You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

http://brooksreview.net/2013/03/quit-i-dare-you/

by tmoretti • 13 years ago

66 67 13 years ago

vacri2• 13 years ago

Why is Bing seen as the only other game in town? If you're really about not letting 'the man' in on your stuff, why would you go to the other 'the man' of Microsoft?

I don't use them, but my privacy-conscious friends use duckduckgo for this exact reason, and it has a wealth of rich search available.

Also, something in me philosophically opposes a mail company that charges 50% more for IMAP access. IMAP should be encouraged for the masses, not shunted into a 'you-only-want-it-if-you-know-it' space. IMAP solves most of the problems I hear from normal users that isn't password-related.

LukeShu• 13 years ago

I was thinking that about Bing too, when I first read it. Then the Bing thing turns into "and that's a worst-case, we also have DDG, which kicks butt!"

vacri2• 13 years ago

Not sure how I missed that on a reread, but it's still puzzling why he firstly recommends replacing 'the man' with the other 'the man'.

nearmiss2• 13 years ago

no love for startpage.com?

brianwillis2• 13 years ago

I like to run my email on my server, but it’s a significant undertaking and I don’t recommend you do that.

I agree with Ben on this point, but don't really understand why things are this way. In looking for a replacement for Google Reader I found a bunch of high quality self hosted options. Similarly, hosting a website on your own server (or one you rent from someone else) is a pretty trivial exercise for anyone that reads Hacker News.

So why is email so damn hard? Where is the Wordpress of email?

analog2• 13 years ago

Gmail is the Wordpress of email surely?

gtz57• 13 years ago

Gmail isn't self-hosted or open source. He wasn't just saying both are popular. Unless you meant something else?

kennu• 13 years ago

Would you mind listing the high quality self hosted alternatives to Google Reader? I host my own email (Postfix+Dovecot on Ubuntu is pretty simple), and I might like to do it for RSS feeds, too.

brianwillis2• 13 years ago

It looks like I'll be sticking with Fever[1]. The assigning-temperatures-to-posts thing seemed like a gimmick at first, but it actually works somewhat well, and you can ignore it if you want to. It also syncs with Reeder[2] on the iPhone/iPad which I've been using with Google Reader and am reluctant to part with.

[1] http://www.feedafever.com

[2] http://reederapp.com/

mnutt• 13 years ago

Newsblur is also open source:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

groby_b• 13 years ago

Uh, thanks. I don't want the Wordpress of e-mail, at least not self-hosted.

If you've ever run a WP site, you're well aware of the number of security fixes (and the insane number of attacks, if the site happens to be semi-popular) that go with it. That's why it's a significant undertaking - the setup is a one-time cost, but fighting to stay as secure as possible is an ongoing nightmare.

[Edit: Not to diss WP here. I think they're doing a great job. It's the general problem of staying up-to-date re: patches]

jfoster• 13 years ago

Spam is one aspect of why email is hard, and having more than just a few email accounts on your host helps to tackle that problem. Take a look in your Gmail spam folder at how much they've managed to weed out.

brdrak• 13 years ago

I self host my personal email and have to use gmail at work. Spam is actually the one thing that I find gmail weaker at compared with self hosting.

My nearly stock Postfix setup with a few basic anti-spam settings, rejects about 80% of spam. Then stock SpamAssassin config (with a nightly sa-update cron job) gets accuracy somewhere into the 90s. The SpamAssassin Bayes plugin takes it to very close to 100% (maybe 2 or 3 Spams per year).

The best part is that I'm in control -- when someone continues to send annoying email even after being asked to stop (like our daughter's old childcare provider), I can add a Postfix rule to reject their mail at SMTP time and enjoy knowing that for every email they send, they'll get a Non-delivery report from their SMTP server complete with a personal message from me.

Another example: an acquaintance liked to send mass mailers to everyone in his address book of the quality on par with most people's facebook/twitter status updates, followed by a barrage of useless replies from people I don't know. After realizing I never want to see those kinds of messages from anyone, I added a regex to Postfix header_checks to reject messages with more that 15 @ symbols in To: or Cc:.

