail in one, it shows up as read in the other within a couple of seconds.
The only things I've had to be careful about is to set the clients to use the IMAP server to store sent mail (k9mail defaults to local storage of sent mail) and I also find it useful to store drafts centrally. Slightly unusually I have most of my clients set to "download and store locally" too, so that if I'm offline for any reason (around here, lack of signal is the primary reason) I still have access to previously-received messages. k9mail downloads the text part, but has to be told to download attachments, which saves data. Local storage for offline use is something that Google-using colleagues of my wife found astounding a few years ago when they were having a meeting at a local venue with neither WiFi nor mobile coverage. They needed to refer to a particular document, but none of them had brought a printed copy, and none of them could access it online. Except my wife, whose copy of Kmail had it cached and ready for reading. It's possible then to set clients to "delete locally if deleted centrally" if appropriate, which might take a while to update, but works.
The thing with Gmail is that for most people it is essentially glorified webmail. I grew up when one of the benefits of email was its frugality with data (I still mostly use "plain text" for email rather than HTML or - god forbid - RTF). I remember how clunky and slow the early webmail clients were, and have avoided them ever since. I also quite like having a local mail store, so that I am not using data every time I re-read an email. The one webmail client I do use is Outlook (for work), which is still clunky and slow. Most people these days have never known anything else, and as email is used relatively rarely (most day-to-day communication is by some sort of "instant" messaging) and data is relatively cheap, it's a non-issue for them.
M.
"The problem is, it's not the 90s and everyone doesn't just have one computer on their desk anymore."
Convenience is the opposite of security. In the US, once you have opened a piece of mail (physical or digital), it can be reviewed by law enforcement through a subpoena and the contents used against you. Do you still want all of your mail on a server whose operator will hand over the contents of you mail box if any TLA just says "please"?
IMAP is a better substitute and you want to make sure that you can delete mail from you server anytime you like with no remaining copies sitting anywhere. Yeah, I know, that's really hard to know for sure, but you can expect that companies such as Google are going to hang on to everything they handle "just in case you delete something on accident".
If you delete mail from the server you're back to relying on using one physical device to access everything. If you don't, IMAP is no more secure against searches than using a web interface.
If you run the kind of operation where you're a high-value target and really have to worry about keeping email secure against three-letter agencies, you probably shouldn't be using email for that stuff. Because they can always get it from the people who sent it to you, or raid your house and take your computer. Nothing is really secure against a determined three-letter agency.
A responsible thing that amazon should do (to reduce the deluge of e-waste) is to un-lock the devices for tinkers and makers, or make it so that you can connect it to an on-prem microserver running mycroft or Rhasspy for the voice interpretation and intent processing. (and give it hooks to home automation systems like home assistant or Hubitat)
Another way would be to open-source the server side of it (possibly as a docker container or set of containers), and release a firmware update (and method to update the echo devices offline) to grant the ability to change what back end it connects to.
However, My more cynical guess is that if amazon were to exit the voice interaction market, they'd probably pull a google and abandon it all and brick everything, because screw having nice looking products that talk to something on-prem without a bunch of hassle, or having to gut the device (generating more e-waste!) it and shoving something home-brew into the empty shell.
That would be nice, but let's be honest, it wouldn't do much for the e-waste problem. I'd be able to get several for next to free as everyone else abandoned them. Most users don't want to set up a self-hosted server for it, so many would be junked anyway. Also, if Amazon just gave out the keys and let people play around, even fewer people would actually do anything, as they'd have to work out the way to best make use of the hardware. Properly open sourcing the platform, including nicely documented drivers, examples, and backends, would take a lot more effort that it's clear Amazon won't bother with.
I like it when companies release source for stuff, but few of those projects ever result in a useful result. Reverse-engineering replacement firmware is hard, and there aren't enough skilled and inclined people for each one.
"Reverse-engineering replacement firmware is hard, and there aren't enough skilled and inclined people for each one."
A big part of that is none of it was written to be reused outside of the company. Nobody comes along later to write a straight-forward dev environment for those devices and the original company isn't going to release anything they developed internally. The walled-garden approach is ingrained. Nobody seems to be putting out an open source framework and selling the hardware for a profit. Simple bits of hardware are easy, but it's not cost effective for individuals to come up with the more capable devices and will opt to buy them and content themselves with tweaking the code. I've had lots of projects that get scrapped when I find out how much cheaper it will be to buy and modify the hardware.
Nobody seems to be putting out an open source framework and selling the hardware for a profit.
Well, there is Mycroft.ai, but the hardware is just shy of $500 and it still requires an internet connection in order to perform the voice processing on their servers.
Otherwise? total agreement. The amount of time I need to put into getting the intents built (or finding/installing a pre-canned library) for Rhasspy and the interconnection with Hubitat is what's putting me off on it. I'd rather figure out how to root/jailbreak/modify an existing Echo to make it do what I want.
When you say 'should', you're saying that pigs should fly. 'Responsibility does not exist in a business equasion, the only factor for any business is their profit, or rather, they maximum profit (and whatever strategy they employ to achieve this, short-term or long-term means), and there's no profit in unlocking the devices, quite the opposite, there's a risk of lower profit. 'Responsibility' only comes into play when / if a business deems it more profitable to be 'responsible', either in reality, or declaratively, than not to be responsible (obviously, with all legal nuances of what they're allowed to do, what they can get away with, etc.).
I don't know about Google's exit strategy for GMail, but I've largely succeeded with mine. In Tutanota, I've finally found an email service worth paying for. I admit it actually makes my life more difficult sometimes (let's face it, GMail is good), but despite being "free", in the convenience/cost/security triangle, it just wasn't working out for me.
That's why Google could tell it's not analyzing email. GMail is a sort of Trojan Horse. Users logs in, and keep that login active tor receive/send mail. In turn Google knows easily what account is accessing the web from that browser. Moreover, there are for more chances users will use the same account on their Android phone, making matching the two devices easier.
