11 ms·

Why I do not want to work at Google

351 points by rl1987 15y ago

tommi 15y ago
I do understand that the mail post is about why he doesn't want to work at Google and not about demonizing Google. Yet, what still strikes me odd is that many people feel like Google and other big companies should act the way they want. "Their “real names” policy on Google+ is one example; it makes it likely that only people who feel they have no repercussions to fear from anyone, ever, will write there." And that is fine in my opinion. Not everybody needs to be on the Google+. It's their playground, let them run it the way they want.
- 4ad 15y ago
  Yeah, I expected this to be yet another post about how evil google really is, but instead I found a very well written and very insightful post with very interesting references. It might not apply to everyone, but it's a great read.
- scotu 15y ago
  the problem in the real name policy, to me, is more related to the fact that they want your ID name while they claim to need the name you go by usually. Would google accept _why as a name for a user? Probably not unless this _why is a well known guy. But what if you are not well known, but your friends call you that way? To me they should accept it based on their terms... P.S. I like/use google plus
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    What concerns me about RN policies is the immoderacy with which they're often pursued, not the idea itself. It's actually (gasp!) a good idea at root. I have no problem with allowing pseudonyms and role accounts-- I think G+ and Facebook should-- but Google is right not to want profiles with names like Fuckhead89 and MiKeY ~:~ j0n3S on the service. Giving less leniency (in terms of the decision whether to can spammers) to non-real-name accounts makes sense. Stopping impersonation is obviously the right thing to do. Preemptively treating accounts as negative-value accounts simply because they look* pseudonymous is the wrong thing to do. What I think needed to be said in the boardroom conversations is that the damage done by deleting a good (even pseudonymous) profile is about 100 times that done by allowing a bad profile. Bad profiles (spammers, trolls) will ruin a site, but they're only dangerous if numerous enough to establish a critical mass. The cost of ripping out a good, potentially pseudonymous profile, is a nasty blog post that makes the rounds on the internet.
- gcp 15y ago
  I guess an issue for many hackers is that whether or not to work for Google is a real, nagging question. Many of us will have the skill-sets that cause Google to seek us out when they are on hiring sprees. Some will certainly get offers. For hackers, Google is clearly an interesting company to work for. They have good infrastructure, good technology, a culture that is likeable to hackers, competitive pay, and an ability to make world-changing technology. So, all in all, it's an enticing offer. However, for many hackers, there's the question if Google's overall corporate direction fits our values. Combined with the fact that Google is so powerful, one wonders if Google is the ally or the threat. I believe that the article make the point that if you have the abilities to land a job at Google, you might as well have the abilities to change things for the better without Google.
  - bergie 15y ago
    Exactly. Right now for good hackers the job market is such that they can pretty much choose where to work. And the market is even so good that most are able to do these decisions based on matching corporate values and not just salary.
- DasIch 15y ago
  It is not that simple. Big companies have an impact on society and culture, that cannot and should not be ignored. Much like there are systems in place to protect the market from companies (or more accurately itself), it needs to be considered if that impact is negative, if such a negative impact is somehow encouraged (like monopolies) and if so what can be done about it. Democracy works because we assume that communication can be done freely and anonymously. If these assumptions don't hold true for major communication platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ we do have a significant problem. The fact that you don't have to join these platforms becomes irrelevant if the societal impact extends beyond them or not-joining prevents you from communicating with others in society.
  - VMG 15y ago
    > Democracy works because we assume that communication can be done freely and anonymously. The real name policy on Google+ doesn't change anything about that. People can still communicate anonymously, just not via Google+. Democracy does not require anonymity on every communication platform imaginable. There also isn't anonymous internet access, and there aren't anonymous domain names (or only few). Democracy depends on the State allowing anonymity, not on every communication provider implementing it. Google thinks that it's system profits from accountability, and they have the right to enforce it on their platform.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      If it's a single provider doing it, without anything close to a dominant market share (the current situation), I agree. It would become more problematic if it became de facto the standard communication platform, though, or even a large share of it. For example, if Facebook messages replace email for 90% of the population, you will find it very difficult to avoid using Facebook messages. I don't see it as much different than the State, really. Companies with smallish market share are like local governments: relatively harmless, because you can just avoid the ones you don't like. Bigger governments and companies get increasingly hard to avoid; it's easier to move out of Pittsburgh than to move out of the U.S.A., and it's easier to avoid Google Plus than to avoid the big-4 telecoms.
- kijiki 15y ago
  I would explain why "so just don't use it" isn't the whole story, but Moxie already did a much better job: http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084
- kragen 15y ago
  Let me explain. I think we have a very fundamental disagreement. I believe that some actions are good and some actions are evil, according to, among other things, whether they harm others, whether they are fair, and whether they are honest. I believe that people should do things that are good and not do things that are evil, whether in their capacity as employees or otherwise; big companies are not moral agents, but their employees are. I can assure you that most of the people who work on Google+ believe that, too, which is one of the reasons they work at Google instead of somewhere else. And I believe that the “real names” policy is evil, because it strengthens existing imbalances of power in the world, which is unfair and also harms people. If I'm wrong, and it is not evil, then I do not want Google (by which I mean a large group of people, especially those with a lot of influence) to abandon it. But if I'm right, and it is evil, then I do want Google to abandon it. That is, I don't want Google to conform to my personal preferences; I want Google to do good and not evil, and I have an opinion about what that consists of, an opinion that might be wrong. Does that clarify? What in the above "strikes you odd"?
  - tommi 15y ago
    I somewhat see where you are going and I do like it. Employees should work in a company where they believe in the way of working and feel comfortable doing the job. Agreed on that. But I see the problem arising on how to define what's evil and what is not. There are lot of things which can be thought as strengthening existing imbalances of power in the world. Even the Google search could be considered to be such. I can't figure out why "real names" policy is evil. I don't see it harming people. From what I have been using Facebook and Google+, I actually enjoy and prefer it so that people use real names. Not all products are suited for everybody and alternatives for different use cases exist. I'm sure that Google has lot to offer for people who don't want to use their real name publicly.
    - kragen 15y ago
      > Employees should work in a company where they believe in the way of working and feel comfortable doing the job. Agreed on that. That's not what I said, although it's probably a good HR policy. I didn't say people should do things that they think are good and not evil (at work or otherwise). I said people should do things that are good and not evil. If I thought what you think I thought, it would be counterproductive to bring up these issues publicly, because it might make people uncomfortable by making them question their values. > But I see the problem arising on how to define what's evil and what is not. Yes, of course it's difficult to know what's good and what's evil (it's not a question of "definition" unless moral relativism is correct), and if past experience is any guide, we probably won't come to any kind of permanent consensus. That doesn't mean that discussing it is pointless. We can probably come to better conclusions about what's good and what's evil with the discussion than without it. > There are lot of things which can be thought as strengthening existing imbalances of power in the world. Even the Google search could be considered to be such. Someone might think Google Search strengthens existing imbalances of power, but I don't think so. And of course it does the opposite of harming people. > I can't figure out why "real names" policy is evil. I don't see it harming people. I don't really want to get into the whole #nymwars discussion here, but suffice it to say that the broad consensus among Google+ users is that you're wrong about that — which is what I meant by saying that Google's policy was undemocratically chosen.
snitko 15y ago
I think there's always a balance between something being open and transparent (and possibly free and opensource, as those two things usually, though not always, go hand in hand) and something being closed and proprietary. I personally think having an opensource search engine - where all the rules for SEO are well known, constantly refactored and updated by the community - would be awesome. Would it be economically viable? Can't tell you that.
grovulent 15y ago
