Holy balls we are living in the wild west era of the internet.
Shit needs to be regulated.
Just I’m not super confident regulation will come in the form of mandatory encryption at rest, end-to-end encryption by default and only not when necessary, banning selling data to 3rd parties, being able to quickly and speedily unban unjustly banned accounts by regulator intervention (like this one).
Terms of service are bullshit when our entire digital identities are attached to emails.
Looking around, the regulation we’ll see will instead be in the form “nothing to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide.”
The problem is they lose their email address, which is tied to just about every digital account they have. Losing your email can royally fuck you. Many sites send an email to the old email of you try to change it, so you’ll have to get in touch with support to get it changed, and then support will want proof it’s your account somehow, and the whole process is gonna take days or weeks to fix all your accounts. God help you if you forgot any passwords because now you can’t login or even reset the password since that goes through email.
Everyone should own their own domain and have ownership of their digital life. If you don’t, then you are borrowing something that can be taken from you easily.
No one can take my email from me. Even if the current provider goes out of business, I can always point it elsewhere.
Holy shit, that’s a pretentious way to say you think you’re hot shit while showing you’ve barely got a chin above script kiddie.
Where the fuck are you gonna cram billions of new DNS records? You trying to nuke the whole system?
Billions of new IP addresses? From where, your ass? IPv4’s fucking dead and IPv6 is crawling.
You want billions of shitty home servers? Why not just hand cybercriminals the keys to everyone’s data?
No big email providers for spam filtering? Hope you like dick pills and Nigerian princes.
Home servers for email? Great plan. Who needs reliability when the power goes out or your shit internet drops?
You think everyone can afford this? Some people can barely pay rent, let alone run a fucking server.
“Private” home servers? Please. They’d fold faster than a house of cards in a hurricane up against any direct persistent attack from any capable threat actors.
Try running a big mailing list on your puny home setup. Watch that shit crash and burn.
Good luck explaining to the feds why you can’t cough up subpoenaed emails.
You really think billions of clueless users can handle this? It’s like giving toddlers chainsaws.
Everyone run their own email on locally hosted domains…? Jesus fucking Christ. What are you, 14?
Edit: lemy.lol has MX records that point to icloud.
This toolbag indeed uses someone else’s services for their email exchange.
This is a pretty misleading article. They cite the BBC “investigation” as a source, but if you go to the BBC article you’ll quickly see it’s not an investigation or anything near that. It’s just a reporting of the anecdotes of 3 individuals who happen to be Palestinians living abroad. You can’t establish any type of conclusions on a sample size that small.
This isn’t a study, it’s not a survey, it’s not a poll, it doesn’t prove that Microsoft is intentionally making these bans, it doesn’t track down the actual reasons for the bans, or anything really. The BBC article is fine for what it is, just a reporting of a mildly interesting event, but this windoscentral article is just bad bait.
The BBC article was subsequently edited down to remove key information while no comment or retraction was made. This isn’t surprising as many journalist who work for the BBC have accused their editors of bias.
wait so you’re telling me in addition to checking the cited material, I have to now check if the cited material was edited? no one fuckin told me that what the hell
While that is a good catch, the only two differences between the original article and the edited one is that they removed the statement where they mentioned they’ve spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad and added a little paragraph that mentions the number of causalities that were caused by the war. The contents of the article are still largely the same. The original article still isn’t an investigation like the windowscentral article claims. It’s just a reporting of the experiences of the 20 or so individuals they’ve spoken to, where again, only 3 individuals are highlighted. I don’t see anything wrong with the BBC article, my issue is with the way that windowscentral framed the BBC article.
Also for the record, while the BBC has it’s biases, Al Jazeera is a Qatari state owned propaganda outlet. They’re not credible on most things, but especially when it comes to anything relating to the middle east. Take anything they say with a tub of salt.
one does not become dependent on tech giants without a critical loss at some day, no matter whats the “reason” for it and they tend to do weird stuff within or without laws…
For others or for a new start and how to avoid such in the future (maybe “migrate” your relatives to secure services “before” you get ripped off):
get your own domain like somestupidtext.info make sure the toplevel (.info .com .net or whatever) has laws that let you effecticely reclaim your domain if one of the providers block something or fail to do their job. also make sure you do not fall into only-first-year-very-cheap traps for domain prices. maybe check that the toplevel domain is not one regulary found to be used by spammers and thus maybe blocked by some providers.
use one company only for DNS related things, maybe name.com, but there are plenty others and lots of generic hosting providers also provide dns-only hosting.
get some provider to host email for your domain or run your own emailserver and set mx records to that mailserver.
configure and change valueable services to your email addresses under your domain
make sure you have a local(!) copy of all your emails that automatically updates itself, if you can, at least daily, offlineimap checked in into a git repo could do a good job
if one provider sucks, change it and leave the rest as is.
