FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera(blog.fastmail.fm) |
FastMail staff purchase the business from Opera(blog.fastmail.fm) |
Please open source Carakan and Presto - don't let them rot, and us hackers have what to learn with them (and potentially do with them). GPL is fine, and may let you still monetize it.
(And ... it's not like it's giving you any advantage - you've switched away from both)
Missing CardDAV/CalDav sync ability is sorely missing, so it's good to see the developers talking about it.
I'd also like to see (and would pay for) options where the data is located in other countries, away from the United States. It's really symbolic, but also practical: I'd like my data closer to where I live.
Currently I'm fine having that live in owncloud, but should fastmail start supporting it, I may want to sync these data-sets.
Not sure I want to move everything into one place and one place only though. If it was one thing my migration from Google Apps taught me, it was that having too much stuff auto-integrated in one place makes it much harder to have control of your own data.
It severely limits your options to mix and mash best of breed services as you see fit.
They also built-out data centre capacity, including facilities in Iceland.
So all around I think FM benefited greatly from the three years under Opera, though I'm not convinced the reverse is true.
Oh god, yes. This was annoying as hell. I actually liked their service but at the end of the month I didn't think I was using email enough to justify paying 40 bucks a year, so I decided to keep using the one I got for free when I got a domain. But even if I was going to buy, I wouldn't have just because of this harrassment. Here's a screenshot from my inbox: http://i.imgur.com/meNhlAr.png (there are some more that couldn't fit into the screenshot)
I cannot recommend them less. Shabby treatment of potential customers.
Here we are now, and the rest of the net has caught up to mobile access, mostly. Though my initial reasons for using Fastmail have become moot points, I'll continue to use my Fastmail accounts with fond memories and hope for improved resistance to governments' exceeding their mandates.
This is from the perspective of using Chrome on high end hardware, but I couldn't ask for a better web interface.
That said, they aren't joking about needing a new mobile interface: the current one is usable, but definitely lacks the same polish as the desktop version.
(I made this!)
There's two apps in the Play store, one for CardDAV[1] and one for CalDAV[2].
That setup works for me.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...
[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.calda...
FastMail provides me with mail accounts for $10/year[2] that provide enough storage for 180 days and include required features like custom domain names, domain aliases, email aliases, etc.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/when-will-our-email-be...
Moving to webkit just let them focus on what actually made them unique to their customers.
Still a shame they dropped Presto, though.
Not sure what you mean. Just FYI : at least on Android phones, among FF, Chrome, Opera (and the default browser), Opera's text flow is the best by far. You can zoom in and read any article on any site, and it does just the right thing. There is honestly an element of fear when you use Firefox for the same thing: it's absolutely unpredictable what it will do when you zoom in. I can sympathize with the developers since the re-layout of a page, figuring out whether the user wants to zoom in on the text or the image, etc; may be quite difficult. Opera Mobile has seemingly perfected this over years and years.
I can understand why they switched and focused on value added features.
I am thinking Opera want to be acquired?
My guess is they're trying going for a niche product and are focusing on what's important to them rather than try to get their feet wet in every market.
To spend more time with their family?
> the USA just did a bad job hiding the fact that you had none.
Er, no - the USA are the main ones wholesale intercepting everyone's shit - I'm not a US citizen and I don't like it in principle. I did have a pretty good expectation of privacy until they started doing that, because no-one else has the resources to do a similar whole-take surveillance effort.
Anyway, I signed up for Fastmail because I thought it was foreign to the USA (though later found out the servers are hosted in NYC - doh).
But seriously, I'd love to see an end to the "oh well" attitude. The stance I do take is "you're spying on and profiling me? Fuck you I'm leaving". And that helps me sleep at night, for better or worse.
I'd love to get this confirmed, and some news on when I can expect to have my account hosted in Europe.
US datacenters is pretty much a no-no these days.
I suppose an argument might be made in favour of Germany -- but I'd be surprised if they don't have a similar infrastructure in place for wire-tapping as we know know is in place in the US. UK and France is out. Russia is an open spyocracy of sorts. Iceland?
Unfortunately, there are increasingly few nations which will refuse US et al spying "requests."
[0]: https://twitter.com/FastMailFM/status/382100278415081473
Simply out of USA/UK jurisdiction would be good, as they're now demonstrably the worst in the West (at least it would certainly seem so based on recent news trends). So, anywhere else.
Plus, it's sunny!
What they could do instead is dual-license it under a strong copyleft license like the AGPL 3.0 and a proprietary license betting on companies being reluctant to share their source code. Still, it would hardly be to their advantage at all.
[1] http://opensource.org/osd-annotated
[2] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#ModifyGPL.
Edit: clarified how the GPL can be changed.
But they didn't. They just dropped the browser engine.
Good question.