Yeah - I'm not a fan of centralisation either, but what this article misses is that the most important thing enabled by the internet is not blocked by any of Google's practices. What is the most important thing? In my view - it enables the formation of "Super Groups" - which I think will represent the most significant cultural change since the dawn of language. All you need for the formation of super groups are sufficiently cheap and efficient signalling processes. Google has perhaps contributed to this drop in signalling costs as much any company on the internet. Anyhoo - for those who want to know what a super group is - I wrote about it here: https://plus.google.com/117405082753493075236/posts/K4fzCvScYcs https://plus.google.com/117405082753493075236/posts/K4fzCvSc...
- zobzu 15y ago
  "What is the most important thing? In my view - it enables the formation of "Super Groups" - which I think will represent the most significant cultural change since the dawn of language." Errr ?! That's why religion always wins. Makes people believe such things.
  - grovulent 15y ago
    Maybe you should try a little harder to engage with the idea before chastising it as religion.
    - aangjie 15y ago
      @grovulent: I am willing to engage the idea. But the amount of suppression(of contradictions) your referred post demands is too high(that i did not finish it). I believe it was the same for the other poster. May be you can express it differently and post again.
- onan_barbarian 15y ago
  The breathless gibberish of your 'Super Group' claims are at least rendered entertaining by their unfortunate nomenclatural confusion with Journey, Asia and Bad English. Any technology that encourages more "supergroups" to form should be killed with fire, lest it inflict another Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-style 50-year musical reign of terror on us.
DavidMcLaughlin 15y ago
This guy really should go work for Google and figure out the problems they need to deal with running a service like Gmail. Even for just a little while. At work we had a researcher from Yahoo Mail come in and give a presentation on the machine learning techniques they use to try and stop spammers abusing their mail servers. It was eye-opening to learn just what kind of hourly battle they face to keep spam out of their systems and the ways they are trying to combat it. It was even more enlightening when the presenter told stories about the problems that machine learning can't solve - like people within the company being bribed to whitelist spam companies based in Vegas. On the surface it's such a simple problem, and I'm sure anyone who's tried to prevent their web application's outgoing mail being marked as spam by the evil corporations of Yahoo and Google will have had the desire to go write a blog post saying what a crock of shit the whole thing is and how they would never take part in that. But here's the thing - those systems are in place because if they weren't, email would be a completely useless form of communication at this point. The people sending spam make _millions_ of dollars abusing a system which is popular because its open and based on trust. That kind of money combined with greed gives people all different levels of drive and incentive to get their emails about bigger penises and viagra through to your inbox. Every time they prevent one form of attack, these guys will create a new one. To do this they do things like install mail servers on unsuspecting user's machines, specifically targeting Yahoo/Hotmail/Google users because their IP will obviously need to be trusted by those companies. They will also hack into other people's private mail servers. They will spoof email headers and pretend they're someone else. They will hire people, experts, who will find new ways of breaking in to servers they detect as having mail servers running on them. All this just to get past the spam filters and prevention that make email a useful form of communication to begin with. And let's forget the people who couldn't set up their own mail server for just a second. I like to think I know what I'm doing. After installing Postfix and jumping through all the hoops to get my emails whitelisted by Gmail and making sure I didn't have an open relay on my mail server, you know what happened? Someone managed to hack in by brute force anyway. I only noticed because of the _millions_ of automated replies that were coming in every day from dead email accounts or people that were out of office. Now, I could have worked hard to fight this. I could have did something other than changing my passwords and hoping they didn't get crack them again. But the point is - I only ran a mailserver to get email delivered to me on my personal domain. I didn't want to have to fight and battle and dedicate myself to solving this problem. I wanted to take this thing for granted. I just wanted to send and receive email. Instead bad people could not only sit there and read all my incoming mail - but they could use my server to spam people and get me blacklisted and blocked from so many other services I worked so hard to be trusted by. And they did all this without even specifically targeting me. I was a statistic to them, someone who simply didn't know what they know. In the end, I moved my personal mail account to Google Apps, free of charge. Problem solved. By using Gmail or Yahoo Mail or Hotmail - you are almost definitely more secure than setting up your own mailserver. You have people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year working full time to make sure your data is secure. I mean if privacy is your reason not to use Gmail, then I hope for your sake your mail server is secure. Maybe you think it is. I know I did too. And all these people complaining about advertisements based on the content of their emails. Yahoo Mail had a team of like 30 people just doing _research_ on how to stop spammers. Then all these other people working on support. How does that service get provided to us _free of charge_ without advertisements or some sort of monetisation? I know in some people's heads they think it's literally just a Bayesian classifier and some hand-coded rules, but it's so beyond that. And of course, let's not forget the fact that a lot of people would not be able to set up their own mail server anyway. Maybe you don't need them, but Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail enable hundreds of millions of people to communicate _for free_ with other people around the world that otherwise wouldn't be technically competent enough to buy a domain name and set up a local mail server. It lets you communicate with them too, because they don't get frustrated wading through hundreds of spam emails just to read the good stuff. And that system only works because we have good guys that are fighting the bad guys who want to ruin it for the rest of us. And this is just the one example of email. Which has all this decentralised and open properties that you desire. I am reminded of Diaspora when they released a first beta of their code and it got absolutely torn to shreds for security reasons, and we haven't heard much since. The real world sucks. That's why I think it might be a good idea for you to go work for Google.
ilovecomputers 15y ago
So far the "real name" policy is the only major, undemocratic, incident that I've seen from a centralized online service. Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers? Nonetheless, I agree with him that we need to make decentralized computing practical. The best example I've seen of this is Opera Unite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w There is also Freenet, but so far (from reading their mailing lists) they are discussing about changing their load management. I've tried Freenet and it slows down my machine (not very practical), but it is the only software project I've seen that distributes the hosting of digital content among peers instead of a centralized server: http://freenetproject.org/ http://freenetproject.org/
- kragen 15y ago
  > Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers? Yes. Many of these are undemocratic, but others are merely unintentional problems of reliability induced by a single point of failure. http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories has a few dozen items up through 2008. http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html livejournal users want more control of livejournal. decentralization-stories omg decentralization-stories: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/ http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-gambling-sites-domains http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-g... more decentralization-stories: caribbeangold.com, etc., censored http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378 more decentralization-stories: legal intimidation takes a site offline http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28 http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28 decentralization-stories: the TWiki Takeover http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308 http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308 The impressive flickr account of blogger and friend Hossam el-Hamalawy is facing censorship by flickr themselves! First they disabled pro-palestine photos he had taken in Ireland, then they started searching their old drawers for reasons to un-list his account from public search. decentralization-stories http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-account/ http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-accou... more details. ugly. decentralization-stories http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist/ http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist... global voices picks it up. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009100.html http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009100.html The most credible voice in the Ossetian war, he tells us, was a Georgian blogger who’d fled Abkhazia for Russia. His LiveJournal account was highly critical both of Moscow and of Sakashvili, and was widely read in the Russian blogosphere. But a flurry of denial of service attacks, launched by a set of zombie computers likely controlled by Russian hackers, disabled LiveJournal for an hour, and forced the owners of LiveJournal to ask the blogger to leave the service so that future attacks wouldn’t take down the platform. He moved to Wordpress, but had the same experience. If governments are able to unleash attacks that can disable whole platforms, it’s likely that they’ll successfully silence many online voices. decentralization-stories http://elphabawest.blogspot.com/2008/12/microsoft-live-has-no-respect-for-users.html http://elphabawest.blogspot.com/2008/12/microsoft-live-has-n... Microsoft Live blogging used to support anonymous commenting, but they were tracking the commenters’ identity --- and when they turned off anonymous commenting, all the previously-anonymous comments became non-anonymous. decentralization-stories http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse (AOL deleted a lot of people's web pages with scant 4 weeks' warning) decentralization-stories http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links-090408/ http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links... decentralization-stories about one social site blocking all links to another. http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ more decentralization-stories: resig is moving public discussion of jQuery off Google Groups http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctorow-cloud-computing http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctor... anti. decentralization-stories. http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/198 http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/198 The Lower Merion School District used laptops with webcams to spy on children in their homes. decentralization-stories http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/1/25/lets-welcome-our-neo-feudal-overlords.