03.05.22
Posted in Google, Mail at 10:10 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: When it comes to Google (Gulag), E-mail messages are merely “content” (to be scanned and indexed)
Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours
Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文)
For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence. I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email.
A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail. I asked him why he would willingly give Google copies of all his email. Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.
Since our conversation, I have often wondered just how much of my email Google really has. This weekend, I wrote a small program to go through all the email I have kept in my personal inbox since April 2004 (when Gmail was started) to find out.
One challenge with answering the question is that many people, like Peter, use Gmail to read, compose, and send email but they configure Gmail to send email from a non-gmail.com “From” address. To catch these, my program looks through each message’s headers that record which computers handled the message on its way to my server and to pick out messages that have traveled through google.com, gmail.com, or googlemail.com. Although I usually filter them, my personal mailbox contains emails sent through a number of mailing lists. Since these mailing lists often “hide” the true provenance of a message, I exclude all messages that are marked as coming from lists using the (usually invisible) “Precedence” header.
The following graph shows the numbers of emails in my personal inbox each week in red and the subset from Google in blue. Because the number of emails I receive week-to-week tends to vary quite a bit, I’ve included a LOESS “smoother” which shows a moving average over several weeks.
From eyeballing the graph, the answer to seems to be that, although it varies, about a third of the email in my inbox comes from Google!
Keep in mind that this is all of my personal email and includes automatic and computer generated mail from banks and retailers, etc. Although it is true that Google doesn’t have these messages, it suggests that the proportion of my truly “personal” email that comes via Google is probably much higher.
I would also like to know how much of the email I send goes to Google. I can do this by looking at emails in my inbox that I have replied to. This works if I am willing to assume that if I reply to an email sent from Google, it ends up back at Google. In some ways, doing this addresses the problem with the emails from retailers and banks since I am very unlikely to reply to those emails. In this sense, it also reflects a measure of more truly personal email.
I’ve broken down the proportions of emails I received that come from Google in the graph below for all email (top) and for emails I have replied to (bottom). In the graphs, the size of the dots represents the total number of emails counted to make that proportion. Once again, I’ve included the LOESS moving average.
The answer is surprisingly large. Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I’ve replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010. On the upside, there is some indication that the proportion is going down. So far this year, only 51% of the emails I’ve replied to arrived from Google.
The numbers are higher than I imagined and reflect somewhat depressing news. They show how it’s complicated to think about privacy and autonomy for communication between parties. I’m not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine.
If you want to run the analysis on your own, you’re welcome to the Python and R code I used to produce the numbers and graphs.
Licence: Copyright Benjamin Mako Hill, distributed as free cultural work under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
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03.12.21
Posted in Deception, Europe, Free/Libre Software, Law, Mail, Microsoft, Patents, Servers at 8:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: The video talks about some of the background surrounding our latest series and efforts to undermine, silence and demonise Techrights (deliberate distortion of our stance); it proceeds to discussing the first part, one of almost 20 in total
PUBLISHING articles about EPO corruption has never been easy because this institution, Europe’s second-largest, is run by Mafia-like entities (e.g. Serco [1, 2]) and their facilitators. Corrupt officials like Benoît Battistelli and their appointees, including António Campinos, would usher in and profit from such corruption. Never mind their attack on the actual law, e.g. lobbying for European software patents while bullying and defaming judges.
The video above is about Part I, which was split into two. Yesterday’s IRC logs reveal some of the difficulties going ahead with this series. Much disruption is caused by outside forces known for their track record of trolling. They exploit the fact that we don’t censor and ban anyone in IRC (free speech is important to us, as freedom of expression is needed for true journalism).
Later today we’ll publish Part II, which concerns Microsoft and a big scandal at the EPO (connected to Microsoft leveraging racism at a time of soaring violence against Asian-Americans). Copies of key documents have meanwhile been disseminated through IPFS. Spreading wide makes us more robust/resistant to censorship attempts. █
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09.29.20
Posted in IBM, Mail, Marketing, Red Hat at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Here we go again, days after they said it would stop
Summary: Red Hat seems incapable of respecting people’s inboxes; it subscribes people to things which they never ever subscribed to and makes it impossible to unsubscribe; what has Red Hat become or succumbed to?
