It's not strange. These organisations have always existed to push mass media. It doesn't matter to them whether it's false information or not, but they are scared of not being able to control the information.
I am terrified of Microsoft going this route, since they make my OS of choice. I could expect Google doing this kind of stuff, like deciding what sites I can visit or what people I can contact using Gmail (examples that have yet to happen, but wouldn't surprise me), but Microsoft? They've always been uninterested in politics, or so it seemed. What if they decide to push this kind of political stuff in their OS?
The biggest problem with any large corporation being a arbitrator of truth, is the only truth they truly believe in is they should always make more profit at the end of the day. With whatever technical and political means they have, they will make that happen. With the massive amount of data collected at an individual level they have a large amount of potential power when it comes to influencing others towards their will.
I share your feelings and not just because this is political and thru have no business but because my browsing is my business and not theirs, political or not
I use eBay mostly for the resellers, i.e., when I need to buy some Chinese crap but I can't wait 2-3 weeks until it arrives here, so I buy it from some reseller in my country.
Back in the day, before aliexpress, it was good too because you could rip off the sellers. Just claim the thing never arrived and since for cheap stuff they had no tracking numbers the seller always had to refund you. You could get TONS of free stuff that way. Now aliexpress does this right and it's significantly harder.
Unless you're using a platform where you can't run an ad blocker (and I can't think of any), a hosts file (or a pihole) is a hamfisted approach compared to having ublock origin.
Just put the domains in your ublock origin list. That way, if you visit those pages, you will be displayed a page that says that the site was blocked but you have a button to temporarily override the block.
It doesn't say anywhere, not even in the title, that Google employees are forbidden to use the word "family". According to TFA:
>The tech giant experienced a backlash from its own employees in March 2017 after a presentation about a product aimed at young people seemed to replace the term with the word 'family', leaving out various groups.
It's clickbait; they don't say it, they imply it. It is said that Google employees were "told" to "stop" using the word after complaints. No context; it conjures up the image of people being censored and oppressed in their everyday activities. In reality, "VP Pavni Diwanji ... told staff to be more conscientious about referring to family" in the context of product advertisement for children, which is absolutely reasonable since the word "family" means different things to different people. And, well, the article is garbage in many more ways than I'm willing to discuss further.
This is dissembling. How can you be "more conscientious" about using a word like family other than not using it? There isn't any other word to refer to a man, a woman and their children as a group, as far as I'm aware.
So if a VP says "be more careful using word X due to outraged employees" and the word for X is ordinary, every day and refers to an important thing, that is absolutely material that should surface in a newspaper.
Especially given the ludicrous employee quotes that accompany it, like:
'It smacks of the 'family values' agenda by the right wing which is absolutely homophobic by its very definition.'
What the heck? Families, those things required for the human race to continue existing, are now considered homophobic? This has got to be a new low in the identity politics endurance race to the bottom. As phrased I can't even tell if they think families are homophobic or just everyone who isn't left wing - both concepts are derisory.
Oh, and:
The person commented: 'My family consists of me and several other trans feminine folks, some of whom I'm dating. We're all supportive of each other and eventually aspire to live together.'
Whatever that living arrangement is, it is definitely not a family according to any dictionary I've ever seen.
But I honestly can't say I'm surprised by this. I used to work for Google and knew Pavni Diwanji quite well. She probably knows this is bizarre but is far, far too weak to do anything other than go along with the loudest crowd in the moment.
Or your were lucky enough to start using Gmail with your own domain, when Google Apps was still free for up to 10 users, and can still use it for free.
Google Apps with a custom domain was once free for as many email accounts as you were approved for. There are a handful out there with lots more than 10 free accounts. They don’t get support, have less space provided, and can’t use the outlook connector so it’s not an equal comparison. It’s nice that google hasn’t changed this on their users.
Zoho recently restricted their free custom domain service for email. Not sure who is the best free option out there now.
I have my own domain name through Google apps and use a naive mail client to access gmail. As soon as the handful of people I talk to exclusively on hangouts migrate elsewhere, I'm ditching Google as a back-end. I'd never have predicted this in 2008. Back then Google still cared about UI speed.