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/1/25/lets-welcome-our-n... decentralization-stories about cloud computing http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphone-applications/?r http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-c... decentralization-stories about how Adobe doesn’t want to do anything for the iPhone http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/538652366/info-roundup-mcafee-kills-computers-worldwide http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/538652366/info-roundup-mcafee... decentralization-stories about virus scanning and “bad code” identification http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282791 discussion thereof http://my.opera.com/unite/blog/2009/07/14/fixing-proxy-problems http://my.opera.com/unite/blog/2009/07/14/fixing-proxy-probl... decentralization-stories: Opera Unite was down for days because it depended on centralized proxies http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-itunes-user-has-account-hacked-loses-access-to-his-own-purchases.html http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-itunes-user-has-account-h... decentralization-stories: a guy’s account got closed after someone broke into it, and he lost all of his previous six years of iTunes purchases. http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disabled/ http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disable... decentralization-stories http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disabled/ http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2010/03/26/facebook-account-d... decentralization-stories http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2010/09/scribd_puts_my.html http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2010/09/scribd... decentralization-stories: scribd changes its terms http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110228/t-mobile-killing-off-microsofts-danger-servers-ahead-of-android-based-sidekicks/ http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110228/t-mobile-killing-of... decentralization-stories: the hiptop/sidekick will be bricked. http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their-data-should-ever-go-google/ http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their... decentralization-stories. in this case google just broke some things, that’s all. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/googles-lack-transperancy-and-openness-android https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/googles-lack-transpera... Earlier this month, Google removed Grooveshark’s popular app from the Android Market for violation of the Android terms of service, later informing Grooveshark that the removal was related to a “complaint from the RIAA" but nevertheless refusing to provide an actual legal or policy basis for the takedown. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-facebook-and-googles-concept-of-real-names-is-revolutionary/243171/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-fa... Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names' Is Revolutionary - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic A bit of a #decentralization-stories item, maybe.
generators 15y ago
google massively tried a completely decentralized form of communication named google wave. if people do not pick it up, google is bound to go ahead.
Jach 15y ago
>If Alice’s email gets marked as spam, Bob ought to be able to find out why — and fix it! While Gmail doesn't exactly let you figure out why, you can nevertheless fix it. That's what the Not Spam action is for. I've had mail land in the spam folder that shouldn't have, it only took a few 'not spam' actions to retrain it to let it through again. You're also free to backup your Gmail through both imap and pop. I never got the Gmail paranoia--the worst they do from my perspective is possibly deep-analyzing my emails in an effort to better serve me ads. They possibly sell the data to others (though I've seen no evidence of this) for them to serve me better ads. All these ads I don't ever see anyway because I use AdBlock Plus making their efforts pointless for my account. I'm not a fan of the rhetorical conflation of decentralized computing with democracy. His other material I don't really want to comment on.
- dagw 15y ago
  Do you know if Not Spam works locally or globally? Assume I'm emailing Alice and Bob and get flagged as spam. Alice checks her spam folder every day and keeps flagging my mails as not spam. Bob just assumes Google's spam filter works and has never looked in his spam folder. Will my emails eventually get through to both Alice and Bob or just to Alice?
  - Jach 15y ago
    I'd bet with fairly high odds (and hope) Gmail whitelists locally. If Alice thinks your mails aren't spam but Bob does, I would want Alice to get your mails normally but Bob to be able to keep ignoring you, implying a need for local blacklists and whitelists with a reasonable set of defaults. If Alice + some large number of others think you're alright, maybe you'll be promoted to not being flagged as spam by default. Bob might then just have to take the action of marking your things as spam to invoke a (hopefully) local spam/blacklist rule.
    - glimcat 15y ago
      There are a few functions which whitelist locally like adding someone to your contacts. But I think "Not Spam" moves it to the inbox and provides feedback into the voting algorithm without whitelisting at any scope.
napierzaza 15y ago
"Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers," Does he realize that Apple computer has been around a lot longer than the internet? And that they've been making an OS with applications on it a lot longer than there was a web browser? So maybe that's actually what Apple DOES and does well?
- glassx 15y ago
  I think it was just an example of companies changing the web for the worse little by little, that was the point of the article. And to be honest, I share his feelings. The web is getting more and more closed with "The Big Four" reigning. But it is ironic that there was a lot of backlash when Apple announced there were going to be only Web apps back then that caused them to release the SDK and App Store: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-... However, at the same time I like the whole "Apps" (AppStore, Steam, Market) concept because it helped create whole businesses. Lots of small people making real money in the age of piracy... But I digress, this is completely off topic.
- kragen 15y ago
  The internet dates from, depending on how you date it, 1969, sometime in the mid-1970s, or January 1, 1983. Apple dates from April 1, 1976. Maybe 34 (edit: 35) years is "a lot longer" than 28 years to you? Anyway, Apple doesn't do that on their less popular computers — Macintoshes.
_debug_ 15y ago
I love the fact that he has his own mailing list instead of a blog. The internet continues to surprise me every day.
- joeyh 15y ago
  The reason it's a mailing list: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/000910.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/0... Also touches on the discoverability problems with using mailing lists like this. I wish I'd been reading this list thirteen years ago when it was started.
  - kragen 15y ago
    > I wish I'd been reading this list thirteen years ago when it was started. Thank you; that's a wonderful compliment.
  - LiveTheDream 15y ago
    One of the reasons is: > I want my list mail to serve as prior art to stop obvious patents from being granted, or to revoke them or the obvious claims in them in court Do discussions of ideas really count as prior art, or must there also be at least an effort of implementation ("reduction to practice" according to wikipedia[1])? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
    - kragen 15y ago
      In theory, yes; if the invention is "known or used by others in this country [the US]" prior to the date of the invention by the patenting inventor, it counts as prior art. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_35_00000102----000-.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_35_00000102----000... It's tricky, though, because that's the invention date, not the filing date, and the "inventor" could lie about the date of the invention. The safest approach is to publish my ideas in print in a foreign country, ideally in a small print run in a language spoken by nobody at Intellectual Ventures, and then wait a year before posting to the list. Prior art does not have to include a reduction to practice; conception of the invention is sufficient. Lore has it that Charles Hall's waterbed patent was narrowed substantially by a reference to Stranger in a Strange Land, which described waterbeds.
lionhearted 15y ago
> Google wants you to keep your mail in Gmail instead of on your home computer Offline Gmail is cool. "Mail Settings" (gear in top right corner) -> "Offline" Doesn't work in all browsers since Google Gears was deprecated in the newest versions of Chrome and Firefox, but it's only a minor hassle to run an earlier version of Firefox for the offline mode and syncing. Very helpful to me and quite easy/convenient to set up, even with the recent Gears deprecation.
- corkill 15y ago
  Yeah gears is gone. They have just launched a new version for chrome which is quite good. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmpbfngldlkglhimk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...
cageface 15y ago
