
De-Googleify Internet - vinceleo
https://degooglisons-internet.org/
======
Ajedi32
> These services track us everywhere, while claiming to give us a better “user
> experience”.

That's kind of the problem though; they usually _do_ offer a better user
experience.

If we want users to start using open source software rather than walled garden
solutions from large companies, we're going to have to start building open
source solutions which offer a comparable user experience to proprietary ones
from large companies; a difficult task to say the least.

~~~
syphilis2
I believe this is true. But I also have found that sometimes the user
experience is diminished when not "logged in" to encourage people to create
accounts. Pinterest has a box that slowly covers up more of the screen as you
scroll drown. Facebook has a login prompt box that stays at the bottom of the
screen and occasionally expands as a reminder. Quora prevents internal
redirects to new pages. With enough know-how these can be worked around but it
is an effort and I often find myself making the undesirable choice between
doing the work around, ignoring the content, or signing up for an account.

~~~
tomphoolery
Is signing up for an account really that big of a deal to you?

~~~
myowncrapulence
Did you even read the post? This is about avoiding tracking. And yes, signing
up for accounts can be grueling. Try making a google account without
submitting a blood sample.

~~~
StevePerkins
Wat? It's been years since I created my "real" Google account, so I just
created "fakeasdlkvjasklfvjasdkljfgasdf@gmail.com" out of curiosity.

It literally took 20 seconds, with a fake name and birthday. There are form
fields for your phone number and alternate email address, but you can leave
them blank.

~~~
ryandrake
bugmenot.com still works. Although an even better solution would be a browser
plugin or add-on that, with one click, creates and logs in via a fake account
populated with fake, throwaway info, changing every time you visit the site.
Don't just avoid tracking, poison it. I'd help fund that kickstarter.

~~~
eriknstr
Even if you did that I think there are a lot of ways to identify you, using
everything from your browsing patterns -- what sites, when and for how long --
to even just the account creation process itself; you'll still need to
complete the captcha and with the "click all images that match" captchas that
Google is currently using on reCAPTCHA (which btw was quite a bait-and-switch;
they originally got a lot of people to use reCAPTCHA because the original
purpose was to help book scanning, "read books, stop spam", remember?) as far
as I've come to understand continuously sends your cursor position to Google
servers, and with the movement data and the order and the timing that you
press the images I would not be surprised if there was a pattern that uniquely
identified you there.

Likewise websites that stream your input key by key instead of submitting the
text when you press the submit button should in theory be able to easily
identify you by the timing of your keypresses. I've only heard of a couple of
instances of sending keys as-you-type but I think that if someone made the
kind of project you spoke of above, then we would start seeing more tactics
like the kinds I mention in order to counter that.

Even if you then proceed to disable JavaScript globally and only browse the
web in 1.0 style with user-initiated GET and POST, the way that you write has
some uniqueness to it that might be possible to identify.

~~~
ggggtez
I think it you want to make browsing data completely anonymous you're going to
have to download a snapshot of the internet and unplug your connection.
Unfortunately, that's really not the user experience most people want.

~~~
AstralStorm
Or prevent a chunk of the Internet pages from abusing JavaScript, then use
proxies such as Tor.

------
mi100hael
I like the idea of this project, but I have several nits/concerns:

\- De-Google-ify is a poor way of marketing these ideas. Your average web user
_loves_ Google because they are trendy and make everything so convenient.

\- The site enumerates the pitfalls of cloud-hosted solutions and then
proceeds to link to their own cloud-hosted solutions with no explanation of
why they're any safer, better, etc.

And not limited to this page, but I really wish in general there was a better
way to convey the point of free software than the word "free." If every single
person immediately misunderstands what you mean, you've already lost.

~~~
mwfunk
I've long felt that RMS/FSF's very specific and nonintuitive usage of "free"
was intended to be misleading. If someone says "free" (which has many, many
different meanings, all positive) when they really mean "copyleft" (which has
one very complicated meaning), they're not trying to clarify anything, rather
they're trying to muddy the waters so that people who don't understand
copyleft or the FSF's political philosophy might think it's much simpler and
much less specifically (and restrictively) defined than it actually is. Even
the phrase "free as in freedom" doesn't actually disambiguate it, as it's a
very specific type of very atypically defined freedom.

It always felt like a certain type of PR strategy, where the intent is to
intentionally mislead people who aren't paying close attention, and that's
always rubbed me the wrong way. Source: observing 3 decades of neverending
confusion, flamewars, and arguments over this very topic.

