[panic]

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

[singron]

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

[znpy]

Ah, this might seem like a joke but it's true.

I was part of a student association when I was an university student.

Part of the activities was to host gnu/Linux courses record them and upload them to YouTube.

One day, out of the blue, the channel goes dark and nobody knows why.

We all panicked. We had received no warnings and there was no way to appeal.

In the end, we asked some former students that were employed by Google to pull some levers internally, and we managed to get our channel restored.

[manigandham]

This is bordering on dystopian monolithic megacorp nightmare.

[xvector]

Ugh. We get the cyberpunk dystopia but we don't get the cool cyber-limbs and neural AR interfaces.

Worst of both worlds. Can I get a refund?

[ehnto]

All of the dystopia, none of the cyberpunk. Instead we get a business services dystopia. Spreadsheets are the last refuge of the BS Underground, fighting for their right to maintain their email inbox and browser extensions, while risking all revenue to MonoCop.

[prox]

And its one of the reasons people should stop using google products, or it will get worse.

I am 99% on DuckDuckGo and other search engines, Firefox (which is great), Lots of mail providers these days which excel on every front, lots devtools that don’t need any Google infrastructure,

I really hope one of these days we get a message from Google (btw Google is really the most faceless organization out there, I really need to think hard to give you any names) that they will change their tune, but until that time, its best to leave.

[stanislavb]

Yup, DuckDuckGo's been my default browser search engine for quite some time now. I'm quite happy with the results. I'm reaching out to google.com less and less every day.

The last straw will be abandoning Gmail :)

[danShumway]

I don't if this will help you make that decision, but Fastmail's alias system is a godsend for me when it comes to filtering incoming emails and protecting myself from spam.

With every account you get a finite number of aliases you can create, but in practice that number is high enough that I just use a new alias for every site I visit.

Unlike in Gmail, these aliases don't contain any references to your original address. So if you're signing up for a dogwalking service, you can create an alias for `[e-mail]`, and then if you start getting spam to that address, you know where it came from, you know that there's no chance your real address will be reverse-engineered from your alias, and you can auto-reject or sort everything to that address into a separate folder without affecting any of your other emails.

I have separate email aliases I distribute to friends and family members so that if I ever run into a doxing situation or for some reason need to go nuclear on my email, I can turn everything off except for them. I also have my email linked to my own domain of course, but when I sign up for most commercial services, I use @fastmail.com aliases. That way I know that there's no way for those services to track me across accounts/websites via my personal domain name.

And everything gets organized in the same inbox, same account. I consider it to be a killer feature.

[omnimus]

I don't want to spoil any joy of yours but this is in my experience pretty standard with most email providers.

With some you can do the + trick (which gmail probably still does) but i just have my domain as catchall and it works pretty great with blacklisting.

[danShumway]

The reason Fastmail's feature matters is specifically because it's not using the + trick or a catch-all domain. They're 'real' aliases, not just Regex filters or wildcards.

If you're using the + trick, you haven't gained any privacy, because I can strip the + and get your original address.

If you're using a catch-all domain, you haven't gained any privacy, because the domain remains a unique identifier for your all of your accounts. It's good for organizing, but not for privacy, because you're still publicly attaching your identity to every email you send.

With fastmail, I don't need to do [e-mail] or [e-mail]. I can just do [e-mail]. That's a really large privacy win, since it gets rid of one of the biggest and least regulated unique identifiers that services can share with each other.

I don't know if other providers like Outlook are also offering 'real' aliases. I'm happy if they are, I think this should be an industry standard feature. Either way, switching to any provider does will be a pretty significant feature upgrade over Gmail, even if you're currently using a paid Gmail account with your own domain.

[omnimus]

I see so the only difference is that they provide 600 aliases on their domain compared to lets say 25 of other providers. I wonder how they deal with poluted namespace.

So It so different from random domain catchall?

The reason why i would be worried about Fastmail is that they have are Australian company with servers in US. Both of those mean that Law enforcement can simply ask for users emails.