Another benefit of self hosting is unlimited temporary email aliases (e.g. temp123@example.com). Many places don't accept the standard myemail+temp123@example.com sub-address that gmail supports (and a spammer can easily identify), and it's nice to be able to tell when companies abuse my email.

spc476• 13 years ago

I have a GMail account but I don't use it. All I get is spam email. And yes, GMail finds a ton, but my inbox, which should be empty (or with very few emails from people thinking I'm someone I'm not) and it is not (granted, I only check once or twice a year, but I should not end up with over 100 messages in the inbox).

fusiongyro• 13 years ago

Email is hard because it is both architecturally insecure, and tremendously valuable to malicious attackers. It's hard because addressing its problems leads to buckets of different bad solutions rather than a single standard one. It's hard because the handful of big fish have decided that a reasonable way to combat its problems is to rely on interoperability with each other at the cost of you, the guy running mail.

That said, as someone who does run mail, from my perspective it's more like the rest of the internet got easier and mail is still where it was a decade ago. Everything used to suck this much. With mail, the old hassles got addressed (goodbye sendmail and your m4 configuration nightmare) but got replaced with new hassles fast enough that it's kind of the same difference. But nowadays running the rest of your web stack (DNS, HTTP server, etc) is not very hard, though the cost of a DNS screwup is still huge.

acabal2• 13 years ago

I've actually been thinking a lot about this in the past month. I too am transitioning away from Google-everything for various reasons. I only use Gmail via IMAP in Thunderbird, so I've already migrated my address book and calendar to self-hosted webDAV, which was shockingly easy.

The last thing to switch over is Gmail. I used to run a mail server in the past so I know what a pain in the ass it is. I was thinking that something very useful would be some sort of big Bash script that would install and configure webDAV and a mail server using existing packages with smart defaults, specifically for individuals hosting their own personal mail. Kind of like an owncloud, but for address books/calendar/email and using existing packages.

I'll see if I can think of this further once I actually sit down and start running my own mail server again. Anyone with thoughts or suggestions is welcomed to drop me a line :)

simonsarris2• 13 years ago

> It’s not an easy thing to do, mostly because old habits die hard, but it is actually very possible.

That's a different premise than most people are using.

I wouldn't quit Google services because its possible. I would quit Google services if it was personally worth it.

And it simply isn't. Not for me and not for the overwhelming majority of internet users.

Oddly, he confuses why it might be worth it too. He says at the beginning that it is "mostly because old habits die hard", but ends with "people are willing to give up their privacy before handing over cash". Neither of these address the utility of being in the Google ecosystem, especially if you own several Android devices.

I think its good to talk about the practicalities of leaving Google, but I don't think this article does a very thorough job. It just takes jabs and offers a few poor alternatives.

~~~

The author mentions he uses iCloud instead of Gmail, but doesn't actually say why there would be any material difference between the two. I know that alternatives to Gmail exist, but I need to know why I'd want to change my email address for more than a lark.

~~~

The author claims DuckDuckGo is "fantastic", but gives zero reasons why except for different search results. I just tried it again, and got nothing useful for "showtimes near me", "movies near me", "NBA standings", "Cafes in Nashua", and a few recipes (for recipes Google shows reviews, total time and calories in-line). Try "flights from SFO" in each. Wow. Prices to popular destinations in-line in Google.

What different search results, make DuckDuckGo fantastic? Does anyone have any examples?

Here we are at long last in the age of the Semantic Web, 12 years after Berners-Lee declared it a thing (and 7 years since he lamented that his vision had gone unrealized). The combination of web semantics and very powerful inferences have made Google (and Bing) search into wonderful powerhouses of utility with so much information above the fold and even before the click! DuckDuckGo has nothing in this space.

One of the best tests for search engines in my opinion is what it does it poor or incomplete search terms. Often I don't know how to spell something, or someone has related something to me with incomplete information. What if someone told me to look up a cat breed called the "egyptian maw". DuckDuckGo returns nothing at all useful, Google correctly figures out that my friend spelled the breed wrong, its really "egyptian mau".

Interestingly, trying DuckDuckGo with capital letters ("Egyptian Maw", or merely capitalizing Egyptian) produces completely different results, in this case more correct ones. That certainly fits the "DuckDuckGo is different" mold, but in a way that's horrifying.

EvanKelly• 13 years ago

Not to nitpick, but I was surprised to see you got "nothing useful" for "NBA Standings".