the setup alone already shows the provider, that only gov (of that toplevel domain) can effectively block you, as when the email provider tries to block you, you find a new one and change MX records (and obviously cancel and stop paying the blocking one), if the DNS provider tries to block you, you get a new provider and transfer the domain to it, if that fails a lawyer could help) also the small providers have usually no way to know what you do on another account at another company, only if you put your whole life into the hands of the few known big evil ones, you are that vulnerable to the chaos they produce.
also setting up recovery addresses (if possible) is a good idea, like when one email is unusable for whatever reason, the provider already has a known email address from you to start a recovery process, of course that second email address MUST be out of reach of the provider of the first one, that is, if you have somemailprovider.com address and one at microshits, then microshit buys somemailprovider.com, you have to change everything from that somemailprovider.com to a new one just to stay secure. due to this, your own domain with a connected email service of a random hosting provider comes in handy as you would not have to change all the email adresses but only that random email provider. also if skype/zoom etc does not work for you, there are plenty of other ways to do video talks on the internet. i prefer to be independent for same reasons even though i haven’t been blocked yet, i just saw the signs of possible approaching evil because of the shitflow big evil tech produces all the time just to flush their believers view of what would be possible down the drain and choosed independence ahead of losses. following signs like leaving companies with red flags (like just too big, like already robbed their users, like give a shit on their users security, like give a shit on their bugs and blame users while their own big-tech-company-network is pwned by someone unknown for month and such) a more privacy aligned messenger that supports videocalls would be for example matrix, there are multiple clients to choose from and lots of providers to choose from (also self hosting or becoming a provider is possible while for talking to each other it is NOT necessary to use the same provider, but again self-hosting of course is most-secure) one cannot do things securely without knowing a bit about what it is. to learn more about dns, email, matrix or other topics the internet is full of informations, sometimes wikipedia is very helpful and linux user groups exist for talking about stuff and helping each other. the type of support is different and -as i see it - much more efficient, but different, there is no one to do it for you (or you get into the very same dependency trap again) but you are encouraged to learn what it takes to do so and do it yourself.
example prices from a random dns provider: .de 10€ / year .eu 16€ / year
random mail provider imap email 100GB storage 3 € /month
that is having more control over your email than when using big tech, may cost you more or less 4€ per month (and maybe the learning time to set everything up). for matrix server one might use managed services, looking around i found etke.cc with 5€ as a base minimum when you provide your own VPS for it, but with many other options too. maybe the free hosting announced by element.io where i did not look into yet is an option too. i prefer my own domains and servers, but just using separate hosting companies for dns, email and matrix gives a whole lot more control while still beeing a simple and adjustable setup. while matrix does not lock you in into one instance from the beginning (i can chat/call from/to my own account/server to any other account on other servers while beeing able to try this out using a multi-account-client that connects to all acvounts/servers at the same time) they now have bridges so one can use the same client to chat with others on telegram or whatsapp (and others) too, so this is rather the opposite of vendor lock-in. while a matrix hoster could still block your account in error and if you did not use your own domain for your matrix account at the hoster, you could connect to your friends again from another account at another hoster as you would still have their matrix adresses stored in your client. however to securely use matrix one should read about its security mechanisms and what backup keys are and why one should validate new connections.
if you had the loss, at least take advantage of the message/lesson: big tech is too powerful and thus insecure. maybe do three steps in parallel: choose and migrate to smaller providers, more providers each for different things, if one f**ks up, everything else stays in place, thus less stressful on problems. second step in parallel: get yourself into DIY your digital life. every little step into independence is a step more powerful while removing the very same power from big tech to attack the stability of your digital life. third step in parallel: share your problem including the possible solutions, which you choosed and how it went to those you think might take advantage of that information ;-)
I love these ideas but self hosting is simply not a solution for average citizens who aren’t skilled at such things. To them it would be like paving their own highway with bridges and also maintaining and policing them. It might be easy for you and me, but that’s because we have training and experience and we chose this way. It’s not a justifiable opportunity cost for most people.
I think a different kind of org than the googles metas and Microsofts of the world is in need, like a compute & communications co-op that can actually compete on that level of capability offerings, accessibility, performance and security.
i think it should not be too difficult to compete with m$ security, that is at least true for the state of the last 30 years or maybe more.
But something like a non-profit organisation - or a bunch of them- that make self-hosting for essential services (like email, messenger, video calls) a charm could be a big win for billions of peoples.
eNom is supposed to forward all emails from one of my domains to Gmail. I get maybe half of them. Really gotta get around to moving that over to SimpleLogin and Cloudflare.
To email? Has being possible to host your own email server for decades. Don’t need to over complicate it with federation, also what would that even look like?
This is what I fear the most with these platforms. They have these shitty automated moderation systems that can just decide to delete everything you have there on a whim. Already common on places like youtube and facebook, but it just keeps getting worse. Every site is pushing users into signing in with their google/microsoft/whatever accounts.