~~~
mjevans
It's less confusing when you focus on the 'freedom of the users'.

Maybe that's the part of the message that's been most lost over the years.
Focusing so much on free/libre that the group to which it applies (everyone
(else), end users) is forgotten.

Freedom for the users is the empowerment to treat ideas and expressions of
ideas as simply that. A restoration to the laws of nature which make the cost
of copying an idea merely seeing it in action.

Yes, that brings hard questions to the table as well. However my answer to
those is mostly that works covered as free/libre software should be public
works. Common infrastructure that everyone is supposed to have access to. An
open and level playing field for the advancement of education and the useful
arts of science. They should also provide a useful platform for more
transitory productions like games and videos.

~~~
Frondo
People walking around with smartphones just don't think of themselves as
"users of software," though that's exactly what they are.

It's unclear wording. It's also not the most immediate and intuitive concept
for people outside the industry to wrap their heads around.

Think about driving a car. You're driving a car, you need to know about stuff
like having a license and gas and insurance and so on, i.e. the things that a
"driver" or "motorist" is generally responsible for.

Obviously, no license needed for having a smartphone, and all you really need
is a charger to keep it going, which is part of why there's nothing nudging
people to that conceptual leap of being "a user of software".

We could do better, but there's an industry-wide revulsion to finding the
right language for communicating with your people, i.e. marketing.

I used to be a big advocate of "free software" as distinct from "open source,"
but after spending a few years in the marketing side of the industry, I don't
give a shit at all about that distinction, because neither does anyone who
isn't already drowning in the kool aid.

Like I said, we could do better.

------
brilliantcode
It's unlikely to happen as the vast majority of the public _simply does not
care_. There is a deep technological disconnect.

The only way to de-google-ify is to bring about mesh network that runs on our
mobile devices or volunteer run nodes. Maybe you need to take the Skytrain to
a remote part of the city to access specific information because there are no
nodes there yet.

The centralized infrastructure created between telecom companies which
inevitably under the control of you know who makes it very difficult to be
truly decentralized and free ourselves from corporations that provide a better
user experience. It's tougher to do on a decentralized platform but I fear
that it will do little to sway herd behavior-vast majority of the population
are clueless about the underlying technology and can't be bothered. That might
change in the future but for now, it's the people who are unwilling to make a
change, especially outside of HN and tech circles that is the big challenge.

A bigger campaign that really sells the value of de-google-ify is going to
take lot of resources and earn the ire of Google who is unlikely to support
their own demise.

~~~
cortesoft
I think the public doesn't care for a good reason; no one has articulated a
realistic, tangible cost to quality of life caused by letting Google track
you. Lots of people talk about it being 'creepy' and dreaming up possible
scenarios where it WOUDLD be costly, but for most people, the costs simply
aren't actually felt.

I am trying to think about it for me personally, and I can't come up with a
single time that Google tracking me has had a negative impact on my life. I
know people have examples for themselves, but none resonate with me as being
something I am at risk for.

Seriously, though; how is my life negatively impacted (in actuality, not
hypothetically), in a way that I can notice the difference, by letting Google
track me?

~~~
bad_user
They can change your perception of anything, leading you to buying stupid shit
you don't need, or to voting for somebody that doesn't protect your interests.

And any piece of knowledge is dangerous in the right context. This is usually
felt more strongly by minorities. You're actually privileged if you're a
straight, white, middle class male, but even so you can end up being harassed
and hurt for who you are. Have you ever cheated on your wife? Have you ever
spoken against powerful men? Do you walk funny?

I was born in 1982, so I caught a couple of years of communist in Romania. And
let me tell you, the atmosphere, the paranoia, the secret service of a police
state managing to change the fabric of society by using a huge network of
informants and fear was far, far more interesting than the 1984 novel.

And if you think it can't happen to you, then think again, because at least
your parents were alive when such things happened for real.