Surely, at that scale if will have a huge cost too - getting rid of ti would mean many users won't be always Google logged in any more.
"GMail is a sort of Trojan Horse"
Yup. This is why I always make sure I hard log out (I've got Google's cookies set to auto clear... not to menton the multiple layers of ad- and tracker blocking I have running) on the rare occasions I'm still required to use a Google account. Much as I'd love to support ny favourite YouTubers, I simply can't "subscribe and click the bell" (and my god do I get bored with people asking me to). Instead, I keep that cookie and rely on the algorithm to keep me updated (but even then I periodically clear it).
I don’t use webmail unless I absolutely have to. Back when I had a gmail account, I used MS Outlook and Apple Mail to handle the account. Google hated that. I attempted to put Gmail onto a new laptop using Outlook… and Google decided that they couldn’t be sure that I was me. Lots of gymnastics later, I killed everything Google on all devices in my control. I had had several Gmail accounts. All gone. Waze, gone. Etc.
I still hate webmail. I still rig Outlook and Mail to read webmail, though now it’s usually MS Office stuff. Microsoft doesn’t care, or at least doesn’t care enough to make trouble. I’ve had free Microsoft email accounts for decades. (Hotmail. Outlook.com. Etc.) MS hasn’t tried to stop me collecting mail using a real email client. Apple definitely doesn’t care; I’ve had several Apple email accounts since the 1990s, Apple started out charging for certain types of services and then made them free. I have _always_ used a real client for Apple email.
If Google kills Gmail, I will simply laugh. If Google is killed by the expenses created by Gmail, I will laugh harder.
Have you tried to cold install Win10 lately ? Same thing. Name address, phone number. Only thing missing from demands is Identity Card, which, no doubt, is coming. Not found any way to have only local account, unlike initial installs.
"What pisses me off about Google is they insist on getting your phone number."
A phone number is the modern day serial number for people. Since we have been able to keep our phone numbers when we switch providers or addresses, it's become a great way for companies to inventory people. If there is no reason for somebody to have your phone number, be sure to have one in memory to hand out. One I use is a test number that just rings. The other number is the direct dial extension to a person at the Internal Revenue Service. Sometimes using a fake number you just make up won't work, but one that does work someplace that most people would not want to ring up is always good as it's a valid number and the call will go through.
But that's exactly the reason why GMail has to be "web first". They can't hinder people accessing it through mail protocols, but they need to push as many as users possible to use it via the web client on any device they can't control. On Android and ChromeOS they may not care much since they already have the account logged, but on any other OS/browser they can't control they need the user logged in - so their tracking code can more easily match the users and web activities. Probably Google still collects more useful information than Amazon does with Alexa, unless Amazon listens to and processes what it shouldn't anyway. If some "rogue engineer" at Google still puts Google nose into email messages we don't know - today it could be more dangerous than in the past, they might just prefer to keep users logged in (unless Uncle Sam wants to know what's in...). Hiding costs into Google Cloud is a way to hide how much Google is ready to pay for users data.
Last time I checked about a month ago, the Thunderbird email client was working nicely with my Gmail address. In fact it's my way of making an offline backup. Gmail supports the app level authentication method for Thunderbird as there's no 2FA with it. You can also use Gmail as an SMTP email server with 3rd party products.
I have a Gmail account as a backup. It worked fine until Google decided everyone had to use Oauth2. fetchmail won't work with that yet, so I tried getmail. However I had to set up some magic stuff at Google to get that to work, and the auth would fail periodically and require resetting. I now forward the Gmail to my main mail but I'm not sure what would happen if my main mail goes away - the purpose of having the Gmail account to start with!
OAuth is a pain to use with smaller open source projects because they generally want you to get your own client ID when you build them, which requires an API account with Google. Larger projects will get a client ID and package it with their builds.
Let's be honest, the email bit is incidental... They're using Gmail for identity more than anything else; combined with various forms of tracking they've got a lot more useful info than whatever is in someone's inbox.
I disagree with the article... Amazon might not get increased revenue from Alexa, but then they're not as pervasive as Google - Tracking a high percentage of all web traffic and some 2 billion phone users... The datasets gained feed back into ads etc whereas Alexa doesn't feed into sales activity for Amazon. I see the scale/cost of running YouTube being far more of an Achilles heel than Gmail.
"They're using Gmail for identity more than anything else; combined with various forms of tracking they've got a lot more useful info than whatever is in someone's inbox."
I expect that for certain services such as mail, there are laws and regulations that must be adhered to or somebody like Google could be fined $10k or so if they get caught (again). If you sign up for an account used for other things, click the box that says you agree to the 37 pages of fine print, they can track you all over the place since you had just given them permission. Anybody that likes to read spy novels can come up with all sorts of ways what you do online can be used against you for a profit without working up a sweat.
Obv. don't know how G monetizes things, but there's clearly an advantage to having 1.8 billion people who know all the ins and outs of your mail application. If nothing else, it probably provides a pipeline of companies ready to pay the $72/user/year for the minimum product.
There are apparently about 7M companies using this stuff, and even if the average company is only 10 people, and they're all on the minimum priced plan, you're talking about $5B in revenue, and those are probably very conservative estimates. That's not trivial for a company with $64B in annual revenues. And its not clear they could compete at all with MSFT's MS 365 suite without that pipeline.
Google couldn’t kill Gmail, but Gmail could kill Google.
We techies all learn about single point of failure and the dilemma of "pick two: good, cheap, fast, you can't have all three".
I can only hope they die a horrible death and take half of the world's email down with it. Lets formulate it as a mail dilemma pick to: gratis, long-lived, functional, you can't have all three.
and yes, I still have my own mail server
"Lets formulate it as a mail dilemma pick to: gratis, long-lived, functional, you can't have all three."
