good replacement for open office

[icantthinkofone]

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 05:07:45PM +0200, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>   
>> nobody intelligent (or completely not caring about it) use any of big 
>> public mail/news/etc services.
>>     
>
> There are two separate concerns here.
>
>   1. General Privacy: If you're concerned with your documents and
>   communications being collected, indexed, and scanned for patterns and
>   flagged terms along with billions of other documents and
>   communications, without any specific attention to yours in particular,
>   you're right -- don't use "public", web-based services.
>
>   2. Specific Privacy: If you're concerned with someone cracking security
>   on your account, targeting your communications for electronic
>   eavesdropping, and similarly making use of the "public" nature of a
>   service like that for nefarious intent, you're probably among the
>   millions of computer users who are carefully locking the front door
>   while leaving the bay windows and garage door wide open.  Are you using
>   public key encryption systems like OpenPGP to secure your email?  Are
>   you encrypting word processor documents when you send email?  Are you
>   using a text-based mail user agent instead of reading XHTML "rich"
>   emails in a GUI mail client?  Are you anonymizing communications via
>   the Tor network?  What exactly are you doing to avoid leaving yourself
>   at least as wide open with plain text transmission of data as you would
>   be with a web-based, SSL-encrypted mail service?  You're probably even
>   transmitting login data to a web server in clear text.
>
> Now . . . I know this is the freebsd-questions mailing list, and many of
> you are running mail servers locally, and otherwise mitigating these
> risks.  On the other hand, simply telling people that they'll be safer
> avoiding web-based services without explaining that this is only true if
> they also pay significant attention to securing their other communication
> and collaboration tools might be considered dishonest, or at least
> irresponsible.
>
>   
But then you are assuming Google, as well as the others, are willing to 
lose public trust by allowing those things to happen and running an 
insecure system.  It would also be assuming an in-house group could 
provide better security than Google and the others.