24 ms·

Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

521 points by LaSombra 10y ago

swalsh 10y ago
Ultimately this is where the decentralized web should go. Having a built-in archive function, will not only prevent work from being lost... the decentralization might prevent it form being shut down.
Grollicus 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063 ?
eplanit 10y ago
More accurately stated: Artist stores (the sole copy of [1]) a decade of work on a service he doesn't pay for and which provides no guarantees of service or quality... Why is the title written to make it seem it was Google that did something wrong here? [1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.
- softawre 10y ago
  Do you really need to "source" a post like this?
corobo 10y ago
Summary of the article > It’s gone because it was kept entirely on his blog Take backups.
- jobigoud 10y ago
  And don't forget to test your restore.
  - corobo 10y ago
    Actually good point that should be the first rule 0. It's not a backup unless you know it restores 1. Always take backups 2. Backup the backup
    - vacri 10y ago
      A few month ago someone here on HN stated "People don't want backups. People want restores". Can't recall who, though...
      - majewsky 10y ago
        I've known (and retold) a similar saying for years: "Nobody wants backup. Everyone wants restore."
        lloyd-christmas 10y ago
        I think people are jaded due to windows automated backup, where you tell it to keep only the latest backup and it still manages to fill your hard drive with 50 of them.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  Does blogger make that easy / possible?
  - corobo 10y ago
    Yes there's Google Takeout, but in this case I'd more back up the originals rather than whatever comes out of Google's optimizations
    - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
      Sure, if we're talking about saving a copy of an image, I agree. I assumed that there was original content (i.e. writing) that had simply been entered directly into blogger, which a typical writer might not know how to backup at all.
- soft_dev_person 10y ago
  They closed his email-account too, though? It has never occurred to me to backup my entire Gmail archive. Should probably look into that now...
  - corobo 10y ago
    Admittedly email has also been in my blind spot too.. Not a bad plan that.
    - Klathmon 10y ago
      Here is a one-click service to backup everything in your google account. Email, google drive, youtube, location history, blogger blogs, bookmarks, calendar, literally ever google service. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
      - pjc50 10y ago
        What format does this produce? A bit of googling suggests mbox. What happens to 'labels' on emails?
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        MBOX is correct. Labels become folders. Mail that has multiple labels will be duplicated into each folder.
        SlashmanX 10y ago
        If you click "details" you can see the format each service is exported as
      - soft_dev_person 10y ago
        Nice tool, and can produce archive directly to Dropbox (or Drive, or OneDrive). Now, if they only could add a periodic option...
    - vertis 10y ago
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  At least the article opens with the conclusion, saves scrolling. Having said that, I did continue scrolling and the article goes on to say > More generally, relying on the internet as an archive is dangerous. And it is, at least, another point toward helping me feel vindicated for being that person who always says "and you have off site backups for when your house burns down, right?"
  - corobo 10y ago
    Definitely feel vindicated, it's the 3-2-1 rule 3 copies 2 different forms of media 1 offsite
    - AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
      Can you qualify what "2 different forms of media" means? I'm assuming one physical, one cloud. Do you consider two separate external HDD's with the data on it to fail that test because they are the same form? When my music collection was smaller, I had everything backed up onto an external as well as had them all physically burned onto like 50 DVDs. Since my collection has grown beyond a terabyte, however, I haven't had the time or energy to keep that up. Now it's just an external, a travel external, a redundant external, and a cloud backup.
      - corobo 10y ago
        A few examples I can pull off the top of my head - DVD, Disk (HDD), Disk (SSD), Disk (Flash.. maybe?), Tape, Cloud So Disk (HDD) and Cloud is fine. Two HDDs (spinny platter style) would indeed fail the test. If you want to argue it you could probably get away with different manufacturers or different batches but I'd prefer my backups to play nicely with the rules rather than try to avoid them! Far-fetched as it is but lets say for example you have a power surge that takes out your external disk (is that even possible?). Chances are high whatever did that would also do that to your other disk. Or maybe a wall caves in and decimates your PC (or you just sweep the desk somehow and knock everything off it. Maybe the desk has collapsed) - The spinny disks may be destroyed if they are both hit hard enough. Mixing an HDD and SSD, the SSD would probably be more hardy against shock damage. From another comment I made in this thread somewhere "I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups [so it's different to just a raw disk]" Edit: I use too many brackets here. I am going to attend my next available parenthesis anonymous support group.
- amelius 10y ago
  Perhaps the internet archive's "way-back-machine" has a backup?
  - nl 10y ago
    Do people even read the posted articles at all?! From the article: Cooper should’ve backed his work up, or known to be more cautious with drafts. ... ... Admittedly, not everything has vanished. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has saved bits and pieces of Cooper’s blog dating back to January 3, 2012, but they are just snapshots of the blog’s front page for a given date, not capturing the blog in its entirety.
    - xigency 10y ago
      Probably not a backup of his email though!
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- hiou 10y ago
  Thanks Dad.
elmar 10y ago
One click and you have a backup... https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
- M4v3R 10y ago
  The article says they've taken down his email address, so presumably he doesn't have access to that page as well.
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    I think the GP meant to say that you can prevent future damage to some extent through regular backups. When things have already gone wrong, it's too late to start making backups. The cloud is no different from physical media in that regard, even if the data still exists in some data centre, you can't access it any more.
    - Sidnicious 10y ago
      I'm not aware of any tool to automate regular backups of cloud services, even though many of them have “download everything” buttons like this now (awesome). That sounds like a thing that should exist.
      - Asooka 10y ago
        You can automate that pretty easily via Phantomjs and the like.
      - SquareWheel 10y ago
        Backupify?
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        If I could regularly have my computer auto-request a Takeout archive, and then auto-download it when Google notifies my email it's been completed, that'd be a tool I'd enjoy having.
talideon 10y ago
Never be a sharecropper, always have backups.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  What is the meaning of 'sharecropper' in this context? I'm aware of sharecropping in the agricultural sense[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
  - AndrewDucker 10y ago
    Working someone else's land, rather than owning your own. i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog. This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.
    - swiley 10y ago
      Word (and pandoc and textedit and whatever else) exports HTML. Most GUI shells will mount (or do something like mount) a WebDAV or FTP server. This stuff is only complicated if you make it complicated.
    - nibnib 10y ago
      For a counter argument, I like to read many blogs that are more or less defunct, but have valuable material. The author has moved on (or passed on) but the material is still sitting on Google servers instead of disappearing when a hosting contract lapses. perhaps using free services and making backups is the best option.
  - ableal 10y ago
    Tim Bray, many moons ago: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...
elmar 10y ago
How To Backup Gmail Accounts (+Restore) http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/ http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/
Klathmon 10y ago
>Early last year Andy Baio wrote about how most of the archival projects Google touted in the early 2000s, such as Google News Archive and Google Groups, were quietly abandoned several years ago. Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?
- Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
  In the sense that Google Groups has been "well" since the current design went live. It's a slow, buggy, frustrating product.