~~~
cortesoft
A network of informants that feed information to a police state that harasses
you based on that information is objectively horrible.

I think the connection of that police state to Google tracking your search and
browsing history is a bit tenuous, however. Sure, if that police state existed
and I lived in it, then Google's trove of information would certainly be
useful to it. If I begin to believe the state that I live in is becoming that
police state, I will certainly curtail my Google searching.

Of course, you might say, "But wait! You might not live in a police state now,
but if your current state changes to become one, they might use your
historical search history from before the rise of the police state to
persecute you!"

Yes, this is true. However, they could also use my many public things I have
said against me. I have said and written many things that a police state might
find dangerous, and persecute me for. I can't possibly live my life trying to
avoid creating any record of my life that a possible future police state could
use against me. That would be impractical and possibly unfeasible. If I live
my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a police state
by my own choice. That seems counter productive.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> If I live my life like that, I would be living as if I already lived in a
> police state by my own choice. That seems counter productive.

No, that is how you prevent a police state.

I mean, obviously you don't actually live as if you already lived in a police
state, but you take some of the same precautions, which all boil down to
keeping power distributed.

That's the whole point of democracy, really: We make our political system
deliberately inefficient by making sure that the amount of power that's
concentrated in any single person's hands is limited, and the only reason we
do that is to limit the damage when the wrong person gets into a position of
power. If there is one thing we absolutely should have learned from history by
now, it is that concentrations of power are extremely dangerous.

Also, much of this is not about individuals, and it's not black and white.
Authoritarian regimes don't care about most individuals. This is about power
structures in a society as a whole. A dictator wants to know the top 100000 or
so individuals that could be dangerous to their power in order to be able to
concentrate their efforts on keeping them under control. Even if your
political disinterest is no risk at all to the dictator's power position, the
fact that they can tell you apart from the dissident next door helps them
staying in power. And all of that is gradual, it's all an economic question in
the end: How much effort does it take to prevent everyone from successfully
challenging the dictator's authority? Every additional person you need in your
secret police in order to maintain your power makes things harder, everything
that a computer can just tell you makes it easier.

So, you have to think not from the standpoint of an individual and what
someone could do to target you specifically (which usually is impractical to
protect against, and is unnecessary in a stable social structure), but from
the standpoint of someone trying to gain power over a large social structure
(such as a dictator in a country--but really, it's not in any way tied even to
political positions, it might just as well be the head of a company trying to
establish themselves as a de-facto monopoly, say), and what makes it easier
for them to gain and to maintain power, and what hinders them, on the scale of
the society as a whole. And you have to realize that a lot of this is path-
dependent: It's a lot harder to remove a dictator once they are in place than
to prevent them. So, reactionary solutions don't really work. In simple terms:
You can vote a dictator in, but you can not vote a dictator out.

------
LoSboccacc
This is just a lame advertisement attempt, and it's not even decentralized,
the advertiser controls all the published alternatives and links thereof

I'll stick linking people to
[http://alternativeto.net](http://alternativeto.net) \- thank you very much

~~~
progval
alternativeto is great if you are looking for a software. degooglisons-
internet.org is a non-profit that aims at hosting software for people who do
not have the skill to host it themselves.

~~~
LoSboccacc
which completely defies the points they're making against google. all the
cloud business runs on trust, and giving all data to newcomers doesn't sound a
good plan.

I can reliably find my emails from ten years ago in Google and there is no end
in sight. this other service runs on donations and expects me to believe
they'll have comparable lifetime?

~~~
dublinben
Every single recommendation on their list can be self-hosted. They are
providing you the tools to take control of your online experience exactly so
you _don 't_ have to rely on a single service provider.

~~~
makapuf
And they'll happily teach you to do so. I know first hand,they started telling
people to how to install open-source/free. They currently _complain_ they're
starting to be a central point. Believe me they're rms-level free, not google-
level free.