The bad thing I see is the gratis part. People have been trained to believe that something for free has value. It's the same way that I'll see stuff being offered for free on Craigslist and it's obvious that the person is really looking for somebody to come by and haul everything away at no cost to the person posting the listing. Especially in cases where there is one or two things that may have some value but you have to take everything in the photos and most of it is landfill. Robert Heinlein tried to hammer home that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" in several of his stories, but decades after his passing, that wisdom is still not believed.
Another thing to look for is something where you can't pay. There is no option to pay for the service while opting out of whatever ad program or big data slurping there may be. Hmmmmmm, his seems much like how animals are live-trapped. They could find food that doesn't trigger a trap, but it's set up to be so tempting. When something is free, you are probably getting much less than you've paid for. Negative value.
"It's the same way that I'll see stuff being offered for free on Craigslist and it's obvious that the person is really looking for somebody to come by and haul everything away at no cost to the person posting the listing."
That's sort of the point. You can have this stuff that I don't want, and I don't need you to pay for it, but you need to come get it. You are incurring a cost in time to obtain a useful item. I've had people retrieve unwanted equipment to scrap it for parts, and it is most definitely their responsibility to deal with the bits they don't want. If they don't want the item, they won't go and get it. This is nice because I don't have to throw things away when someone will actually use them.
You could run your own server, but the proper off-ramp for regular users is to get a paid-for email service, from a company whose business model is to offer services and get paid for them. You don't need to be a techy to do that, and it's cheap.
Ideally, get your own domain too; that way, your address can, with some hassle and some help from a techy friend, survive the death of the company too. Looks cooler too.
However, as long as users think they can get one of the most important services in their life for free, from a private company, and rely on it to keep working forever, people will get burned.
EMail is no longer just a simple RFC822 plain text protocol. There are lots of other things going on nowadays.
Lots of people criticise me for used, shock horror, a paid for, email service when I could easily run my own email server. (Been there, done that) Life it too short to deal with all the haslle of running a server under constant attack by ner-do-wells. Paying someone a small fee to do it for me just makes so much sense.
I don't run my own email server (now), but I do have my own domain name. My email is @thatdomain and the MX entries point to the company that runs the email server. If the email provider goes under, I just have to get a new email provider*, and update the MX entries for @thatdomain.
I actually switched from hosting my own email server to using said email provider some time ago, and it worked flawlessly. Nobody noticed their emails to me were handled by a totally different entity. There were a couple hours downtime, most of which was me figuring out what I had to do, and that was it.
* A real email service provider, not one that just provides addresses @ their own domain.
"Best hope the email provider doesn't go under. Now if you run your own email server..."
That's handled by registering your domain through somebody else. If your hosting provider goes away without notice, you can be back up with somebody else the same day in most cases. I suppose it could happen that your registrar ceases to exist, but I've never had that happen and I'm pretty sure you'd still be up and running with time to sort out which company will be your new registrar. I keep an off-line file of my web site backups, passwords and configurations so I can sign up with a new provider right away. They aren't that hard to find. Back in the dialup days, mine was just down the street and I could do backups at their location. These days I expect most people don't have any idea where the computer is their stuff is hosted on. I haven't for years.
If you have a landline and DSL or the like access, your friendly telco normally gives you an email address and some goodies bundled with the monthly fee.
On my first DSL contract there was also bundled in the NNTP server access and an ftp area you could upload files and a web area with static html files.
I was using it with a desktop PC.
Gmail service is way more interesting for smartphone only users because the easy to use app. Telco email has to be used with a separate mail client and you have to setup arcane parameters for IMAP and POP3 and TLS.
That's why you really need your own domain as mentioned above. I get it that most people think they don't need their own domain since they don't want to mess about setting up a web site (and these days ISP provided web space is pretty much extinct) but the real value is in the email identity and setting up an email redirect to your current ISP provided email server is completely straightforward. With a bit of hand-holding even the most tech clueless could do it. I suspect there's a business opportunity there. Make it USD5/year and promote the crap out of it as email service and it could be a nice little earner. Personally, I've been paying two to three times that for decades and have never regretted it. (Having an infinite supply of email addresses comes in very handy.)
You can easily claim your own domain with accompanying email service. This has the added bonus that you can keep your email when you switch internet or even email providers.
I do this and also run my own email server for my domains (and also web for those same domains). This is somewhat more cumbersome, but allows me even more flexibility. I haven't managed to get Webmail working on it, though.
I did a stint at Pest Sty, in Peek Squid a few years back.....one very busy Boxing Day......,
Can you help with my email setup on my phone\laptop, its not working?
OK account name, ... & password...... Oh it won't accept it, You have to contact Shaw I cant assist you with password resets.
But why do we have to contact them? We just moved to Telus!
When you changed providers, they weren't going to keep providing you with a email address for free, so they closed your account & access!
But what about all our emails, pictures etc?
I'm sorry I can't help you you have to get in touch with them
That would probably work, as long as the ISP resists the temptation to make it a significantly larger bill or charge per month. I've never used an ISP-provided email (I don't think my current ISP even offers them), but I see enough of the things around that people must lose stuff when they let them expire.
" (I don't think my current ISP even offers them)"
Mine does but they don't have any instructions on how to configure your email client to access them. They also can't seem to send notices to any external email address no matter how you update your account or call customer service.
The cable company was supposed to send me a new terminal adaptor so I could take advantage of the higher speeds they offer (one size fits all). I clicked the boxes online and was disturbed to find they had no information conformation page regarding the "order" so I contacted CS on the phone so I could make sure they didn't send the package to my house, but use my mailing address instead. After 20 minutes with a brain dead little tart I was assured that it would go to my mailing address and she understood there are lots of porch pirates around where I live and I'm often away at short notice for work. When I logged in to pay my bill, I reviewed the email tab and saw that they sent the box to the wrong address, another message with cartoon on how to install the new TA and register it online, but no way to tell them it never arrived. The chat bot was not configured to understand any statement about not getting the shipment. Voice CS line, "your estimated wait time is 47 minutes due to an unusually heavy number of calls at this time". The former landline company (no more landlines in my town) is supposedly putting in fiber and I can't wait. Verizon is also rolling out 5G internet only service for much less.