shrikant 10y ago
Ah yes, the "customer support by Internet shaming" strategy, the only approach that appears to work with inexplicable Google takedowns.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Given that Google's customer support has autistic tendencies to put it mildly, I do not feel sorry for them
  - amelius 10y ago
    I know what you mean. But there may be autistic people reading this.
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      I understand you worries, I'm focusing on the characteristic rather than people with that condition
      - napperjabber 10y ago
        Pretty much sums up my life. I'm an individual with a condition to pick fits because, Reddit.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    For all autistic people: this is not being autistic, I guess maybe sometimes arrogant, sometimes dumb (as an organisation) or rather "too big" for our own good would be better descriptions. But at least not autistic, and definitely not with a follow up where that is used as an excuse for not feeling sorry for them. :-/
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      Do you think I really should feel sorry for a megacorp that can't be bothered to treat their customers like human beings? I do feel sorry for autistic people, though.
webtechgal 10y ago
This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time: http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...
- webtechgal 10y ago
  Ha! Found a copy of the home page at last, cached just yesterday!! For those curious enough, here is the link: http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&fr=yfp-t-100&ei=UTF-8&u=http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4DJlbOV5E8J:http://www.dennis-cooper.net/%20http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&icp=1&.intl=in&sig=CCAAR6c4TCWHwpM030gyVw-- http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...
  - PhantomGremlin 10y ago
    Interesting find. But now I'm really confused. That page still exists as of this minute: http://www.dennis-cooper.net http://www.dennis-cooper.net The link from the fusion.net story is: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ That blog does not exist. So maybe we're talking about two different things?
NameNickHN 10y ago
I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.
- afarrell 10y ago
  There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist. The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
  - webtechgal 10y ago
    > There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file... So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time. The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site. As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!! Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
  - obj-g 10y ago
    But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define what he was doing, you might take the time to learn how to make a simple site.
_Understated_ 10y ago
Why did Google take him down with (presumably) no warnings? Or did they? Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve". The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final. Edit: Clarity
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Google doesn't ever provide warnings of imminent account closures like this. The history of HN and plenty of other sites is littered with cautionary tales of assuming Google would tell you before they take away all your stuff or give you a chance to appeal or contest it first.
- joesmo 10y ago
  This is a new age in customer support, if you can call it that. Amazon and I'm sure many other companies do the same thing. You don't even have to actually violate TOS. That's probably why no one can reverse the decision. They'd have to admit to closing the account on a whim (might be a bot's whim, but it's still a whim), unrelated to any actual TOS violations. They can choose to not do business with you anytime, even if you've paid them, and your only recourse is to sue them. Yeah, that's going to work out well ...
- wmil 10y ago
  Google keeps per user costs low by trying to avoid all tech support. Sending an email like that invites the user to try to start a conversation. Google really should have an option to freeze the account while allowing the user to download their content, but it seems that they don't.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zby 10y ago
Since a few years loggin into Blogspot (former Blogger) became very difficult for me - I am constantly being bounced between the authentication pages, and most of the time I end up with an error. I think Google is just preparing for discontinuing it.
- panglott 10y ago
  There are still a ton of pages in Blogspot. Closing Blogspot would be a Geocities-closure-level event, or bigger.
  - GadgetJax 10y ago
    They aren't paying? Shut it down!
  - nilved 10y ago
    It would be much bigger. Some blogs are still updated.
clishem 10y ago
Somewhat relevant https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/
- jagermo 10y ago
  Not somewhat, but really, really relevant. Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation. And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?
  - hackits 10y ago
    This makes me laugh my ass off. This is a bit of a pet peeve I have with people and modern technology. They believe they have a right to use a service even though they're not paying for the usage of the service. Then they turn around shocked and angry when the free service is removed. `Why! why did they do this to me, this is the biggest injustice! How un-professional of them!`. Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
    - pyre 10y ago
      To be fair, Google's ad dept. wants you to put everything about your digital life into their services, yet nowhere do they warn you about backing your stuff up with the same gusto that they put into getting you to use the service in the first place. It's not quite a "Chad's Garage" scenario. "I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities." Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.
    - daveloyall 10y ago
      pyre is right, Google has fought tooth and nail to make their services indispensable. It is a failure of ethics to then delete that indispensable thing. There were laws in the old USAmerican West about horse theft. Strict laws! And similarly strict laws throughout history in shepherding cultures, regarding livestock. The justification for draconian punishments for livestock theft has always been that the animals (property, items) were indispensable. You can't go around drastically changing or possibly ending people's lives by taking the things they depend on away from them. It's wrong!
emcrazyone 10y ago
concerning to say the least considering every galaxy/Android phone I've owned backs up to google in such a seamless & effortless way. My wife backs up all our family photos to google. Google offers "Unlimited free storage" if you allow them to compress your photos. https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.
- pjc50 10y ago
  A good case for "yes, and"; backing up to the cloud is convenient and subject to very different failure modes to local storage. Why not both?
FussyZeus 10y ago
> “Nothing on the blog is backed-up or archived anywhere else, as far as I know,” he explained in a Facebook message. Cue sad trombone. This had to happen to me a couple of times before I got to be a real Nazi about backup. I'd consider myself a fairly smart guy too, it's just one of those things you never want to take care of properly...until you lose stuff, then you get it. Poor guy, hope he can get his work back but it doesn't seem too likely.
a3n 10y ago
The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect. The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I used to use gmail (with me@mydomain.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since 2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain. (Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens. I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.) Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need meta-domains that can't be transferred, that are our identity, but I don't know how that would be implemented. I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list. Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is warranted by the importance of your communication.
- hackits 10y ago
  Better way to put this is to pay for the service if you're relying on it as a source of income or advertising yourself to the world.
wstrange 10y ago
It looks like his work is not deleted, just not accessible due to possible TOS violations? I am guessing he can get it back. The title seems like click-bait.
- willemojnr 10y ago
  My thoughts too. Annoying.
  - eitland 10y ago
    Still happy to upvote it as is creates healthy and useful discussions. Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google service department.
- broken_symlink 10y ago
  Also, if he did violate the terms I'm not sure why he would think it would be a good idea to sue.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