Remember the guy who lost access to his smart home when amazon banned him for no reason?
Not under their new owner, since he's the one that pushed for the definition change in the first place, among many other blatantly biased changes to the ADL in the past decade.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different, but i agree with your sentiment.
if you are depending on a platform where you are the goods being sold, not the customer, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are taken of the shelf on a moment’s notice.
well it wasn’t for no reason, it was for stupid reason, which is different
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
The accusation was completely false, and even if the guy actually were a racist pos, remotely disabling devices he paid for and owns is not a good road to go on.
Yeah, guess I ovesimplified a bit. For anyone not aware, it was one report of racism towards a delivery driver.
ok, that doesn’t even make sense, but it shows how wildly different and random the “reasons” can be.
i was thinking about the case where guy took a photo of some rash on his son’s penis to send it to a doctor and some automated system flagged it as child pornography.
while you are technically correct, i would refrain from disrespecting these poor people.
Facebook content moderators in Kenya call the work ‘torture.’ Their lawsuit may ripple worldwide
By EVELYNE MUSAMBI and CARA ANNA Published 9:52 AM GMT+2, June 29, 2023
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — On the verge of tears, Nathan Nkunzimana recalled watching a video of a child being molested and another of a woman being killed.
Eight hours a day, his job as a content moderator for a Facebook contractor required him to look at horrors so the world wouldn’t have to. Some overwhelmed colleagues would scream or cry, he said.
I remember that story. Thanks for that perspective - certainly, no disrespect is intended. In the context of people who should ever see your child in the nude, social media company employees are strangers which I used a synonym for. Strangers who aren’t paid enough for what they do. “Underpaid randos” sounds OK at the moment but I’ll sleep on it.
i didn’t mean to accuse of anything, it is just morbidly interesting how many layers there are to this modern dystopia we are being lured into right now.
before reading that story, i wouldn’t give content moderators second thought as well.
I use Gmail, and am concerned about the same thing. But of the alternatives I don’t know any that have wide support for social logins, which are damn convient.
i have my personal and important mails in my private mailbox, on my own domain. i use gmail as a backup and spam mail, i use it everywhere where i assume the mail can go to some spam database sooner or later.
so if i lost access to it one day, i would lose history of some confirmations from various eshops and shit like that, but nothing that would really cripple me.
i would definitely not put my family photos there and hope they stay there forever.
Yeah, see that is the issue. The social logins (though not for anything real money related) and the photo backups are so well integrated. Nothing really competes. My personal emails are even less of a concern to me than the rest.
No, it’s standard corp level behavior that’s beholden to government censorship and propaganda when it doesn’t fit the narrative. You can substitute any big tech company in the US for Google. They all do this. It’s why the government is not a fan of TikTok, they don’t have that same level of control over the flow of information.
that and it is quite literally spyware that sends all the consumer data to the CCP where they can adjust their own algorithms to show things that can sway the minds of people too young to think critically
The hell do you think the data from American companies goes‽ Snowden literally told us the US govt is doing the same thing…not saying they should, just asking where is the outrage that we’re being spied on by our own government… It’s plenty there when we’re being spied on by China… And quite frankly I feel like China can do a lot less to me than home can.
I’m no microsoft fanboy, but I am shocked that they would do this. Everyone should be shocked. To be anything but shocked is to be complacent.
This is the kind of shit google does on the regular, Never heard of Microsoft doing anything like this before.
And as I’ve said in response to instances of google doing this, I’ll say it again here. This continues to highlight the dangers of having all your eggs in one companies basket, by choosing comfort and convenience you’ve given your entire digital life over to a company that has no compunctions against metaphorically guillotining it for any reason they want.
This continues to highlight the dangers of having all your eggs in one companies basket, by choosing comfort and convenience you’ve given your entire digital life over to a company that has no compunctions against metaphorically guillotining it for any reason they want.
I agree. Which is why I don’t use anything Microsoft. Even in software projects I go out of my way to not use a single Microsoft dependency or library.
I self-host my own photo auto-upload with Nextcloud. I don’t use Windows. I’m forced to use MS stuff at my work but I managed to get the company-wide policy changed to allow anyone to use Linux or Mac, so I’m running Ubuntu.
I’ve also been working up the effort to ditch stock Android and go with GrapheneOS.
What confirmation do we have that Microsoft did not have a good reason to ban this person? There seems to be just this single report going around the net.
Genuinely shocking and disgusting. What is Microsoft’s problem with people just trying to live their lives? They absolutely need a class action lawsuit over this. I’m so glad I just switched to Ubuntu as my default and now really don’t want to give this sh*thole company another cent.
The corpos can fuck you over any time for any reason. If your data is not held on your own infrastructure, it’s not your data. If your computer runs Windows, it’s not your computer.
windowscentral.com
Active