"The difficulty with Telco provided email addresses is that you lose them when you change telephone or internet company."
Not always. Some will let you keep your email address for a small annual fee. A friend of mine just did that. The vast majority of his email goes to his own domain, but he had the cable internet address for friends and family. He's getting everybody transitioned and will delete the old email in May.
Gmail service is way more interesting for smartphone only users because the easy to use app. Telco email has to be used with a separate mail client and you have to setup arcane parameters for IMAP and POP3 and TLS.
That's very much by design. Thunderbird automatically figures it out based on the domain in the e-mail address.
The number of complaints about a service is also correlated with the number of customers. If you find a service with few or no complaints, it might also be so small that losing a few customers could take it down. If you can find one with a lot of praise and few or no complaints, there's a reasonable chance they made up the praise and also have few customers. There is no simple solution for figuring out how long something will stay up. You have to research them more thoroughly and have a plan for what you'll do if they tell you they're going away (and hope that they do tell you).
There are big companies that provide paid email services. They are the ones that do hosting, identity services, websites, e-commerce services and whatnot. There are a handful in my country (Italy), I'm sure there are at least a few everywhere. I agree that I wouldn't use a tiny company that only does email.
"I agree that I wouldn't use a tiny company that only does email."
If all you need is email, it's a much simpler product to deliver so a small provider can deliver good service. Email is much easier to support than web sites. I have several of my own domains but I also have paid services through Proton. There are occasions where I don't want to give out too much information to somebody as would happen using email tied to my domains and free services are something I avoid.
.. but they have made it so, so, so difficult to run your own mail server and get your email delivered to people using their services that having to pay billions to keep said services running is no less than they deserve.
Marketing people are highly focused on their part of an enterprise and tend to carry too much weight with decisionmakers so they constantly overestimate the power and importance of advertising and 'services'. They don't seem to understand that past a certain point individuals are saturated, they just don't want any more messages (and will tune them out anyway). We saw this with TV advertising where louder and louder (and more frequent) 30 second slots made TV unwatchable. Services are also an annoyance -- the constant hassle of logging in here and there, the drip of subscriptions, its all a nuisance, especially as with all the sophistication they claim to have they can't even cope with users that have more than one machine (or phone/tablet). Its a mess and it wastes huge amounts of resources but I suspect its the only thing keeping large parts of the Internet alive.
Voice assistants are useful, sufficiently so that they are worth paying for if that's what keeps them around. They have limitations, though, and one of those limitations is that nobody is interested in listening to a two minute exposition about some capability or another. Unlike a human the voice assistant can't read body language or hear subtle "I've got it" or "I'm not interested" clues in a user's inflexion. Amazon is still likely to be win out with their Echoes because they're an interface to a giant selling operation -- the Echo may not be a profit center in of itself but it is a gateway to a lot of specialized uses, many of which can be monetized -- just not overnight.
"the drip of subscriptions,"
The funniest one is when marketing uses phrases like "less than the price of a cup of coffee per day" to equate to cheap. But they mean the price of a Starbucks "coffee" at £2+ per day. Well, no. My coffee costs a lot less than that because i make my own coffee. I take a flask of hot water and some instant for on the road. That's a saving to me in the order of £300 per year for each of those "less than the price of a coffee per day" deals. £60 per year for each of "less than the price of a coffee per week" subscriptions too. The steady drip of "low cost" subscriptions very quickly add up to a significant amount of money per year.
More of a mokapot and supermarket ground coffee to start the day myself. Still much cheaper than the chain coffee shops. I always wonder about the badge folk I see on their way into the turnstiles each morning in the centre of the city clutching their £2.25 cups of coffee...
My gmail account acts as a contact address and spam trap for my modest vanity Web site. Friends and family have the real email address and mobile number.
Off topic, as a Brit, I am in need of enlightenment about the following cultural reference from the original article...
"...heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree"
Is there something special about retired people in New Jersey that I should know about?
Icon: retiree with a new jersey.
I think this explains the simile:
In the US "going south" is a metaphor for failing.
People from NJ (and states to the North of it) "go south" to Florida in their thousands for retirement to get away from cold winters, however that's a literal going south, not a metaphorical one.
You could also say that Florida itself is a state of madness and I suspect many would agree . . .
You touched most of the topics, but missed a subtlety... New Jersey specifically, because for a New Yorker the "only reason" to live in the Garden State would be for an easy commute to NYC. Once retired there is no upside left, so obviously time to get out ASAP.
https://brilliantmaps.com/new-yorkers-world/
Florida itself is a state of madness
I built a studio complex in Florida once. The contractors complained that Florida has the most complex building regulations in the USA; that Miami has the most complex regulations in Florida; and that Dade County has the most complex regulations in Miami. Guess where I was building?
And three years later the guy that owned the building we leased decided to knock it down...
But back on subject: might I recommend One.com as an IMAP and POP email provider on your own domain? By no means the world's cheapest, but I have had zero problems in the many years I've been a customer. In particular, they have local offices at several European cities - I think they're based in Holland but I could be mistaken - and purely by chance I discovered their London office is at the same address I was interviewed for my first job back in the late seventies.
"I think there are very few offices in Denmark without a filter coffee maker installed. It’s one of the benefits that are expected."
Caffeine delivery is the best way to get the most work out of people. Somebody like Elon wants people doing quad shots every hour, but he's also auctioning off the machines.
"Is there something special about retired people in New Jersey that I should know about?"
It could be the property tax is so high that if you are on a fixed income/pension you may have to sell your home or go broke much too quickly except selling a home with really high property tax bills is a tough thing to do.
Gmail is a very popular option with small businesses (like mine, in fact - I pay £50/year/user or so) and the only reason I use it is because I had a free gmail account and was familiar with it. They're not going to axe the free service while the infrastructure remains necessary for the paid service, and I'm certain the paid service is paying for itself.