What do you consider useful? Is it not worth your time if the search engine doesn't provide the current standings on the page? My first result for "nba standings" was nba.com/standings which is probably the canonical source for such a thing.

nilkn4• 13 years ago

To be fair to DuckDuckGo, I tried your searches and did get useful results. "movies near me" took me to Yahoo! Movies, which showed me theaters near me. I could also search for something like "movies [zip code]". I tried it for a few different zip codes and it always got me the results I wanted, but not always through the same site. For one zip code, it brought up the Fandango page for that area, which had exactly what I wanted. For another, it took me right to the showtime page of the only theater in the town.

As for "NBA standings," I'm not a huge NBA guy, so maybe I don't know what you wanted, but it takes me right to nba.com/standings, which is the same as the top result on Google. The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine. Actually I'd say that's one of the least important factors in a search engine, to me anyway.

Anyway, with all that said, I don't have anything against Google. I just don't agree with your assessment of DuckDuckGo.

Edit: That's not to say DuckDuckGo is perfect. I queried my own name and found that DuckDuckGo didn't pick up on all the stuff that Google does about me. For instance, I can't seem to find my linkedin page through DuckDuckGo at all.

Still, honestly, I think it seems pretty decent for a search engine. Not better than Google, but certainly useful.

Edit2: DuckDuckGo actually has some cool features that Google does not.

Search "password generator" on DDG and it actually generates a password for you above the search results. Search "hackage reactive-banana" and it gives you a summary of the Haskell package above the search results.

simonsarris2• 13 years ago

The author touted DuckDuckGo returning different results as an advantage, so I've been looking for differences between DuckDuckGo and Google, not similarities, and semantic data pulled is the easiest way to show that Google results are more informative faster.

After all, if we ignore all the sugar from Google results, and they merely return the same top result, why then would I use DuckDuckGo?

I've been fooling with it for 15 minutes now. Are there any good examples of DuckDuckGo results being more relevant than Google results?

JoshTriplett• 13 years ago

> What I would miss from Google, though, is stuff like "5 feet to meters." Google does the calculation. DuckDuckGo, like a pure search engine, just gives me a link which will do the calculation.

For that search, DuckDuckGo shows an inline calculation: "Conversion result: 1.524 meters". It also includes a link to Wolfram Alpha, but it shows the result inline.

Cushman2• 13 years ago

> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly.

Fifteen seconds isn't a lot, but multiplied by every search you do in your life it starts to add up. Multiplied across the Internet, you start talking about whole lifetimes being wasted-- and multiplying miniscule efficiencies into lifetimes is Google's bread and butter.

> It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine.

I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.

weixiyen2• 13 years ago

I searched NBA Standings in Google and it gave me 5 teams in one division. How is that better?

RobAtticus• 13 years ago

Because you can expand that list to instantly see the rest of the NBA?

nearmiss2• 13 years ago

I've been attempting this to some extent. I use startpage.com for search, google results without the tracking. Firefox for chrome, and pay $1.50 a month for a personal domain email account.

My gmail account is only used for my Android device at this point.

notlisted2• 13 years ago

Hmmmm, I suspect that Google, just like Facebook, creates "shadow profiles" on non-members, ie profiles on unique non-member users across a very large part of the internet (G: any site using google analytics, a +1 button, etc; FB: any site with FB like button) As such, escape from Google or FB is near-impossible.

You might say: sure, but at least they will not know my identity!

Try again. Most US ISPs sell click-stream data. Several services that offer those "interesting articles elsewhere on the web" that you see on various news outlets, have in their terms that ANY registration submitted on those sites is passed on to them as well by their "publishing partners". Combine IP addresses and date/timestamps, and very detailed user profiles, including personally identifiable information, can and are compiled.

The only way to escape the clutches of G/FB is to disconnect from the web.

PS I'm fully aware of the very large number of additional tools/options one can employ to remain more anonymous (FB disconnect, VPNs, Ghostery etc etc) but remember: just one "essential" service that you cannot live without and requires a real name (mobile phone, landline, credit card, etc.) is all that is needed to "close the loop".

dictum• 13 years ago

As a paranoid would say: that's what they want you to believe.

Now that people are learning about how companies use their data in dubious ways (and they can't deny it, only PR-speak it), it's in their best interest to twist the narrative so that people believe that they now have no agency—that everyone is being tracked all the time, and that there's no way to escape that.

