Avaaz in "grave danger" due to GMail spam filters

[Moon Jones]

On 21.08.2013 00:19, rysiek wrote:
>> What do you mean by «legitimate»? And second what do you mean by
>> «legitimate activities»?
>
> Not sure if troll, but oh-kay...
>
> I mean "I have subscribed to their list; this list provides clearly marked and
> functional way of unsubscribing; thus, mail from this source is considered
> legitimate; and hence sending such mail by them is considered legitimate
> activity".
>
> I'd say it's quite obvious, though.

Cute. Last time I have checked spam meant unsolicited mail, nothing 
about providing ways to unsubscribe. Would that make a spammer who keeps 
sending me offers because their system keeps reharvesting my address ok 
as long as give me a way to unsubscribe each time? I know it's not the 
case of Avaaz, but still.

Yet, you have avoided once more the question. I'll requote it:

 >> By introducing policies that are disruptive to legitimate activities.
 >> Why they are disruptive? Because GMail is being used by a huge part
 >> of e-mail users.

 > What do you mean by «legitimate»? And second what do you mean by
 > «legitimate activities»?

Or is it just a figgure of speech? You write over and over again «us» 
although you are one person (I think). You generalise «policies that are 
disruptive to legitimate activities» and yet you only meant Avaaz. 
What's this?

>> But «fucks us in the arse» implies a deliberate act.
>
> Well, my bad. Should have been more clear there, I give you that.
>
> I do attribute malice to Google with regard to several of their recent actions
> (the Jabber debacle and the anti Net Neutrality stance, for starters). With
> great power (and Google does have great power over the Internet right now,
> sadly) comes great responsibility; they *should* be aware of what effect their
> policies have on the rest of the Net.

Jabber is a server. Google has never supported Jabber as far as I know. 
Do you know anything against it?

Net Neutrality is accepted by Google. They are against it. And lobby 
against it. And it's their right. I have searched their help pages and 
they never say anything like «we fight for Net Neutrality». And you know 
why I believe this is not an issue? Christians say Thou shall not kill, 
yet many christian countries have the capital punishment. Islam 
supporters come forward and say islam is a religion of peace even after 
all those bloody attacks. Buddhists and hindus are about don't do harm 
as you will have a crappy future life and still they kill other people.

Yet people like you keep going after Google, implying they are somehow 
evil. And most of them, at least the ones I know, they do enjoy at least 
few of the things Google provides for free and on a daily basis. Am I 
wrong to call it hypocrisy?

That quote, like the also often used «freedom of speech» argument, was 
meant for the state. Not for people or companies. It might sound nice, 
that does not make it true. Neither makes it binding.

I am sure they are well aware of the effects. And that they ponder it 
well before jumping with a new service. As long as it brings Google 
closer to 100% of the online advertising business it's good. As long as 
it brings Google closer to 100% of the portable devices business it's 
good. And so on for each and every market they're in as well as markets 
they are going to start conquering after this wonderful August 2013.

> And I would say, we should *expect* them to be aware of that. Even more -- I
> am quite sure they *are* aware. And hence, we're getting dangerously close to
> what could be described as malice: conscious decision to perform actions that
> are heavily detrimental to a lot of other entities with the only rationale
> being profit maximalisation.

That's all cheap propaganda. It's wrong on so many levels.

> I shall re-phrase, then:
>
> "We are being fucked in the arse by GMail, so let's ask them politely to use
> some lubricant".

Do you have multiple personalities?

Probably you are not aware of this. But your discourse contains more 
crap than anything I have read as coming from Google or one of its 
owners. «we» is a way to implicate the guillable. If you had any decency 
you would have limited that «we» to anything more precise. Paranoid 
people. People who need protection from their own states. People who 
hear voices. People living in the Northen Hemisphere. Me and my partner. 
People who can't afford $5 a year for a mail account. Anything but we.

> This version leaves about as much space for GMail doing that completely
> accidentally and without any knowledge nor awareness of the grave effects
> their action will have as I am willing to leave. I.e. some, but not that much.

Sure. These days I was checking the laptop market for somebody. Guess 
what! Most laptops, at least the cheap ones do not have a LED for hard 
drive activity. So the user is left in the dark about hard drive 
activity. Most laptops do not have the flickering leds for WiFi. Many 
laptops don't have flickering leds for the Ethernet port, and some have 
it, but you have to turn the laptop in a weird position to notice them. 
Some don't have a LED to signal if the webcam is on or off, and some can 
turn that led off in software. I have yet to see a laptop that has the 
microphone with an associated LED to show it's status on / off. No 
switch, Ethernet or otherwise, signals it might be under surveilance. 
And the list can go on for a few pages. And I am sorry, but I do not 
recall any hysteric person making a fuss about any of the above issues.

>> I see your domain is from Poland, which is
>> quite a backward country when it comes to anything people do, yet a pope
>> disaproves. Meaning anal sex, heterosexual, homosexual or plain
>> masturbation is a very very bad thing to do. I might be wrong, but in
>> this context «GMail fucks us in the arse» implies at least malice. Yet
>> now you write «I am not assuming malice on Google's part». Help me
>> understand.
>
> I'm sorry, but I find your your comment right there borderline offensive.