"Gmail is a very popular option with small businesses "
Your business doesn't have its own domain and website? I have over one hundred email addresses included with my hosting package and can get more for much less than $50/user/year. I also don't have Google filtering who can send me emails and who can't. I do use a spam filtering product, but I configure it so I can whitelist people if I need to. I periodically review what gets kicked into the spam can just in case it's being too aggressive.
We have a number of Alexa devices in the house and we use them just as the study suggests: music, reminders and the occasional argument settler. The only Alexa service we pay for is the advanced white noise app that we use for sleep and it is worth its weight ($2.99 a month) in gold. I'm willing to bet Amazon will increase the cost of Prime for Alexa devices over and above the cost of regular Prime service to keep the accountants happy. When this happens we will bin the lot and go back to earplugs.
And that's why they won't.
Alexa and Google Assistant have to remain free-to-use, or nobody will use them. They can only make money from individual apps with subscriptions.
The thing that worries me is that hundreds of thousands are now reliant on these subscriptions for basics like heating controls.
When the person who took out that subscription dies, the rest of the household is utterly screwed.
A friend of mine recently went through this. It took over a year for them to figure out what was tied to what subscription, and over that period they lost the house Wi-Fi (was a subscription based management), heating (subscription based management), doorbell, security cameras...
Each one suddenly vanishing as the annual renewal came up and the dead didn't pay.
I'm embarrassed to admit it's a matter of pure convenience on our part. It is much easier to say "Alexa play white noise" than it is to muck around with Bluetooth and plugging in yet another device to save the battery. Trust me we have tried myriad ways and this is the easiest and best solution for the both of us. The app has a ton of settings to sculpt the sound to your liking as it's not easy to get two people to agree on what constitutes "white noise" as apposed to just "noise".
`it's not easy to get two people to agree on what constitutes "white noise"`
So the exact same sound from any custom sound system would cause an argument, but because Alexa plays it that makes it white noise. Since sleep is precious, I'm inclined to agree, $2.99 a month is a bargain.
"The only Alexa service we pay for is the advanced white noise app that we use for sleep and it is worth its weight ($2.99 a month) in gold."
Do you know you can get the same thing with a radio tuned to where there is no station? Cheap radios work best as you want one that doesn't automatically mute when it doesn't detect a signal.
I always go to sleep with an audiobook playing. A course on global economics is way better than Ambien.
I've tried the radio trick in hotels, and nearly always woken up to the ghostly sounds of a distant radio station. I think there are two problems here -- one is that there are no truly empty frequencies in much of the US and the other is that the AFT in most radio receivers will try very, very hard to lock on to a carrier signal, even if it means pulling off-frequency a bit.
Google couldn’t kill Gmail, but Gmail could kill Google you say ..............
heads out to the shops, buys a LOT of popcorn, awaits the day that Google bites one BIG time :o)
nothing against Google personally ............... who TF am I kidding LOL, they were supposedly using the surgeons mantra [ DO NO HARM ] but as they increased in both size and intrusiveness, it has become painfully obvious that they consider themselves far above the madding crowd, and well apart from 'consequences'
so yea, I will be sat here, with me pile of popcorn, awaiting the day the world finally gets to take that first step backwards in the tech world
yes, tech has allowed us to do many amazing things, but the cost has become that no one is invisible any more, and it is just a handful of Co's effectively running our lives, on OR offline
and I, for one was never happy with that scenario
... who is smarter than I am (not a high bar, but he seems pretty smart to me :-) )
and he said - almost immediately - "I can see a nationalization - by the time something that important is in trouble, nation states have to step in: as with bailing out the banks, or indeed the first British Rail nationalization (which may have to be repeated, because Railways just aren't profitable)"
Seems a possibility to me ...
I would not trust "government" with maintaining and securing my email any more than I do Google. I certainly would not expect the service to improve. They might save money by getting rid of those pesky warrants needed to access personal communications.
Financially Google/Apple/Microsoft are probably in a better position to take over government then the other way around. They just have to wait until all our government services have been moved to the cloud then ...
For those among us who own a house, we're entrusting the government to look after the ownership record. I'm thinking of leaving a few K of the mortgage outstanding as interest only, as the lender who is registered on the deed will have a lot more clout that I do if anything goes wrong with the Land Registry database.
"For those among us who own a house, we're entrusting the government to look after the ownership record. I'm thinking of leaving a few K of the mortgage outstanding as interest only, as the lender who is registered on the deed will have a lot more clout that I do if anything goes wrong with the Land Registry database."
It depends on what country you are in as to what might be the best tactic to use. You might want to pay off the home and shop around for the best deal on a loan/line of credit with the home as security instead of using a regular unsecured credit card. Just be very careful about setting limits on that account. If the title to a home is Mr Smith AND Mrs Smith rather than "OR", both parties have to sign off on a sale/transfer but that can add a bit more paperwork if one party passes away. It might even make sense to form a limited company that does nothing but own the house. That's not as unusual as it might seem. It's done all the time for exotic cars, boats and aircraft.
Bad idea. The interest off a few K won't be worth fighting over. They'll look at what's owed vs what's been paid, decide they made enough profit, then just let the government have their way with it. And, to add insult to injury, they'll either make you pay off the balance immediately or write it off and kill your credit. The only difference for your plan is you'll have paid them every month prior to the screwing vs just saving it.
You have to owe a large amount to get the bank to side with you over the government and even that assumes they won't just let the government take the property anyway, buy it back for pennies on the dollar at the tax lien auction and hang you for the difference anyway. The bank will take the more profitable option every time, even if it's a pence different, regardless of how it impacts you.
"Financially Google/Apple/Microsoft are probably in a better position..." .
Maybe I was unclear but that's what he's saying. Not that nationalization is good or even desirable... but that big corps losing $$$ running what they can (probably not unreasonably) claim to be essential services eventually find a way of socializing the losses and making the state pay.
