Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very disturbing how Google shuts down accounts without warning or a reasonable resolution process. They did this to a Canadian psychology professor earlier this month (and then silently restored access after Joe Rogan picked up the story).
I'm extremely loathe to wean myself off of Google's products, especially Gmail. But I can no longer really see it as a safe place to have verifications of all my other accounts sent with all the risks of automated flagging, technical error (which cost me my pre acquisition YouTube account when they forced everyone onto Plus), and their increasingly aggressive security / account recovery mechanisms that ask for information such as the exact month a decade old account was created.
I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS.
I can't support their shady practices anymore.
I recently moved to iPhone. Now I am not an iFan or so (and I am an Android developer at my day job) but what I like about it that there are couple of service centres in my city and I can actually go and talk to a person directly employed by Apple. Their reps are a phone call away and in fact I can just get a call from them in a few click, or send an email and a human being will respond to me.
I don't like robo bans. I think nobody does. I had really bad experience when Uber banned my account based on some false alarm and it took almost a week to get it revived. Just imagine a robo ban where there's possibly no remedy or in most cases no hopes to contact with an actual human being.
There are also very good paid hosts like https://mailbox.org/en (I moved to them as my third non-throwaway email address after I realised sdf.org can't be anything more than a site for hobby, chitchat, and nostalgia).
I hardly use Hangout now so there's little incentive in sticking with Gmail anyway. Office moved almost entirely to Slack (but it's still GApps mail and GDocs sadly) and friends and family to WhatsApp and Fb Messenger long ago. But this is risky too - Fb owns both. My effort to move them to something like https://signal.org has failed spectacularly (any tips on this? Or alternate services?). Some of them are on Telegram though, and some still on Viber.
So this is how tech-nerds revenge their nemesis.
Just imagine losing control not only your email, but also every account that is tied to that email. Nightmare.
This could be countered by a separate forest of bots that looks for and identifies "mere eccentricity" (such as very heavy internet search use that will inevitably trigger many false bot hits re terrorism merely due to the law of averages.) But we're not that sophisticated yet, it would seem, judging by results. [Run to the patent office! First to file means anyone can steal this idea!]
Luckily, in this case, you won't be hit with a drone strike because you have an odd web site; but in other cases sudden death from the skies has been the result of bot analysis of mass intercepted communications targeting entirely innocent people.
Just to be clear, I actually rather like the idea of drone strikes on bad guys, just not idiotic-algorithm-triggered drone strikes, thanks so much.
If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.
Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.
Edit: of course you will need to download and keep the emails by yourself if you don't want to lose access to them, but that's much easier than handling a whole server.
That has always been the trick. Running the mail server is easy. Having your email show up in other servers is "hard". Right now, with so many users using GMAIL, using gmail is a huge boon to not being marked spam (Google is way less likely to market a @gmail.com email as spam compared to say a @aol.com email).
However I still end up forwarding everything to to my gmail account and using it as en e-mail client because it makes e-mailing searching and filtering so fast and easy. Outgoing mail sent through my own SMTP server and typically gets through, so I could set up dovecot later.
Doesn't sound like an accident.
The answer is quite obviously "no," and that doesn't cut it for people need rely on services like these for their everyday workflow. We wouldn't consider "accidental" AWS downtime acceptable, so why will we accept it from Google?
But because of his "brave" fight against the bill, he's become a hero to alt-right and other people worried about transgendered people forcing everyone to use pronouns, and this is a lucrative market to attract. So lucrative that he now gets over $40,000 a month through Patreon alone for his classes, where he praises Carl jung, criticises post-modernism, the supposed infiltration of Marxism into culture and ideas like White Privilege and Cultural Appropriation
He's also a regularly featured on r/badphilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/64rg9i/jorda...) while there is a good discussion about him on r/AskPhilosophy(https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/673zy2/dr_jo...).
I certainly am. That rat might be rare, but the system that allowed it to go out isn't one I can trust implicitly.
What would be my best bet to move to if I'm too much of a bad to host my own email?
* Fastmail.com -- good reputation and track record at reasonable prices
* mailbox.org -- long track record, privacy-oriented, German-based. Some people describe the mail UI as aging (it's OX suite), but I like it just fine.
* Protonmail.com -- UX & privacy focused email with fancy in-browser encryption. Protonmail-to-protonmail emails are E2E (OpenPGPjs). No IMAP, and in-browser (read: scary) encryption, albeit open-source. Based in Switzerland, although that means a lot less than they make it out to, re: privacy.
* tutanota.com -- V. similar to Protonmail. Based in Germany and a cheaper than protonmail. Uses a custom-implemented encryption protocol vaguely and unreassuringly described as a "..standardized, hybrid method.." comprised of RSA and AES [0].
[0] https://tutanota.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/470732...
EDIT: Made some corrections re: protonmail & tutanota encryption, pointed out by bartbutler.
Use Google email but from a custom domain -- it doesn't back-up your email, but you can update the DNS to a new provider if you get locked out of Google's services. This means you can still recover accounts, use the same email, etc after a brief disruption, instead of totally hosed.
