7 ms·

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don'

by sdan 7y ago

Google's making us play by their rules: 1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. 2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. 3. Don't use Google Webmaster or use AMPs? Good luck finding your page on the 1st page. 4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming.

pluma 7y ago
Ironically most spam I've been getting recently is from Gmail addresses.
xxs 7y ago
>2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. I get recapthca ALL the time for just not being logged on and deleting all filthy cookies on exit; and not "honoring" 3rd party cookies at all... and I don't care. Best part is that if you live in a country you don't speak the language you get google services in one of the country official languages -- so what you should do and mark is often unclear. The next best part is a road trip through Europe (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services) >4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. History is a far greater offender. >1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. Years ago, I recall my company hosted gmail started detecting CEO mails as spam... and he was pissed for not getting responses.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  I was getting really long and annoying recaptcha all the time, presumably because I use Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. But lately (past 2-3 months?) I only get a single challenge, I wonder if they've found a way around the protection or if they've just changed the model
  - xxs 7y ago
    >Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. Default Safari option for 3rd party cookies is: "from visited". Check if you have cookies set, if you do - they know you have been a good boy.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      It's not that simple with Intelligent Tracking Prevention.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    FWIW I've observed the same change in Firefox on Linux (with privacy.resistfingerprinting enabled) in the last few months.
  - gm 7y ago
    OMG, me too, and all I did was to tighten up cookies (disable 3rd party trackers, erase all cookies on close, etc). Now I've got a PhD on solving "traffic light" and "crosswalk" Captchas as a result. I started to resent Google for this, except now I think twice before going to a web site that will give me these hurdles, so it ended up helping me to focus on my work. Now I appreciate the extra work.
- loup-vaillant 7y ago
  > (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services) Seriously, you shouldn't have to. Your browser sends language preferences, doesn't it? Nope, IP trumps user preferences. Had the same problem when using my job's VPN with an exit point in Germany (working from France). Very annoying.
  - xxs 7y ago
    >Your browser sends language preferences, doesn't it? Since http1.0[0]... I have wanted to add another header -> "RespectAlHeaders:All-Custom-CrRafted", so the wimpy implementation of ip->country->language is duly removed. [0]: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt
  - seventhtiger 7y ago
    Google also forces certain countries to use Hijri calendar with no option to switch to Gregorian. Even if your language is English and your calendar is Gregorian, it will still display news dated in Hijri. No setting or option to change.
    - xxs 7y ago
      Ok, that's cruel
tipsysquid 7y ago
For those of us that can, we must vote with our dollars. To divorce ourselves from Google is expensive and painful, but to ignore it is catastrophe
- clairity 7y ago
  but it's not expensive. there are other free email services, or you can pay for decent email hosting for a few bucks a month.
  - thih9 7y ago
    Could you post examples? In my opinion free email services either belong to other big corporations or provide lower quality service than gmail. Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many. I don’t like google and I pay for a different email account. I just wanted to remind that gmail may be hard to quit and that costs are subjective.
    - skrause 7y ago
      I use https://mailbox.org/en/ https://mailbox.org/en/, it's from a small German company and I can use my own domain with the smallest plan for just 1 € per month. Their spam filter also seems pretty good.
      - tpetry 7y ago
        Until the day you get german spam mails because all spam filter are trained for english mails. Had to add a few keywords to tune the spam filter.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      If you're not paranoid about Russia, you might consider Yandex Connect. It supports custom domains and has free tier with ads in the web interface.
    - tkel 7y ago
      https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-comparison/ https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-comparison/
LeoPanthera 7y ago
"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again. That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge providers.
- divbyzer0 7y ago
  I have mostly moved to self hosting email. I still have a lot of legacy registrations with various companies that go to gmail, otherwise everything else is self host on a hetzner vps (2.50 eur per month) which doubles as a wireguard vpn. First time setting up an email server was quite a chore as I have no background in email, getting all of the moving parts to play nice required some patience. My second email server used Mail-in-a-box scripts which I highly recommend. Zero to functioning email server in a few minutes. The slowest part is DNS propagation. Anyone comfortable setting up a domain name and the basic DNS settings that are invloved will have no problem self hosting email. The setup includes web-based client. I use k-9 mail client on my phone. I find the catch-all email feature very helpful in creating ad-hoc addresses for spammy companies (eg car insurance). I can sign-up with spammy.companyname@mydomain.com and it will direct to spammy@mydomain.com. I'm not completely de-googled, but I am consciously and gradually reducing my exposure to google, and other large networks. At the very least it is worth a try. https://mailinabox.email https://mailinabox.email edit:spelling, added url.