As with the given examples of the bank bailouts and the first rail nationalization.
The problem with nationalising supposed "essential" services, especially in times like these when we're being taxed until the pips squeak, is that the people who don't use those "essential" services soon start to complain about subsidising those who do. The railways is an excellent case in point.
It doesn't take long for it to become an election vote-loser, at which point the government finds that it can't afford to keep running them if it wants to stay in office, but can't afford to close them either, just like the commercial situation. They're then either underfunded and left to wither, or privatised again where they become someone else's problem.
It becomes a vote loser in a country where people educationally unprepared to counter the propaganda they read have developed lower brain reflex "public spending = bad"
This is why we got PFI when the state should have *financed* new hospitals to pay private contractors and corporations to build them.
It becomes a vote loser in a country where people educationally unprepared to counter the propaganda they read have developed lower brain reflex "public spending = bad"
Public spending is neither inherently good nor bad, maybe one needs to be "educationally unprepared" for one to to make such an oversimplified generalisation.
Like private spending, public spending needs to be appropriate and justified, more so than private spending perhaps because it's the taxpayers' money that is being spent for them. Some areas, like education, are pretty easy to justify, but others are less so. Nationalising a failing company such as an email provider because it is presumed "essential" but cannot pay its way rarely has a happy ending.
You appear unaware that the UK railways are already nationalised.
The only reason any of the rail operators turned a "profit" was the massive subsidies they were paid by central government.
Since 2020 they are now entirely nationalised, except for the profits of course, as the Government now receives all ticket revenue for all tickets, and simply hands the rail operators a very large fee to operate them - and pay dividends.
It would be far, far cheaper to reintegrate British Rail, run as a single arms-length organisation. Much like it used to be before this failed Tory experiment commenced.
If nothing else, this would remove the ridiculously wasteful market of confusing and overlapping tickets, which wastes millions of pounds simply to bounce and reallocate ticket revenues around between the various operating companies.
Not to mention that drivers and other train staff could be allocated as required, rather than (eg) Avanti refusing to hire enough staff and requiring overtime simply to run their contracted timetable.
Nevermind the rolling stock debacle.
LNER is more or less the best run of the operating companies. And guess what - it's government-owned, as nobody wanted the franchise.
Not to mention that drivers and other train staff could be allocated as required,
Not with Mick Lynch and his merry band of arseholes around. You'd have to schedule them in teams of 6, scheduled a month in advance, and paid special rates for driving someone else's train.
Yes I was going to make the same comment about tax.
The other huge thing missed has already been noted above -- some essential service (essential to Alphabet that is) could easily be "losing money" in a profitable company and yet there is no way to turn it off. If you operate a retail store then the shelves "make money" and the lights "lose money", but you can't just turn off the lights to make that "loss" go away. It would be nice if you could silo the lighting into it's own operating division and then get some kind of tax credit for the losses.... Once the business is big enough I suppose the facilities department can get creative with the accounting.
There's more of a case for Alexa going away, unless it's tied to some profitable part of the business in a way that we can't see.
"It would be nice if you could silo the lighting into it's own operating division and then get some kind of tax credit for the losses...."
Companies do that sort of thing all of the time. A division or subsidiary in a high tax location makes very little or operates at a small loss and the parent company get located in some country that has very low taxes and will show the most profits. The subsidiary "buys" its inventory from the parent at a high comparative wholesale price so its Cost of Good Sold eats up what would otherwise be profits.
Any company that's looking at ROI on shelves vs lighting has accountants that need serious help. Of course you should always contain your costs, but there are better ways to look at it. An evenly and brightly lit store conveys a certain mood. It's also going to be perceived as cleaner and more colorful. Is that a loss or is that a component of marketing? I suggest it's the latter.
While Google might not be making a ton of money from ads from people using Gmail, those who use Gmail are also likely to use other Google services as well so they can use Gmail to monetize them elsewhere because they will be tracking them across all their services.
Plus even if they are loosing millions a year on running it, having billions of active users mean they could just come along and say they are limiting the functionality of the account in some way, unless you pay to upgrade which costs you money - like they did with Google Photos a couple of years ago after millions of people got used to unlimited photo storage.
Lots of people would pay a monthly sub rather than move because if you have been using Gmail for some time it would be a hassle to loose access to that email address and having to update all services and website with a new address is a pain in the arse. Something I know about myself after using the free email that came with my ISP in the past and then loosing access to it when i moved to a different ISP.
Email was never intended to be run by two mega corps. That's not how the protocol was designed, nor was it how the designers invisiaged it would work. By allowing it to be dominated in this way we've totally lost the inbuilt resilliance the protocol was designed with.
Lets be honest - faced with a choice of pay X pounds/dollars a year or lose your email, most users will pay up. They may gripe, they may moan but very few will be motivated enough to change and even fewer of those will be technically adept enough to do it. The only thing preventing Google doing that right now is the inevitable bad press but sooner or later the financial imperative will become too great to ignore.
Expect to see a decoupling of the 'Google account' used for sign-in to phones, apps etc. from the actual email service well ahead of this so as to limit potential regulatory issues as much as possible. Email will become an additional, paid for, service.
Me, I'll stick with my own mail server on my own domain like I have for the last 22 years.....
This. All of this.
Just like the PC was designed to free us from the terminal/mainframe tyranny, everything about the Internet was intended as the same. To free us.
Yet everyone rushed headlong back to terminal/mainframe. With a LOT of help from those who wanted to force the walled garden on everyone.
The hitch is that if you own your own domain name and run your own email server you need to jump through continually changing and multiplying hoops to have email from your server delivered to the inbox of folks with Google/Yahoo/whatever accounts as they add yet more bells and whistles to block spam that accidentally on purpose also make it harder to run your own email server. Gimp mask because the big boys are making you wear one when you run your own SMTP box. :(
I run my own IMAP server to handle incoming mail for my own domain name. Outgoing mail is sent through my ISP's SMTP server, but the 'from' address still uses my domain name (I just have to authenticate with my ISP username and password), and a copy is saved in the 'sent' folder on my IMAP server. Outgoing mail always gets delivered, no hoops to jump through. YMMV.
