The maddening thing is Google had this exact same problem with Buzz. You’d think they would have learned from that or maybe they just have a very short institutional memory.
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Thank you for your generous (patient) response.
I created a Diaspora account in 2011 and deleted my FB account. Your description matches my experience because I didn’t know the community, mostly developers. I never went back to FB though and BB is the closest I generally get now to digital social networking.
Is there a primer on SMTP you can recommend? I find myself confused on many technical subjects and esp.about packets which copy across different layers of digital abstraction over a network.
I can’t see the edges of the puzzle. There’s the OS and ports and tcp/ip, and I dunno WTF.
And VC circlejerk? That’s a good one.
Why do coders want that? It’s like investing in your own poverty. They should insist on opening all the source code they can as a matter of professional survival.
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I can say in all honesty that this particular issue hasn’t happened to me, because I don’t even know what Gmail speed-dial is. Is it something that they’re rolling out slowly? Is this something I’m not privileged enough to have yet?
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I believe that @lanika’s point was not that this particular product could cause problems, but that any sort of social networking software, designed to connect people automatically, where the user can’t pre-emptively either opt out of customize it because it could connect them to someone who is dangerous to them is a problem that the developers haven’t thought about because it’s not a problem they themselves have experienced. The fact that it’s speed dial is immaterial to the point she was trying to make.
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Well, I’ll rephrase.
What is speed dial? The writeup doesn’t tell me much, except it makes it sound like something that’s forced on people using Gmail. All I can find is a Chrome extension.
I’d love to see this and try it out, because I’m a straight white male who does get emails from some dickbag, and would love to see whether or not it tries to speed dial people I’ve filtered out. If that’s what it’s doing, it’s amazing that nobody thought to add that functionality.
Or it was always a marketing ploy to begin with.
Anytime Google and/or Facebook have had the option of giving users agency in their experience, both companies have consciously chosen instead to disenfranchise their users. This is no accident; it’s a central part of their corporate philosophy. We may occasionally wrest back some small modicum of control here and there for a time, but the overall arc of these companies and the other companies aspiring to their market shares remains unwavering. User privacy is treated as a nuisance to eradicate.
Cory’s correct that forcing users into contact with their harassers wasn’t the intent of the developers, but the design philosophy that led to it is no accident and won’t change even if they fix this particular bug under public pressure. Which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t fix it. Obviously they should. But more than that Google should change their corporate philosophy. Unfortunately as long as their real customers are marketers and users remain a commodity access to whom they can sell, I don’t see them having any incentive not to do the same sort of thing the next time they offer a algorithmically curated service.
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Honestly, I don’t know, but I’d guess it’s some sort of extension of their phone software? I wasn’t aware of it either.
This seems precisely to be what @lanika was discussing, which was compromising people’s safety via automatically connecting them to people they’ve filtered out who were a threat to them. I think we can understand why this would be a problem and how people who haven’t had stalkers wouldn’t understand how this could be a problem.
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Speed-dial lists that are trying to be helpful let you decide who goes on them, and lets you block people who you don’t want to speed-dial, and remembers to keep them blocked after the first time you’ve told them.
But beyond that, why is a speed-dial list creation algorithm using your IN box instead of your SENT mail. Speed dial is for simplifying sending mail to the people you send mail to a lot. At $DAYJOB, I get LOTS of email from various vendors, and lots of email from $DAYJOB’s various corporate communication organs, but they aren’t the people I send mail to most often. Surprisingly, you’d be able to find that more effectively by looking at the people I DO send mail to. (More surprisingly, Microsoft Outlook does a pretty good job of guessing after a couple of letters, from the people I send mail to more often and also from the other recipients of messages I’m replying to.)
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never?
You should meet my white male cis hetro inbox before you make assumptions about it.
Oh, but it’s them, I see. Thanks so much for being totally unlike your oppressors.
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Oh, dear God, I feel like a damned fool. The linked article is talking about Inbox, which while it’s part of Gmail, isn’t the first thing I think of when I think of Gmail, because it’s not Gmail.
Inbox is just overall fucking horrible imho. It’s not just speed dial–and I had no idea it was called speed-dial–it’s everything. It tries to think for you. I just opened it for the first time in a long while, and it chose a Frontier tech support person as one of my speed dial contacts. I’ve received exactly one email from this person.
Inbox is overall useless imho, though I know it has its fans.
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I’m afraid that I can’t tell you too much of use about SMTP, It’s the mechanism by which messages are passed between mailservers, and so it(along with the fact that a reasonable percentage of the world’s mailservers still listen to external SMTP traffic, rather than ignoring it) is responsible for email being usable between accounts on different domains/services; and that’s what makes email something of a rarity among contemporary communications mechanisms, which tend to either have no mechanism for communication between users of different services, or have a spec for one but have close to zero adoption(as is the case with XMPP/Jabber, an instant messaging protocol which supports ‘federation’ that looks a lot like email’s arrangement in practice; but good luck finding anyone willing to federate: Google Talk dropped support in 2014, and it was kind of flakey even before then, Facebook Chat is/was XMPP-based but never federated with anything and was always touchy about even use of 3rd party XMPP clients).
I’ve poked at it a few times during attempts to troubleshoot the mailserver at work; and you usually run into SMTP settings when configuring a non-webmail email client; but aside from that fairly lightweight stuff, I really don’t have the technical background to tell you anything useful about how it works; just that it is notable because it’s more or less the last reasonably widely adopted mechanism for communication between services that does work.
Email is hardly a shining beacon of brilliance, so the various attempts to kill it aren’t exactly undeserved; but unlike its would-be successors it will at least let you communicate with people who aren’t in the same walled garden.
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The RFC is fairly straightforward. You can telnet into port 22 and type the commands, if you have an open system.
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They don’t “read” the email, they parse it for ad content, and only on that context, no data is fed back. This is nothing new, unless you’re talking about a radical move that someone has not noticed until very recently.
The most current RFC.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321
(I know you can get to it from the obsolete one, but you might as well start from the current end.)
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Dude, if the shoe doesn’t fit you don’t have to wear it you know…
Or do we need a #notallmen up in here?
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It’s part of Inbox not the basic GMail client app.
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The conceptual way you’re writing about it is helpful to me so thank you. I think the insight that it’s not walled off is important and not obvious.
I’ll try it. I don’t know what an RFC is so I’ll look that up first. Thank you.
Bookmarked. Thx!
Fair enough, but I still think that @lanika’s criticism stands! 
Now imagine if the person it decided to call wasn’t a random tech support person, but an angry, stalkerish ex!
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