Moving out of Gmail
So, I decided to move out of Gmail. I am not moving to Yahoo or any other commercial-they-own-your-data company. We’ve had our own server space for some time now at medhas.org. I simply installed RoundCube on my server in about 20 minutes and configured it to use my hosting provider given mailbox. I will slowly move all my mails to this account (thanks to Google for letting me to that). I shall be asking people to use sunil or bunny at medhas dot org now and not sunilmohan at gmail dot com.
RoundCube offers only basic stuff and is still very much in development. However:
- Its Free Software and I know what it is doing with my mails.
- I own my mails and all my data, truely. No evil entity or its AI machines are invading my privacy.
- No ads on my face when I look at my own content.
- Nobody is going to automatically subscribe and log me into new services that I don’t want/like.
- I know php well enough to add my own features to it and I am indeed planning to contribute to the project if I find time.
More Google Evil
Like many others, I’ve noticed a lot of things over the past few months of Google doing that are definitely evil. Here is the latest one:
Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web (The New York Times)
Saying that the deals are not exclusive is not an excuse to what they are trying to do. They will take the works for millions of people for free and use it for their commercial advantage and not allow everyone to freely have it. For God’s sake, those are public domain books. I see two ways now
- Say No Thank You to Google and a few years (even if it is 10 or 20) years down the line projects like Gutenberg will eventually do the task with volunteer support. We waited more than 80 years for them, I am sure we can wait more.
- Hand over those books forever to the commerical advantage of a single (or a few) company in exchange for immediate access to digital content.