7 ms·

Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified

• andrey_utkin 10y ago
  We need to follow Richard Stallman in his obsession with ehtics. "Sorry mate, I find FB/Google/Skype/etc. unethical, so I won't get in touch with you using this, let's better stick with email, phone call or meeting in person".
  • discordianfish 10y ago
    Which is, maybe, the reason nobody knows or cares about Richard Stallman and his ideas beyond us tech folk.
    • michaelvoz 10y ago
      He is also a bit of a windbag. He likes to change words because the semantics don't suit his world view. Additionally, his rants are very alienating. The man is a genius in a lot of ways, but he really misses the mark on a lot of things.
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    • a3n 10y ago
      That is a dilemma, isn't it? I also don't think it's the most useful or practical way to accomplish a goal.
  • sliverstorm 10y ago
    Pots isn't open source...
    • jessaustin 10y ago
      Yeah I struggle to think of corporations more "unethical" than ATT and VZN.
      • duderific 10y ago
        How about Volkswagen?
      • sixothree 10y ago
        I've heard stories from multiple people older than me about ATT physically entering people's homes (typically when their husbands were at work) because they had "illegal" extensions.
    • hueving 10y ago
      It's an open protocol and there are open source implementations of the technology. I can use asterisk to set up a phone system and have numbers routed to me from a provider. It's the same as the Internet in that regard. It's like saying email isn't open source because it has to have a connection to the Internet to be useful.
  • Frondo 10y ago
    No, we just need to stop trying to solve social problems with technical solutions. Domain getting stolen by a registrar? That's a crime, treat it like theft, there ought to be some justice for that theft. Big business doing something awful/scandalous/inappropriate? Change the laws, and work to persuade people that it ought to be societally unacceptable to violate those laws. I see this a lot on tech-oriented forums, that you can "fix" social problems with the right kind of code, or you can get out of legal repercussions with the right set of legalese, and really, no, stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff. Treating business and law like a black box, or something to be worked around, as though there were sufficient cleverness to solve everything without engaging with larger society, well, no, that's not gonna get you anywhere.
    • FeepingCreature 10y ago
      This doesn't have to be an either/or.
    • andrey_utkin 10y ago
      > stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff. So you effectively agree that solid ethic opinions help fighting this. Then why you started your comment with "No, ..."? :)
• a3n 10y ago
  I have wished from the beginning that Twitter was a protocol, and not a business. (I wonder if Twitter investors wish that? :) Fastmail et al. show that you can run a business on a protocol, even if it won't necessarily make you a unicorn.
  • sulam 10y ago
    This was a subject of large debate roughly 6-7 years ago at Twitter, back when Ev was CEO. This was before advertising existed on Twitter (except for a banner ad in Japan). At the time there were many strands to the debate but the tldr rolled up into three ways of being -- closed Twitter, the one that looked like FB then and Twitter today, open Twitter, the one Twitter looked like then without all the API restrictions and developer community difficulties and probably still with ads, and finally -- for lack of a better term -- Internet Twitter, which would be a federated service much like Diaspora has ended up working. It was very hard to imagine how Twitter the company would make enough money to justify the investments it had taken by that point if Twitter the service looked more like Diaspora. You on,y have to look at Diaspora today to see that it's not obviously meeting the mission that Twitter serves today. One interesting aspect of this is you had people like Alex Payne voting with their code in the form of the API and later with his feet after the company was clearly going down the ad-supported route (and hiring a lot to support that model -- you need to build a large amount of revenue-oriented infrastructure in that world). The API then had to be pulled substantially back because it didn't fit the revenue model, something the developer community still hasn't forgiven Twitter for. It's amazing to me how much of what looks like corporate BS can be traced to individual personalities and their debates, or the echoes of their debates. [to be clear, all of what I've outlined can be gleaned from media reports, books and presentations about Twitter over the years. While I am an ex-employee, this history is available to anyone who either was paying attention back then or has a small amount of investigatory skillset.]
  • marssaxman 10y ago
    If Twitter were an open protocol, I'd probably have had some interest in using it, but as a closed proprietary business service, it seems completely uninteresting, and I've never signed up or really paid any attention. Why would I want to let some random company own my communications like that?
• Arnt 10y ago
  Hm, I've spoken to gmail's lead developer for imap many times over the years and never detected even a hint of hostility. What have I missed?
  • a3n 10y ago
    He doesn't run the business, just the pipes.
  • TeMPOraL 10y ago
    His/her superiors.
    • Arnt 10y ago
      Aren't you saying that despite the observable part of the moon being rock, the unobservable part is cheese?
      • TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I'm saying that while the technical lead may not be hostile towards IMAP, the "higher ranks" may decide it's not a business priority anymore and ask to get rid of it.
      • ordinary 10y ago
        Google management is neither unobservable nor unobserved.
        • Arnt 10y ago
          Judging by the actions of Google's people in IETF, any feature that's used by paying mail customers seems to have management support. Management seems to like income, as far as I can tell.
  • daveloyall 10y ago
    The effing rotating TLS keys. You missed that?
• daveloyall 10y ago
  This is a gestalt response, but leonroy, I hope you don't mind if I put it here. You are talking about what I want to talk about: solving a problem. ... Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email? Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!" Sounds like a utility to me. The law isn't always right. Times change, for example. I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account. If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change! The USAmerican Congress does have a history of designing rules to serve the common good and forcing tech giants to play by those rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934 One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society. Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process. Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives. This kind of thing is what Government is FOR. Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.
  • leonroy 10y ago
    > Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way. I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc. https://todoport.com/index.html https://todoport.com/index.html In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider. It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least! Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services. I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.
• mschuster91 10y ago
  > Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could. But they cannot, at least not for a foreseeable future. Both are used in enterprise environments, who would flee the first platform in droves which would disable IMAP/POP3. And even if they'd both disable IMAP, people would write adapters.
• wmil 10y ago
  Closed platforms come with a risk of censorship. Open platforms come with floods of spam and phishing attacks. Fundamentally life is about trade offs. For most people closed platforms are the better choice.
  • Qwertious 10y ago
    Luckily, everyone's happy to come to the compromise of doing nothing and letting the dominant paradigm figure out what should happen, because that's such a great solution. /s