
Why I do not want to work at Google - rl1987
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2011-August/000938.html
======
omouse
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
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
I can appreciate that thought, but I think you are overlooking that we are
moving from the primary medium of the telephone for these types of
communications. Telephones certainly weren't anonymous, or undetectable. In
fact when they first started they weren't even private but quasi public (to
the operator and others on the party line).

I'm not arguing with the ideal, just pointing out that we didn't transition
straight from face to face, anonymous and undetectable to the internet. We
passed through the telephone phase, which last many decades, and arguably had
less tools available to do what you wanted. Internet communication is an
outgrowth of the telephone and its network, but arguably with some work is
able to provide more of what you want.

Your home phone was the equivalent of a gmail address. A pay phone was closer
to a home email server, or an anonymous internet cafe web browsing session. If
its shocking that this debate isn't larger about web decentralization, it
should be doubly shocking that it never seemed to occur at all, so far as I
can tell, during the phone age.

But regardless, your ISP will always be present, and your packets will always
traverse many dozens of pieces of networking equipment, owned by several dozen
big faceless institutions, along the way. Services can be eliminated, the
network cannot. True point to point communication in the manner the OP and
yourself seem to want truly requires point to point communication. Maybe we
need some innovation in the ham radio space.

~~~
wsc
Encrypting or even obscuring communications on the amateur radio bands is
illegal.

~~~
jrockway
How many people have ever been prosecuted for that, though?

Walking across the street when the light is red is illegal. But everyone does
it anyway, and "the law" does not seem to care much.

------
ender7
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
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.

~~~
kragen
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.

------
kragen
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!

------
tommi
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.

~~~
DasIch
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.

~~~
iand
I think this misses the wider point. Google are basically saying: "we can't
guarantee your anonymity so we won't pretend we can".

By enforcing a real name policy they are sending a message to those that need
real anonymity: use a system designed from the ground up to give you privacy.

~~~
dagw
Anonymity and pseudonymity are two orthogonal concepts. Google could easily
offer pseudonymity without making any sort of offer of anonymity. Arguing
against pseudonyms with "We can't guarantee your anonymity" is nothing but a
straw man.

~~~
true_religion
I don't think the everyman views them as separate concepts.

People honestly believe that if you're using a pen name, then you're anonymous
to those who you haven't told your real name to. Note even the terminology
used here "Real Name", as in anything that isn't your government ID name is
not actually a name. Pseudonyms in formal language are 'names', but not so in
informal language.

------
cageface
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
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.

------
DavidMcLaughlin
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.

~~~
jasonzemos
Your solution to admin incompetence is for a centralized service to eliminate
the admin. Why can't the service just provide competence? If dozens are people
are working round the clock to eliminate spam for your _free_ mail service,
why can't they package that and let you control your own data?

The centralized solution you've proposed carried to it's fullest extent is
basically eliminating email altogether, where a small cabal of whitelisted
services are only able to pass messages to each other. If spam detection
software must remain secretive and proprietary at these big companies, this is
basically a capitulation to the spammers.

~~~
DavidMcLaughlin
One:

The anti-spam systems work because they are based on content of emails and
properties across the providers entire user-base. Every time you click "Mark
as spam" you are contributing data for all users in the service. In a
decentralised service, even if people agreed to submit all their emails and
information for the greater good (which they probably wouldn't), the data
still needs to be centralised somewhere and secured by experts. The
blacklist/whitelist of notorious spammers and servers needs to be maintained
somewhere. You end up having a committee to do that, an elected/trusted group
of people and they need to deal with appeals, etc.

Two:

If the logic for blocking spam were public, don't you think that would make it
much easier for spammers to circumvent?

Edit - I can't reply to the user below. Must be some HN feature. But the logic
for accepting an email is essentially a decision tree, it is based on data and
evolves over time. It is a very different problem from something like
encryption.

~~~
yuvadam
One makes lots of sense. Two makes none.

By analogy: "the logic for encrypted two-way communication (e.g. RSA) is
public, don't you think that makes it much easier for hackers to intercept
your credit card details?".

Enough has been said about security - or spam filtering in this case - by
obscurity.

~~~
ehsanu1
If you can propose a spam-filtering algorithm which would not be circumvented
if its exact implementation were known, I'd seriously love to hear it. That
would basically be a magic bullet for all spam.

~~~
dredmorbius
Spam filtering is a wicked problem. The solutions are contextual, and there's
no one single tool that will slay the dragon.

That said, a great many anti-spam solutions work by well-known and publicly
available methods. DKIM (header signing) actually utilizes PKI. DNSBLs are
publicly queryable (in some cases the zonefiles may be downloaded), Bayesian
and rules-based filters are also generally available.

The real challenges are:

1\. Spam is cheap. Spam mail outnumbers ham (non-spam mail) by 100:1 or
better. There's a lot of it.

2\. Distinguishing spam from ham is contextual, and people's contexts differ.

3\. False positives are expensive. Wrongly classifying ham as spam carries far
worse consequences than wrongly classifying spam as ham (false negatives).
Filters must skew to permissive.

4\. There's little central agreement on methods, there are many old systems in
existence. We've seen a few small advances (DKIM, SPF) in the past decade, but
brute-force content filtering is still required.