I have mixed impressions of owncloud so far depending on what area of the product you are using.
The good parts: Contact and calendering managament. Just works. Integrates nicely with Android, Thunderbird, etc. Not very good synching back to Google though. I don't really care about that, but now you know.
The not so good parts: I tried running it on my NAS, because that would be the storage-backend for the file-sync service anyway. I quickly discovered that the code is not near efficient enough to be deployed on underpowered devices like this. It needs optimization, or to be put on proper hardware. I chose the latter and redeployed.
On my NAS, with enough data getting synched across clients could take days. So don't even think about putting this on a Raspberry Pi or something silly like that.
The worse: Using owncloud's files-module as a drop-in Dropbox replacement, you will be surprised by how well supported all kinds of platforms are. If you treat it as a Dropbox replacement though, you will encounter issues.
I tried putting my code/project/build-folders under owncloud and hack away, much like I've done with Dropbox. Even with a limited amount of clients, you will quickly encounter at least some bugs. The most annoying thing I encountered was probably getting conflicts when only one of the clients had updated the file.
The client updated the file, called back to owncloud with the changes, and then got a response back that this update cannot be done cleanly.
It then proceeded to the code/build/project files involved in the conflict and rename the local and the "server"-version to $file.conflict345678543 & $file.conflict1234567 or something to that effect. Needless to say that broke my code, my build and needed to be cleaned up.
If you think that sounds annoying, imagine it happening several times during a 30 minute coding session.
So yeah. The owncloud file-service currently suffers and cannot be treated as a drop-in replacement for Dropbox. Hopefully it will get there, but outside coding, I haven't experienced anything like that and it seems to chug along just fine. With a high CPU-usage though.
So yeah. There are good, not so good and directly bad things about it. If it fits your use-case is up to you.
Funnily enough I have both Baikal and BitTorrent Sync running on a Raspberry Pi (model B/512) and it is handling it surprisingly well, I even use it as a destination backup server for some VPS's and local computers (using duplicity). I just wish the Pi had more RAM as BTSync is a bit of a memory (and CPU) hog when you start to hae a lot of files involved, it is under strain. My compromise has been to tar a lot of folders I rarely access to cut down the number of individual files it needs to track, not ideal. I was thinking of buying one of the Intel Next Unit of Computing I think it is called, which is more powerful but still power effecient enough to be left on 24/7.
Possibly. They were uncannily quick in adopting Blink. The series of events seemed to be Opera->WebKit, Google->Blink, Opera->Blink... so perhaps they want to get cosy with Google? Although, I can't see what G would want with them.
I think it's also known that, sometime around IE7, Microsoft tried to acquire them. Microsoft have long since made their bed though... unless they want a better mobile browser.
Either way, it'd make total sense for Opera to ditch their email operation if they were looking to be acquired by a business with an established email product already. Especially when many Fastmail customers are there because of their particular niche in service.
Perhaps it's the new Blackberry group? Dark horse! :P
- Opera has publicly commented it was aware of Google's plans for Blink, and that information was a factor in the decision to switch to the Chromium engine.
As a FastMail user I was very concerned with last year's rumors. Now I don't care because FastMail doesn't have anything to do with Opera anymore.
As a geek, I often forget that a shared market can indicate why a company is doing something new, as well as a shared product.
I don't know what you mean. No Android browser matches mobile Safari for the slickness of zooming into pages, but FF mobile just works fine.
Austrian company but they offer hosting in Iceland. I once tried Malaysia. Bad idead, lot's of spam from Malaysia. Lost 50% of my Email due to blacklisting...
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2993 btsync 19 -1 122m 60m 2988 S 11.9 12.4 610:05.84 btsync
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2993 btsync 19 -1 122m 60m 2988 S 63.8 12.4 612:51.33 btsync
/usr/bin/cpulimit -e btsync -l 60 -b >> /dev/nullI send most of emails through gmail because I don't care if the NSA reads them. For my cross-border drug deals, I use carrier pigeons with encrypted handwritten messages.
> It's not an "oh well" attitude.
> I don't care if the NSA reads them..
Indeed. However, I've used Royal Mail (postal service in UK) all my life without thinking that I needed to worry about what I said - I always found that very liberating, looking back. Even postcards I assumed wouldn't be read by anyone, and certainly not photographed and archived permanently against my name. Given that IP traffic is replacing the postal service, to not have this assumption any longer is painful on several levels.
> You shouldn't be practicing security through good-will Fair enough. That said, the need to defend myself against a well equipped foreign government is just not a job I'm up to on my own. I'd prefer it if the government demonstrated goodwill, which would seem to be their job.
I believe the solution is political.
This is true for the United States Postal Service as well. I've always thought it'd be interesting to look at what historically brought about the strong privacy expectations to postal mail when it's technically so easy to intercept.