- brongondwana 7y ago
  We're still a fair way away from that! We're growing steadily, but not at the same rate that "give it away free and work out how to monetize it later" services do. Worth it for having a sound business model and no venture capital breathing down our necks to turn evil though.
  - austhrow743 7y ago
    Thank you for not being evil. Please allow me to export notes to txt.
loose_pants 7y ago
> we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It’s so demoralizing. Get off your high horse.
- moksly 7y ago
  It’s been a while since google made anything awesome hasn’t it? Maps is still great, but things like AMPs are so terrible that they were a bigger part in driving me to DDG than privacy. Maybe I’m weird, but I’ve never been in an AMP where I wouldn’t rather go to the actual side and use reader mode.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It’s so demoralizing. Get off your high horse. I don't use gmail these days (except as a honeypot out of laziness), but I get plenty of email from google hosted domains. The issue isn't (just) that people want to use these services and want Google to have more reasonable policies, there is also the issue of having to tolerate Google's policies because other people use their services. Emails from Google servers are notable to me because there is no way to report spam (and the signal to noise ratio from Google is pretty low for my case). Google's opaque approach to email means that deliverability issues become even more tedious to deal with than they should be.
- CaptainZapp 7y ago
  What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It seems you're not getting the point. The problem is not for users of those "awesome" Google services the problem manifests itself for people sending legitimate emails from legitimate email accounts to a Google account. Google tags those as spam and refuses to deliver them, while always shifting the goal posts and providing sub par support (an number of essentially useless links) to the sender of the email to a Google account. This happens, btw, also when the sender account never spammed and sent legitimate mails to the Gmail user for years. So your snarky comment is completely out of line here. It's not about people mooching free "awesome" Google services for free it's that Google is a rotten net citizen and is behaving like shit to the entire world.
hotgeart 7y ago
> Before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives That's already the case.
9dl 7y ago
Isn't duck duck just redesigned yandex (aka kgb) search? At start it has mark that search results based on results from yandex engine and crawled results
- tkifnn 7y ago
  Ddg is a wrapper around Bing. They may incorporate other results as well.
  - 9dl 7y ago
    For free ofc
perennate 7y ago
Have you actually had a lot of problems sending e-mail to Gmail users from your mail server? For me Gmail has not been great about accepting e-mail and not marking it spam (occasionally have issues), but others like icloud.com have been worse.
dingdingdanggg 7y ago
> Google's making us play by their rules Yeah well, they offer a free service and you use it. They own their network and they can decide what they allow.
jiveturkey 7y ago
> but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude I think that's exactly opposite. We need more competition, not forcing a private company to behave in some way that "we" (and who is "we"?) find acceptable. It's time to break them up.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Why is it necessary to break them up when the alternatives are right there? Google can exist, and people can choose to use Bing, DDG, Fastmail, etc., right?
  - jiveturkey 7y ago
    That's a very fair point. The problem is that Google is not just Google the search engine, or Google the email provider, or Google the video service, or Google the website analytics engine, or Google the online office suite, or Google the ads syndicate. Because Google is all of those things, it has accumulated too much market power, to the extent that they are market distorting. Bing and DDG (which is not an independent engine, but collates results) are irrelevant to a company's Internet presence. There is no such thing as SEO for Bing. Whereas Google can make-or-break you. When Google the ad syndicate and Google the search engine collude (as it were) to place your competitor's ads ahead of your organic search result, a top result even, and to distinguish such ad results as ads only technically, by the narrowest of definitions, this compels you to advertise with Google the ad syndicate. Just as an example. This behavior is harmful to the market (not to mention to users, but that's a different subject) and it is a given that Google the monopoly^Wsingle entity will continue to make such moves, whack-a-mole style so it's futile to squash any individual behavior even if you could. Ergo the reasonable solution is to break them up.
jammygit 7y ago
Could you sue Google for slander in a case like this? They are explicitly labeling your messages as being manipulative or dishonest without any just cause. Why does it matter it’s an algorithm instead of a careless person in power?
gnicholas 7y ago
FWIW, I tried creating a Hacker News account via Tor. I was hit with an unending stream of CAPTCHAs. Eventually gave up. I was surprised/disappointed to see this happen on HN.
- sdan 7y ago
  Possibly because HN was under attack a few weeks ago. More about that here: https://sdan.xyz/hnhack https://sdan.xyz/hnhack
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    This was months or years ago.
winkeltripel 7y ago
> before they become a huge conglomerate too late?
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming. This ship sailed years ago, though.
anonygler 7y ago
I mean, I get captcha's all the time while working from Google's network. You're exhausting from a shared quota. That's life on the modern internet. Bitch about Google all you want, it's not like they decided this is how the internet should work. Prior to Google, my company integrated with reCaptcha because no other choice existed to reduce automated abuse.

