[p2p-research] "Many of us will not send mail to gmail.com"

Sat May 9 18:57:49 CEST 2009

Marco,

Gmail is a function rich, highly secure, free service (for seeing some
ads...which to my ways of thinking is a good deal if not pure free).  It
gives me huge amounts of free disk space, free file support etc.  Someone
may be paying, but it isn't me.  And I disagree with Marc that these
services are inherently expensive to society.  Corporations can be quite
efficient, and I believe Google is so, bye and large.

I've long ago given up on strong expectations of privacy.  What do I have to
hide that isn't inherently coded and defended by other service providers
(e.g. banks) anyway?

I love GMAIL and recommend it continually--over the years I've probably put
200 people on it.  I've used many a university system, and am forced to use
the hated MS Outlook at the office.  I can get my mail anywhere on the
planet, be relatively confident that it will be available, that people won't
miss spell my provider / host, etc. I might add that I am fiercely pro Open
Net, Open Architecture, etc.  That said, my house has Linux computers, a Mac
and even MS Windows XP.

In gmail I can also chat with many friends within it, link it to my
calendar, carry on video (when my Sony is willing) and find many of their
lab features such as embedded search, etc. extremely useful.

As I have said, I'm not a political zealot for P2P.  It isn't an
idealism--it is, to me, a ethos.  I recognize it as a valuable set of ideas
whose time has come.  If its time passes, I'll shed no tears and will be on
to the next most moral and productive ethos/approach/system/architecture.  I
do believe there are reasons to think P2P represents the most stable form of
social relationships given a certain level of technology infrastructure.  I
believe it is compatible with any range of political and economic systems
simultaneously to existing on its own--and P2P systems from China to Sri
Lanka to New York City prove that to me.

Give me a free/easy, stable, feature equal or similar facility on P2P and
I'll be there tomorrow (or even today).  I could probably solve the problem
for myself given enough time and effort, but my time is valuable to me to
use in other ways.  I'd gladly donate money to an Apache-like organization
to solve email through some other mechanism, but short of that, I don't have
any moral issues at all using Gmail or any Google product.  Google Maps is
superior in my view to competitors, so is their search.  I've shared many
documents with it, and I like their innovations.

Wordpress is far superior to Blogger.  When I blog, I use Wordpress, which
is more conventionally open/non-profit.  On the other hand, I personally
find Google to be more ethical in its governance, employee treatment, public
positions, etc. than most firms.  I really have no issues at all in
supporting/using them.  That said, when something better or freer matches
it, I'd be quick to switch.  If P2P adapts a radical anti-market posture, it
will fail.

Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 10:47 AM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:

> There is a question I asked yesterday in the "p2p email" thread that
> went lost in the discussion, so I thought it could be interesting /
> worthwhile to make a new thread of it. Yesterday I wrote:
>
> > What I've been sincerely wondering for months now is how it's
> > possible that a p2p-research and advocacy list, of all places, has
> > so many members "running" their own email with gmail, that is in the
> > way which is as far as possible from P2P ideals and suggested
> > practices, a way which relies on one huge provider with bunches of
> > large, very centrally managed data centers. I'm on tenths of lists
> > and the percentage of gmail addresses among, say, the 20/30% most
> > active users is far higher here than in any other of them.
>
> Another reason not to use centralized providers is privacy. The
> subject of this email is a quote from http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/,
> which I invite everybody to read carefully, even if with a mandatory
> disclaimer:
>
>      the style of that whole website is a bit too much dramatic for
>      my taste, and above all it seems stuck to ~5 years ago. I don't
>      use Gmail, so I don't know if the reason is that the webmaster
>      was too busy to update the page or that the situation hasn't
>      changed.
>
> But even if there are many specific informations which are outdated
> now, I believe the gist of the page is still quite a valid summary of
> all the privacy related reasons why one should avoid Gmail or any
> other global email provider.
>
> So why do so many subscribers of a list like this, ie people
> interested in P2P-ness and, often, also in civil rights issues, use
> Gmail?
>
>        Marco Fioretti
> --
> Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
> software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090509/0e76069d/attachment.html>