Now i am for sure not target of Law enforcement or goverment so i dont care but i am not sure why i wouldnt use service thats in better juristiction and is privacy focused.

[CodeWriter23]

And a fairly common trick used by those who want to mask how they got your email address is to strip everything between + and @ in the email address you gave them.

[retpirato]

I believe outlook & yahoo mail also have real aliases.

[adamcharnock]

I’ve been looking at Office 365 this weekend as an alternative to my (single person) GSuite account. I’m actually pretty impressed. It feels much more polished than than Google’s software (to me, anyway). Teams also looks like a good slack alternative, I’ve already got good use out of OneNote, and all the Mac desktop software launches very quickly (definitely not the MS Office I remember!).

I think I may actually migrate all my email over today. The idea of having a different interface to GMail is pretty exciting. I’ve been staring at that (increasingly slow) interface for too long.

20 years ago I certainly wouldn’t have imagined myself doing this, but it actually seems like decent software now. Sure I need to jump into bed with MS, but that doesn’t bother me nearly as much as Google.

[jamaicahest]

I agree, Google is not forcing anyone to use their browser, yet people are complaining that Google is evil and immediately after continue to use their products/services. I don't understand the human psychology behind this..

[Silhouette]

The tech giants seem to operate on a law of averages, where automating everything and having essentially zero support system for those using their services is worth it despite the (apparently quite frequent) failures that may break accounts and cost the giant some money as a result.

I've seen similar situations happen with Facebook, where entire businesses with what you might think were significant ad budgets were completely shut out of advertising on FB because its system for advertisers was broken yet again. I guess if you have a very small number of channels that are totally dominant, as Google and FB now are, you can afford to throw away a thousand here or even a million there if it saves you millions in support costs.

Whether organisations that have become so dominant should be legally allowed to do that, given the unfair adverse effect it can have on others operating in the ecosystems they create, is a different question. Just as we have laws about monopolies and limit what they can do in other contexts, maybe it's time for the handful of businesses that dominate online advertising or marketplaces to be regulated for the protection of everyone else.

[dragonwriter]

> Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government.

It's more like dealing with a blind automaton, and that's becoming more common outside of Google, too. Automation support scales well because the fixed costs are high but the marginal cost is low, human attention scales poorly, with a high marginal cost.

[adrianN]

To a first approximation authoritarian bureaucracies are blind automatons too.

[TeMPOraL]

To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units. A lot of "fat" in bureaucracy comes with dealing with the fact that the computing units are buggy, unreliable, and sometimes actively malicious.

[dragonwriter]

> To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units.

Having spent a fair amount of time working in various bureaucracies, and studying law and government administration, that's very much not true. It's very much the idealized view that many people outside of bureaucracies have of them, especially people in computing, but it's very much not a good approximation of most real bureaucracies, or their governing law and regulation, because the latter usually is written in a way which deliberately relies heavily on discretion within (often deliberately fuzzy) constraints rather than seeking to provide deterministic rules for outcomes, and in many systems regulation is actually written by the bureaucrats enforcing it (who also tend to have disproportionate influence on shaping the actual law).

[TeMPOraL]

You'll see down in the subthread that I essentially agree with what you wrote here. However, I still maintain the analogy to a distributed computing system is good and revealing. It's particularly the observation of the flow of forms and documents in and out of bureaucracy, as well as within it, that makes me think of it.

As explained below, I don't agree that it's a good idea to replace bureaucracy with code. However, I think the lessons our industry has learned in architecting software systems could inform designing efficient data and request flow within a bureaucracy. At the very least, it gives us language to talk about bureaucracies as systems.

[dragonwriter]

> However, I think the lessons our industry has learned in architecting software systems could inform designing efficient data and request flow within a bureaucracy.

This I definitely agree with; it's kind of disappointing the information systems engineering knowledge has tended to become siloed within organizations dedicated to information technology, because you get much bigger gains if you apply that knowledge to broader processes, not just within computing systems supporting the processes. OTOH, with people who have that knowledge generally getting paid more to apply it in IT (and getting listened to more there), it's kind of understandable if unfortunate that the knowledge gets stuck in IT.