There's a lot of interesting grey area between surrendering everything to Google and rolling your own mail server. I unplugged from Google this month but I'd still rather pay a little money to fastmail.fm, for instance, than fight spam myself. The net isn't the wild west anymore but it doesn't have to be a sterile walled garden either.
- sixtofour 15y ago
  Fastmail, exactly what I did this month. I'd already had an account on hot standby (it's cheap), I just changed my mail forwarding to fastmail. I think it's a reasonable practice to spread your services around.
anotherevan 15y ago
Every time I see one of these "Why I don't want to work at Google" articles I think to myself, "Don't worry, they don't want you to work there either."
- kragen 15y ago
  Uh, thanks. :)
ristretto 15y ago
Then don't
matth 15y ago
Much of Kragen's vision for the future is in line with where I think our world is heading. It actually inspired me to draft up a blog post: http://blog.matthewghudson.com/post/9497957290/the-public-and-its-problems http://blog.matthewghudson.com/post/9497957290/the-public-an...
- kragen 15y ago
  Thank you! That makes me happy. Don't forget that the future is yet unwritten, though.
sneak 15y ago
He had me right up to the point where he claimed that Jake Appelbaum has made a significant contribution to anything.
zmonkeyz 15y ago
'Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what “apps” they allow in their “app store”.' It was originally intended that you would make web apps to access on the IPhone and they did not want developers making apps for it. Consumers and developers demanded that feature so you got what you wished for. (not you per se)
omouse 15y ago
49 comments in 5 hours and almost all of them talk about the technical aspects or about working at Google. This is about more than that, it's about decentralization as a way to empower people so that in the end we don't need centralized companies or governments to control our data. Apple (and other companies) control what you're allowed to download. Google (and other companies) control what emails get through to you and your email history. Microsoft (and other companies) control your hardware. He forgot to mention the larger and more disturbing point; many of these companies are American and so they're under the jurisdiction of the NSA and FBI (and CIA if you're not from around there). With centralization, law enforcement has easy and direct access to things. The only barrier is a warrant and even that isn't a barrier as we saw in the AT&T NSA wiretapping case. He wouldn't want to work at Google or many other companies because they're pushing for centralization which brings certain political/social effects that he dislikes. So can we please have a discussion about the political and social implications of decentralization vs centralizaton rather than the technical aspects??
- qjz 15y ago
  Exactly. Or, as the author puts it: I imagine a different future, where if Alice wants to talk to Bob and Bob wants to talk to Alice, there’s no unaccountable intermediary that can interfere with their communication, whether they’re speaking text, or video, or 3-D models, or simulation. I never thought I'd live in a society where the value of privacy or anonymity was up for debate. These are real world concepts that I thought everyone took for granted in their routine communications, but are being tossed aside on the Internet merely because finding a technical solution seems too hard (and it is very, very hard). Maybe we should reframe the debate around the concept of intimacy instead. There are a lot of activities that are perfectly innocent, but I still wouldn't want to do them in a crowded room or in my boss's office. The Internet is becoming the primary medium of electronic communication. I should be able to use it to have an intimate discussion without it being data mined by anyone. There's no reason any third party should be able to detect the conversation is even taking place, and anonymity should be at my discretion, subject to the acceptance of the party I'm communicating with.
  - rmrm 15y ago
ender7 15y ago
Here's the issue. No one cares. Well, I care, and presumably a number of other readers care, but compared to the total sum of internet users we're just a rounding error. You know why people are using services like Gmail? Because it just works. Have you ever tried setting up your own mail server? I like to think that I'm pretty damn skilled with "the computer" but after a day of tweaking I'm still not sure mine is operating properly. The sad fact is that being idealistic is not enough. You have to be idealistic and better than the bad guys. If you offer people a system that is hard to use, wastes their time, and/or is simply inferior to other options, no one will ever use it no matter how idealistically pure it is. Then you just sound like an asshole when you say "you're all morally inferior for refusing to degrade your experience." So. Fix your system. Make it better than what we currently have. Then come back and convince me to care (hint: if your solution involves end-users installing and maintaining multiple servers, you're doing it wrong).
- j_baker 15y ago
  To be fair, the author (appears to) work for Canonical who has had success working to make idealistic software more approachable. So it appears to me that he isn't some Ivory Tower FOSS advocate, and is merely stating a personal preference.
  - paulv 15y ago
    He doesn't work for Canonical. The domain is canonical.org, not canonical.com.
  - sciurus 15y ago
    "kragen has worked for a variety of companies doing mostly cool things. In early 2006, he pulled up stakes and headed to South America, to begin exploring how he can empower people through technology. And to work on his Spanish."
  - kragen 15y ago
    I do not now work for and never have worked for Canonical Software, although they tried to buy our domain early on, and they're good folks. I recuse myself from the question of whether I am or am not an ivory-tower FOSS advocate.
msh 15y ago
Isn't This part of problem freedom box want to solve?
- kragen 15y ago
  Yes, the Freedom Box project is directed by people whose ideals I share.
- sudonim 15y ago
  My frustration with the freedom box is that the way they pitch it, it will only appeal to the nerdiest nerds. I think it's an awesome idea, but for it to make any impact it has to have better packaging.
garyd 15y ago
Kragen is obviously not well informed of how the Internet works regardless of how long he's been online. Or to use one of his piss poor analogies, just because a cat is 20 years old does not mean he knows every cat in the neighborhood. His descriptions of DSL, wireless networking, p2p, network topology, and his guesses about the infrastructure behind major "evil" web sites are about as narrow sighted as a twenty year old feline.
- kragen 15y ago
  I would be delighted to become better informed. Would you like to explain a couple of my errors to me?
mlinksva 15y ago
FWIW I think "Why I do not want to work at Google" originally composed in HN thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728174 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728174 These older posts are also fun http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January/000322.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January... http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe... Doing many things, including filtering spam, is more difficult in a decentralized environment. (It is curious that email, itself decentralized, has come to be dominated by several large service providers; I wonder how much of this is due to economies of scale for fighting spam and other attacks relative to other economies of scale relative to things not characterizable as an economy of scale? Search of documents published in a decentralized manner on the web is another example.) Many things are even easier in a completely centralized manner, thus G+, Facebook, Twitter, and their morbid predecessors. For all their issues, architecturally decentralized email, web, and internet are much more valuable than the 2011 versions of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy silos. So thank you to all working on making the next bits of decentralized architecture work. I imagine it is possible to do a bit of this work at Google et al, but it is clearly way, way down the priority list of any such companies.
- kragen 15y ago
  That is correct. Thanks for pointing that out, Mike. I probably should have linked to that in my post.
billmcneale 15y ago
tl;dr: This guy doesn't want to work for Google because he hosts his own email and Google wants you to store your email in Gmail.
kragen 15y ago
It's heartening to see so much interest in my little post; it was quite a surprise to come home from a weekend traveling around to dance contact improv and discover hundreds of comments waiting for me. It's disappointing that so many of the comments focus on one or another point about why things are the way they are: spam filtering is hard and benefits from secrecy from spammers, centralized software is currently more usable, etc. My post was about values, about what kind of a world we can be building, not about which tactics are expedient in the world we currently live in. People with the same values can get together to discuss what tactics to use to advance their goals, but it's no use in suggesting to me that I should use a tactic that advances goals I oppose because that tactic is more expedient!
damian2000 15y ago
I think there is a fair bit of difference between 'closed' centralized control in the form of apple / facebook, which is generally proprietary and secretive, compared to the 'open' centralization that google espouses ... they are one of the great proponents of open source ... their android OS for example is open source. Given that, I probably still wouldn't want to work for them though, from what I've heard theres a lot of c++ coding at 1am in the morning. ;-)
sschueller 15y ago
Why do you have gmail.com listed for the canonical.org SPF record? "v=spf1 a mx include:gmail.com ~all" Might be a reason your emails end up in spam at gmail. Although a and mx would cover it I would also add: ip4:208.70.31.125 a:canonical.org If you use gmail to send mail the SPF should be: include:aspmx.googlemail.com or include:_spf.google.com
- kragen 15y ago
  > Why do you have gmail.com listed for the canonical.org SPF record? As you guessed, some people at canonical.org send email from Gmail. We actually added the SPF record hoping it would help with the reputation problem. > If you use gmail to send mail the SPF should be: include:aspmx.googlemail.com or include:_spf.google.com Thank you!