THAT Red Hat hired its external PR people to work directly for Red Hat (from inside Red Hat) is no secret. We could name some of the people in question because they mailed us, first from E-mail addresses outside Red Hat and later from redhat.com addresses (after Red Hat had hired them). With new leadership comes another culture and IBM is an aggressive marketer, as we noted a decade ago and again several weeks ago. Master liars. Deniers. World-class cheats.
“With new leadership comes another culture and IBM is an aggressive marketer…”Shame on you, Red Hat. Even after unsubscribing (see screenshot, unsbscribing from something never subscribed to in the first place) they still spam today (E-mail from the morning shown at the top), much as predicted last week. Marketing people have no financial incentive to decrease the scale of their spamming operations.
Shame on IBM and shame on Red Hat, too. Red Hat should have remained an independent company, but in this ‘G[I]AFAM’ era there consolidation in ‘tech’ (grand scale of Pentagon-connected and sometimes Pentagon-funded oligopoly, optimised to serve ‘Global Empire’). █
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09.24.20
Posted in IBM, Mail, Marketing, Red Hat at 6:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
In the name of “engagement” (newspeak like the Linux Foundation‘s E-mail “blasts”, in their own words!), Red Hat turns into a spammer, apparently Windows-powered too
Summary: “Engagements” from Red Hat; have the IBM-led marketing people gone overboard, subscribing lots of people to marketing spam without bothering to ask for consent?
SO-CALLED ‘engagements’ have made Red Hat a bit of a marketing/spam firm, looking to promote its self-promotional articles by sending unsolicited mail spam to a lot of people (who knows how many) starting earlier this week.
“Come on, Red Hat. You can do better than this!”I don’t have any real grudge/issue with Red Hat (their CEO did an interview with us); I’ve often linked to OpenSource.com (many thousands of times since the site’s birth more than a decade ago), but I have a serious grudge when it comes to spam, or mass-mailing people without any solicitation or consent. IBM has routinely done those sorts of things to us, even as recently as last month.
Days ago we received this:
How quaint. We never subscribed to this.
Never ever gave that E-mail address to anybody at Red Hat either, so they must have looked that up somehow. What. On. Earth…
Then again this morning:
Where does this come from and how does one unsubscribe (having never subscribed in the first place)?
OK, unsubscribed now. From something never subscribed/asked for in the first place! Time will tell if that took effect; maybe it’s as effective as attempting to remove systemd.
What’s behind this aggressive marketing operation?
Is that you, Windows? Hiding behind another layer (security by secrecy/obscurity)?
Come on, Red Hat. You can do better than this! Stop trying to become what you used to be against. █
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04.27.15
Posted in Europe, Mail, Microsoft at 3:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Privatising the NHS and compromising privacy of every Brit with foreign entities
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia
Summary: The worst privacy violator in the world and the firm behind LSE failures are pocketing as much as £0.35 billion of British taxpayers’ money to acquire access to very sensitive data of British people
IT IS being reported in the British media that the NHS, which is gradually moving to adopt more and more Free/libre software, has just given a contract to Microsoft minion Accenture (article by IDG). £0.35 billion are to be spent on mail alone; that’s just crazy! That’s a big — even colossal! — mistake for the NHS to make when budget is tight and the Conservatives try to kill or privatise it. A lot of money for Microsoft/Accenture means that a degree of privatisation is happening here. “The same crew that did in the stock exchange,” iophk notes regarding the role played by Accenture. The article says “NHSmail has almost a million registered accounts and 730,000 active users. It has been running on Microsoft’s Exchange platform since 2009. Accenture is yet to confirm which IT systems it will use.” What a ripoff. £0.35 billion for less than a million users? What a heist! They should have gone with Free software and a British Free software consultancy. But since Conservatives like Cameron insist that encryption is such a nasty thing, no wonder an insecure proprietary alternative might be sought. Need PRISM (and by extension the NSA) be mentioned here?
Several days ago an article was published titled “The NHS must embrace open source to improve”. No doubt that’s true. The article says: “This is according to CIO at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust Rachel Dunscombe, who we recently caught up with to learn more about the transformation facing the UK healthcare system.