by sdan 7y ago

pluma 7y ago

Ironically most spam I've been getting recently is from Gmail addresses.

xxs 7y ago

>2. You're using Tor or a VPN? Here's 10 reCaptcha's. I get recapthca ALL the time for just not being logged on and deleting all filthy cookies on exit; and not "honoring" 3rd party cookies at all... and I don't care. Best part is that if you live in a country you don't speak the language you get google services in one of the country official languages -- so what you should do and mark is often unclear. The next best part is a road trip through Europe (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services) >4. Youtube video includes education hacking tutorials? Demonetized. History is a far greater offender. >1. Our ML models see that your emails spam? You're spam. Years ago, I recall my company hosted gmail started detecting CEO mails as spam... and he was pissed for not getting responses.

kalleboo 7y ago
I was getting really long and annoying recaptcha all the time, presumably because I use Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. But lately (past 2-3 months?) I only get a single challenge, I wonder if they've found a way around the protection or if they've just changed the model
- xxs 7y ago
  >Safari which has all that anti-tracking stuff. Default Safari option for 3rd party cookies is: "from visited". Check if you have cookies set, if you do - they know you have been a good boy.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It's not that simple with Intelligent Tracking Prevention.
- majewsky 7y ago
  FWIW I've observed the same change in Firefox on Linux (with privacy.resistfingerprinting enabled) in the last few months.
- gm 7y ago
  OMG, me too, and all I did was to tighten up cookies (disable 3rd party trackers, erase all cookies on close, etc). Now I've got a PhD on solving "traffic light" and "crosswalk" Captchas as a result. I started to resent Google for this, except now I think twice before going to a web site that will give me these hurdles, so it ended up helping me to focus on my work. Now I appreciate the extra work.
loup-vaillant 7y ago
> (edit adding "?hl=en" to the url tends to fix the issue in most of google services) Seriously, you shouldn't have to. Your browser sends language preferences, doesn't it? Nope, IP trumps user preferences. Had the same problem when using my job's VPN with an exit point in Germany (working from France). Very annoying.
- xxs 7y ago
  >Your browser sends language preferences, doesn't it? Since http1.0[0]... I have wanted to add another header -> "RespectAlHeaders:All-Custom-CrRafted", so the wimpy implementation of ip->country->language is duly removed. [0]: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1945.txt
- seventhtiger 7y ago
  Google also forces certain countries to use Hijri calendar with no option to switch to Gregorian. Even if your language is English and your calendar is Gregorian, it will still display news dated in Hijri. No setting or option to change.
  - xxs 7y ago
    Ok, that's cruel