351 points by rl1987 15y ago

tommi 15y ago

I do understand that the mail post is about why he doesn't want to work at Google and not about demonizing Google. Yet, what still strikes me odd is that many people feel like Google and other big companies should act the way they want. "Their “real names” policy on Google+ is one example; it makes it likely that only people who feel they have no repercussions to fear from anyone, ever, will write there." And that is fine in my opinion. Not everybody needs to be on the Google+. It's their playground, let them run it the way they want.

4ad 15y ago
Yeah, I expected this to be yet another post about how evil google really is, but instead I found a very well written and very insightful post with very interesting references. It might not apply to everyone, but it's a great read.
scotu 15y ago
the problem in the real name policy, to me, is more related to the fact that they want your ID name while they claim to need the name you go by usually. Would google accept _why as a name for a user? Probably not unless this _why is a well known guy. But what if you are not well known, but your friends call you that way? To me they should accept it based on their terms... P.S. I like/use google plus
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  What concerns me about RN policies is the immoderacy with which they're often pursued, not the idea itself. It's actually (gasp!) a good idea at root. I have no problem with allowing pseudonyms and role accounts-- I think G+ and Facebook should-- but Google is right not to want profiles with names like Fuckhead89 and MiKeY ~:~ j0n3S on the service. Giving less leniency (in terms of the decision whether to can spammers) to non-real-name accounts makes sense. Stopping impersonation is obviously the right thing to do. Preemptively treating accounts as negative-value accounts simply because they look* pseudonymous is the wrong thing to do. What I think needed to be said in the boardroom conversations is that the damage done by deleting a good (even pseudonymous) profile is about 100 times that done by allowing a bad profile. Bad profiles (spammers, trolls) will ruin a site, but they're only dangerous if numerous enough to establish a critical mass. The cost of ripping out a good, potentially pseudonymous profile, is a nasty blog post that makes the rounds on the internet.
gcp 15y ago
I guess an issue for many hackers is that whether or not to work for Google is a real, nagging question. Many of us will have the skill-sets that cause Google to seek us out when they are on hiring sprees. Some will certainly get offers. For hackers, Google is clearly an interesting company to work for. They have good infrastructure, good technology, a culture that is likeable to hackers, competitive pay, and an ability to make world-changing technology. So, all in all, it's an enticing offer. However, for many hackers, there's the question if Google's overall corporate direction fits our values. Combined with the fact that Google is so powerful, one wonders if Google is the ally or the threat. I believe that the article make the point that if you have the abilities to land a job at Google, you might as well have the abilities to change things for the better without Google.
- bergie 15y ago
  Exactly. Right now for good hackers the job market is such that they can pretty much choose where to work. And the market is even so good that most are able to do these decisions based on matching corporate values and not just salary.
DasIch 15y ago
It is not that simple. Big companies have an impact on society and culture, that cannot and should not be ignored. Much like there are systems in place to protect the market from companies (or more accurately itself), it needs to be considered if that impact is negative, if such a negative impact is somehow encouraged (like monopolies) and if so what can be done about it. Democracy works because we assume that communication can be done freely and anonymously. If these assumptions don't hold true for major communication platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+ we do have a significant problem. The fact that you don't have to join these platforms becomes irrelevant if the societal impact extends beyond them or not-joining prevents you from communicating with others in society.
- VMG 15y ago
  > Democracy works because we assume that communication can be done freely and anonymously. The real name policy on Google+ doesn't change anything about that. People can still communicate anonymously, just not via Google+. Democracy does not require anonymity on every communication platform imaginable. There also isn't anonymous internet access, and there aren't anonymous domain names (or only few). Democracy depends on the State allowing anonymity, not on every communication provider implementing it. Google thinks that it's system profits from accountability, and they have the right to enforce it on their platform.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    If it's a single provider doing it, without anything close to a dominant market share (the current situation), I agree. It would become more problematic if it became de facto the standard communication platform, though, or even a large share of it. For example, if Facebook messages replace email for 90% of the population, you will find it very difficult to avoid using Facebook messages. I don't see it as much different than the State, really. Companies with smallish market share are like local governments: relatively harmless, because you can just avoid the ones you don't like. Bigger governments and companies get increasingly hard to avoid; it's easier to move out of Pittsburgh than to move out of the U.S.A., and it's easier to avoid Google Plus than to avoid the big-4 telecoms.
kijiki 15y ago
I would explain why "so just don't use it" isn't the whole story, but Moxie already did a much better job: http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084
kragen 15y ago
Let me explain. I think we have a very fundamental disagreement. I believe that some actions are good and some actions are evil, according to, among other things, whether they harm others, whether they are fair, and whether they are honest. I believe that people should do things that are good and not do things that are evil, whether in their capacity as employees or otherwise; big companies are not moral agents, but their employees are. I can assure you that most of the people who work on Google+ believe that, too, which is one of the reasons they work at Google instead of somewhere else. And I believe that the “real names” policy is evil, because it strengthens existing imbalances of power in the world, which is unfair and also harms people. If I'm wrong, and it is not evil, then I do not want Google (by which I mean a large group of people, especially those with a lot of influence) to abandon it. But if I'm right, and it is evil, then I do want Google to abandon it. That is, I don't want Google to conform to my personal preferences; I want Google to do good and not evil, and I have an opinion about what that consists of, an opinion that might be wrong. Does that clarify? What in the above "strikes you odd"?
- tommi 15y ago
  I somewhat see where you are going and I do like it. Employees should work in a company where they believe in the way of working and feel comfortable doing the job. Agreed on that. But I see the problem arising on how to define what's evil and what is not. There are lot of things which can be thought as strengthening existing imbalances of power in the world. Even the Google search could be considered to be such. I can't figure out why "real names" policy is evil. I don't see it harming people. From what I have been using Facebook and Google+, I actually enjoy and prefer it so that people use real names. Not all products are suited for everybody and alternatives for different use cases exist. I'm sure that Google has lot to offer for people who don't want to use their real name publicly.
  - kragen 15y ago
    > Employees should work in a company where they believe in the way of working and feel comfortable doing the job. Agreed on that. That's not what I said, although it's probably a good HR policy. I didn't say people should do things that they think are good and not evil (at work or otherwise). I said people should do things that are good and not evil. If I thought what you think I thought, it would be counterproductive to bring up these issues publicly, because it might make people uncomfortable by making them question their values. > But I see the problem arising on how to define what's evil and what is not. Yes, of course it's difficult to know what's good and what's evil (it's not a question of "definition" unless moral relativism is correct), and if past experience is any guide, we probably won't come to any kind of permanent consensus. That doesn't mean that discussing it is pointless. We can probably come to better conclusions about what's good and what's evil with the discussion than without it. > There are lot of things which can be thought as strengthening existing imbalances of power in the world. Even the Google search could be considered to be such. Someone might think Google Search strengthens existing imbalances of power, but I don't think so. And of course it does the opposite of harming people. > I can't figure out why "real names" policy is evil. I don't see it harming people. I don't really want to get into the whole #nymwars discussion here, but suffice it to say that the broad consensus among Google+ users is that you're wrong about that — which is what I meant by saying that Google's policy was undemocratically chosen.

snitko 15y ago

I think there's always a balance between something being open and transparent (and possibly free and opensource, as those two things usually, though not always, go hand in hand) and something being closed and proprietary. I personally think having an opensource search engine - where all the rules for SEO are well known, constantly refactored and updated by the community - would be awesome. Would it be economically viable? Can't tell you that.

grovulent 15y ago

Yeah - I'm not a fan of centralisation either, but what this article misses is that the most important thing enabled by the internet is not blocked by any of Google's practices. What is the most important thing? In my view - it enables the formation of "Super Groups" - which I think will represent the most significant cultural change since the dawn of language. All you need for the formation of super groups are sufficiently cheap and efficient signalling processes. Google has perhaps contributed to this drop in signalling costs as much any company on the internet. Anyhoo - for those who want to know what a super group is - I wrote about it here: https://plus.google.com/117405082753493075236/posts/K4fzCvScYcs https://plus.google.com/117405082753493075236/posts/K4fzCvSc...

zobzu 15y ago
"What is the most important thing? In my view - it enables the formation of "Super Groups" - which I think will represent the most significant cultural change since the dawn of language." Errr ?! That's why religion always wins. Makes people believe such things.
- grovulent 15y ago
  Maybe you should try a little harder to engage with the idea before chastising it as religion.
  - aangjie 15y ago
    @grovulent: I am willing to engage the idea. But the amount of suppression(of contradictions) your referred post demands is too high(that i did not finish it). I believe it was the same for the other poster. May be you can express it differently and post again.
onan_barbarian 15y ago
The breathless gibberish of your 'Super Group' claims are at least rendered entertaining by their unfortunate nomenclatural confusion with Journey, Asia and Bad English. Any technology that encourages more "supergroups" to form should be killed with fire, lest it inflict another Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-style 50-year musical reign of terror on us.

