I was curious about something a while ago since we are so dependent on technology: What if, one day, Google immediately ceased all its operations and shut down all its services with no warning, destroyed all its backups and vanished entirely? Would people just get used to Vimeo and Bing while mourning the loss of billions of videos and e-mails over the last decade? Would worldwide economy collapse beyond recovery? Or would modern civilization simply collapse into some sort of dystopia, unable to adapt to such drastic change even if it's not as bad as power going out worldwide permanently?
Google shuts some of their services down once in a while, such as Google Code (that one was kind of drastic, but at least they offered people to rehost their stuff on GitHub), but most of the time it's their ventures they deem failed and don't want to waste any resources on them anymore. If the whole of Google would cease to exist, then that would be a problem indeed. Google is considered a giant, to the point they can do whatever they want with the internet, so if they are to disappear that would leave a big hole in it. Of course, some geeks figured out how to live without Google, I'm sure the Internet would be able to recover well.
Yeah I was talking about if everything ran by Google and the company itself vanished off the face of the earth instantly, or following a massive financial scandal, with no warning and no trace of any backups.
The answer is obvious.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Bing_logo.svg/750px-Bing_logo.svg.png)
Lots of worldwide issues regarding GMail first, then Web Search, then YouTube, then everything else, I guess (by order of priority)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q
A bit different scenario, but still interesting ;)
This hypothetical situation shows why the Internet should be more decentralized.
Quote from: CVSoft on December 26, 2015, 08:32:40 AM
The answer is obvious.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Bing_logo.svg/750px-Bing_logo.svg.png)
Bing lacks a video sharing social network, though.
@Legimet actually got it I think. The main problem with such scenario is the fact that everything is so centered around Google and the question is if we're too dependent on Google or not, like people are dependent on electricity and Internet.
All elderly people would be sitting infront of their PC typing in www.google.com over and over trying to get it to work :P But that would really suck since I use it for almost everything online <_<
Quote from: c4ooo on December 27, 2015, 03:20:53 AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q
A bit different scenario, but still interesting ;)
I've seen this video, it's pretty interesting.
At this point I don't depend too much on google anymore, I've been trying to get out of the matrix. :P
But google is so useful :P I mostly just use it as a search engine thought.
Quote from: CVSoft on December 26, 2015, 08:32:40 AM
The answer is obvious.
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Bing_logo.svg/750px-Bing_logo.svg.png)
But
It's
Not
Google
Because Its No Good
(:P)
Well WolframAlpha can (and should) replace google for anything math related. The two should sign an agreement so WA results are piped into google. So for example, if i search "factor(thegame)" into google it will use WA to actualy factor it and not return some useless websites.
Quote from: alexgt on January 04, 2016, 04:26:43 PM
But google is so useful :P I mostly just use it as a search engine thought.
Yeah that's the point. I stopped using things such as google calendar/contacts/whatever, even the play store isn't welcome on my phone anymore. I still do use search, youtube and translate and I'm strongly considering getting off gmail too.
Quote from: Streetwalrus on January 04, 2016, 08:24:26 PM
Quote from: alexgt on January 04, 2016, 04:26:43 PM
But google is so useful :P I mostly just use it as a search engine thought.
Yeah that's the point. I stopped using things such as google calendar/contacts/whatever, even the play store isn't welcome on my phone anymore. I still do use search, youtube and translate and I'm strongly considering getting off gmail too.
Getting of of Gmail? Do you want me to buy you microsoft outlook? :trollface:
Well the google services i use are the search engine, chrome, gmail, and google translate ;)
Ohh and i forgot youtube _._
Nah, self hosted mail, or a more private mail service run by someone I know I can trust.
Edward snowden uses google iirc ^.^
The thing is a self hosted one is eiser to say hack then google, and google cant read your emails anyway because they are encrypted. If you self host you also reveal your ip, which increases the risk of getting hacked ect...
There are two sides to privacy: identity disclosure and having your every move tracked. I don't mind anyone knowing who I am, I do however care about not being watched when I do my casual stuff.
Google can effectively access your email because even if it's encrypted, they do have the key. Email was not designed with encryption in mind, you can encrypt the contents with PGP but that's it. And they do use your email's contents for advertising (though I don't actually see said advertising because I use an ad blocker and I don't use the webmail anyway).
Gmail and privacy = no.
As far as security is concerned, your own mail server is as secure as you make it. Also a VPS is inexpensive so your actual IP doesn't need to be known by people you exchange email with, as you're not hosting it at home.
Ohh, i thought google could not read your emails :(
Also i have no idea what an VPS is :(
I'm late, but yeah Google privacy record is questionable and I wouldn't trust them about not reading my e-mail nor selling my info to third-parties. However, I don't mind them accessing my content as much as I mind the NSA doing so, simply because Google probably doesn't give rats about what I do on the Internet compared to the NSA, at least except maybe to optimize their server performance and change their services based on what people like or use the most or to provide relevant adsense.
But yeah on Google I only use Gmail, the search and Youtube. Most other stuff like Google Code and Google+ was already obsolete before they became a thing, IMHO, because they couldn't compete against Github, Codeplex, SourceForge and Facebook.
I just kinda wish for a single service I could use for everything, which Google is trying to do, but there are just too many other things that Google can't recreate or connect to- like Windows 10 and Microsoft services. It's for this reason, that even though I use my Google account for nearly everything, I still require a Microsoft account, an Apple account and several others, though sites that let you sign up/in w/ Google helps.
Unfortunately, if there were a single service for everything, making you require only one account, then that one corporation that controls that service would have 100% market share, thus monopolising the bussiness. That would not be good at all for anyone.
Yeah, monopoly has its pros and cons. We would all like if we'd have one single service for everything on the Internet, but that would have its share of problems. A few years ago, OpenID was kinda popular and one of the first services to tackle this problem. It was nice because you'd have a single account for everything that implements OpenID, but different companies and services can provide an OpenID, such as Google or even CodeWalrus if we decided to do that. It was decentralized, you'd type the URL to your account page on your favourite website and you'd login this way with said website. Nowadays, social networks are the popular way to login, each one of them provides their own proprietary but kinda works the same "Login with Facebook/Twitter/GitHub/etc.", and you end up having a bunch of such buttons on every login page.
For the record, CodeWalrus supports pretty much everything I mentioned and even more. You have quite a lot of options when you login here :P
Quote from: c4ooo on January 04, 2016, 08:36:40 PM
Ohh, i thought google could not read your emails :(
Also i have no idea what an VPS is :(
A VPS is a virtual private server: which is pretty much a server. Uhh, look it up.
Some time ago I saw an interesting talk that is to a similar problem with Google:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q
Haha,
@c4ooo already posted that . But yeah, that talk was really interesting.