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The Screwed-O-Meter (2013)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- denkmoon 3y agoAbsolutely love the way the page gets darker.
- MandieD 3y agoPosted in 2013, but still current.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- irjustin 3y agoI got 74% for gmail. hrm....
- jrockway 3y agoI got 18% on GMail. I pay them, other people pay them, and they don't have much downtime. IMAP support hasn't changed in decades and pushes each email to your local machine. If they start to suck one day, I just point my MX records somewhere else and nobody will even know. All in all, one of the least scary services I use. Most of the 18% are them not being bound to any contract. I am not sure I have ever signed a contract that binds the other party (I don't even think my offer to buy a home completely precluded the seller from backing out), so it doesn't extra worry me. Having a backup and a changeable address assuage any of my fears. (I feel the same way about cloud providers. If GCP nukes me, it will be an annoying day to get going on AWS, but hardly the end of the world.)
- lukevp 3y agoYou just point the MX records of your custom domain to a different provider, you mean? The vast majority of Gmail users do not have custom domains, and directly give out @gmail.com addresses to other users and services.
- kelnos 3y agoThe thing is, Google Workspaces base plan is only $6/user/mo. If you value your email (which, as annoying as email can be, you should, since it's often the key to all of your other online accounts), $6/mo is... intensely reasonable. (And you get other stuff with that too; it's not just email.) Unfortunately, we've been trained to expect that everything on the internet is free nowadays, so even that sounds like an expensive service. But agreed, most people just have @gmail.com addresses, and thus no portability. Google of course knows this, and that's by design. I wish we had a popular email service that would register a domain for you as a part of the signup flow. That would be pretty cool.
- tomjen3 3y agoYou can host them at apple if you have iCloud+, the cheapest of which is 0.99. MS charges you about half of Gmail (through resellers) if you don't want the office programs installed and about the same if you want that included. Zoho mail is about 3 dollars a month and then there is that service I can't remember (just email?) that will let you host the entire domain for 10 a year. Neither of which is very expensive.
- antiterra 3y agoYes, that’s the nature of the meter — it’s ‘how screwed are you’ not ‘how screwed is everyone who uses a particular thing?’
- zootboy 3y agoI got 66% for Gmail, but a bunch of these did feel a little difficult to judge. Like "Bugs are not fixed." Is that any bugs? All bugs? The majority of bugs? Important bugs? Etc, etc. I went with no for "bugs are not fixed", but yes for "bugs are not acknowledged." Honestly, the biggest potential avenue for being screwed by Gmail is being locked out of all your other accounts that use your Gmail address as a login credential. That's sort of covered by a few of the options, but I think it deserves a question of its own (e.g. "My access to other services is mediated by this service.") I also drew a line between Gmail and GSuite. GSuite would obviously win back some points in the "I pay for it" category.
- quickthrower2 3y agoMy mitigation strategy for gmail: 1. Important logins through a domain I own are forwarded to gmail. 2. Do a regular Google takeout.
- codepoet80 3y agoI have a sinking feeling this applies to most Google services...
- genocidicbunny 3y agoIt's not quite Google-specific, but many of Google's free services do tick a lot of the checkboxes. Gmail is at least 15.
- alex7734 3y ago> They have a history of killing projects Yeah that's Google alright
- EdwardDiego 3y agoYou can pay them at least.
- themodelplumber 3y agoYeah I mean I even get invoice emails from them which is kind of amusingly reassuring.
- Pxtl 3y agoYup I paid them for my domain OH WAIT
- mdwalters 3y ago
- bombcar 3y agoThis is a great way to see how screwed you'll be.
- nvy 3y agos/'ll be/ are
- jjoonathan 3y agoHaving time on your side counts for a lot. Enough to outweigh every single box on that list. If you take action.
- mikewarot 3y agoThis seems to be quite applicable for services, if you took the questions and applied them to products, especially operating systems or programming languages, we're all in deep deep trouble.
- jrockway 3y agoCan you give me an example of how you are screwed in the programming language case?
- mikewarot 3y agoI use WikidPad[1] to store my notes, appointments, etc. I've been doing so for more than a decade. I switched to Linux last year, only to find that WikidPad does not work correctly. There were breaking changes made to one of the libraries, so none of the dialog boxes work correctly. After missing doctors appointments(that I didn't know about, because they were in WikidPad), I decided that WikidPad was something I had to be able to use, and switched back to Windows 10. I'm fortunate in that I'm not using source code, but rather a Windows Binary, so I should be good, effectively forever... or until Microsoft decides that only "apps" will be allowed. Look at all the mess that happened when Python decided that we must all convert to Python 3 to satisfy a Unicode fetish, and made a ton of breaking changes along the way. --- Also, I became interested in a C program written about 21 years ago[2], and it took the efforts of some kind souls here on HN to help me get it to run in a modern environment, because C itself has changed so much in the meanwhile. [1] https://github.com/WikidPad/WikidPad https://github.com/WikidPad/WikidPad [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQUID
- telotortium 3y agoThink you want https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid_(software) for [2]
- mikewarot 3y agoStupid Windows with it's multiple clip-boards.... actually, I was trying to link to this https://stoical.sourceforge.net/documentation.php https://stoical.sourceforge.net/documentation.php It was written in C, in 2002, but in the intervening years, C idioms have changed, and we've gone from 32 to 64 bit CPUS.