Everyone should occasionally use Google Takeout to back up their stuff, but non-tech users don't understand this. I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger. But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like how comments are handled. Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a small add-on to my own web properties. Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.
- planteen 10y ago
  I had no idea Google Takeout existed. Thanks. I backed up my Gmail over IMAP in the past but this looks far easier.
  - stephengoodwin 10y ago
    I love Takeout. Given how much of our lives is invested into digital platform, I wish every Internet company had something similar to Takeout for user data.
- creeble 10y ago
  omg, takeout. Been using various scripts for years (and should keep testing them I guess [1]). I have "Feature announcements" on from Google, but never heard of this. Anyway, thanks mucho! [1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cautionary-tale-google-decides-hold-personal-data-wont-let-go/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cautionary-tale-google-decides-...
- niftich 10y ago
  I too have never heard of Takeout. It seems like it's been in around since 2011 with a much smaller set of supported services [1]. One of the top results when you search for 'Google Takeout' is one from 2011 titled 'The Silent Release of Google Takeout' [2]. It looks like it used to be closely associated with the Google Plus branding more so than Account Management, so that may explain why it's not as widely known. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front [2] http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-silent-release-of-google-takeout-20336.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-silent-release-o...
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Friendly reminder that your stuff is not "backed up" in the cloud unless you have a local copy. Otherwise it just lives in the cloud, meaning it lives on someone else's server.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Yep. General point. Same goes for external hard drives etc: it is only a backup as long as it also primarily exists somewhere else.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Well, if you have read-only copies on different enough servers, owned by different enough people, it's a backup to some degree. Security is never an absolute. But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated risks in the ways that matter".
ungzd 10y ago
If it's really due to some kind of erotic pictures, then I don't understand why often american companies like Google act like iranian. Is there any laws in USA that allows to punish Google for hosting images of woman nipples? Why both App store and Google play's TOS include sins from Old Testament?
- icefo 10y ago
  I've heard that ad companies don't like to mix ads and boobies but I have no idea why.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I'm guessing because associating your product with porn works like associating it with charity in reverse.
- discordianfish 10y ago
  I've wondered the same over an over. Maybe it's ads but maybe they simply do it because many people outside the liberal western would would indeed feel offended (and those companies would face legal issues in very conservative countries).
- drusepth 10y ago
  Other people here are saying those erotic pictures (or story depictions) were of kids, where there _are_ laws that allow punishing Google for hosting and not immediately reporting them.
- lotharbot 10y ago
  Google is in competition with a lot of other companies, and they've decided they're in a stronger position if they don't set off a firestorm of criticism that gives people an excuse to move to a different service. Even if you personally don't care about erotic pictures, if your grandma starts associating google with porn (because a case like this became high enough profile to get covered by the local news), and then you e-mail her from your google account, now you're having an uncomfortable conversation with your grandma. Or your wife or mother or sister or really conservative friend or whatever. Which isn't enough to make everyone leave, but it's enough to make some people leave, and pretty soon Bing or Yahoo would have bigger mindshare. It's a lot easier for Google to just say "ToS violation = deleted" and be done with it, and occasionally have to reverse a decision if there's too much fallout.
simbalion 10y ago
Why would you keep 14 years of your labors on a server owned by an uninterested corporation with no off-site backups anywhere?
leephillips 10y ago
Well, at least he still has a Facebook account. Whew.
janekm 10y ago
The fact that every single comment in this thread amounts to "should have backed up" makes me a little sad. Is this really what we want to expect from companies like Google? Is this acceptable? Is it just a "force of nature" that I should consider beyond the ken of man? What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think worth having a conversation about.
- wpietri 10y ago
  Definitely. My dad, a now-retired programmer, was dealing with an error at his bank in the 80s. It was a bunch of work and frustration. At some point he asked why a thing happened and the rep said, "Oh, the computer just does that." He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for." I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.
  - wvenable 10y ago
    I don't think the problem is software necessarily, it's scale. Software allows for scale but it's not the underlying cause. Google is responsible for the content of maybe hundreds of millions of people; if even a small fraction of them have issues that's overwhelming. At that scale it's impossible for you to be anything other than nothing to them.
    - wpietri 10y ago
      > At that scale it's impossible for you to be anything other than nothing to them. Even if that's the case, it is not impossible. It's just a choice that they made about how to structure things. The US government has hundreds of millions of citizens, but each one of those persons has rights, responsibilities, and privileges. The Catholic Church has hundreds of millions of members, but each one can have a personal relationship with a priest. If Google is really indifferent to what people have entrusted to them, that's a choice.
DavidWanjiru 10y ago
When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You get the picture. That correspondence was, and remains, important to me. Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it? The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have. But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want. From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me. That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership. The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.
- losvedir 10y ago
  > the law, I feel, will have to change What is a reasonable law that won't, say, make services like Snapchat illegal (which many people seem to find useful)?
  - maus42 10y ago
    Good point, but not unsolvable. I can imagine the law would require user specifically giving permission to delete the data afterwards, maybe even mandating a certain form of presenting the gist of the deal, instead of lengthy and indecipherable TOS. I don't know the legal language, but requiring a text box with a tick mark or equivalent that presents a legally mandated predefined statement designed as a short and simple (unlike most TOS and EULAs), in clear and visible text, should not be impossible. For example, "I agree that $corp may delete my data without notice and opportunity to back it up" if the $corp isn't willing to offer a TOS that grants the user those rights. Possibly another similar one about privacy.
whack 10y ago
I found the following cryptic snippet, from the Guardian's coverage of this topic: "He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities." I have little idea what the above really means, but it almost sounds like advertising/marketing for prostitution. My best guess at the moment, is that Google considered the above to be a flagrant violation of its rules, and hence, shut down his page immediately. I can understand if Google considers certain aspects of his page to be unacceptable, but I wish they had notified him of the reason for their decision, and given him a week's time to download all his data and transition to a different website. As someone who relies on gmail/drive very heavily for important documents/correspondence, reading something like this makes me feel quite uneasy.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  It sounds more like satire to me.
- mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
  The quickest way to stop feeling uneasy is to back up your gmail and drive data immediately.
- JohnTHaller 10y ago
  He was taking existing ads for escorts in the wild and critiquing them as satire.
  - whack 10y ago
    Ah, I see what you're saying. By "take ads from escorts", I assumed that meant that he was literally allowing escorts to post ads on his page. What you're saying seems more reasonable.
  - tamana 10y ago
    Are you sure it is "satire"?
    - 10y ago
chillingeffect 10y ago