“Dunscombe told us that she is a strong supporter of open source in the NHS because it removes many of the risks presented by using proprietary products.”
The risks presented by proprietary products are not just to budget (disproportionately high cost) but also to patients. There have been stories about unencrypted data leaks and this new report from the British press [via Slashdot, which amended the post], calling out Windows, recalls Stuxnet and shows how using Microsoft Windows yourself helps your enemies (espionage): “Malware probers Tillmann Werner, of Crowdstrike, and Felix Leder, of BlueCoat, say the clever cyber-spy tool – said to have put back Iran’s nuclear program by two years – was on the brink of failure thanks to buggy code.
“Stuxnet had to remain undetected to the Iranians or else it would have blown the operation. Unfortunately, a programming blunder would have allowed it to spread to PCs running older and unsupported versions of Windows, and probably causing them to crash as a result. Those blue screens of death would have raised suspicions at the Natanz nuclear lab.”
And Windows continues to be used in British healthcare. This is insane. Another report from IDG in the UK helps Microsoft pretend to care about privacy (see “Microsoft moves to address customers’ concerns about cloud control and transparency”) while it’s actively providing the NSA with back doors, such as those which enabled sabotage in Iran.
If the NHS is serious about money savings and about privacy of patients, then it must immediately drop Windows and other Microsoft traps. As this British report from the other day serves to remind us, Windows ‘sales’ still are falling, largely due to GNU/Linux. It says that “Microsoft has weathered a tough three months, and despite signs of growth in cloud computing, Redmond saw its sales dragged down by dwindling demand from consumers.” Now recall the article above, “Microsoft moves to address customers’ concerns about cloud control and transparency”. Microsoft now wants the NHS to give Microsoft its data, using buzzwords like the ‘cloud’ nonsense. It is clear that the NHS should reject all that and just self-host using Free/libre Open Source software instead. It would cost far less than £0.35 billion and be more reliable, secure, etc. █
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06.28.14
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Mail, Microsoft at 5:52 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How the increased reliance of proprietary software for E-mails breeds abuse at the higher levels while hurting those who are vulnerable
COMPANIES and individuals who rely on Free software for their E-mail needs rarely lose any mail. The protocols, the software and the failovers are generally robust. They are well tested and widely used. There is usually redundancy built in and the costs of this redundancy is low.
When one relies on Microsoft for E-mails one can end up in prison and deported, as this recent case taught us. Microsoft’s E-mail infrastructure is ripe for surveillance abuses even by Microsoft itself. Blunders relating to lost mail often trace back to Microsoft and it’s too easy to see why. Any business that uses Microsoft for storing and relaying E-mail is settling for an office is almost as bad as Microsoft Office. It boggles the mind; why do people put such trash in offices? It’s a Trojan horse to communications. Most mail filtering and antivirus products are used specifically to tackle Microsoft issues (zombie PCs and Windows malware). Free software overcomes many of these complications and it is more efficient, economic, and robust.
“Free software overcomes many of these complications and it is more efficient, economic, and robust.”The other day offices that rely on Microsoft for mail came to a standstill. Any office that “relies heavily on Microsoft Outlook,” as the article put it, was unable to get anything done. “LOL,” wrote a reader of ours, “rely and Microsoft in the same sentence”.
This reader previously drew our attention to the way Microsoft’s broken mail software saved the Bush family from embarrassment (deleting evidence). Spot the pattern here. Here is another new report about Microsoft mail going down pretty badly and staying down for a whole business day. “In outages this week,” says the Microsoft-friendly site, “Microsoft’s online Exchange service was down for nine hours, crippling Office 365 and hosted Outlook accounts across North America and Mexico, just after its unified communications service also crashed.”
Microsoft’s hosted services can only be as reliable as the underlying software, which is simply not reliable. Why would anyone at all want to use hosted Microsoft services? Downtimes are just too frequent and we used to cover them regularly. Watch a Microsoft-affiliated site (Fool.com) thinking that Ubuntu users will give Microsoft their files for hosting. Only a fool would do that, or one whose goal is to have the files spied if not altogether lost.
