Shark Lady Tech

Technology, Internet, Gadgets and Geeks

Posts Tagged ‘gmail’

Out of the circle: I just deleted my Google+ account

July 27th, 2011

I’ve been ambiguous about Google for quite a while now. What started as an amazingly innovative and efficient search engine, grew up to be quite a monster of internet services and advertising tools. That, in itself, isn’t a bad thing. A big company isn’t necessarily a bad company.

Yet, bit by bit, Google services seem less and less appealing. First – the flagship – the almighty Google search engine. Gimmicks like Google Suggest and Google Instant became annoying rather quickly, and didn’t add much to the search efficiency – rather the opposite. Then, there’s the fact that Google seems to think that it knows what are you looking for – even without you asking for it. When you search certain keywords, Google will give you results which include many “related” keywords, but a lot of the time it just interferes with the search process.

To top it off, the amount of data and info Google’s gathering about us is frightening. And finally – the results are useless, still full of spam and too mainstream in many cases (That’s why I use DuckDuckGo in most of my English searches) .

Gmail is still great, but then there’s always that nagging fear that one day you’ll try to login and find that your account have been closed, canceled or hacked into, and no one in Google will lift a finger to help you with that. I have regular pop3 mail and many backups, but that’s not enough for me. I eagerly await a webmail that supports Hebrew in an efficient way – when I find that, I’ll switch immediately.

And then there’s Google+, which so many rave on and on about. Yeah, it’s cool and slick, it’s fast and you can have a nice social media experience with it. Yes. So? That’s also true for Twitter, Facebook and reddit. Oh, and hey – everyone is on Google+, too. Again – so? “Everyone is doing it” has never been a good reason for anything.

I have several websites and blogs, accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and reddit – there’s no reason for me to maintain yet another data-sucking account, even if many other people think it’s cool.

So, I deleted my Google+ account. I find that having one less Google service is a good idea. I think it’s time for me to limit my Google exposure. Where there are substitutes – I’ll happily use them. Where there aren’t any – I’ll tread carefully.

–

TL;DR: I deleted my Google+ account. Why? Because FUCK YOU, that’s why.

No comments »

Posted in Privacy, SEO and Search Engines, Social Networks

Tags: duck duck go gmail google search engines social media

Gmail is Slow; Delicious is Spammed

May 9th, 2010

If you are a Gmail user, you might have experienced the horrors of awful slowness in your inbox lately. Gmail problems include: extremely long load times (we are talking 10 minutes in some cases), messages that are late to arrive, problems downloading attachments and problems with sending messages.

These issues arise in all browsers and all operating systems.

This situation has been going on for a while. Users are complaining all over the so-called Google help forums – and to no avail. Google says nothing, and the only help these poor users get is a link to the unhelpful Gmail is Slow page. Trust me guys – you can’t blame Norton Anti-Virus for this one! Twitter, too, is full of complaints about Gmail, and still no official word from Google.

The rumors say that Google has been compromised by hackers and that their servers took a real hit – but they won’t admit it. Since Google has no customer service to speak of, it seems that we will just have to wait for this mysterious situation to resolve itself.

Delicious Spam Attack

No, this is not a funky name for an even funkier recipe – this ain’t no cooking blog, fellas. Anyway, on a more serious note – Delicious, the social bookmarking site (which I love deeply) has fallen victim to a vicious spam attack. If you take a peek at the Popular Bookmarks page, which is usually a great place to see what’s hot on the web, you’ll see that it’s filled with filthy spam articles in all languages.

At first, this also affected aggregators like Popurls and Oursignal, but they seem to be filtering out the crap right now.

There’s no official response from Delicious/Yahoo on this matter.

Something is rotten in the state of the interwebs, my friends. First it’s disgusting “Like” buttons – now a slow/hacked Gmail and a spammed Delicious. Thank God there are still funny cats around!

No comments »

Posted in Hacking and Security, Internet, Social Networks

Tags: delicious email gmail google slow spam spam attack yahoo

Google VS China – Who is Evil Here?

January 14th, 2010

At this point in time, you can’t take anything Google does face value. There are too many agendas and business interests, and since Google has long forsaken its “Do no Evil” motto, you might wanna hold the cheers for a while.

In a very detailed post, that has been quoted and referenced all over the net, Google announced that it considering shutting down its business in China. The reason? Seems that the Chinese government has hacked Google’s infrastructure, performed surveillance and stolen its intellectual property. More to the point – someone in the Chinese authorities has tried (and partially succeeded) to hack into Gmail accounts that belong to human rights activists, presumably to spy on them. According to Google, “Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information”.

As a response, Google are going to “review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all”.

So, in plain words – Google aren’t really yet shutting down its business in China, as some bloggers seem to think. It’s just considering the next step.

The question that we should be asking is: WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG? Why does it take an attack on Google servers in order for Google to realize that censorship and disclosure of private information is a bad thing? Where was this sanctity before? Google has been cooperating with the Chinese government for years – where was the care for human rights for three years?

This looks less like a righteous move and more like a filthy little PR trick. While there’s not much to be said in favor of China and their barbaric behavior towards citizens, there are no compliments due here for Google, either. It’s doubtful that Google will cease operations in China. And if they do – there are probably other reasons for them to do that – definitely not the concern for human rights or privacy.