This just underscores the need for a government to defend our rights. Corporations can't be relied on to do it for us.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Although I agree completely with your statement, especially wrt right to repair and DRM, I don't know what you would want the government to do in this case to protect a person's data when they choose to store it on a free service that offers no guarantees of anything, and specifically states in their TOS that they may remove an account for any reason at any time. On top of that, this person chose not to take the simple step of using Google Takeout to back up the years of data that he couldn't afford to lose. If my business or mental health depended on that data, I'd be doing that every couple of weeks at least. I do think it would be nice if Google would, when they remove an account, give you a couple of days to go to Takeout and download the data. Just deleting it with no warning seems very rude indeed, especially when you consider the amount of advertising revenue they generate from serving people's data. Google should also make less claims about, "A safe place to store your data"!, if they continue to remove people's data without warning or recourse.
zippy786 10y ago
Losing the email would be a disaster since the decentralized web is now relying on a centralized email system.
modeless 10y ago
From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1] I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper_fears_censorship_as_google_erases/d5da89a https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper...
- andrewclunn 10y ago
  Which would also explain why he wouldn't have local back-ups, to avoid prosecution. Though this may be something of a case of, "Innocent until algorithms say otherwise."
  - sliverstorm 10y ago
    Considering how few people actually take backups, I'm willing to assume laziness. You wouldn't believe how many people I know who say things like, "Yeah I'd lose my entire PhD project if this laptop died, because I haven't taken a backup in X years" (and proceed to continue not backing up their work)
    - frou_dh 10y ago
      This seems a step before that sense of the word "backup". The guy's PC did not die. He apparently created "GIF novels", which presumably involved using some application to work on a file on his local hard drive. What did he do after uploading the finished GIF to his blog? Manually delete it from his hard drive? Why?
      - 10y ago
seesomesense 10y ago
Tldr; Child porn writer has works deleted by service provider.
bhartzer 10y ago
I'm not going to comment on the topic of the content involved. But seems to me that using your own doamain name (not hosting the blog on blogspot) and/or a backup would have solved this issue. Even if you're using blogspot, that's no reason not to have a backup.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
>“[If Google doesn’t] respond and rectify the situation, I won’t have any choice but to sue them,” Cooper wrote. “I don’t want to do that for obvious reasons, but I will if I have to.” Really? Because you didn't take the necessary steps to create your own backups!?? Edit: Reading some of the other comments about the ... um ... content ... of his blog, no wonder he didn't keep backups!!!
- Sylos 10y ago
  Victim-blaming isn't going to help anyone. And even if he would have had backups, Google has completely dispersed his followership, too.
cft 10y ago
There is a legal definition of child pornography: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256 Did his work fit this definition? I doubt it, because he would have been in jail by now, given that he never concealed his name. Also Google is notorious for heavy handed treatment of smaller AdSense publishers, which makes me doubly sceptical. http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-google-for-unpaid-adsense-earnings-2015-01/ http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-googl...
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  Who cares anyway, algorithmically full time surveillance of the public basically castrates pedophiles, limiting them to fiction. So the usual will happen, public shaming of the "artist" into some pseudo-religious organization, where he/she/it can be forced by the "believers" to uphold some the marriage/basic-income-for-beauty Contract. Another horrific social machine from the past. Could we at least pressure potentially creative persons into something socially useful? He/She/It who makes the biggest scientific contribution of a group of three, gets a good life and "surveilanced" freedom, the median gets publicly outed and "surveilanced" freedom, the least contributing goes to some prison. Repeat every year.
bradrydzewski 10y ago
I think a more appropriate title would be "Google disables artist's Blog". The author describes the blog and email accounts as disabled and has no direct evidence that anything has been permanently deleted > I’ve asked about whether the work on Cooper’s blog has been deleted permanently or is simply on a server somewhere, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.
leepowers 10y ago
So there's a good chance this guy is a creep. That doesn't change the fact that any content any of us have posted to a third-party site (be it Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) can be taken down at any time, without notification or appeal. Certainly these third-party companies mostly take down the pedos and creeps, but that doesn't really matter. Power is delineated by the maximum possible reach of their actions, not by how they choose to act at any given moment.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jeena 10y ago
There is no cloud, only other peoples computers.
JDiculous 10y ago
Reminds me of what happened to my old Youtube account. One day it was just taken down - no warnings, no chance to back anything up (I had a backup on my home computer, but that hard drive was reformatted while I was in college). Contacted Google, and never got a response. Lost some videos I made as a kid that I would love to see again. Aside from the obvious "back up your stuff" mantra, this points to a couple things: 1. We need a decentralized web ASAP (eg. IPFS) 2. Private corporations should have some degree of responsibility over being reasonable with their services. This guy should've at least been given the opportunity to back up his stuff, or hell even just a response from customer service.
- brokenmachine 10y ago
  Re: Point 1, I agree with you that we definitely need a decentralized web, but I wonder how many people would be mirroring your youtube videos. Even IPFS still needs your data to be stored somewhere. I have some youtube videos with literally 2 or 3 views. Those wouldn't be mirrored on a decentralized net. Zeronet is working on using "zerocoin" as a way you can pay the decentralized net to mirror your data. This is a killer feature. I don't know if IPFS has a similar feature but I hope so. Re: Point 2, I agree completely, it seems way too draconian to just delete immediately with no warning. With the size of google, there's always going to be the chance that an account is removed by mistake. At least give people a couple of day's chance to get their data before it is removed, if only as a goodwill gesture of thanks to the millions of people providing free data for Google to serve and make advertising revenue from.
slackstation 10y ago
How does one make you primary artistic medium the internet for a decade and yet don't know how it works enough to have backups of your work? It's as if I worked in artistic welding but, never learned anything about the dangers of highly pressurized tanks of gas and then get surprised when leaving the tank valve open causes a fire and ruins your artwork. He didn't have any backups anywhere else. He just completely relied on Google to do it for free forever just because. After a decade of making work that controversial, you never just save that stuff to jump drive? This person is incompetent and irresponsible. Google owes him nothing.
ggggtez 10y ago
Some on here note that the email account was also banned. Not to state the obvious but isn't it possible it had nothing to do with the blog, and everything to do with something else related to the account?
bigB 10y ago
Regardless of content the fact that he didn't have backups is juts plain stupid. Deserves pretty much everything he got. Im not sorry if that sounds like im an a$$hole but people really need to assume their OWN responsibility not blame others when things go wrong. 14 years worth of information is something that should have been backed up if he didn't want to lose it, no excuses.
Const-me 10y ago
That’s one of the reasons why I prefer desktop-based e-mail clients. With a desktop client, an e-mail provider like gmail is able to terminate or suspend my account and prevent me from using my mailbox, but they can’t block me from accessing the e-mails I have already written or received.
HappyFunGuy 10y ago
Sue for damages and get the data back via discovery before you lose. You could also ask your "fans" to send you their cached copies. Or you could search your local browser history. Or you could hire forensic analysists to examine any drives you may have had the data on. You could also pay lots of fees and bloat up the bitcoin blockchain with it, if you don't want to lose it again.