It's not a total solution, but it does mitigate some problems, which makes Google's policies easier to swallow. (If you do separate email back-ups, then you'll only lose the emails since the last back-up.)
I'm in the process of switching to that set-up (partly because of these antics; partly because of other concerns).
1) I use an address on my own domain (hosted on Google Apps) as my primary email address. If Google pulls the plug on me I can point my MX records elsewhere, and won't have to worry about changing my email at countless places.
2) I use offlineimap to back up the contents of my GMail account at home. If I had to, I could load that backup into a new provider's service (or my own). I still have email from the 90s and would be sad if I lost all that.
That's just email, though. If my entire Google account got axed, I'd lose a bunch of docs and spreadsheets, not to mention all my contacts. And, while I do have everything on Google Photos in places other than Google, it would be a pain to gather it all together again.
But you can back up virtually all data hosted with Google through Takeout.
P.S.: I do have a Riseup email account that I barely use for some specific areas of activism.
The hardest part is switching all your accounts to use your new domain.
But bottom line, it's Google's business what they do. And with a free account, there's no recourse. Except maybe getting to HN front page, and reaching someone sympathetic at Google.
And, in the case of people like the banned professor, traffic to Google sites (e.g. blog) is multiplied.
We make it sound like Google is gifting us with free email. They're not.
At least for the "free" Gmail, as of two months ago (June 2017) Google promised to no longer scan email content. That change is coming in the near future. [1]
[1]: https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-tractio...
Edit: We call them "non-paid" obviously.
"We have so many zillion customers that we're forced to use bots for customer service" and "Only one out of a zillion customers has this kind of problem" would seem to be mutually exclusive.
Edit: OK, so I'm dyslexic. False negatives are arguably more problematic, because they attract more attention.
I wish one of the Googlers reading this here could reach out internally what is going on here.
I'd wager though that the professor's Google account did something wrong, and might be even a serial offender in Google's eyes, so as to warrant a ban. Question is though if the professor himself did something wrong.
Also, not telling what specifically he did wrong is also intentional. They have already decided that they don't want any future relationship. At that point, telling which behavior exactly went over the line is counterproductive - since it would invite that information to be challenged, and they've preemptively decided that no, they don't want to read the response or excuses or reasons, they've made a decision already; and throughly explaining and defending a decision takes much more effort than simply making one, effort that Google doesn't want to spend on every banned person.
Alas, the long term cost of being opaque is lost trust. I much rather have Google give a straight answer. Especially when there is publicity around a case. That way a lot more people would see that Google actually is mostly really reasonable, and that there is another side to the story.
Or better yet:
1) move to a reputed, paid e-mail account (fastmail, mailbox.org, tutanota, protonmail etc...)
2) there used to be baywords.com for uncensored blogs, but I think you can trust posthaven.com.
https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89891222812829696...
Salil Mehta: "Shameful: if you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech. @JulianAssange"
He apparently has worked for both Obama and Trump.
Is that tweet in violation of Google's Terms and Conditions?
edit: formatting
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190?hl=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Takeout
Problems though: if your account is already disabled, you can't use this as far as I can tell; and there's no diff option, it's a monolithic backup each time. But it might provide a strategy to limit data loss resulting from having an account disabled for whatever reason.
These are all put into either a zip, tgz or tbz. The different archive formats have different max download sizes. Looks like the tbz has a 50G download size limit.
I'm not seeing "google is evil" here as much as "we need to do more to inform people that free services from giant companies may change or go away at any time without notice."
He is not a professor at Columbia nor even an adjunct professor. He is a lecturer in the school of professional studies:
https://search.sites.columbia.edu/people/sm786
The school of professional studies at Columbia offers "certificate" and "professional degrees" with minimal academic standards. Within the university, it is considered an embarrassment.
Advertising this credential is very misleading. This is a far cry from being, for example, a professor in the world class statistics department at Columbia.
I don't know the gentleman nor the facts of this case, but I'd be very suspicious of someone advertising a Columbia SPS affiliation.
Here[1] He is suggesting he was blocked for Probability work on Hilary's election odds.
Here[2] he is implying they are doing it in connection with him being a math educator, and tweeting at all kinds of famous accounts with maximum sensationalism (though in his defense, the only way to get support from google is to make a massive stir).
None of that means anything on its own, and this would be far from the first time Google have closed an account by mistake (though Id be very surprised if the ban was of a political nature).
1. https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89890618596913971... 2. https://twitter.com/salilstatistics/status/89873001303747788...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-18/blm-paradox-black-a...
If Google shut down my account tomorrow, I think I could recover from pretty much everything else (although I'd have a hell of a time with the Android phone), but a decade and a half of emails are damn near irreplaceable.
but neither source provides much clarity, although they contain the same information.
Seems like there's a new set of skills that academics need to learn; paging Dr Assange.
# 4 32 points 2h Winning the War on Error
(scroll to bottom)
#29 157 points 2h Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google
Soon this thread will be out of the homepage. Keep up the great work guys!