------
nvk
Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine
for over 2 years. It's incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-
learn how to search. The same way you "changed yourself" initially for google.

~~~
eterm
Except google didn't need learning, in fact that's part of what made it so
much more powerful, they early on dropped support for AND and OR and other
boolean keywords which other search engines required to get good results.

In fact one of google's early "hidden" successful features was using implicit
AND not implicit OR, which had been the de-facto on other search engines, so
searching for "gold plates" on other search engines would return results for
"gold" and results for "plates", that seems crazy now but that's just how it
was back then.

"learning" how to search is precisely what google didn't require, they used
data and some key insights to do a lot of "magic" behind the scenes to match
the way people actually used search engines into results, and without needing
to advertise being a "human" search engine like Ask Jeeves.

~~~
kazagistar
You certainly did have to learn to use google, you just don't remember it, or
remember it selectively. I frequently come across people who ask questions
which seem simple to google for, but when they try ask google, they do so
incompetently and get bad answers or no answers, because they fundamentally
don't get keywords, how other uses of words can override your intended
meaning, or how to clarify by adding further phrases, or removing extraneous
detail.

~~~
glimajr
I feel like nowadays you can just Google "how do I change my oil" or "why do
spiders make webs" and I pretty much always get something good.

It seems to me as if you can just ask Google the way you would a normal
person.

I know that wasn't always the case, but I'm curious what specifically you feel
like you need to learn about using Google today.

~~~
zeven7
My wife does this. It drives me crazy; I'm thinking "That's not how you
search! You should just type 'changing oil'." But she gets the results she's
looking for anyway so she doesn't listen.

~~~
richardwhiuk
Why 'should' you?

~~~
zeven7
I was more poking fun at myself for thinking you "should" when the other way
actually works fine.

~~~
enraged_camel
You're actually more likely to get instruction-type results if you ask
"natural" questions. You can test this by searching for "changing oil" and
then "how do i change my oil" and comparing the results.

------
oliv__
It's unfortunate that it comes down to this but... maybe people will use an
alternative to Google when it stops looking like this:
[https://framadate.org/images/date.png](https://framadate.org/images/date.png)

Unfortunately for these projects, user experience is pretty much everything.
Yes people care about privacy, but obviously not enough to have to use lesser
products.

~~~
a3_nm
I'm surprised because I wouldn't have said that Framadate's interface for
voting is particularly ugly or unintuitive, compared (e.g.) to Doodle. The
mobile version of the interface is crappy, but so is Doodle's.

However I have to say that Framadate's interface to set up the poll (in
particular, choosing voting options) is quite unintuitive and unpleasant to
use.

------
dao-
> The increasingly centralized online services provided by sprawling giants
> like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft (GAFAM) pose a threat to
> our digital lives.

Curious that they don't talk about browsers. Your browser sees everything and
knows everything it wants to know about your online life, it's arguably the
most sensitive piece of the puzzle. All major browsers except Firefox are
owned by "GAFAM."

~~~
JBiserkov
An important point. I've switched to Firefox (with uMatrix) for this very
reason.

I can't yet bring myself to stop using Google. But I make a deliberate effort
to not use their search when I don't have to:

\- when I know exactly when I'm going, I rely on bookmarks and the browsers
history or just type the URL in full.

\- when my destination is a deep URL I use the method above to navigate to the
website's homepage, and search using the builtin search (Wikipedia, IMdB).

\- when all else fails, I Google.

The small decrease in productivity is more than made up by the warm feeling I
get inside.

------
inlined
The arguments feel disingenuous. A start-up is much less likely able to fight
a subpoena for user data. A start-up is much more likely to disappear. The
only real case I see is an argument against ads, though I don't see any
disclaimer that the service will then need to be a paid service.

Disclaimer: I work at a big company. I also worked at a small start-up in the
past.

~~~
bondant
This is not a start-up, this is a non-profit association. They do not want to
have hundred of thousands of users. They are only trying to show that
alternatives exist. They let you try them for free. And if you want and have
the aptitudes, you can host the application on your own server.

------
daveloyall
Their alternative services appear to mostly be existing FOSS projects, re-
branded...