521 points by LaSombra 10y ago

Ultimately this is where the decentralized web should go. Having a built-in archive function, will not only prevent work from being lost... the decentralization might prevent it form being shut down.

Grollicus 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063 ?

eplanit 10y ago

More accurately stated: Artist stores (the sole copy of [1]) a decade of work on a service he doesn't pay for and which provides no guarantees of service or quality... Why is the title written to make it seem it was Google that did something wrong here? [1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.

softawre 10y ago
Do you really need to "source" a post like this?

corobo 10y ago

Summary of the article > It’s gone because it was kept entirely on his blog Take backups.

jobigoud 10y ago
And don't forget to test your restore.
- corobo 10y ago
  Actually good point that should be the first rule 0. It's not a backup unless you know it restores 1. Always take backups 2. Backup the backup
  - vacri 10y ago
    A few month ago someone here on HN stated "People don't want backups. People want restores". Can't recall who, though...
    - majewsky 10y ago
      I've known (and retold) a similar saying for years: "Nobody wants backup. Everyone wants restore."
      - lloyd-christmas 10y ago
        I think people are jaded due to windows automated backup, where you tell it to keep only the latest backup and it still manages to fill your hard drive with 50 of them.
oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
Does blogger make that easy / possible?
- corobo 10y ago
  Yes there's Google Takeout, but in this case I'd more back up the originals rather than whatever comes out of Google's optimizations
  - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    Sure, if we're talking about saving a copy of an image, I agree. I assumed that there was original content (i.e. writing) that had simply been entered directly into blogger, which a typical writer might not know how to backup at all.
soft_dev_person 10y ago
They closed his email-account too, though? It has never occurred to me to backup my entire Gmail archive. Should probably look into that now...
- corobo 10y ago
  Admittedly email has also been in my blind spot too.. Not a bad plan that.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    Here is a one-click service to backup everything in your google account. Email, google drive, youtube, location history, blogger blogs, bookmarks, calendar, literally ever google service. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
    - pjc50 10y ago
      What format does this produce? A bit of googling suggests mbox. What happens to 'labels' on emails?
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        MBOX is correct. Labels become folders. Mail that has multiple labels will be duplicated into each folder.
      - SlashmanX 10y ago
        If you click "details" you can see the format each service is exported as
    - soft_dev_person 10y ago
      Nice tool, and can produce archive directly to Dropbox (or Drive, or OneDrive). Now, if they only could add a periodic option...
  - vertis 10y ago
TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
At least the article opens with the conclusion, saves scrolling. Having said that, I did continue scrolling and the article goes on to say > More generally, relying on the internet as an archive is dangerous. And it is, at least, another point toward helping me feel vindicated for being that person who always says "and you have off site backups for when your house burns down, right?"
- corobo 10y ago
  Definitely feel vindicated, it's the 3-2-1 rule 3 copies 2 different forms of media 1 offsite
  - AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
    Can you qualify what "2 different forms of media" means? I'm assuming one physical, one cloud. Do you consider two separate external HDD's with the data on it to fail that test because they are the same form? When my music collection was smaller, I had everything backed up onto an external as well as had them all physically burned onto like 50 DVDs. Since my collection has grown beyond a terabyte, however, I haven't had the time or energy to keep that up. Now it's just an external, a travel external, a redundant external, and a cloud backup.
    - corobo 10y ago
      A few examples I can pull off the top of my head - DVD, Disk (HDD), Disk (SSD), Disk (Flash.. maybe?), Tape, Cloud So Disk (HDD) and Cloud is fine. Two HDDs (spinny platter style) would indeed fail the test. If you want to argue it you could probably get away with different manufacturers or different batches but I'd prefer my backups to play nicely with the rules rather than try to avoid them! Far-fetched as it is but lets say for example you have a power surge that takes out your external disk (is that even possible?). Chances are high whatever did that would also do that to your other disk. Or maybe a wall caves in and decimates your PC (or you just sweep the desk somehow and knock everything off it. Maybe the desk has collapsed) - The spinny disks may be destroyed if they are both hit hard enough. Mixing an HDD and SSD, the SSD would probably be more hardy against shock damage. From another comment I made in this thread somewhere "I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups [so it's different to just a raw disk]" Edit: I use too many brackets here. I am going to attend my next available parenthesis anonymous support group.
amelius 10y ago
Perhaps the internet archive's "way-back-machine" has a backup?
- nl 10y ago
  Do people even read the posted articles at all?! From the article: Cooper should’ve backed his work up, or known to be more cautious with drafts. ... ... Admittedly, not everything has vanished. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has saved bits and pieces of Cooper’s blog dating back to January 3, 2012, but they are just snapshots of the blog’s front page for a given date, not capturing the blog in its entirety.
  - xigency 10y ago
    Probably not a backup of his email though!
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
hiou 10y ago
Thanks Dad.

elmar 10y ago

One click and you have a backup... https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

M4v3R 10y ago
The article says they've taken down his email address, so presumably he doesn't have access to that page as well.
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  I think the GP meant to say that you can prevent future damage to some extent through regular backups. When things have already gone wrong, it's too late to start making backups. The cloud is no different from physical media in that regard, even if the data still exists in some data centre, you can't access it any more.
  - Sidnicious 10y ago
    I'm not aware of any tool to automate regular backups of cloud services, even though many of them have “download everything” buttons like this now (awesome). That sounds like a thing that should exist.
    - Asooka 10y ago
      You can automate that pretty easily via Phantomjs and the like.
    - SquareWheel 10y ago
      Backupify?
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      If I could regularly have my computer auto-request a Takeout archive, and then auto-download it when Google notifies my email it's been completed, that'd be a tool I'd enjoy having.

talideon 10y ago

Never be a sharecropper, always have backups.

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
What is the meaning of 'sharecropper' in this context? I'm aware of sharecropping in the agricultural sense[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
- AndrewDucker 10y ago
  Working someone else's land, rather than owning your own. i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog. This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.
  - swiley 10y ago
    Word (and pandoc and textedit and whatever else) exports HTML. Most GUI shells will mount (or do something like mount) a WebDAV or FTP server. This stuff is only complicated if you make it complicated.
  - nibnib 10y ago
    For a counter argument, I like to read many blogs that are more or less defunct, but have valuable material. The author has moved on (or passed on) but the material is still sitting on Google servers instead of disappearing when a hosting contract lapses. perhaps using free services and making backups is the best option.
- ableal 10y ago
  Tim Bray, many moons ago: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...

elmar 10y ago

How To Backup Gmail Accounts (+Restore) http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/ http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/

Klathmon 10y ago

>Early last year Andy Baio wrote about how most of the archival projects Google touted in the early 2000s, such as Google News Archive and Google Groups, were quietly abandoned several years ago. Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?