[klingonopera]

And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

I'm serious.

Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

[TeMPOraL]

That would be a very wrong move. I'm serious.

This unreliability that comes from agency of the individual compute nodes has some very important benefits: the system is much more resistant to bugs in code[0], and much more humane. Software, as it is today, doesn't understand morality. That's e.g. you wouldn't want to automate away judges in the justice system - the law is code, but it's buggy, and isn't complete enough to handle all cases in all contexts. You need case-by-case judgements, and that's why it's good to have human bureaucrats who can independently think and override the system as needed. Otherwise, the system would just grind people that fell into it.

--

[0] - Like, "you have to deliver document X before 14th to get something done, but the document is only available from 23rd". Happened to me during university, where some scolarship depended on a government document that you could procure only well after deadline. Of course, the secretary at the university knew this and let you fill in incomplete application; she'd wait for the whole allowed processing time, then send you a letter asking you to bring in missing documents and giving you 14 extra days. Given that this was a bug at an intersection of two bureaucratic systems, if this was software, it would likely go undetected for a while, until someone started to wonder why nobody is applying for scolarships anymore.

[klingonopera]

I'm just going to hook up on your example of the document and the deadline, and state the following: You're assuming a (very) pessimistic scenario (that you likely justify with your experience of IT systems and their bugs, but Apollo 11 had IT too, and got it done, and everyone back).

Allow the benefit of doubt that a "software-based" system would only be implemented, if it were superior in such a way, that such a situation doesn't even occur in the first place. That is the benefit. It alleviates the necessity for the "human-wiggling-around-laws-that-actually-make-it-illegal-what-you're-doing,-but-those-laws-are-stupid,-so-whatever,-we-don't-care-about-that-specific-law".

It's most likely a very unknown concept for anyone presently, since it doesn't yet exist, but I believe, if human civilization works more on the aspect of creating a universal law that is language-agnostic, we would have a better solution than the ones we currently have.

Also, tax filings and the like are basically automated. It's just about expanding such automated concepts for more efficiency as well as removing the language-bias laws exhibit. I'm fully aware of the shortcomings of automation, and also do believe that a human "arbitrator", or judge, is required and preferred.

But in essence, my goal in stating my opinion was to plant the idea of language-agnostic law, for which maths, code and logic can form a solution. It's philosophical pondering towards a global government policy in a very long-run.

[dragonwriter]

> And so the next step would be to actually throw out the written word and replace it with actual code.

That is, indeed, that natural conclusion of the deeply flawed premise that law and regulation are basically computer code written by programmers who have to contend with buggy, sometimes malicious, computing units.

But other than the fact that the word “code” is often used in reference to each, law/regulation and computer code are not the same kind of thing.

> Why let "government code" be subject to all the shortcomings and pitfalls of natural language when you could just use cold hard logic and exact math instead?

The fuzziness in law and regulation is very rarely anything close to minimum required because you are dealing with natural language, and very often deliberate to create room for flexible application. And there is a strong overlap between the places that that is least true and widely perceived gross injustices in the law.

> Natural language is just programming for humans, anyways.

No, it's not.

[nana-]

So true. It's maybe not intended, but no fat shaming please.

[dragonwriter]

I don't think that's really true. Authoritarian regimes are, if anything, more prone to personal foibles of individual decision-makers than others.

[foobarbazetc]

Having friends (software engineers, SREs, etc) at Google used to be the way to get a human to look at something but these days it gets you nothing.

You’re better off with a highly rated news.yc post.

[alasdair_]

It depends how highly placed they are (and how much money you spend/ make them).

[artsyca]

This is a manifestation of O'Sullivan's law as applies to corporate culture and it's a spot on assessment

[abbadadda]

Zomg good thing this is visible.

[ezoe]

s/these days/always/

Here, fixed it for you.