- stevenwliao 3y agoStart by analyzing whichever email service you use. Add additional checkboxes: - [y/n] Is SMS the only 2FA method available? - [y/n] Is there no 2FA at all? - [y/n] Do they have a history of unpatched zero-days? - [y/n] Is it possible that if there is a security breach, you won't hear about it because no tech journalist pays attention to this service? - [y/n] Can someone socially engineer the support team to get access to your account? - [y/n] If a hacker gets access to your account, can your bank accounts be drained?
- worthless-trash 3y agoAren't all vulnerabilities zerodays and therefore unpatched at some point?
- slater 3y agoknown vs. unknown, and all that
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoIt’s a zero-day only at the point when it’s been exploited without having been reported. “Zero” is referring to the number of days since disclosure that an exploit ocurred. If it’s patched before it’s exploited, it wouldn’t be considered a “zero-day exploit”.
- pksebben 3y agoor if it's been reported but not acted on, and gets exploited before that happens.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI believe if, say, 10 days had passed since the report, it would be called a “10-day” exploit. But it’s also security research jargon that I’m not familiar with in a practical sense so I may be wrong.
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- johngalt 3y agoExcellent checklist. Anyone who is directly accountable for operations but only a non-voting advisory role for platform selection will have flashbacks reading this list.
- sandworm101 3y agoDo they claim to not be technically "evil"? Are they in fact evil?
- intelVISA 3y agoWell, the answer is of course: it depends. Am I paid enough to look past that?
- slater 3y agothings are so bad, "may your startup never be featured, even tangentially, on rachel's site" is the new "may you live in interesting times" :D
- duxup 3y agoIt is interesting too how many of these are things people in one way or another… want / incentivize. A large chunk of the individual consumer web is free services where we are the product… but generally we won’t pay / use much of anything else. Then we get upset when the service nobody is paying (or not enough) costs money and/or dies. We as consumers seem attracted to / incentivize the inevitable “eshit…”
- gvb 3y agoIf you read with JavaScript disabled, she says Hey NoScript peeps, (or other users without Javascript), I dig the way you roll. That's why this page is mostly static and doesn't generate the list dynamically. The only things you're missing are a progressive descent into darkness and a happy face who gets sicker and sicker as you go on. Oh, and there's a total at the bottom, but anyone who uses NoScript can surely count for themselves. Rock on! Love it!
- jchw 3y agoYou know, on that note, I bet you could find a way to do this purely with CSS. Wouldn't be terribly useful, but alas.
- quickthrower2 3y agoYou could also do it server side
- polalavik 3y agoI ask this out of genuine curiosity - what is HNs obsession with disabling JavaScript? Are y’all browsing the internet like this? If so how and why? Isn’t most of the modern web dependent on JavaScript? Anytime I’ve shared a personal project on HN someone has commented that it doesn’t work with JavaScript disabled.
- Tanoc 3y agoI've been running like this ever since Javascript started to take over from Flash, circa 2010 or so. RAM usage is decreased, CPU usage is decreased, UI spam is basically gone, it often disables hostile page formatting, it lets me see which websites are slapped together like a five year old played with LEGOs and are thus security nightmares, and it generally just makes things safer and faster.
- MrStonedOne 3y ago[dead]
- 3y ago
- paulcole 3y agoHacker News scores about 40%
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI guess there should be a checkbox, or maybe even a slider, for "how much do you care about this service?" or "how much does this service impact your life?"; if HN dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, I'd be unhappy, but life would go on, whereas for many people a gmail account ban would be catastrophic.
- chunsj 3y agoWith my email message service provider, I think, 59% of screwedness, I have.
- jameskerr 3y agoClassic
- neilv 3y agoThat smiley face is very optimistic. I ticked several showstoppers, and it's still grinning. What a can-do trooper! Also, when using this analysis platform to vet production architectures, the more terrifying a SaaS/PaaS option is, the more clearly the indicator "green lights" that plan. I suspect that enterprise sales is involved.
- justinclift 3y agoNeeds some other questions added. :) * Does your house have an audio/video doorbell that staff or contractors of the company could ever interact with?