Why do you think this is? Do you really believe these efforts are not being taken by every major world covert agency?
Tell me what "other major world covert agency" has these:
- Gigantic data centres like the one in Utah
- Practically all Internet data flowing through their territories
- The large majority of all cloud storage user's data, and largest social network, in the world, with the added unchecked ability for this major covert agency to request query all this data
- Strong influence in the world's crypto-standards
- Control over the world's two largest closed-source Operating Systems and the proven ability to place backdoors therein (the latter only for Windows, dunno if they got iOS too, but why wouldn't they)
There's quite a few more areas in which the US definitely has an exclusive and unique ability to track and intercept the entire world's Internet data that other "major world covert agencies" most definitely do not possess.
Now put some names to it, the others are? China and Russia? I think it was pretty bloody obvious that nobody was suggesting to all start using cloud storage in those territories instead. But even then, it IS strictly better to have your data surveilled in part by China, Russia and the US, than to have all of it surveilled by a single entity, the US. Because you know it won't be shared between them, and that is a tiny bit of privacy gained. So that's already where your silly defence of your beloved Orwellian government falls apart.
Of course, there's other places still.
Take the Netherlands, definitely another bad choice, but at least none of these "major covert agencies" have a direct line into our data. Our own secret service (AIVD) can be rather cosy with the NSA, and they definitely perform surveillance on a level of intrusiveness that equals and exceeds that of the NSA, but not on a level of SCALE and that is, when it comes to data and privacy, what can make all the difference. When the NSA comes knocking on the door of a Dutch Internet hosting provider (this happened), they will refuse or tell them to contact the police or something. We have no "gag orders", "secret laws", "plea bargaining" or similar Kafkaesque nightmare fuel like the US, so if the police forces a company to hand over data to the US without an extremely good reason, heads will roll. Like everywhere, there is a lack of accountability in NL, but this much I trust. You guys wouldn't need gag orders if no one would give a shit, after all.
So, a tiny but heavily surveilled country like NL is already two steps better for hosting data than the US. And then there's even better places. I don't know, I've heard people mention Switzerland? What about some places in East Europe with not too much oversight? Either way, just fragmenting all that data instead of keeping all of it right in the hole of the beast, is going to make it a lot harder to develop a terribly powerful singular system such as XKeyScore.
Then, there's of course the tiny little slight caused by the fact that hardly anyone in the US gave a damn about the whole world's Internet data being intercepted and analyzed by the NSA, but only started to complain when it turned out that included them, too. Not just that, but even right here on HN some people have the audacity to argue that it's fine (expected, even) to do this to the world, as long as there are legal checks and rules before the same is applied to US citizens. Doesn't sit very well with me, that. Is already a great reason to grab my data and take it some place else, and tell all my friends in the world to do the same.
So just stop, stop making excuses for the US or the NSA, and start acting like a citizen of the world.
This is the Internet, this is the 21st century, just grow up beyond "but they're doing it toooooo!", and who are you?
This sounds more like ability rather than choice. It seems odd to demonize the U.S. because practically all Internet data flows through their territories.
> So just stop, stop making excuses for the US or the NSA
I'm not making excuses, and of course it's a Bad Thing. But don't pretend that avoiding one actor is really a solution, any more than rebooting your computer is going to solve deeper issues.
No. Targeted surveillance is the job of every major world covert agency. Mass-surveillance of one's own population is an ambition of totalitarian societies and governments only. It's not necessary for secret services of the world to do their job or to do it well.
On the other side Chrome based Opera is also starting to look pretty good in it's own rights: it's fast and snappy, mouse gestures are there if I'm not mistaken, page stack (or whatever the name is) is cool. If I would to choose between Chrome and Opera 16 now I would go with the latter (also because Chrome really pushes too much Google on the user).
It's one of those features other browsers simply do not have (Opera has a couple more but this one's pretty unique) that I really do use several times a day, and I'm not "upgrading" until I know they won't take that away.
Not that it matters too much, features or not, I'm thinking to switch to Firefox because these are times no longer to be using closed-source software.
Looking at the course Blink based Opera has taken thus far, it doesn't look like they're focusing on keeping current users happy (any new user base is going to be an uphill climb). It's still new, but as a consistent Opera user for almost a decade, I'm very skeptical of them keeping all the previous customization as well as avoiding "Chromisms" in the UI.
And the IRC client and BitTorrent client?
How do you increase you're competitive abilities by removing everything that made you unique when you're already the underdog? :S
IMHO they did the correct choice, every new version Opera will difference itself more and more of Chromium. You can continue to use Opera 12.16 until they take the decision to pull the trigger to completely kill 12.16 auto-updating it...
Remember the transition from Firefox 3.6 to the current Firefox, they didn't kill 3.6 until they reached version 12.
Opera sets their own schedule beholden to nobody.