DavidMcLaughlin 15y ago

This guy really should go work for Google and figure out the problems they need to deal with running a service like Gmail. Even for just a little while. At work we had a researcher from Yahoo Mail come in and give a presentation on the machine learning techniques they use to try and stop spammers abusing their mail servers. It was eye-opening to learn just what kind of hourly battle they face to keep spam out of their systems and the ways they are trying to combat it. It was even more enlightening when the presenter told stories about the problems that machine learning can't solve - like people within the company being bribed to whitelist spam companies based in Vegas. On the surface it's such a simple problem, and I'm sure anyone who's tried to prevent their web application's outgoing mail being marked as spam by the evil corporations of Yahoo and Google will have had the desire to go write a blog post saying what a crock of shit the whole thing is and how they would never take part in that. But here's the thing - those systems are in place because if they weren't, email would be a completely useless form of communication at this point. The people sending spam make _millions_ of dollars abusing a system which is popular because its open and based on trust. That kind of money combined with greed gives people all different levels of drive and incentive to get their emails about bigger penises and viagra through to your inbox. Every time they prevent one form of attack, these guys will create a new one. To do this they do things like install mail servers on unsuspecting user's machines, specifically targeting Yahoo/Hotmail/Google users because their IP will obviously need to be trusted by those companies. They will also hack into other people's private mail servers. They will spoof email headers and pretend they're someone else. They will hire people, experts, who will find new ways of breaking in to servers they detect as having mail servers running on them. All this just to get past the spam filters and prevention that make email a useful form of communication to begin with. And let's forget the people who couldn't set up their own mail server for just a second. I like to think I know what I'm doing. After installing Postfix and jumping through all the hoops to get my emails whitelisted by Gmail and making sure I didn't have an open relay on my mail server, you know what happened? Someone managed to hack in by brute force anyway. I only noticed because of the _millions_ of automated replies that were coming in every day from dead email accounts or people that were out of office. Now, I could have worked hard to fight this. I could have did something other than changing my passwords and hoping they didn't get crack them again. But the point is - I only ran a mailserver to get email delivered to me on my personal domain. I didn't want to have to fight and battle and dedicate myself to solving this problem. I wanted to take this thing for granted. I just wanted to send and receive email. Instead bad people could not only sit there and read all my incoming mail - but they could use my server to spam people and get me blacklisted and blocked from so many other services I worked so hard to be trusted by. And they did all this without even specifically targeting me. I was a statistic to them, someone who simply didn't know what they know. In the end, I moved my personal mail account to Google Apps, free of charge. Problem solved. By using Gmail or Yahoo Mail or Hotmail - you are almost definitely more secure than setting up your own mailserver. You have people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year working full time to make sure your data is secure. I mean if privacy is your reason not to use Gmail, then I hope for your sake your mail server is secure. Maybe you think it is. I know I did too. And all these people complaining about advertisements based on the content of their emails. Yahoo Mail had a team of like 30 people just doing _research_ on how to stop spammers. Then all these other people working on support. How does that service get provided to us _free of charge_ without advertisements or some sort of monetisation? I know in some people's heads they think it's literally just a Bayesian classifier and some hand-coded rules, but it's so beyond that. And of course, let's not forget the fact that a lot of people would not be able to set up their own mail server anyway. Maybe you don't need them, but Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail enable hundreds of millions of people to communicate _for free_ with other people around the world that otherwise wouldn't be technically competent enough to buy a domain name and set up a local mail server. It lets you communicate with them too, because they don't get frustrated wading through hundreds of spam emails just to read the good stuff. And that system only works because we have good guys that are fighting the bad guys who want to ruin it for the rest of us. And this is just the one example of email. Which has all this decentralised and open properties that you desire. I am reminded of Diaspora when they released a first beta of their code and it got absolutely torn to shreds for security reasons, and we haven't heard much since. The real world sucks. That's why I think it might be a good idea for you to go work for Google.

ilovecomputers 15y ago

So far the "real name" policy is the only major, undemocratic, incident that I've seen from a centralized online service. Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers? Nonetheless, I agree with him that we need to make decentralized computing practical. The best example I've seen of this is Opera Unite: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivshJ-qyg5w There is also Freenet, but so far (from reading their mailing lists) they are discussing about changing their load management. I've tried Freenet and it slows down my machine (not very practical), but it is the only software project I've seen that distributes the hosting of digital content among peers instead of a centralized server: http://freenetproject.org/ http://freenetproject.org/

kragen 15y ago
> Does anyone know of any other incidents that make case against centralized servers? Yes. Many of these are undemocratic, but others are merely unintentional problems of reliability induced by a single point of failure. http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories http://www.delicious.com/kragen/decentralization-stories has a few dozen items up through 2008. http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html http://beckyzoole.livejournal.com/395310.html livejournal users want more control of livejournal. decentralization-stories omg decentralization-stories: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/ http://www.chrisbrogan.com/google-gets-back-to-nick/ http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-gambling-sites-domains http://valleywag.com/5053704/kentucky-judge-moves-to-seize-g... more decentralization-stories: caribbeangold.com, etc., censored http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341378 more decentralization-stories: legal intimidation takes a site offline http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28 http://blog.wikiring.com/Blog/BlogEntry28 decentralization-stories: the TWiki Takeover http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308 http://norayounis.com/2008/11/04/308 The impressive flickr account of blogger and friend Hossam el-Hamalawy is facing censorship by flickr themselves! First they disabled pro-palestine photos he had taken in Ireland, then they started searching their old drawers for reasons to un-list his account from public search. decentralization-stories http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-account/ http://arabist.net/arabawy/2008/11/04/flick-censors-my-accou... more details. ugly. decentralization-stories http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist/ http://globalvoicesonline.org/2008/11/05/support-the-arabist... global voices picks it up. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009100.html http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009100.html The most credible voice in the Ossetian war, he tells us, was a Georgian blogger who’d fled Abkhazia for Russia. His LiveJournal account was highly critical both of Moscow and of Sakashvili, and was widely read in the Russian blogosphere. But a flurry of denial of service attacks, launched by a set of zombie computers likely controlled by Russian hackers, disabled LiveJournal for an hour, and forced the owners of LiveJournal to ask the blogger to leave the service so that future attacks wouldn’t take down the platform. He moved to Wordpress, but had the same experience. If governments are able to unleash attacks that can disable whole platforms, it’s likely that they’ll successfully silence many online voices. decentralization-stories http://elphabawest.blogspot.com/2008/12/microsoft-live-has-no-respect-for-users.html http://elphabawest.blogspot.com/2008/12/microsoft-live-has-n... Microsoft Live blogging used to support anonymous commenting, but they were tracking the commenters’ identity --- and when they turned off anonymous commenting, all the previously-anonymous comments became non-anonymous. decentralization-stories http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse (AOL deleted a lot of people's web pages with scant 4 weeks' warning) decentralization-stories http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links-090408/ http://torrentfreak.com/facebook-blocks-all-pirate-bay-links... decentralization-stories about one social site blocking all links to another. http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/ more decentralization-stories: resig is moving public discussion of jQuery off Google Groups http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctorow-cloud-computing http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/02/cory-doctor... anti. decentralization-stories. http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/198 http://www.publicschoolreview.com/articles/198 The Lower Merion School District used laptops with webcams to spy on children in their homes. decentralization-stories http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/1/25/lets-welcome-our-neo-feudal-overlords.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/1/25/lets-welcome-our-n... decentralization-stories about cloud computing http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphone-applications/?r http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-c... decentralization-stories about how Adobe doesn’t want to do anything for the iPhone http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/538652366/info-roundup-mcafee-kills-computers-worldwide http://andreyf.tumblr.com/post/538652366/info-roundup-mcafee... decentralization-stories about virus scanning and “bad code” identification http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282791 discussion thereof http://my.opera.com/unite/blog/2009/07/14/fixing-proxy-problems http://my.opera.com/unite/blog/2009/07/14/fixing-proxy-probl... decentralization-stories: Opera Unite was down for days because it depended on centralized proxies http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-itunes-user-has-account-hacked-loses-access-to-his-own-purchases.html http://www.itwriting.com/blog/2647-itunes-user-has-account-h... decentralization-stories: a guy’s account got closed after someone broke into it, and he lost all of his previous six years of iTunes purchases. http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disabled/ http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disable... decentralization-stories http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disabled/ http://blogs.gnome.org/rodrigo/2010/03/26/facebook-account-d... decentralization-stories http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2010/09/scribd_puts_my.html http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2010/09/scribd... decentralization-stories: scribd changes its terms http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110228/t-mobile-killing-off-microsofts-danger-servers-ahead-of-android-based-sidekicks/ http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/20110228/t-mobile-killing-of... decentralization-stories: the hiptop/sidekick will be bricked. http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their-data-should-ever-go-google/ http://e1ven.com/2011/04/14/why-no-company-that-values-their... decentralization-stories. in this case google just broke some things, that’s all. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/googles-lack-transperancy-and-openness-android https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/googles-lack-transpera... Earlier this month, Google removed Grooveshark’s popular app from the Android Market for violation of the Android terms of service, later informing Grooveshark that the removal was related to a “complaint from the RIAA" but nevertheless refusing to provide an actual legal or policy basis for the takedown. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-facebook-and-googles-concept-of-real-names-is-revolutionary/243171/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/why-fa... Why Facebook and Google's Concept of 'Real Names' Is Revolutionary - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic A bit of a #decentralization-stories item, maybe.

