SpiceWare's Blog

I never allow comments anyway.

 

(Not that I ever really use YouTube in the first place.)

I discovered I had a Google+ and gmail account that I didn't realize I had - I think that occurred because I used Google Checkout back in 2010 to buy my Harmony Cart. Those accounts have been deleted.

 

After finding out about that, I decided to purged other Google items off my equipment: Google Maps, Google Earth, etc. I also changed my default search engines to Yahoo (the only other option was Bing! and I'm not a fan of Microsoft). Wish I could select DuckDuckGo for my search engine.

 

The only Google thing that remains on my computers is Chrome, and it's only used for the handful of websites that force you to use Flash, which I also don't have installed. My web browsing experience improved tremendously after uninstalling Flash - Gruber wrote up a nice article, Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It for that.

I don't know what it's like on a Mac, but I'm able to choose DDG as my default search engine in Firefox or (with an extension) Chrome for Ubuntu, as well as on my Android devices using the DDG app/widget and third party browsers like Firefox and Dolphin. And I did just that when Google started throwing a hissy a few weeks back, saying that there was "unusual activity" coming from my machine and making me enter a CAPTCHA every single time I tried to search, most likely triggered by my constant refinements to my searches to get around their recent policy of always returning results even if they're not relevant and don't contain the specified keywords.

 

The announcement yesterday that they would soon begin showing my real name and Google Plus profile pic to any Android user who called or received a call from me may cause me to delete my Google Plus account altogether. They provide a way to opt out, but then, Facebook used to do the same regarding the use of your name in ads, and they no longer do.

 

Ever since Google Reader went away and we discovered TT-RSS on one of our old desktop machines provides a better experience anyway, we've been slowly swapping out other parts of the Google infrastructure. The various OpenStreetMap options are a lot better than they used to be for maps, though still not so good for navigation. (Waze is better, but Google recently bought them.) Our gmail addresses are all over the place in the wild and it's unlikely we'll be able to shut those down anytime soon, but Roundcube is an okay webmail we can run ourselves for our main accounts. Haven't found a good substitute for Google Docs yet, though (my girl and I use it all the time to share non-privileged info such as our ever-expanding cookbook project or xmas shopping lists). Owncloud may be an option, but I would need to hack rudimentary online spreadsheet editing support into it, unless someone has done so since I last played with it.

 

It was nice having a big corporation throw so much weight behind free/open source software projects over the last decade, but one only needs to look at the latest Android release and announcements like the one yesterday to see that those golden years are over, and the balance has shifted from providing no-BS web services with non-intrusive advertising (as they once did) to arrogant, monopolistic behavior. They're still less annoying than Microsoft was when I used to run Windows around the turn of the century, but there's no doubt that's where Google is headed.

 

May I ask what video sharing service you're switching to, if any?

I typically run WebKit, which is the basis for Safari. Safari and Webkit give you a choice of Google, Yahoo! and Bing. I have added the DuckDuckGo extension, but it doesn't provide a fully integrated search experience - if I right-click on a word the context menu lets me Search with Yahoo! but not Search with DuckDuckGo.

 

I'm not really that thrilled with Facebook either, I've mainly kept using it because of the shear number of friends using it for invitations to events.

 

I used to run Firefox, but it looked so out of place on the Mac that it was jarring - things like buttons on forms that looked like they belonged on a Windows 3 system. I just ran Firefox and it now looks like it belongs on a Mac. I'll have to try it out for a few days and see what I think.

 

I use OpenOffice for spreadsheets and such as I've no need for online collaboration.

 

I haven't investigated other video sharing services yet as I've been too busy wrapping up Stay Frosty 2. I posted Release Candidate 1 to the play testers last night. I found a minor issue this morning on the recently revised pause screen and have already fixed it, so RC2 will be posted tonight

Atarileaf, who did a great review of Space Rocks, has moved some videos over to Dailymotion. I'll probably check them out after I recoup from SF2.

 

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x16x4nj_space-rocks-atari-2600-homebrew-a-closer-look_videogames

I only log in youtube to upload video and then log off. At least it still let me upload under subtitlenation and now suggest use my Gmail email account with the @gmail.com. Before it suggest me to use my real name with my last name I intended abrieved to one letter. They killed the useful subscriber box that I used before to keep track of my channel. Most of those channel have been shut down. Google need to stop being an obnoxious nosy company. If they want more money, then they should charge people to use their service or do a bake sale or something.

For I while I was trying to always sign out of of Google before visiting YouTube, but that was getting cumbersome.

 

I like this idea better, and just deleted my channel. I got the pop-up to use my real name yet again when I signed onto the channel for the last time.

i dont think i will ever close my youtube account, even if everyone uses dailymotion instead, i dont think i will ever close my account. i probably will create a dailymotion account at some point in the near future.

I closed my YouTube account too. And I use StartPage for searching. Combined with Ghostery that should help protecting my privacy.

 

 

Though there are still those nasty browser footprints, all kinds of cookies...

Safari just downloaded an update to the DuckDuckGo Extension. It opened a new page with info about the update, namely that you can now use Safari's Smart Search field to search via Duck Duck Go I haven't found any "update log" or official announcement, but I see at GitHub that the changes were commited 2 days ago.

 

It wasn't enabled by default though, I had to check the option to do it. I did it via the little Duck Duck Go icon just to the left of the Smart Search field, though you can also do it via Safari->Preferences->Extensions tab->DuckDuckGo. It's possible a fresh install would have that enabled by default.

 

It doesn't change the text in the Smart Search field from "Search Yahoo or enter an address" to "Search DuckDuckGo or enter an address", but it does use DuckDuckGo for the search. Likewise right-click on a word and the context menu still says "Search with Yahoo", but the actual search is now done via DuckDuckGo