Doctor_Fegg 10y ago
In the sense that Google Groups has been "well" since the current design went live. It's a slow, buggy, frustrating product.

shrikant 10y ago

Ah yes, the "customer support by Internet shaming" strategy, the only approach that appears to work with inexplicable Google takedowns.

raverbashing 10y ago
Given that Google's customer support has autistic tendencies to put it mildly, I do not feel sorry for them
- amelius 10y ago
  I know what you mean. But there may be autistic people reading this.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    I understand you worries, I'm focusing on the characteristic rather than people with that condition
    - napperjabber 10y ago
      Pretty much sums up my life. I'm an individual with a condition to pick fits because, Reddit.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  For all autistic people: this is not being autistic, I guess maybe sometimes arrogant, sometimes dumb (as an organisation) or rather "too big" for our own good would be better descriptions. But at least not autistic, and definitely not with a follow up where that is used as an excuse for not feeling sorry for them. :-/
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Do you think I really should feel sorry for a megacorp that can't be bothered to treat their customers like human beings? I do feel sorry for autistic people, though.

webtechgal 10y ago

This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time: http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...

webtechgal 10y ago
Ha! Found a copy of the home page at last, cached just yesterday!! For those curious enough, here is the link: http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&fr=yfp-t-100&ei=UTF-8&u=http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4DJlbOV5E8J:http://www.dennis-cooper.net/%20http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&icp=1&.intl=in&sig=CCAAR6c4TCWHwpM030gyVw-- http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Interesting find. But now I'm really confused. That page still exists as of this minute: http://www.dennis-cooper.net http://www.dennis-cooper.net The link from the fusion.net story is: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ That blog does not exist. So maybe we're talking about two different things?

NameNickHN 10y ago

I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.

afarrell 10y ago
There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist. The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
- webtechgal 10y ago
  > There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file... So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time. The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site. As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!! Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
- obj-g 10y ago
  But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define what he was doing, you might take the time to learn how to make a simple site.

_Understated_ 10y ago

Why did Google take him down with (presumably) no warnings? Or did they? Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve". The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final. Edit: Clarity

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
Google doesn't ever provide warnings of imminent account closures like this. The history of HN and plenty of other sites is littered with cautionary tales of assuming Google would tell you before they take away all your stuff or give you a chance to appeal or contest it first.
joesmo 10y ago
This is a new age in customer support, if you can call it that. Amazon and I'm sure many other companies do the same thing. You don't even have to actually violate TOS. That's probably why no one can reverse the decision. They'd have to admit to closing the account on a whim (might be a bot's whim, but it's still a whim), unrelated to any actual TOS violations. They can choose to not do business with you anytime, even if you've paid them, and your only recourse is to sue them. Yeah, that's going to work out well ...
wmil 10y ago
Google keeps per user costs low by trying to avoid all tech support. Sending an email like that invites the user to try to start a conversation. Google really should have an option to freeze the account while allowing the user to download their content, but it seems that they don't.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

zby 10y ago

Since a few years loggin into Blogspot (former Blogger) became very difficult for me - I am constantly being bounced between the authentication pages, and most of the time I end up with an error. I think Google is just preparing for discontinuing it.

panglott 10y ago
There are still a ton of pages in Blogspot. Closing Blogspot would be a Geocities-closure-level event, or bigger.
- GadgetJax 10y ago
  They aren't paying? Shut it down!
- nilved 10y ago
  It would be much bigger. Some blogs are still updated.

clishem 10y ago

Somewhat relevant https://xkcd.com/1150/ https://xkcd.com/1150/

jagermo 10y ago
Not somewhat, but really, really relevant. Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation. And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?
- hackits 10y ago
  This makes me laugh my ass off. This is a bit of a pet peeve I have with people and modern technology. They believe they have a right to use a service even though they're not paying for the usage of the service. Then they turn around shocked and angry when the free service is removed. `Why! why did they do this to me, this is the biggest injustice! How un-professional of them!`. Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
  - pyre 10y ago
    To be fair, Google's ad dept. wants you to put everything about your digital life into their services, yet nowhere do they warn you about backing your stuff up with the same gusto that they put into getting you to use the service in the first place. It's not quite a "Chad's Garage" scenario. "I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities." Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.
  - daveloyall 10y ago
    pyre is right, Google has fought tooth and nail to make their services indispensable. It is a failure of ethics to then delete that indispensable thing. There were laws in the old USAmerican West about horse theft. Strict laws! And similarly strict laws throughout history in shepherding cultures, regarding livestock. The justification for draconian punishments for livestock theft has always been that the animals (property, items) were indispensable. You can't go around drastically changing or possibly ending people's lives by taking the things they depend on away from them. It's wrong!

emcrazyone 10y ago

concerning to say the least considering every galaxy/Android phone I've owned backs up to google in such a seamless & effortless way. My wife backs up all our family photos to google. Google offers "Unlimited free storage" if you allow them to compress your photos. https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.

pjc50 10y ago
A good case for "yes, and"; backing up to the cloud is convenient and subject to very different failure modes to local storage. Why not both?

FussyZeus 10y ago

> “Nothing on the blog is backed-up or archived anywhere else, as far as I know,” he explained in a Facebook message. Cue sad trombone. This had to happen to me a couple of times before I got to be a real Nazi about backup. I'd consider myself a fairly smart guy too, it's just one of those things you never want to take care of properly...until you lose stuff, then you get it. Poor guy, hope he can get his work back but it doesn't seem too likely.

a3n 10y ago

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect. The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I used to use gmail (with me@mydomain.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since 2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain. (Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens. I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.) Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need meta-domains that can't be transferred, that are our identity, but I don't know how that would be implemented. I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list. Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is warranted by the importance of your communication.

hackits 10y ago
Better way to put this is to pay for the service if you're relying on it as a source of income or advertising yourself to the world.

wstrange 10y ago

It looks like his work is not deleted, just not accessible due to possible TOS violations? I am guessing he can get it back. The title seems like click-bait.

willemojnr 10y ago
My thoughts too. Annoying.
- eitland 10y ago
  Still happy to upvote it as is creates healthy and useful discussions. Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google service department.
broken_symlink 10y ago
Also, if he did violate the terms I'm not sure why he would think it would be a good idea to sue.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

Everyone should occasionally use Google Takeout to back up their stuff, but non-tech users don't understand this. I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger. But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like how comments are handled. Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a small add-on to my own web properties. Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.

planteen 10y ago
I had no idea Google Takeout existed. Thanks. I backed up my Gmail over IMAP in the past but this looks far easier.
- stephengoodwin 10y ago
  I love Takeout. Given how much of our lives is invested into digital platform, I wish every Internet company had something similar to Takeout for user data.
creeble 10y ago
omg, takeout. Been using various scripts for years (and should keep testing them I guess [1]). I have "Feature announcements" on from Google, but never heard of this. Anyway, thanks mucho! [1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cautionary-tale-google-decides-hold-personal-data-wont-let-go/ http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cautionary-tale-google-decides-...
niftich 10y ago
I too have never heard of Takeout. It seems like it's been in around since 2011 with a much smaller set of supported services [1]. One of the top results when you search for 'Google Takeout' is one from 2011 titled 'The Silent Release of Google Takeout' [2]. It looks like it used to be closely associated with the Google Plus branding more so than Account Management, so that may explain why it's not as widely known. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front [2] http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-silent-release-of-google-takeout-20336.html http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-silent-release-o...