generators 15y ago

google massively tried a completely decentralized form of communication named google wave. if people do not pick it up, google is bound to go ahead.

Jach 15y ago

>If Alice’s email gets marked as spam, Bob ought to be able to find out why — and fix it! While Gmail doesn't exactly let you figure out why, you can nevertheless fix it. That's what the Not Spam action is for. I've had mail land in the spam folder that shouldn't have, it only took a few 'not spam' actions to retrain it to let it through again. You're also free to backup your Gmail through both imap and pop. I never got the Gmail paranoia--the worst they do from my perspective is possibly deep-analyzing my emails in an effort to better serve me ads. They possibly sell the data to others (though I've seen no evidence of this) for them to serve me better ads. All these ads I don't ever see anyway because I use AdBlock Plus making their efforts pointless for my account. I'm not a fan of the rhetorical conflation of decentralized computing with democracy. His other material I don't really want to comment on.

dagw 15y ago
Do you know if Not Spam works locally or globally? Assume I'm emailing Alice and Bob and get flagged as spam. Alice checks her spam folder every day and keeps flagging my mails as not spam. Bob just assumes Google's spam filter works and has never looked in his spam folder. Will my emails eventually get through to both Alice and Bob or just to Alice?
- Jach 15y ago
  I'd bet with fairly high odds (and hope) Gmail whitelists locally. If Alice thinks your mails aren't spam but Bob does, I would want Alice to get your mails normally but Bob to be able to keep ignoring you, implying a need for local blacklists and whitelists with a reasonable set of defaults. If Alice + some large number of others think you're alright, maybe you'll be promoted to not being flagged as spam by default. Bob might then just have to take the action of marking your things as spam to invoke a (hopefully) local spam/blacklist rule.
  - glimcat 15y ago
    There are a few functions which whitelist locally like adding someone to your contacts. But I think "Not Spam" moves it to the inbox and provides feedback into the voting algorithm without whitelisting at any scope.

napierzaza 15y ago

"Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers," Does he realize that Apple computer has been around a lot longer than the internet? And that they've been making an OS with applications on it a lot longer than there was a web browser? So maybe that's actually what Apple DOES and does well?

glassx 15y ago
I think it was just an example of companies changing the web for the worse little by little, that was the point of the article. And to be honest, I share his feelings. The web is getting more and more closed with "The Big Four" reigning. But it is ironic that there was a lot of backlash when Apple announced there were going to be only Web apps back then that caused them to release the SDK and App Store: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-... However, at the same time I like the whole "Apps" (AppStore, Steam, Market) concept because it helped create whole businesses. Lots of small people making real money in the age of piracy... But I digress, this is completely off topic.
kragen 15y ago
The internet dates from, depending on how you date it, 1969, sometime in the mid-1970s, or January 1, 1983. Apple dates from April 1, 1976. Maybe 34 (edit: 35) years is "a lot longer" than 28 years to you? Anyway, Apple doesn't do that on their less popular computers — Macintoshes.

_debug_ 15y ago

I love the fact that he has his own mailing list instead of a blog. The internet continues to surprise me every day.

joeyh 15y ago
The reason it's a mailing list: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/000910.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/0... Also touches on the discoverability problems with using mailing lists like this. I wish I'd been reading this list thirteen years ago when it was started.
- kragen 15y ago
  > I wish I'd been reading this list thirteen years ago when it was started. Thank you; that's a wonderful compliment.
- LiveTheDream 15y ago
  One of the reasons is: > I want my list mail to serve as prior art to stop obvious patents from being granted, or to revoke them or the obvious claims in them in court Do discussions of ideas really count as prior art, or must there also be at least an effort of implementation ("reduction to practice" according to wikipedia[1])? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art
  - kragen 15y ago
    In theory, yes; if the invention is "known or used by others in this country [the US]" prior to the date of the invention by the patenting inventor, it counts as prior art. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_35_00000102----000-.html http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_35_00000102----000... It's tricky, though, because that's the invention date, not the filing date, and the "inventor" could lie about the date of the invention. The safest approach is to publish my ideas in print in a foreign country, ideally in a small print run in a language spoken by nobody at Intellectual Ventures, and then wait a year before posting to the list. Prior art does not have to include a reduction to practice; conception of the invention is sufficient. Lore has it that Charles Hall's waterbed patent was narrowed substantially by a reference to Stranger in a Strange Land, which described waterbeds.

lionhearted 15y ago

> Google wants you to keep your mail in Gmail instead of on your home computer Offline Gmail is cool. "Mail Settings" (gear in top right corner) -> "Offline" Doesn't work in all browsers since Google Gears was deprecated in the newest versions of Chrome and Firefox, but it's only a minor hassle to run an earlier version of Firefox for the offline mode and syncing. Very helpful to me and quite easy/convenient to set up, even with the recent Gears deprecation.

corkill 15y ago
Yeah gears is gone. They have just launched a new version for chrome which is quite good. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmpbfngldlkglhimk https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...

cageface 15y ago

There's a lot of interesting grey area between surrendering everything to Google and rolling your own mail server. I unplugged from Google this month but I'd still rather pay a little money to fastmail.fm, for instance, than fight spam myself. The net isn't the wild west anymore but it doesn't have to be a sterile walled garden either.

sixtofour 15y ago
Fastmail, exactly what I did this month. I'd already had an account on hot standby (it's cheap), I just changed my mail forwarding to fastmail. I think it's a reasonable practice to spread your services around.

anotherevan 15y ago

Every time I see one of these "Why I don't want to work at Google" articles I think to myself, "Don't worry, they don't want you to work there either."

