Recently helped a small business set up a Google Workspace account and we hit a wall during registration.
Told the owners that if Google is already being difficult during signup, imagine being locked out later with client work on the line. Pulled up a few horror stories about Google lockouts to drive the point home. They ended up with another workspace solution.
Last time YouTube wanted to verify my phone number it was easier to find a free service to receive SMS than for Google to deliver it to my actual phone. And Google didn't care I "verified" a number assigned to other side of the world.
That doesn't really change the fact that it's hard. Do you know how many full movies are on YouTube that infringe on copyright? How many pirated streams are hosted on S3? How many piracy sites are behind Cloudflare. It's just very hard to police at scale and if something is flying below the radar it will be there for a while. They probably spread out their assets over many accounts, or even use misconfigured buckets with write permissions to drop some files in there.
I got this a few weeks ago, it was a URL like "sms?:number" which tries to pre-fill text in app. Didn't work for me (Fossify) so I had to copy the number and verifier text from that URL and send it manually. It's for saving money spent on providers like Twilio.
Gmail has been evil from the very beginning, both for client privacy as they use email scanning for marketing purposes, and for 'spam' filters that reject legitimate emails.
The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually a great signal, because it will significantly harm the customer experience, which will result in the growth of responsible paid email services.
The only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.
Recently helped a small business set up a Google Workspace account and we hit a wall during registration.
Told the owners that if Google is already being difficult during signup, imagine being locked out later with client work on the line. Pulled up a few horror stories about Google lockouts to drive the point home. They ended up with another workspace solution.
With which workspace solution did they end up with?
I assume "next leading brand" ;P
Last time YouTube wanted to verify my phone number it was easier to find a free service to receive SMS than for Google to deliver it to my actual phone. And Google didn't care I "verified" a number assigned to other side of the world.
Any Gmail person can tell me why Gmail is tolerating Gmail phishing emails that use Google's own services (e.g. https://storage.googleapis.com/savelinge/... ?
More info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665414
The same reason spam filtering is hard. It's not possible to catch every misuse of the service without too many false positives.
The same 5 urls has been used for 3 months
That doesn't really change the fact that it's hard. Do you know how many full movies are on YouTube that infringe on copyright? How many pirated streams are hosted on S3? How many piracy sites are behind Cloudflare. It's just very hard to police at scale and if something is flying below the radar it will be there for a while. They probably spread out their assets over many accounts, or even use misconfigured buckets with write permissions to drop some files in there.
https://xkcd.com/277/
Ok, it's even harder when you do not care because they people are either freeloaders or locked into your solution because it's a customized mess.
I got this a few weeks ago, it was a URL like "sms?:number" which tries to pre-fill text in app. Didn't work for me (Fossify) so I had to copy the number and verifier text from that URL and send it manually. It's for saving money spent on providers like Twilio.
... and gives me a message on my primary phone: "This number has been used too many times."
Gmail has been evil from the very beginning, both for client privacy as they use email scanning for marketing purposes, and for 'spam' filters that reject legitimate emails.
The fact that they're introducing QR/SMS/MMS/whatever they want is actually a great signal, because it will significantly harm the customer experience, which will result in the growth of responsible paid email services.
The only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.
Tuta, Fastmail, and Posteo are all much better alternatives to Gmail in terms of privacy.
My comment, as per subject, is about Google Mail.
The real problem for privacy is that governments are increasingly outsourcing the verification of identity and bot protection to private companies.
When did it start?