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

Friendly reminder that your stuff is not "backed up" in the cloud unless you have a local copy. Otherwise it just lives in the cloud, meaning it lives on someone else's server.

reitanqild 10y ago
Yep. General point. Same goes for external hard drives etc: it is only a backup as long as it also primarily exists somewhere else.
marcosdumay 10y ago
Well, if you have read-only copies on different enough servers, owned by different enough people, it's a backup to some degree. Security is never an absolute. But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated risks in the ways that matter".

ungzd 10y ago

If it's really due to some kind of erotic pictures, then I don't understand why often american companies like Google act like iranian. Is there any laws in USA that allows to punish Google for hosting images of woman nipples? Why both App store and Google play's TOS include sins from Old Testament?

icefo 10y ago
I've heard that ad companies don't like to mix ads and boobies but I have no idea why.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I'm guessing because associating your product with porn works like associating it with charity in reverse.
discordianfish 10y ago
I've wondered the same over an over. Maybe it's ads but maybe they simply do it because many people outside the liberal western would would indeed feel offended (and those companies would face legal issues in very conservative countries).
drusepth 10y ago
Other people here are saying those erotic pictures (or story depictions) were of kids, where there _are_ laws that allow punishing Google for hosting and not immediately reporting them.
lotharbot 10y ago
Google is in competition with a lot of other companies, and they've decided they're in a stronger position if they don't set off a firestorm of criticism that gives people an excuse to move to a different service. Even if you personally don't care about erotic pictures, if your grandma starts associating google with porn (because a case like this became high enough profile to get covered by the local news), and then you e-mail her from your google account, now you're having an uncomfortable conversation with your grandma. Or your wife or mother or sister or really conservative friend or whatever. Which isn't enough to make everyone leave, but it's enough to make some people leave, and pretty soon Bing or Yahoo would have bigger mindshare. It's a lot easier for Google to just say "ToS violation = deleted" and be done with it, and occasionally have to reverse a decision if there's too much fallout.

simbalion 10y ago

Why would you keep 14 years of your labors on a server owned by an uninterested corporation with no off-site backups anywhere?

leephillips 10y ago

Well, at least he still has a Facebook account. Whew.

janekm 10y ago

The fact that every single comment in this thread amounts to "should have backed up" makes me a little sad. Is this really what we want to expect from companies like Google? Is this acceptable? Is it just a "force of nature" that I should consider beyond the ken of man? What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think worth having a conversation about.

wpietri 10y ago
Definitely. My dad, a now-retired programmer, was dealing with an error at his bank in the 80s. It was a bunch of work and frustration. At some point he asked why a thing happened and the rep said, "Oh, the computer just does that." He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for." I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.
- wvenable 10y ago
  I don't think the problem is software necessarily, it's scale. Software allows for scale but it's not the underlying cause. Google is responsible for the content of maybe hundreds of millions of people; if even a small fraction of them have issues that's overwhelming. At that scale it's impossible for you to be anything other than nothing to them.
  - wpietri 10y ago
    > At that scale it's impossible for you to be anything other than nothing to them. Even if that's the case, it is not impossible. It's just a choice that they made about how to structure things. The US government has hundreds of millions of citizens, but each one of those persons has rights, responsibilities, and privileges. The Catholic Church has hundreds of millions of members, but each one can have a personal relationship with a priest. If Google is really indifferent to what people have entrusted to them, that's a choice.

DavidWanjiru 10y ago

When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You get the picture. That correspondence was, and remains, important to me. Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it? The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have. But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want. From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me. That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership. The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.

losvedir 10y ago
> the law, I feel, will have to change What is a reasonable law that won't, say, make services like Snapchat illegal (which many people seem to find useful)?
- maus42 10y ago
  Good point, but not unsolvable. I can imagine the law would require user specifically giving permission to delete the data afterwards, maybe even mandating a certain form of presenting the gist of the deal, instead of lengthy and indecipherable TOS. I don't know the legal language, but requiring a text box with a tick mark or equivalent that presents a legally mandated predefined statement designed as a short and simple (unlike most TOS and EULAs), in clear and visible text, should not be impossible. For example, "I agree that $corp may delete my data without notice and opportunity to back it up" if the $corp isn't willing to offer a TOS that grants the user those rights. Possibly another similar one about privacy.

whack 10y ago

I found the following cryptic snippet, from the Guardian's coverage of this topic: "He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities." I have little idea what the above really means, but it almost sounds like advertising/marketing for prostitution. My best guess at the moment, is that Google considered the above to be a flagrant violation of its rules, and hence, shut down his page immediately. I can understand if Google considers certain aspects of his page to be unacceptable, but I wish they had notified him of the reason for their decision, and given him a week's time to download all his data and transition to a different website. As someone who relies on gmail/drive very heavily for important documents/correspondence, reading something like this makes me feel quite uneasy.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
It sounds more like satire to me.
mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
The quickest way to stop feeling uneasy is to back up your gmail and drive data immediately.
JohnTHaller 10y ago
He was taking existing ads for escorts in the wild and critiquing them as satire.
- whack 10y ago
  Ah, I see what you're saying. By "take ads from escorts", I assumed that meant that he was literally allowing escorts to post ads on his page. What you're saying seems more reasonable.
- tamana 10y ago
  Are you sure it is "satire"?
  - 10y ago

chillingeffect 10y ago

This just underscores the need for a government to defend our rights. Corporations can't be relied on to do it for us.

brokenmachine 10y ago
Although I agree completely with your statement, especially wrt right to repair and DRM, I don't know what you would want the government to do in this case to protect a person's data when they choose to store it on a free service that offers no guarantees of anything, and specifically states in their TOS that they may remove an account for any reason at any time. On top of that, this person chose not to take the simple step of using Google Takeout to back up the years of data that he couldn't afford to lose. If my business or mental health depended on that data, I'd be doing that every couple of weeks at least. I do think it would be nice if Google would, when they remove an account, give you a couple of days to go to Takeout and download the data. Just deleting it with no warning seems very rude indeed, especially when you consider the amount of advertising revenue they generate from serving people's data. Google should also make less claims about, "A safe place to store your data"!, if they continue to remove people's data without warning or recourse.