5\. Even well-established strong verification tools are too technically
advanced for the vast majority of the userbase, and/or are unappealing to
others. PGP MIME-encoded email signatures (strong cryptographic identity
verification) dates to 1991, fer crissakes! Getting even corporate-supported
users to employ this properly is at best difficult (though it's becoming ever
so slightly more common largely due to compliance requirements). For others,
repudiability is important.

6\. It's an arms race. Spammers change methods (many based on automated tools
assuring rapid widespread adoption of new methods) based on new anti-spam
methods.

7\. Client and server (MUA/MTA) support for tools which would facilitate
whitelisting of users and mail peers is difficult. Centralizing mail gateways
can complicate the issue if those core gateways emit proportionately high
levels of spam (I see or have seen middlin' amounts of spam from Hotmail,
Yahoo, GMail, AOL, and other large email service providers, though generally
they're pretty good).

That said: whitelisting, reputation systems (sender, server, DKIM, SPF),
authentication (DKIM, PGP), contextual (Bayesian), and rules-based (e.g.:
SpamAssassin) properly used do make the situation tenable. But this requires
extensive support largely for the administrator of an email gateway. End-users
may be forgiven for thinking spam is a "solved problem", though at their level
it largely is.

What ultimately will solve the email spam problem will be for email to be
superseded by another communications channel (SMS, weblogs, social sites,
etc.) to the extent that spammers focus their energies there. It's an economic
problem, and if the economics fail to support spamming, the (smart) spammers
will move elsewhere.

------
Jach
>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
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
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
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.

~~~
aangjie
That's what i think/guess/glean from the gmail blog posts too.

------
ilovecomputers
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>

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/>

~~~
omouse
_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?_

Easy access for law enforcement, easy access for the NSA, CIA, FBI, everyone
else. The attack on Gmail by Chinese hackers used the interface that Google
provides to law enforcement to use. There's also the commercial access part.
Some companies sell their centralized databases to 3rd parties.

About freenet; it encrypts all network traffic so that no one else knows what
is being transferred. That causes quite a bit of a slowdown. Also, it's Java
and on some machines it can use up a lot of RAM, especially on older machines.

The alternative is encrypting your emails and letting GMail store that. The
problem with that is that they still know when you sent an email, and who you
sent it to. Just the fact that your email is encrypted can be taken as sign of
guilt by law enforcement. But it's still an option.

~~~
LiveTheDream
> The alternative is encrypting your emails and letting GMail store that. The
> problem with that is that they still know when you sent an email, and who
> you sent it to. Just the fact that your email is encrypted can be taken as
> sign of guilt by law enforcement.

Does this actually have precedent?

~~~
omouse
Not sure but thinking back to those Chinese hackers they might be interested
in knowing who's talking to who.

It's also useful for anyone who wants to smear someone else. "Oh politician
so-and-so is talking to such a person in secret, I wonder what they're
saying".

------
grovulent
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/K4fzCvSc...](https://plus.google.com/117405082753493075236/posts/K4fzCvScYcs)

~~~
zobzu
"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
Maybe you should try a little harder to engage with the idea before chastising
it as religion.

~~~
aangjie
@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.

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

~~~
joeyh
The reason it's a mailing list:

[http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2010-March/0...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2010-March/000910.html)

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.

~~~
LiveTheDream
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>

~~~
kragen
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...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/usc_sec_35_00000102----000-.html)

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.

~~~
AppSec
Serious question, not meant to infer anything --

but if you used a centralized server for your blog, wouldn't the date/time
stamp of that server provide the same information as a mail server would?

In other words: wouldn't that file/database entry timestamp (ie: wordpress'
time -- just an example/name of a blog not necessarily available at that time)
serve the same purpose?

~~~
kragen
Yes — but if an evil person were running a blog like that, they could write
posts about other people's inventions and put fake old dates on them. They
could also fake the timestamps added by _their_ mail server, but not the
timestamps added by the mail servers of their subscribers. So the timestamp
wouldn't have as much legal weight.

------
snitko
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.

------
mlinksva
FWIW I think "Why I do not want to work at Google" originally composed in HN
thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2728174>

These older posts are also fun [http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/1999-January...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/1999-January/000322.html) [http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-Novembe...](http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-
tol/2006-November/000841.html)

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

------
lionhearted
> 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
Yeah gears is gone. They have just launched a new version for chrome which is
quite good.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejidjjhkpiempkbhmpbfngldlkglhimk)

------
zmonkeyz
'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)

------
anotherevan
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
Uh, thanks. :)

------
matth
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-
an...](http://blog.matthewghudson.com/post/9497957290/the-public-and-its-
problems)

~~~
kragen
Thank you! That makes me happy.

Don't forget that the future is yet unwritten, though.

------
sschueller
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
> 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!

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

~~~
sudonim
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.

------
damian2000
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. ;-)

------
ristretto
Then don't

------
napierzaza
"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
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-...](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-
Third-Party-Web-2-0-Applications.html)

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.

------
billmcneale
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.

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

------
garyd
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
I would be delighted to become better informed. Would you like to explain a
couple of my errors to me?