"Expect to see a decoupling of the 'Google account' used for sign-in to phones, apps etc. from the actual email service well ahead of this so as to limit potential regulatory issues as much as possible."
It basically is already. You can set up a Google account with a different email address. It's just that almost all Google accounts are Gmail addresses and that, if you go through the typical registration process, they ask you to choose your Gmail address instead of entering your own email. You can still get to that form if you want, and if it became a regulatory issue, they'd start saying that more loudly.
Whatever you do, you start with using your OWN domain name, because then you can move it anywhere you want to.
As long as the email address ends on gmail.com, me.com, yahoo.co.uk (etc etc) you are beholden to that company for communication. Having your own domain puts an end to that, provided you use a decent provider (so definitely, definitely not GoDaddy, ever). That's also why these providers will often charge you for adding an email domain to the mailbox: you're breaking their lock-in strategy.
Of course, you will need to look for interesting domains because fredtheconscierge@rediculouslylongandhardtotypedomainname.com won't really fit on a business card (nor will you ever get people to type that but that's what a QR code vcard is for) but with some effort you can assure your independence.
Reading your comment, feelin proud of myself. Did that six months ago. Tired of the spying & tracking. Really tired of the pain of migrating between email addresses. Sure, it costs me more than free-mail. But that is the price of being in control. And to be completely realistic....overall cost is less than one beer a month.
Nonsense. I have my own domain but of course I don't need it - Gmail will run for a very long time. Using a hosted account is SO much easier than running stuff yourself and Gmail is the best option. Most people would be fine with changing their email address 4 times a century or so anyway.
Gmail will run for a very long time
Yes, but mostly because it gives them access to all details of your life which translates into intelligence revenue. Have you ever actually ever read the Terms you agreed to and understood what they mean?
I have two slides when I educate C level execs about IT risks. One of them has certain details of their Terms highlighted, and after getting a full "no" from the room if they would ever want to deal with a company that so exposed their information and made it their own I then change to the next slide where the blanked out company name "Google" is filled in, with the words "you already have". It's interesting how pale people can get.
Somehow people only object to someone physically looking over their shoulder and following them around. Do it electronically and the less bright amongst us don't mind..
> Whatever you do, you start with using your OWN domain name, because then you can move it anywhere you want to
+1
It's also possible to have your own domain and point it (OK in a roundabout fashion) at Gmail so you can post and receive your domain email using Gmail services whether web or via a client such as thunderbird.
I may however bump the frequency I dump Google data down to local storage (which for Gmail it dumps in a handy mbox format) :)
I got hold of a three letter domain in a two character TLD country. As a result, some of my email addresses are only 9 characters long, and that includes the @ and the dot (so in the format aa@bbb.cc).
I could make it eight but that makes life too easy for iterative spammers, and it also means I run my own link shortener - comes in handy at times..
I have it on my phone's welcome screen. Saves a ton of time on conferences and meetings, and it's more likely people actually have my business details - cards get lost or cost too much effort to type in unless they too contain a QR code.
My job is in essence to make people's life easier - a QR code to help them store my details rather proves the point :).
Gmail is much less immediately at risk than Google Cloud. That’s the part that the few corporates and the many loss-making startups who Google has wooed or bullied into using should be worried about being switched off.
On the Alexa side, I have to assume that the simple functionality you described wouldn’t cost billions to maintain. I suspect the billions cover the more ambitious AI assistant project which is lightly used because most of us find it too creepy. The obvious money saving step for Amazon would be to put Alexa into maintenance mode for only those tasks which are reputationally important and then gauge how the unprofitability compares to the brand impact and make a call. If they aren’t doing that it presumably means they are still holding out hope that advancements in AI and easing of consumer concerns about it will lead to more profitable future use cases.
Android phones were another Trojan Horse to breach privacy. With regulations getting tighter, it's easy to imagine their value quickly drying up.
It looks like Google is trying desperately squeeze money out of Android by selling Cloud storage. They crippled microSd performance and usability to the point where apps needed to drop out of Play Store. You'll also notice that G-apps phones have declining storage capacity. Models for Google markets are usually 128 or 256 GB maximum with no microSd, regardless of price.
Luckily, there's a way out. Plenty of phones run fine without the G-apps and libraries. I wouldn't mind "Material You" being ripped from the codebase either.
In the past, big religion was relevant because of the information they had gleaned from “private” confessions, that could then be leveraged for political influence and financial benefit.
Nowadays it’s the free email services that take the place of the confessionals.
They know everything about everybody , and complain they can’t make it pay somehow!!
“Do no evil,” indeed.
Not all big religions have confession systems, and those that did didn't have organized systems for sending important confessions to someone who could handle them. Not that it wasn't ever used for blackmail purposes, but that's not what made religion powerful.
What made religion powerful was that people believed in the religious figures and trusted the clerics knew what those figures wanted. If the clerics say that the guy who can sentence you to an eternity of torture wants you to donate a lot of money, and you believe that the torture is a real option and that the cleric is speaking truthfully, you give a lot of money. Bring in social and legal pressure for people who don't believe one or both of those things and you have pretty good coverage. You don't need to leverage confessions for that, especially as people who don't believe in the power of the religion are unlikely to confess something they don't want someone to know.
I can't believe that Google would ever kill GMail. The fall-out and loss of reputation would be too great. Killing something that almost two billion users use on a daily basis and is an integral and critical part of their lives would lead to mayhem and uproar.
Alexa is OTOH already slated for shutdown. There are many alternatives, including some open-source voice assistants which don't send your conversation to Amazon Central, the main reason I never opted to buy one.
"Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized."
GM is said to lose money on the Bolt EV. So why do they sell them? Carbon credits in the CARB states. With those vouchers, they can sell more high margin trucks and full size SUVs. While they lose money on the Bolt, they make even more someplace else.