zippy786 10y ago

Losing the email would be a disaster since the decentralized web is now relying on a centralized email system.

modeless 10y ago

From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1] I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper_fears_censorship_as_google_erases/d5da89a https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper...

andrewclunn 10y ago
Which would also explain why he wouldn't have local back-ups, to avoid prosecution. Though this may be something of a case of, "Innocent until algorithms say otherwise."
- sliverstorm 10y ago
  Considering how few people actually take backups, I'm willing to assume laziness. You wouldn't believe how many people I know who say things like, "Yeah I'd lose my entire PhD project if this laptop died, because I haven't taken a backup in X years" (and proceed to continue not backing up their work)
  - frou_dh 10y ago
    This seems a step before that sense of the word "backup". The guy's PC did not die. He apparently created "GIF novels", which presumably involved using some application to work on a file on his local hard drive. What did he do after uploading the finished GIF to his blog? Manually delete it from his hard drive? Why?
    - 10y ago

seesomesense 10y ago

Tldr; Child porn writer has works deleted by service provider.

bhartzer 10y ago

I'm not going to comment on the topic of the content involved. But seems to me that using your own doamain name (not hosting the blog on blogspot) and/or a backup would have solved this issue. Even if you're using blogspot, that's no reason not to have a backup.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

>“[If Google doesn’t] respond and rectify the situation, I won’t have any choice but to sue them,” Cooper wrote. “I don’t want to do that for obvious reasons, but I will if I have to.” Really? Because you didn't take the necessary steps to create your own backups!?? Edit: Reading some of the other comments about the ... um ... content ... of his blog, no wonder he didn't keep backups!!!

Sylos 10y ago
Victim-blaming isn't going to help anyone. And even if he would have had backups, Google has completely dispersed his followership, too.

cft 10y ago

There is a legal definition of child pornography: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256 Did his work fit this definition? I doubt it, because he would have been in jail by now, given that he never concealed his name. Also Google is notorious for heavy handed treatment of smaller AdSense publishers, which makes me doubly sceptical. http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-google-for-unpaid-adsense-earnings-2015-01/ http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-googl...

Pica_soO 10y ago
Who cares anyway, algorithmically full time surveillance of the public basically castrates pedophiles, limiting them to fiction. So the usual will happen, public shaming of the "artist" into some pseudo-religious organization, where he/she/it can be forced by the "believers" to uphold some the marriage/basic-income-for-beauty Contract. Another horrific social machine from the past. Could we at least pressure potentially creative persons into something socially useful? He/She/It who makes the biggest scientific contribution of a group of three, gets a good life and "surveilanced" freedom, the median gets publicly outed and "surveilanced" freedom, the least contributing goes to some prison. Repeat every year.

bradrydzewski 10y ago

I think a more appropriate title would be "Google disables artist's Blog". The author describes the blog and email accounts as disabled and has no direct evidence that anything has been permanently deleted > I’ve asked about whether the work on Cooper’s blog has been deleted permanently or is simply on a server somewhere, and I’ll update this post if I hear back.

leepowers 10y ago

So there's a good chance this guy is a creep. That doesn't change the fact that any content any of us have posted to a third-party site (be it Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) can be taken down at any time, without notification or appeal. Certainly these third-party companies mostly take down the pedos and creeps, but that doesn't really matter. Power is delineated by the maximum possible reach of their actions, not by how they choose to act at any given moment.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jeena 10y ago

There is no cloud, only other peoples computers.

JDiculous 10y ago

Reminds me of what happened to my old Youtube account. One day it was just taken down - no warnings, no chance to back anything up (I had a backup on my home computer, but that hard drive was reformatted while I was in college). Contacted Google, and never got a response. Lost some videos I made as a kid that I would love to see again. Aside from the obvious "back up your stuff" mantra, this points to a couple things: 1. We need a decentralized web ASAP (eg. IPFS) 2. Private corporations should have some degree of responsibility over being reasonable with their services. This guy should've at least been given the opportunity to back up his stuff, or hell even just a response from customer service.

brokenmachine 10y ago
Re: Point 1, I agree with you that we definitely need a decentralized web, but I wonder how many people would be mirroring your youtube videos. Even IPFS still needs your data to be stored somewhere. I have some youtube videos with literally 2 or 3 views. Those wouldn't be mirrored on a decentralized net. Zeronet is working on using "zerocoin" as a way you can pay the decentralized net to mirror your data. This is a killer feature. I don't know if IPFS has a similar feature but I hope so. Re: Point 2, I agree completely, it seems way too draconian to just delete immediately with no warning. With the size of google, there's always going to be the chance that an account is removed by mistake. At least give people a couple of day's chance to get their data before it is removed, if only as a goodwill gesture of thanks to the millions of people providing free data for Google to serve and make advertising revenue from.

slackstation 10y ago

How does one make you primary artistic medium the internet for a decade and yet don't know how it works enough to have backups of your work? It's as if I worked in artistic welding but, never learned anything about the dangers of highly pressurized tanks of gas and then get surprised when leaving the tank valve open causes a fire and ruins your artwork. He didn't have any backups anywhere else. He just completely relied on Google to do it for free forever just because. After a decade of making work that controversial, you never just save that stuff to jump drive? This person is incompetent and irresponsible. Google owes him nothing.

ggggtez 10y ago

Some on here note that the email account was also banned. Not to state the obvious but isn't it possible it had nothing to do with the blog, and everything to do with something else related to the account?

bigB 10y ago

Regardless of content the fact that he didn't have backups is juts plain stupid. Deserves pretty much everything he got. Im not sorry if that sounds like im an a$$hole but people really need to assume their OWN responsibility not blame others when things go wrong. 14 years worth of information is something that should have been backed up if he didn't want to lose it, no excuses.

Const-me 10y ago

That’s one of the reasons why I prefer desktop-based e-mail clients. With a desktop client, an e-mail provider like gmail is able to terminate or suspend my account and prevent me from using my mailbox, but they can’t block me from accessing the e-mails I have already written or received.

HappyFunGuy 10y ago

Sue for damages and get the data back via discovery before you lose. You could also ask your "fans" to send you their cached copies. Or you could search your local browser history. Or you could hire forensic analysists to examine any drives you may have had the data on. You could also pay lots of fees and bloat up the bitcoin blockchain with it, if you don't want to lose it again.