Why? Because if you think there's no way around it, you just give up and eventually stop worrying about being tracked and analyzed. Since you no longer care, you give up on blocking tools, and most importantly for them: you give up on trying to find alternative companies that respect your privacy.

acabal2• 13 years ago

Perhaps, but there is a kernel of truth in what the parent comment says. As long as an IP address can be associated to an undeniable identifier, like an address, credit card, SSN, etc., your identity and activity can ultimately be tracked. Perhaps not by Google, but by your ISP and thus the government who can coerce that ISP, or by business partners your ISP sells that information to.

The buck has to stop somewhere--and it stops at what packets your ISP handles, and thus has the ability to inspect, on your IP address's behalf.

notlisted2• 13 years ago

This might open your eyes a little: http://www.propublica.org/article/everything-we-know-about-w...

networked2• 13 years ago

I regularly search for fairly obscure stuff in several languages, so when I decided to quit Google Search trying to use alternatives like DuckDuckGo [1], Ixquick [2] or Bing [3] didn't quite work out for me. The best solution I found was to use StartPage [4], which works like a proxy for Google. Based on over a year of experience I can highly recommend it. I rarely have to resort to using Google Search directly and at times I prefer the non-personalized results that StartPage gives me. Still not sure if I like their domain-squattery name, though.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/

[2] https://www.ixquick.com/

[3] http://www.bing.com/

[4] https://startpage.com/

greenyoda• 13 years ago

Startpage and Ixquick are really the same thing:

"Startpage was released in 2009 in the United States as a new name for the Ixquick search engine. Because the name Ixquick can be somewhat difficult to remember and spell, people asked us for an easier name, and we were happy to oblige. Startpage uses Ixquick's search methodologies and privacy features, and is governed by the same privacy policies." [1]

[1] https://startpage.com/eng/company-background.html

networked2• 13 years ago

Not quite. Their information pages might not make this immediately clear but currently Ixquick aggregates the results from several sources while StartPage uses Google exclusively (hence the "Enhanced by Google" logo).

For a bit of fun try comparing the results they give you for the same query.

mynameishere• 13 years ago

I stopped using Google's search a long time ago because of the monstrous "instant" feature. Sure, you can turn it off, but you have to be signed in to do that. And if you're signed in, you're being very closely monitored. It wasn't that hard.

ivank• 13 years ago

You can add &complete=0 to the URL, or avoid running JavaScript on encrypted.google.com, or use https://startpage.com/ to see results that are very similar to Google Search

jpxxx• 13 years ago

I've been using DuckDuckGo exclusively for months now, and it is a dog's breakfast compared to Google. Some types of searches are almost as good, but nothing about it is better than Google's experience yet.

stevewilhelm2• 13 years ago

Just tried searching "march madness" and "yuba city hotels" in Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Google. I don't think I will be switching.

I use Google Apps for Business: 25GB email inbox plus 5GB doc storage, custom domain, Google Docs, admin controls, two-step verification, best spam filtering on the planet, integrated calendars, video chat, mobile support, UI support for multiple accounts (business and personal), 99.9% uptime, and no ads for $5 per month / per user.

robomartin• 13 years ago

Until you do something they don't approve of and they shut you out of EVERYTHING overnight.

If Google provided a no-shutdown guarantee and service to service shutdown isolation I would consider them for business. Until such time, no friggin way.

There are far better ways to deal with violators than killing off their entire account and every single service they use. Staged restrictions with feedback comes to mind.

stevewilhelm2• 13 years ago

In the nine years I have been using GMail, this has never been an issue for me.

ISL• 13 years ago

Anyone else getting 404'ed?

nilved3• 13 years ago

Why is anyone under the impression that living sans Google is difficult or unrewarding? I haven't used a single Google product in months (and I use Android.)

tolmasky• 13 years ago

So you do use a Google product, one of the ones they care most about right now.

Kerrick• 13 years ago

For anybody who wants to go for Android without Google, try Replicant, an Android distribution only running free (libre) software through its whole stack. http://replicant.us/about/

nilved3• 13 years ago

There isn't a trace of Google on my Android phone unless you count blames for the source code.

pbreit• 13 years ago

> Why is anyone under the impression that living sans Google is difficult or unrewarding?

Because it plainly is. Let's just take search. I try to switch to Bing or DDG every 3-6 months and can't take it for more than a few days. It is very, very clearly difficult and unrewarding.

nilved3• 13 years ago

I've been using DDG full-time for almost 3 years, even since before I abandoned Google. The !bang searches alone made it a better option for me.

score2• 13 years ago

I'm almost completely off Google (started my exodus late last year) and it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it'd be.