Normally that would trouble me, but in this context... maybe a great idea! The
uninitiated might have less trouble adopting "the frama suite" vs a dozen
separate apps...

Granted, the GNU ecosystem should already provide that, but of course there
are lots of good FOSS apps that don't and won't fly the GNU banner...

~~~
majewsky
I haven't seen the GNU ecosystem provide anything at all in the web service
space. GNU is, for the most part, the same set of applications that it was,
say, 10 years ago. (Or at least I perceive it as such.)

------
throwaway0391
I haven't really looked at what this start up is offering, but I want to point
out that you can delete your user history, disable personalized advertising
and disable tracking by Google by going to myactivity.google.com. I would
encourage everyone who cares about this issue to do that. The only
disadvantage that I have seen is that the maps app does not autocomplete past
queries anymore. I would also recommend you install browser plugins that
prevent tracking by other companies.

A point I also wanted to make is that contrary to popular opinion Google's
business model is not build on collecting user data. Google actually makes
most of it's money on search ads. These don't really require a lot of
information about the user since advertisers are advertising to a specific
query.

Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer.

~~~
gvurrdon
Another disadvantage is that turning off "web and app activity" prevents
useful features of Android Wear from functioning, e.g. setting reminders or
receiving commute time notifications.

If it weren't for smartwatches I'd still be using Android with all account
activity settings turned off (or "paused"), but instead I am reluctantly using
an Apple Watch (and therefore an iPhone, unfortunately) and searching with
DDG.

By the way, I'd happily pay for software with the ease of use and
functionality of Google's location history browser if I could host it on my
own server and keep all that location data to myself.

------
tannhaeuser
I used to think of Google as the nemesis of the open web, out of an instinct
against monopolies and for the little guy. Now I'm thinking Facebook and
others are much worse monopolies (though I always wonder who's using Facebook?
Certainly not anyone I know below the age of 30).

Fb hasn't a reciprocal relationship with the web in the sense that it takes
content from the web but doesn't give back. Best thing about Fb is that it's a
good filter for people I choose not to care about, was what I was thinking.
But now I believe the kind of communication going on in Fb is extremely
detrimental, dangerous even, to an open society/democracy, because people with
opposing views don't talk to each other but rather prefer to talk themselves
into rage with like-minded people, and get fueled with fake news.

Needless to say, worse things happen in autocratic states.

It's only in Google's best interest the web doesn't become a scripted ghost
town anymore than it already is. Therefore I don't understand what they want
to accomplish with AMP.

I used to think that p2p is the future of the web, but eg. zeronet/ipfs don't
help one bit with the above problems. Also, I don't want to cede the web; it
was created by a whole generation of liberal-minded people.

Google should leverage their power for something big to counter web
balkanization and echo chambers.

------
ianstormtaylor
I love the reasons for doing something like this, and I'm personally really
glad that people are investing time in trying to solve this problem.

That said, I think that one of the big mistakes that these initiatives make is
trying to solve __all __of the problems that Google solves, under one roof. It
's impossible. The only way Google is able to manage it is that they are an
absolutely __huge __software organization. No free, or even smaller-but-still-
not-open-source, alternative is going to be able to match the sheer number of
services.

But I also don't think they have to. Instead it should be tackled in a
decentralized way, which is much easier—one company or organization focusing
on beating Google (or whichever monopoly) at exactly one of their products, by
offering a better experience, or an equivalent experience with more freedom.

It makes me wonder whether a viable alternative approach as a consumer might
be to use "best in class, but not necessarily FOSS" solutions from _many_
different providers. For example, you could use...

\- DuckDuckGo for search, an easy enough switch.

\- Fastmail for email, which is very similar and an easy enough switch as
well.

\- Dropbox Paper for documents and notes, which is arguably a better, simple
experience for most peoples's simple use cases.

\- Microsoft Office365 for spreadsheets, since it's very hard for FOSS
alternatives to be good _and_ interoperable.

\- Facebook for social messaging and events.

\- Spotify for music.

\- etc.

You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the
list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. At most
you'd have to "rebalance" your portfolio when big acquisitions or shutdowns
occur.

