Google: officially evil

[SteveRiley]

Found guilty of tracking Safari users, even those who specifically didn't want to be tracked.

http://betanews.com/2012/07/10/safar...-million-fine/
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/...DExNDAyWj.html

My email, calendar, and contacts are no longer on Google. I've moved docs back to Evernote (only because the OwnCloud client sync is still kind of broken). I will no longer use Picasa for screenshots. And all my searching is via StartPage.

[sealbhach]

How about Duck Duck Go for search? I try to use it as much as I can but find myself going back to Google time and again. I never heard of Start Page before, will give it a try.

.

[SteveRiley]

DuckDuckGo aggregates their results from several sources, none of which are Google. StartPage comes from Ixquick, who provides a similar multi-source aggregation. Like DuckDuckGo, Ixquick's regular engine doesn't include Google. StartPage is a separate Ixquick product that relies only on Google for search results, so it essentially acts as a Google anonymizer.

[oshunluvr]

What about browsers? Are you using Iron or Chromium or what?

[SteveRiley]

Rekonq for almost everything.

Firefox for the few things where Rekonq breaks -- usually involving JavaScript with PostBack statements.

[whatthefunk]

Its been obvious to me that theyve been evil for years now. Dont know why people think of them as anything but a heartless multinational corporation like the rest...

[woodsmoke]

SR.....

evernote.....

hmmm, I dld it on my Android quite a while ago, and never really used it. so......hmmmmm

you are a person of many ideas old/young fellow!

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

evernote..... hmmm, I dld it on my Android quite a while ago, and never really used it. so......hmmmmm

I need a mechanism to sync a variety of lists across multiple devices. I was hoping to do it with simple text files and the Owncloud instance running on my server. However, the Owncloud clients are sort of broken right now. The Linux client creates a new PHP session on the server every time it checks for file changes, which results in thousands of tiny files filling up a subdirectory and killing the server's performance (bug has been reported). The Android client can't properly resync a file that was downloaded and edited on the phone. Sigh.

[K-Project]

DuckDuckGo is getting better all the time. I often switch over to it to see how it's improving. But I always find something it doesn't do so well with, particularly when you're in desperate need of Linux help and you're entering strange syntaxes into the search. However, I'm going to give it another go for a while and see how it is.

[HalationEffect]

I've been pretty wary of Google ever since the demise of Scroogle (a Google search anonymiser) earlier this year.

Read about the nasty tricks Google played on Scroogle at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroogle

At the end of the day, I guess it'd be fair to say that I mistrust any person, group or organisation that has any significant power. Power corrupts.

[The Liquidator]

@ HalationEffect +1

It is a sad sign of the times that the thought process is no longer "whom do I trust?" but "whom do I mis-trust the least?".

There never will be anything truer than "the love of money is the root of all evil". It seems that once a company reaches a certain size the people running it start acting like Gordon Gekko. They will seemingly do anything to pursue more wealth.

Can anyone remember the time when a Bank Manager was considered trustworthy? I certainly can.

So far as Google itself currently is concerned it has my e-mail and calendar and I can access my .co.uk e-mail address via google apps via webmail/e-mail client and my Android phone. I'm not sure I could actually move it anywhere without some form of sacrifice. Ironically some of the reasons I did that was that they did seem fairly trustworthy at the time. They also appeared to support Linux rather more than everyone else although I now see the reality is that they don't really do that, they just take advantage of it.

Are there any serious replacements available though?

[SteveRiley]

Register a domain with Dyn. Configure your router to keep your DNS record updated at Dyn. Build your own Postfix + Dovecot + RoundCube + OwnCloud + MySQL + Webmin server. You'll have better IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support than Google offers and web-based mail/calendar, too. I'm very happy with mine.

[ScottyK]

I question the numbers that Googles comes up with showing the increase in Chrome downloads.

yesterday I had to do an Adobe flash update on my kids Windows/Linux box.

Normally I make sure that no other items (McAfee, Chrome, Norton, etc) are included in the download.

After the flash update was finished (for windows), I discovered that Chrome was installed, along with the Google Toolbar!

I didn't ask for it, didn't see anyplace to unselect it, but still had it. I uninstalled it, but it still counts as a download.

I have a Gmail account because my android phone requires one, but don't use it.

As stated above, I also use startpage.

[SteveRiley]

Monthly browser statistics gathered by W3Schools.com:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

[HalationEffect]

Monthly browser statistics gathered by W3Schools.com:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Just don't neglect to read the several paragraphs of disclaimers at the bottom of that page, which basically warn that the stats shown are only for visitors to their site and not the web in general.