tipsysquid 7y ago

For those of us that can, we must vote with our dollars. To divorce ourselves from Google is expensive and painful, but to ignore it is catastrophe

clairity 7y ago
but it's not expensive. there are other free email services, or you can pay for decent email hosting for a few bucks a month.
- thih9 7y ago
  Could you post examples? In my opinion free email services either belong to other big corporations or provide lower quality service than gmail. Few bucks a month add up and can be considered expensive by many. I don’t like google and I pay for a different email account. I just wanted to remind that gmail may be hard to quit and that costs are subjective.
  - skrause 7y ago
    I use https://mailbox.org/en/ https://mailbox.org/en/, it's from a small German company and I can use my own domain with the smallest plan for just 1 € per month. Their spam filter also seems pretty good.
    - tpetry 7y ago
      Until the day you get german spam mails because all spam filter are trained for english mails. Had to add a few keywords to tune the spam filter.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    If you're not paranoid about Russia, you might consider Yandex Connect. It supports custom domains and has free tier with ads in the web interface.
  - tkel 7y ago
    https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-comparison/ https://thatoneprivacysite.net/email-comparison/

LeoPanthera 7y ago

"Moving to Fastmail" is such a popular alternative that if they ever get to any kind of reasonable size we'll be in the same position all over again. That should not be the suggestion. Many smaller providers encourages the competition necessary for an open network, not a small number of huge providers.

divbyzer0 7y ago
I have mostly moved to self hosting email. I still have a lot of legacy registrations with various companies that go to gmail, otherwise everything else is self host on a hetzner vps (2.50 eur per month) which doubles as a wireguard vpn. First time setting up an email server was quite a chore as I have no background in email, getting all of the moving parts to play nice required some patience. My second email server used Mail-in-a-box scripts which I highly recommend. Zero to functioning email server in a few minutes. The slowest part is DNS propagation. Anyone comfortable setting up a domain name and the basic DNS settings that are invloved will have no problem self hosting email. The setup includes web-based client. I use k-9 mail client on my phone. I find the catch-all email feature very helpful in creating ad-hoc addresses for spammy companies (eg car insurance). I can sign-up with spammy.companyname@mydomain.com and it will direct to spammy@mydomain.com. I'm not completely de-googled, but I am consciously and gradually reducing my exposure to google, and other large networks. At the very least it is worth a try. https://mailinabox.email https://mailinabox.email edit:spelling, added url.
brongondwana 7y ago
We're still a fair way away from that! We're growing steadily, but not at the same rate that "give it away free and work out how to monetize it later" services do. Worth it for having a sound business model and no venture capital breathing down our necks to turn evil though.
- austhrow743 7y ago
  Thank you for not being evil. Please allow me to export notes to txt.

loose_pants 7y ago

> we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It’s so demoralizing. Get off your high horse.

moksly 7y ago
It’s been a while since google made anything awesome hasn’t it? Maps is still great, but things like AMPs are so terrible that they were a bigger part in driving me to DDG than privacy. Maybe I’m weird, but I’ve never been in an AMP where I wouldn’t rather go to the actual side and use reader mode.
inferiorhuman 7y ago
What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It’s so demoralizing. Get off your high horse. I don't use gmail these days (except as a honeypot out of laziness), but I get plenty of email from google hosted domains. The issue isn't (just) that people want to use these services and want Google to have more reasonable policies, there is also the issue of having to tolerate Google's policies because other people use their services. Emails from Google servers are notable to me because there is no way to report spam (and the signal to noise ratio from Google is pretty low for my case). Google's opaque approach to email means that deliverability issues become even more tedious to deal with than they should be.
CaptainZapp 7y ago
What about stop being so entitled? Google is offering free awesome services for very little and you’re saying these things. It seems you're not getting the point. The problem is not for users of those "awesome" Google services the problem manifests itself for people sending legitimate emails from legitimate email accounts to a Google account. Google tags those as spam and refuses to deliver them, while always shifting the goal posts and providing sub par support (an number of essentially useless links) to the sender of the email to a Google account. This happens, btw, also when the sender account never spammed and sent legitimate mails to the Gmail user for years. So your snarky comment is completely out of line here. It's not about people mooching free "awesome" Google services for free it's that Google is a rotten net citizen and is behaving like shit to the entire world.

hotgeart 7y ago

> Before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives That's already the case.