kragen 15y ago
Uh, thanks. :)

ristretto 15y ago

Then don't

matth 15y ago

Much of Kragen's vision for the future is in line with where I think our world is heading. It actually inspired me to draft up a blog post: http://blog.matthewghudson.com/post/9497957290/the-public-and-its-problems http://blog.matthewghudson.com/post/9497957290/the-public-an...

kragen 15y ago
Thank you! That makes me happy. Don't forget that the future is yet unwritten, though.

sneak 15y ago

He had me right up to the point where he claimed that Jake Appelbaum has made a significant contribution to anything.

zmonkeyz 15y ago

'Apple wants to relegate websites to second-class status on their popular computers, and exercises viewpoint censorship on what “apps” they allow in their “app store”.' It was originally intended that you would make web apps to access on the IPhone and they did not want developers making apps for it. Consumers and developers demanded that feature so you got what you wished for. (not you per se)

omouse 15y ago

49 comments in 5 hours and almost all of them talk about the technical aspects or about working at Google. This is about more than that, it's about decentralization as a way to empower people so that in the end we don't need centralized companies or governments to control our data. Apple (and other companies) control what you're allowed to download. Google (and other companies) control what emails get through to you and your email history. Microsoft (and other companies) control your hardware. He forgot to mention the larger and more disturbing point; many of these companies are American and so they're under the jurisdiction of the NSA and FBI (and CIA if you're not from around there). With centralization, law enforcement has easy and direct access to things. The only barrier is a warrant and even that isn't a barrier as we saw in the AT&T NSA wiretapping case. He wouldn't want to work at Google or many other companies because they're pushing for centralization which brings certain political/social effects that he dislikes. So can we please have a discussion about the political and social implications of decentralization vs centralizaton rather than the technical aspects??

qjz 15y ago
Exactly. Or, as the author puts it: I imagine a different future, where if Alice wants to talk to Bob and Bob wants to talk to Alice, there’s no unaccountable intermediary that can interfere with their communication, whether they’re speaking text, or video, or 3-D models, or simulation. I never thought I'd live in a society where the value of privacy or anonymity was up for debate. These are real world concepts that I thought everyone took for granted in their routine communications, but are being tossed aside on the Internet merely because finding a technical solution seems too hard (and it is very, very hard). Maybe we should reframe the debate around the concept of intimacy instead. There are a lot of activities that are perfectly innocent, but I still wouldn't want to do them in a crowded room or in my boss's office. The Internet is becoming the primary medium of electronic communication. I should be able to use it to have an intimate discussion without it being data mined by anyone. There's no reason any third party should be able to detect the conversation is even taking place, and anonymity should be at my discretion, subject to the acceptance of the party I'm communicating with.
- rmrm 15y ago

ender7 15y ago

Here's the issue. No one cares. Well, I care, and presumably a number of other readers care, but compared to the total sum of internet users we're just a rounding error. You know why people are using services like Gmail? Because it just works. Have you ever tried setting up your own mail server? I like to think that I'm pretty damn skilled with "the computer" but after a day of tweaking I'm still not sure mine is operating properly. The sad fact is that being idealistic is not enough. You have to be idealistic and better than the bad guys. If you offer people a system that is hard to use, wastes their time, and/or is simply inferior to other options, no one will ever use it no matter how idealistically pure it is. Then you just sound like an asshole when you say "you're all morally inferior for refusing to degrade your experience." So. Fix your system. Make it better than what we currently have. Then come back and convince me to care (hint: if your solution involves end-users installing and maintaining multiple servers, you're doing it wrong).

j_baker 15y ago
To be fair, the author (appears to) work for Canonical who has had success working to make idealistic software more approachable. So it appears to me that he isn't some Ivory Tower FOSS advocate, and is merely stating a personal preference.
- paulv 15y ago
  He doesn't work for Canonical. The domain is canonical.org, not canonical.com.
- sciurus 15y ago
  "kragen has worked for a variety of companies doing mostly cool things. In early 2006, he pulled up stakes and headed to South America, to begin exploring how he can empower people through technology. And to work on his Spanish."
- kragen 15y ago
  I do not now work for and never have worked for Canonical Software, although they tried to buy our domain early on, and they're good folks. I recuse myself from the question of whether I am or am not an ivory-tower FOSS advocate.

msh 15y ago

Isn't This part of problem freedom box want to solve?

kragen 15y ago
Yes, the Freedom Box project is directed by people whose ideals I share.
sudonim 15y ago
My frustration with the freedom box is that the way they pitch it, it will only appeal to the nerdiest nerds. I think it's an awesome idea, but for it to make any impact it has to have better packaging.

garyd 15y ago

Kragen is obviously not well informed of how the Internet works regardless of how long he's been online. Or to use one of his piss poor analogies, just because a cat is 20 years old does not mean he knows every cat in the neighborhood. His descriptions of DSL, wireless networking, p2p, network topology, and his guesses about the infrastructure behind major "evil" web sites are about as narrow sighted as a twenty year old feline.

kragen 15y ago
I would be delighted to become better informed. Would you like to explain a couple of my errors to me?

mlinksva 15y ago

FWIW I think "Why I do not want to work at Google" originally composed in HN thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728174 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728174 These older posts are also fun http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January/000322.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/1999-January... http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-November/000841.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe... Doing many things, including filtering spam, is more difficult in a decentralized environment. (It is curious that email, itself decentralized, has come to be dominated by several large service providers; I wonder how much of this is due to economies of scale for fighting spam and other attacks relative to other economies of scale relative to things not characterizable as an economy of scale? Search of documents published in a decentralized manner on the web is another example.) Many things are even easier in a completely centralized manner, thus G+, Facebook, Twitter, and their morbid predecessors. For all their issues, architecturally decentralized email, web, and internet are much more valuable than the 2011 versions of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy silos. So thank you to all working on making the next bits of decentralized architecture work. I imagine it is possible to do a bit of this work at Google et al, but it is clearly way, way down the priority list of any such companies.

kragen 15y ago
That is correct. Thanks for pointing that out, Mike. I probably should have linked to that in my post.

billmcneale 15y ago

tl;dr: This guy doesn't want to work for Google because he hosts his own email and Google wants you to store your email in Gmail.

kragen 15y ago

It's heartening to see so much interest in my little post; it was quite a surprise to come home from a weekend traveling around to dance contact improv and discover hundreds of comments waiting for me. It's disappointing that so many of the comments focus on one or another point about why things are the way they are: spam filtering is hard and benefits from secrecy from spammers, centralized software is currently more usable, etc. My post was about values, about what kind of a world we can be building, not about which tactics are expedient in the world we currently live in. People with the same values can get together to discuss what tactics to use to advance their goals, but it's no use in suggesting to me that I should use a tactic that advances goals I oppose because that tactic is more expedient!

damian2000 15y ago

I think there is a fair bit of difference between 'closed' centralized control in the form of apple / facebook, which is generally proprietary and secretive, compared to the 'open' centralization that google espouses ... they are one of the great proponents of open source ... their android OS for example is open source. Given that, I probably still wouldn't want to work for them though, from what I've heard theres a lot of c++ coding at 1am in the morning. ;-)

sschueller 15y ago

Why do you have gmail.com listed for the canonical.org SPF record? "v=spf1 a mx include:gmail.com ~all" Might be a reason your emails end up in spam at gmail. Although a and mx would cover it I would also add: ip4:208.70.31.125 a:canonical.org If you use gmail to send mail the SPF should be: include:aspmx.googlemail.com or include:_spf.google.com

kragen 15y ago
> Why do you have gmail.com listed for the canonical.org SPF record? As you guessed, some people at canonical.org send email from Gmail. We actually added the SPF record hoping it would help with the reputation problem. > If you use gmail to send mail the SPF should be: include:aspmx.googlemail.com or include:_spf.google.com Thank you!