I'd be curious: If anyone is much more aware of privacy issues , could you
weigh in on whether this approach would help? It might not help with
government-actor spying, but it might help with lots of the other monopolistic
issues?

~~~
drivingmenuts
> You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the
> list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player.

But many of these companies are going to offer their services for free, which
means advertising and you're right back to square one, except now your data is
in the hands of someone completely unknown.

------
blfr
Worth an upvote for the Asterix reference alone.

For me it's mostly the smartphone which is difficult to unlock. I use Ubuntu
on my laptop, run my own web/mail/irc/etc servers, flashed all routers with
OpenWRT... and it all made my experience better but Android with a Google Apps
account is hard to beat. Say what you will about tracking and spying but it
delivers.

Using FLOSS tools I can compete with Microsoft or TP-Link, not Google though.

~~~
sweden
I have been using CyanogenMOD without the famous Gapps for year and I have to
say that I don't miss anything in them.

------
earthly10x
Once again showing that Google is many orders of magnitude above companies
like twitter, aol and facebook in terms of reach, revenue, influence, data and
more importantly, algorithmic AI. Just take a look at the top 10 sites and
apps on the net, most are controlled by Google, not twitter, aol or the next
aol, facebook.

~~~
cromwellian
Except that people spend more time on Facebook than anything.

------
nojvek
Well Google made a lot of money from ads. They invested heavily in
infrastructure, engineers and buying whatever could enhance their reach.
Android, Google docs, YouTube, Adclick. All insanely valuable acquisitions.
Can't say the same about other big tech companies.

It's a great time to be Google

------
9erdelta
I'm as much a google/fb/microsoft "hater" as anybody. I waste countless hours
trying to get a linux based workflow that doesn't create huge conflicts with
getting my real work done (everyone else at work is on Windows). But despite
my idealism, the pragmatic truth in my opinion is that commercial companies
offer a product that to the completely none technical user, is FAR better than
any "free as in freedom" product. Even looking at the link provided here, I
clicked on it and immediately my reaction was "oh another freetard website."
Until this kind of stuff has state of the art websites and user friendliness,
it won't catch on with people who struggle to turn on a computer. And that
happens to be the majority of people. Diaspora? My aunts and uncles would
probably think they logged into the dark web when visiting that site (except
they don't know what the dark web is).

------
Mikeb85
I wish them good luck. I do use Google services and devices (written on a
Pixel XL, and I use all the track my movements and usage options) because
their AI suggestions and integrated features do make my life a tad easisr, but
alternatives, especially open ones are never a bad thing.

------
maxt
It's quite possible to break the Internet by blanket-blocking core Google
IPs[1]. I tried blocking these in my firewall and my surfing sessions became
really slow. I would much prefer things like uBlock which do it at the browser
level and it doesn't cause a lag.

    
    
        74.14.192.0/18
        216.58.192.0/19
        216.239.32.0/19
        64.233.160.0/19
        66.249.80.0/20
        72.14.192.0/18
        209.85.128.0/17
        66.102.0.0/20
        74.125.0.0/16
        64.18.0.0/20
        207.126.144.0/20
        173.194.0.0/16 
    

This is usually because if you're resolving domains to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 in
hosts then there is an inbuilt timeout as localhost is typically not running
any services.

Best to make localhost run a service. A personal thing I use is lighthttpd[2]
which ensures such a lag is vanished

[1]:
[https://gist.github.com/int64ago/1d72c80e8082b78777c9](https://gist.github.com/int64ago/1d72c80e8082b78777c9)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighttpd)

------
ravenstine
Not to get too political, but I find the idea that the internet is better
being decentralized and non-corporate to be the new Libertarianism. Sure,
these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free market",
but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Don't get me wrong,
I'm not necessarily against such concepts as ideals, but in the end they are
hard to implement in their pure form as the entire system gets larger and they
aren't without consequence. An internet not dominated by Google, Facebook,
Reddit, Amazon, etc., sounds great because, well, screw the man, man! Let's go
back to 1999(or better yet, the 80's so we can connect to dial-up BBSes for
free by routing through a bunch of local numbers, because, screw the man!). I
know I'm hyperbolizing here a little bit, but it seems silly and pointless.
The vast majority of users don't want this.