I'm sorry too. It's the second time this day you are pointing that out 
so I'll be quiet afterwards.

>>From the perspective of copyright reform debate[1] and Internet porn
> censorship debate[2] I could say that many other countries are extremely
> backwards with regard to some things (censorship, copyright, porn), bot that
> doesn't get us anywhere, does it.
>
> [1] http://rys.io/en/70
> [2] http://rys.io/en/109
>
> Not to mention the unwarranted generalisation that "all Poles are <insert your
> observation>". That has some potential to backfire, after all there is a slim
> chance you could happen to be talking to an atheist[3]...

Poland is to Europe what Pakistan is to the Orient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Catholicism_by_country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

Now one might argue that Catholics are a few centuries ahead of Islam. 
But the point was that being in Poland for an extended period makes one 
feel anal sex far more offensive than a civilised country like Denmark 
or The Netherlands, even if there are only a few kilometers away (that 
is a figgure of speech).

I never even even imply anything remote like «all poles». I happen to 
know quite a few Russians living there. Ukrainians too. The Jews have 
had a very difficult life in the past century, but there are still a 
few. And I can assure a Jew living in Posen has a better chance to be 
prejudiced against gay people than a Jew living in New York.

And that can be a good argument: myself I believe that developing 
critical thinking to fight 1000 year old or older beliefs can help with 
the need for freedom and privacy. Yet things like denying medical care 
because it might lead to an abortion are far worse than Google policy. 
I'm not saying PRISM is a good thing. I'm saying only that there are far 
worse things which get ignored.


> [3] http://rys.io/en/16
>
> Also, the .io domain here might prove problematic to interpret in the context
> of your previous assumptions, I guess.

Yes. It might be have something to do with Input/Output so it might be a 
key logger. Or worse: it can lead to IOerr, famous hacker who happens to 
be of jewish descent and the Sionists have an agenda of World domination 
just as exposed in revealing show Pinky and the Brain. Sorry. Couldn't 
help myself. This whole paragraph is a joke.

>>> Had such a centralisation not occured, there would be no serious
>>> problem. One of the providers introduces such policies? Fine,
>>> whatever, they have a few percent of users at the most, we can live
>>> with that. And users can switch, no problemo.
>>
>> How can anybody draw the line? It's fine as long as they are under an
>> arbitrary value set by WHOM, but it's wrong after that?
>
> Well, as with *most* of important things in life, there is no precise border,
> crossing of which makes you a monopolist. But I guess we can all agree that if
> Avaaz sees that as a grave danger, that might be some indication.

The answer according to me: there can't be set a reliable limit. Thus 
there should be no limit. Either you leave the things the way they are 
or you start working towards forbiding by the law.

>>> However, with GMail having such a huge slice of the pie, they can
>>> literally make or break organisations like Avaaz.
>>
>> Than they should break Avaaz.
>>
>> If one company depends so much on another, than you can call the first
>> one a parasyte. If it's existence depends on Google, than they should
>> ask nicely and maybe forward a nice sum of money. Or they have quite
>> some nerve to try to impose rules from the position of parasyte.
>>
>> Hopefuly for you their niche might be filled afterwards by a company
>> that can stand on its own.
>
> Okay, I think you didn't get the crux of the issue.
>
> Avaaz, AFAIK, is *not* using Google's services to distribute mail. Their
> members/users/activists do for their personal accounts. It's not that Avaaz is
> *relying* on Google/GMail, it's that they have no say who delivers their mail
> to a huge part of their users/activists.

Than there should be no problem getting their message some other way 
than email.

> Also, it's not a company, it's an NGO.

You mean it's not for profit.

>>> And the right way to deal with that is at least telling the users
>>> "look, the problem is related to centralisation, considering moving
>>> to a different mail provider would be a good idea".
>>
>> Don't you think that is for the people to decide?
>
> You *do* see the difference between:
>
> "look, the problem is related to centralisation, considering moving to a
> different mail provider would be a good idea"
>
> ...and...
>
> "we demand you move to a different provider immediately"
>
> ...right?

Than what's the fuss with the grave danger? Why does this thread exist?

>>> Instead, what we get is "please, dear users, play according to rules
>>> set by this behemoth that can do with e-mail whatever the hell it
>>> wants". Hence my (overly ribald for some, as it turns out) metaphor.
>>
>> Because they way you expressed it, as I have no idea what Avaaz is or
>> does, they are a puny corporation living from Google's leftovers.
>> Meaning Google does a good thing for their users.
>
> Avaaz is ~20mln-strong civic organisation operating via on-line petitions to
> try and convince politicians to sometimes do the right thing. Instead of
> slandering them, you might want to educate yourself:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avaaz

Online petitions. Meaning spam.

I recall another initiative like that: feeding African children by 
clicking banners. Each click meant one piece of rice. I've read the 
creator is stinking rich because of that.

> Yes, I should have provided the link in my first e-mail, I assumed that on
> this list Avaaz might be already known. See, everybody makes wrong assumptions
> from time to time.

It seems that I am helping the cause of that corporation. Sorry, I'm 
against.