The amount of information that those spy devices can collect by listening to a home is huge. With time and in conjunction with data from other Big Data companies, the files on people can be very detailed. Highly targeted ads during a stressful time for somebody can be very lucrative. If a family member has been diagnosed with a terminal disease, ads for estate planning, funeral services, etc can start being cycled in right at the time when the family is the most vulnerable. Knowing that kids in household are a certain age can make back-to-school promotional ads more appropriate. If a teenager is about to take their driving test, ads from companies that specialize in auto insurance for them might start to appear. It's just like magic.... or is it?
X has earned Y nothing this year. It could have been monetised, but at what cost to Y's reputation? No. It's best it's just surgically removed as it is economically inactive.
Consider for values of X = "My arse" and Y ="Me"
Now consider for values X="Gmail" and Y= "Google"
Now discus the practicalities of each, and how not everything in the world makes money despite it being integral to the smooth running of everything it is connected to.
revenue from Google Cloud jumped to $6.895 billion from $4.99 billion, which would be quite a thing for a free email service.
Searching for Google cloud brings up
Google Cloud: Cloud Computing Services
Meet your business challenges head on with cloud computing services from Google, including data management, hybrid & multi-cloud, and AI & ML.
If they are losing money it is from the cloud computing business, the completion in that area is quite cut throat.
(1) Surfshark.....VPN located in Texas, USA....at least for today!
(2) Gmail account initiated for EamonnAndrews@gmail.com
(3) Burner phone -- SIM and minutes for cash from the convenience store
(4) Burner phone used in a public place (not domicile) to authenticate new gmail account
Ha! Monetise away, Google......good luck selling the records of someone who is in Texas and in Leicester Square.....at the same time!!!
There's so much data flying back and forth between your phone, burner or no, and Borg Central that a VPN doesn't really do anything for you. VPNs work for computer based application because there is (or rather, used to be) insufficient spyware to identify you and your location, People -- or rather their marketing departments -- insisted on trying to locate you by IP address even though literally everyone and their dog knows that its really easy to spoof.
Any time you use a point to point link, be it wired, virtual or wireless, you're nailed. The only reason why EamonnAndrews hasn't figured in the location stakes is that he/she isn't important enough to spend the resources on identifying.
They don't care that much about identifying you in the sense of having a folder of you with your name on it and photos of all your associates for James Bond to flip through. All they really care about is aggregating a set of preferences so they can target advertising at you. Even if you've separated your identity into two different files those files are going to converge unless you extensively segregate what you do with them; it's quite likely there's enough data to correlate them.
Also VPN companies are themselves in the business of data collection. And Texas has some of the weakest consumer protections of any state.
Maybe due to missing out on things, from my viewpoint it looks like google is not innovating.
Years ago I expected in 2020's plug into docks phones that could serve as chrome books, they even didn't try to come up with something.
Google failed to market chromebooks and its services as a low cost replacement for hard to secure and expensive windows farms.
AI, same story, the one able to rollout chatGPT as replacement for the "throw a bucket of URL's at you" search results from google will get rich soon.
I tried their cloud, not convincing, not inviting to hobbyists to try things.
Maybe the big-three, MS/AWS and Google, got a bit too cozy together, split up the market and decided not to compete too hard.
The rich price levels for the 2015 level hardware they all have on offer in their clouds seems to indicate this.
If Google get really worried about the cost of running Gmail (and I not convinced that they will) then they can reduce the free storage limit and charge a subscription fee for those who use it regularly enough to build a large inbox.
Those upset by that change would take their email elsewhere, leaving a smaller user base of people split between a large number who hardly use it (and so have a nominal cost to serve) and a power user group who are paying anyway.
I am a typical home automation user. I use Alexa devices in every room of our home, presently numbering over sixty devices, including motion and presence sensors, water leak detectors, break-in and burglary detection equipment, security cameras and numerous other devices, almost all of which were purchased from Amazon, and I continue to add new devices and update old ones, most of which are purchased from Amazon. This is a developing industry. I hardly think it is going way. Instead, the convenience results in our also making most of our ordinary household goods and supplies from Amazon.
To paraphrase what a great man once said, the imminent death of this industry has been greatly exaggerated.
...still one that could conceivably be leveraged without comeback... Google are (perhaps unintentionally) gradually allowing more Gmail spam through into the Gmail spam folder to increase non-paying One/Gmail users' gigab's of storage, causing increasing numbers of users to hit the 15Gb limit so they become more likely to subscribe to Google One at like $2 a month.
I wonder whether this is a mark of entering the late phase of the late 2000s-2010s model of "offer service to lots of users for free, figure out how to make money with it later" - the same thing that Facebook, Twitter, and friends did. Most of that generation are struggling to some degree with the fact that users now expect their services to be free and aside from advertising and exploiting our data they didn't necessarily find good ways to make money with it. I feel like Google are in a better boat than most- I pay for a little extra storage for Gmail and Drive whereas the idea of paying to use Facebook or Twitter is truly ridiculous to me.
search ads are quite expensive, but the monied players keep peeling off the Franklins th stay at the table as players. But is that enough?
Google offers a LOT of services; all are used to some degree, some rarely, some by a mongolian horde.
I pay for extra google cloud drive space, and gladly. Thats a cloud based money tree. There is free hoasting, and fee based for more serious web weaving players. This can be expandes into a universal cloud desktop, with an even leaner meaner thin client than the chromebook devices currently on market. That's another subscriotion fee money tree.
Social media tends to be processor heavy, yet monetizing it is awkward. Maybe these shoud be 'clubs' with an annual or monthly dues? 'Information wants to be free.' But only after we pay the price to have it somewhere, somehow. Alexa and google and the meta/facebook thing, and YaHOOIE show us that like some soecies of historic nature, some good looking ideas may become extinct- unless they evolve into a more survivable form. Ask a Mastodon anout that.
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