~~~
sedachv
> Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how "small government" and "free
> market", but how well do they work in practice on a large scale?

Serious question: do you know anything about the history or workings of the
Internet or the ARPANET? Or how email or HTTP works? Your understanding seems
to be completely opposite to reality. It took a lot of effort for Google,
MySpace, Facebook etc. to build centralized systems on a large scale to
interoperate with the existing decentralized Internet, and for the amount of
time and effort invested into them they do not actually work that well
compared to the regular Internet.

------
ChuckMcM
I like that they took the illustration from Getafix and Asterix :-)

[1] [http://www.asterix.com/the-a-to-z-of-
asterix/characters/geta...](http://www.asterix.com/the-a-to-z-of-
asterix/characters/getafix.html)

------
jordigh
In the unlikely case anyone is wondering, "publicity" is an incorrect calque
from French where it means "advertising". So they are not saying that Google
gets a lot of publicity, but that it pushes advertising.

------
PascLeRasc
Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google
as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing
email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close
to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist
to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads
but its navigation and UI is so nice to use. It seems obtuse to just refuse to
use a web service just because it happens to be made by Google.

~~~
techsupporter
> To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as
> a part of it would be so inconvenient.

How so? I don't use any Google services (even search) and don't feel the least
bit inconvenienced. Microsoft's suite has those same things (Excel, Word, and
OneNote are all available through a web page if that's your thing),
translations are widely available (Bing and Dictionary.com), alternative maps
(I like Here Maps, it even lets me download entire countries or regions for
offline use), and so on. I must be the only person on the planet who _doesn
't_ like Gmail, so I'll just leave that one alone.

~~~
prplhaz4
I'd say the "better-ness" of Google services these days is strictly the fact
that everyone already uses them (which is critical for something like instant
messaging). Individually they are (IMO) no better than most alternatives.
Unless I'm real serious about a certain tool, the one I already have is the
one I'm likely to start using - and most of the adult internet right now
probably already has a Google account - and I'm pretty sure the kids are still
signing up w/them, so no end in sight here...

------
malkia
Well, I'm sorry but it's in french and I don't speak it, and english is not my
native either, but it's rather established when comes to open software.

------
mads
I recently reinstalled my system and didn't immediately install any AdBlock
software, so for the first time in many years, I actually saw ads (that I
noticed). I was surprised how relevant the ads actually were. They very
clearly had an idea about what I had been researching the last couple of days.
I think this is probably a good thing, if ads are supposed to be a necessary
evil.

------
danielpatrick
Why doesn't google offer a paid version which encrypts your data and takes all
manors of privacy measures? I would go for that

~~~
mjevans
It would be nice if Google offered a paid set of services that:

1) Would use a public cryptography key to encrypt for storage any messages
sent to you in the clear.

2) Not index or advertise to you (since you're now a customer).

3) Provide some reasonable support.

4) Have 'opt out' for ads elsewhere in their networks too.

5) Provide access to a fully anonymous (globally shared profile, no
search/user matching logs of any kind) search system.

~~~
linkregister
G-Suite (their $5/mo/user Google Apps offering) fulfills some of these.

2\. Email isn't scanned and ads aren't presented within Gmail (Search still
has them)

3\. Limited support

The rest can be self-fulfilled by running an ad blocker, and using
Incognito/Privacy mode for searches. Granted, these are annoying .

All Google accounts can disable indexing for advertisement, and can opt out of
using web history to "improve" ad placement.

------
hobarrera
Hint: you window needs to be over 1020px for the page to actually work.
Otherwise the actual content you get when clicking the map is hidden __behind
__the map (I almost dismissed this, but noticed it by coincidence).

------
ilaksh
See
[http://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization](http://reddit.com/r/rad_decentralization)

------
partycoder
I think this is a good initiative. Pretty much like Wikipedia is to Mediawiki.

I hope they can implement single sign on so you can reuse your account across
the different services.