9dl 7y ago

Isn't duck duck just redesigned yandex (aka kgb) search? At start it has mark that search results based on results from yandex engine and crawled results

tkifnn 7y ago
Ddg is a wrapper around Bing. They may incorporate other results as well.
- 9dl 7y ago
  For free ofc

perennate 7y ago

Have you actually had a lot of problems sending e-mail to Gmail users from your mail server? For me Gmail has not been great about accepting e-mail and not marking it spam (occasionally have issues), but others like icloud.com have been worse.

dingdingdanggg 7y ago

> Google's making us play by their rules Yeah well, they offer a free service and you use it. They own their network and they can decide what they allow.

jiveturkey 7y ago

> but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude I think that's exactly opposite. We need more competition, not forcing a private company to behave in some way that "we" (and who is "we"?) find acceptable. It's time to break them up.

shadowgovt 7y ago
Why is it necessary to break them up when the alternatives are right there? Google can exist, and people can choose to use Bing, DDG, Fastmail, etc., right?
- jiveturkey 7y ago
  That's a very fair point. The problem is that Google is not just Google the search engine, or Google the email provider, or Google the video service, or Google the website analytics engine, or Google the online office suite, or Google the ads syndicate. Because Google is all of those things, it has accumulated too much market power, to the extent that they are market distorting. Bing and DDG (which is not an independent engine, but collates results) are irrelevant to a company's Internet presence. There is no such thing as SEO for Bing. Whereas Google can make-or-break you. When Google the ad syndicate and Google the search engine collude (as it were) to place your competitor's ads ahead of your organic search result, a top result even, and to distinguish such ad results as ads only technically, by the narrowest of definitions, this compels you to advertise with Google the ad syndicate. Just as an example. This behavior is harmful to the market (not to mention to users, but that's a different subject) and it is a given that Google the monopoly^Wsingle entity will continue to make such moves, whack-a-mole style so it's futile to squash any individual behavior even if you could. Ergo the reasonable solution is to break them up.

jammygit 7y ago

Could you sue Google for slander in a case like this? They are explicitly labeling your messages as being manipulative or dishonest without any just cause. Why does it matter it’s an algorithm instead of a careless person in power?

gnicholas 7y ago

FWIW, I tried creating a Hacker News account via Tor. I was hit with an unending stream of CAPTCHAs. Eventually gave up. I was surprised/disappointed to see this happen on HN.

sdan 7y ago
Possibly because HN was under attack a few weeks ago. More about that here: https://sdan.xyz/hnhack https://sdan.xyz/hnhack
- gnicholas 7y ago
  This was months or years ago.

winkeltripel 7y ago

> before they become a huge conglomerate too late?

oarabbus_ 7y ago

>Obviously some alternatives are moving to Fastmail and using Duck Duck Go, but we need Google to stop this "my way or you don't exist" attitude before they become a huge conglomerate which controls major aspects of many people's lives (which they arguably already do) and leaves everyone (like small companies that don't use Google or just regular people who don't want a Google account) separated from the world they're forming. This ship sailed years ago, though.

anonygler 7y ago

I mean, I get captcha's all the time while working from Google's network. You're exhausting from a shared quota. That's life on the modern internet. Bitch about Google all you want, it's not like they decided this is how the internet should work. Prior to Google, my company integrated with reCaptcha because no other choice existed to reduce automated abuse.