Then subject of lost E-mail is very hot at the moment because of stories relating to the IRS and NSA, Microsoft’s special ally for well over a decade. Here is some of the latest:
During a hearing held yesterday by the House Oversight Committee, Committee Chairman Darrel Issa said that it was “unbelievable” that the IRS had lost the e-mails of former IRS official Lois Lerner. While Congressman Issa is not generally ignorant on tech issues, he’s clearly not familiar with just how believable such a screw-up is.
“A retention policy designed to ensure that mail is lost” is what our reader called it. Maybe they too used Microsoft, but it is hard to tell for sure. IRS recently signed a big Microsoft deal, so it is a Windows shop (we covered this at the time, only months ago).
The bottom line is, Microsoft’s E-mail infrastructure breeds abuse. It is easy to claim that some “computer crash” (read: Windows issues) made evidence of crime disappear and when one who is vulnerable uses Microsoft for mail it is clear that those in power will be able to retrieve a lot to be used against the individual. Proprietary software tends to work against its users and in favour of the software ‘masters’. E-mail is a great example of this. █
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07.16.13
Posted in Free/Libre Software, Mail, Microsoft at 3:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Cannot find a home, struggles to find its identity
Mailbox down the drain
Summary: How a Free software Exchange/Outlook challenger became an obscure option with no FOSS identity
According to this report from VAR Guy, the Zimbra shuffle continues:
VMware (VMW) has sold Zimbra, its Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange alternative, to Telligent. The VAR Guy isn’t shocked, considering VMware has been selling off non-core assets and Zimbra’s website had barely been updated this year. But what exactly does Zimbra’s sale mean to VMware and its channel partners? Here’s the analysis.
Zimbra was already in the hands of two Microsoft-inflitrated companies, Yahoo and VMware, and it never really made the impact it deserved to make. Back in the days it was marketed as FOSS, but this is no longer the case. The above article says that “Telligent — which focuses on enterprise social software — has acquired Zimbra. And going forward, Telligent will be known as Zimbra. Telligent CEO Patrick Brandt will lead the combined company. It sounds like Intel Capital, NXT Capital Venture Finance, BDCA, Hall Financial Group and VMware will each invest in the new Zimbra — which offers a “unified social collaboration suite built for the post-PC era.””
“Zimbra is no longer what it claimed to be, but some FOSS-backing companies like Red Hat use it.”This is interesting. So the company will be known as the product it just bought? Either way, no word is said about Free/open source software, which was the key proposition of this company way back in the days. The new owner is, according to Wikipedia, “previously a founding member of Microsoft’s ASP.NET team and helped build and run the Microsoft ASP.NET community.”
That’s reassuring, isn’t it?
Kolab would be a good option for those seeking a Free software option in this area. Zimbra is no longer what it claimed to be, but some FOSS-backing companies like Red Hat use it. █
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05.14.13
Posted in FSF, Google, Mail, Microsoft at 2:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another hypocritical attack of Microsoft against Google, this time in Boston
THE home of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the principal battleground for Microsoft's anti-ODF wars in the US is going to abandon Microsoft. Relation expected, right? Microsoft, as we saw before, is getting all nasty about it.
Well, “despite the Anti-Google FUD-slinging” Boston will ditch Exchange: “Faced with the choice of saving serious money or buying a load of FUD, the City of Boston has become the latest enterprise customer to dump Microsoft Exchange in favor of Google Apps.
“The thing to do is not to learn from Boston’s government branches but from the Boston-based FSF.”“And the city’s 20,000 employees won’t be the last to make this move until Microsoft either closes the cost chasm or comes up with a scarier story.”
Here is more: “THE CITY OF BOSTON has switched its 20,000 employees from Microsoft Exchange to Gmail in a move that will save $280,000 a year.”
Neither choice is acceptable. They are both proprietary and not privacy-respecting. So on what grounds does Microsoft attack Google? The same was done by Novell and Microsoft in California. They are all hypocrites because Microsoft itself is trying to do exactly what Google is doing.
The thing to do is not to learn from Boston’s government branches but from the Boston-based FSF. What they need is encrypted, self-hosted, FOSS-based mail. Later in the week we shall write about some newly-discovered Microsoft surveillance. Microsoft is a lot worse than Google when it comes to privacy. █
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