------
tedunangst
What is this map? I tap minecraft, get a menu where I select minecraft again,
and now there's a circle on the map. Hurray?

~~~
progval
The map is adapted from the map in Astérix, a well-known comic in French. The
Gallic village (called the Librist Village on this map) is surrounded by
Romans (proprietary software) -- and on this particular map, Roman cities are
taken back by the Gallics.

------
ommunist
The question is what I really gave up when signed in to Creative Cloud for
example, instead of continuing using GIMP.

------
throw2016
I think it will be all fun and games untill someone has to pay a price for all
the tracking and then most will wisen up. Untill there is a personal price to
pay no one really cares as the risks are theoritical.

Anyway since a significantly large number of software folks are actively
working on creating and enabling these systems discussion in a software
centric environment usually leads to handwaving and normalizing.

~~~
anigbrowl
_someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up_

No they won't. Otherwise dictatorships wouldn't survive for very long. Most
people do whatever they're told by whoever has power and think as little as
possible.

------
ourcat
Nice Google+ link in the footer ;)

------
anigbrowl
Oh dear...when will the left learn?

a goal is not a strategy, and as other posters have pointed out, these
offerings are Not Very Good. Nor has Frama invested much in making them
accessible. For example, I am a big consumer of news, so I clicked on
FramaNews...only to be taken to a page entirely in French.

Now I happen to know french, and like it, but most people....don't. And there
wasn't much on the page anyway other than an exhortation to use RSS. If you
can't be bothered to localize in even a few major languages, how am I supposed
to be confident about the development of quality services? I agree
wholeheartedly with the principle, but restricting myself to only using Free
Software means I'm going to incur a major hit to my productivity, which is
strategically stupid. I would be better off leveraging the capitalist
establishment's tools against them to provoke change than sitting around
waiting for for free software tools to catch up.

It depresses me that a lot of free software advocates don't seem to get or
care how shitty their products are. I know, if you've spent ages working for
nothing on a very complex software product it's infuriating to have some
jackass like me come along and sneer at it. But a lot of Free software
products are, well, broken. I use LibreOffice but I hate it, because of things
like selecting a single paragraph for a formatting change only to have the
paragraph before or after included in the format change as well. I get that
making a WYSIWYG word processor is a truly massive software development
undertaking, but what's the point if it doesn't work properly for even the
most basic tasks? It's like a bicycle with the world's most incredible carbon-
fiber frame where one of the wheels consistently falls off. I don't care how
brilliantly engineered the thing is or how much work went into it or how great
the sacrifices of the designers were; if the wheels fall off it's a shitty
bicycle.

I am left-wing. I'm very much in favor of cooperative ventures, Free culture,
mutuality, privacy, and all the other things the Frama people care about. I
want to live in essentially the same kind of world they want to live in. I
want to support this project....but I'm not going to, because my resources are
too limited and using (most of) the tools they recommend might make my life
better in theory but is definitely going to make it worse in practice.

tl;dr ain't nobody got time for that shit if it don't work right.

------
rihegher
Framatalk is surprisingly quite good and easy to use

------
charred_toast
We're all economic and spiritual slaves now. Nothing will make a difference.
All lights of hope will be stamped out when we get our one-world government.
Have a great day!

------
drivingmenuts
Ironically, many of their pages are in French, which Chrome then calls on a
Google service to translate to English.

~~~
mi100hael
That's not ironic at all considering you're browsing the page with Google's
own custom browser.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Well, feel free to suggest some alternative that is as easy to use, because I
don't read or speak French beyond that which is required to start a fight.

------
mtgx
Google is starting to become dangerous not just in terms of how much data it's
now collecting while killing privacy principles they used to abide by in their
"don't be evil" days, but also because they now have a powerful lobbying
machine, and that machine is slowly starting to turn against the "people".

When they fought against SOPA, they were an ally of the people, and they were
on the right side of history. Now, they were one of the supporters of the TPP,
and largely a rival of the people in this fight and on the wrong side of
history, and they lost.

Google needs to start being on the side of the people, and the right side of
history, once again, before it permanently tarnishes its reputation.