I moved into the Microsoft ecosystem.

It's all there. Bing is surprisingly good, SkyDrive surpasses even Dropbox and Office 365 w/ OneNote is the best office suite available. I even got a Windows Phone 8 (yeah, I can get carried away sometimes).

The point is, there's a whole new world out there that's sans Google, and it's probably better than you imagine it to be.

fpgeek• 13 years ago

It's great that you're happy in the Microsoft ecosystem, but other than the "not Google" checkbox, what issues with being in the Google ecosystem does being in the Microsoft ecosystem solve?

score2• 13 years ago

It's an upgrade and a change from the usual, and the change didn't disrupt my workflow. If anything, it streamlined it.

But in terms of privacy, it just means I have a new taskmaster.

cgusto• 13 years ago

So you quit using Google, but you advocate products by Apple and MS? Clearly those companies don't want to monetize your data. Ever.

piyush_soni• 13 years ago

Contrary to what the author believes and would want us to believe, at this point I really don't see how is Google going to "come and get me" with the data that I choose to give it to them. Yes, I have given my credit card number to its Play Store, but I have given that to like 15 other services on the internet who just charge me when appropriate. They have my personal emails, its machines read them and show me ads, which I block with adblock plus anyway. It is training its natural language processing algorithms by reading my emails, and not giving me a share of them. I'm fine with that. It's giving me a really unmatched email service for that cost, and I understand that. It is acting according to its privacy policy, which it is trying to unify across its products. I believe so far, except one or two occasions they have been pretty fair to it.

TommyZ• 13 years ago

> You can easily use it on your Mac in Safari by changing your hosts file and in Chrome like so.

Using Chrome to help you quit google? ;)

kephra• 13 years ago

some more points:

maps - replace them with OpenStreetMap, that could even be used offline

news - my http://w3dig.com/ aims on replacing this in the long run

play - I dont have it installed on my phone, and only use apk's I compiled myself

youtube - I host videos only my own server, but I still watch yt, if someone sends me a link

security - google blocks many one click share hosters, claiming that they are attack sites. I have this firefox/google service off since that time.

chrome - I prefer to turn of google features in FF, I wont switch to chrome, not for money or good words

analytics - a 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts might help ;-)

apis - ouch they are really evil. Sites wont work, if you turn them off, but google will monitor you if you leave them on.

... the evil big brother google is much bigger then just search

mehrzad• 13 years ago

You're fighting the Good Fight, though I personally think it's fine to use the Play Store. You use FF Nightly?

graue• 13 years ago

I don't see Google Maps mentioned here. That's proving the hardest to quit for me - by far. I moved to NYC a month ago and it would be like an order of magnitude harder to get around without GMaps' transit, walking and biking directions.

For biking, http://ridethecity.org actually gives great directions comparable to GMaps but the site isn't mobile friendly at all - have to memorize the route before you set out. I know there are alternatives for transit directions but I haven't tried them - suggestions? And I haven't seen walking directions offered anywhere.

Even for browsing maps on mobile I haven't found a good option yet. Of course there's http://openstreetmap.org/ on desktop, but it doesn't show your current location and isn't very mobile friendly. There's an "OSM Browser" app for Android, but it's solidly mediocre - no directions, doesn't show current location, and you can only scroll one screen at a time, like MapQuest circa 2002.

It's my hope that I'm simply ignorant and some smart HNers will reply with apps/sites I haven't heard of yet... Anyone?

agersant• 13 years ago

I like Nokia's map app (http://here.com). Haven't tried it on mobile but it's great on the desktop.

jamesaguilar• 13 years ago

Why would you want to? Because they are no longer providing you with as many free services as before? I mean yeah of you are selling ad space maybe. But otherwise I don't really see it.

damian2000• 13 years ago

He says he has quit Google, but its unlikely that he has quit using all third paty apps that sit directly or indirectly on Google services/APIs such as Maps & Search.

reid• 13 years ago

An alternative to the OP's recommendation of Hushmail is FastMail.fm. I recently switched to FastMail from GMail and wrote about it: http://reidburke.com/2013/03/25/own-your-email/

deconq• 13 years ago

What he doesn't mention is YouTube - the one product for which there is NO alternative. Sure, you can choose to post your own videos elsewhere, but when it comes to watching videos - many videos are only posted on YouTube and nowhere else.

You Can’t Quit, I Dare You

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