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

Sun May 10 08:28:20 CEST 2009

I'll second wholeheartedly this explanation by Ryan,

especially for non-tech oriented people like myself, we want to drive the
car, but are not interested in knowledge about the motor.

Gmail has by far the most interesting ecology of services, it is what made
the crucial difference that losing my laptop without backup wasn't actually
a catastrophe, because my material is available through the gmail archive.
Centralization is not inherently worse in terms of robustness. Full p2p
architectures would have their own problems.

I've yet to encounter, at 51 years of age, my first real problem with
privacy, and have never clicked on an online ad, as far as I can remember.

We have to use products from capitalist enterprises for almost everything we
do, I don't see gmail being different essentially from buying a
corporate-made hifi station.

There are many struggles to be fought, and gmail is an efficient tool to
communicate,

Google is a netarchical capitalist, part shark, these practices are
negative, part dolphin, it has to enable our social cooperation, that is
positive; we have to learn to distinguish, using whatever can help our cause
and human cooperation.

Michel

On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 11:57 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
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>
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