6 ms·

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

by clishem 10y ago

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!
  - rexpop 10y ago
    we are paying. we have shared our IP with them, from which they profit. we are paying.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  The problem is, Google actively advertises their reliability and does not actively encourage backing up your account to protect yourself from Google deleting you. As many people perceive that Google is incredibly unlikely to lose your data, this isn't usually thought of the way you immediately tend to think you need a backup of your hard drive in your PC. Very few people backup their Google account regularly (or at all), even though Google Takeout is available. People should, but I'd argue part of the burden is on Google for misleading them into thinking they don't need to.
  - klagermkii 10y ago
    It's more than just Google, it's the whole tech press that pushes the glorious cloud future without covering these kinds of caveats. A big selling point of the cloud for average people is that supposedly they don't have to worry about having to protect their data as professionals will do it for them, but then these incidents come out and there's these "I told you so" where apparently they always need a self-hosted version as well.
- joyeuse6701 10y ago
  Partially relevant. A more apt example would be 'xyz lets me put all my junk in his nice shelf garage, I can look at 'em whenever I want, my junk looks great. He also lets anyone come through his garage to see it. It's so popular he gets advertisers to spend money posting other items to sell there... now he just threw out all my stuff without warning because his advertising garage business wasn't worth maintaining anymore.' That's a dick move through and through. We can wag our fingers and say 'you should have known better' but clearly if this were the case all the time, with all our free services, this model of business would fail. It is 'free' so long as it's profitable or has the potential to be profitable to them. These services have no explicit guarantee that they will last, or protect your stuff, but we expect them to. It's implied in the marketing or usability of the thing. You pay a merchant for an item, you don't explicitly pay to secure your credit card with hashes and salts in a DB, it's implied in the service. I suppose it's your fault if your credit card is swiped because you should have used cash... or gold bullion.
transfire 10y ago
It's NOT like that. Rather Chad already sold it all off to Craigslist and informed the owner after the fact. If Google was a storage facility and did this, free or no, they would be liable.
- hackits 10y ago
  Storage facility will charge for the service because storing physical goods and providing 24/7 security cost money. Last time I checked they will have a clause in the contract if X weeks go by and you have not paid your bill they will auction the items off to recover the debt. Though could be different for different storage facilities. For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?
  - unimpressive 10y ago
    No. That is not the situation here. Pretending like somebody using a 'free' service is equivalent to them being far behind on payments to a storage service is a ridiculous analogy. Google advertises their reliability and nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups or move out. You are not generally in an adversarial relationship with google like you would be to a company you're in debt to. EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry. As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that. They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.
    - hackits 10y ago
      `nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups`. Nowhere do they tell you that your data will be stored forever. You're making assumptions based on something they haven't even said they would provide `FOR FREE!`.
FeepingCreature 10y ago
Also relevant https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/

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

by clishem 10y ago

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

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!
- rexpop 10y ago
  we are paying. we have shared our IP with them, from which they profit. we are paying.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
The problem is, Google actively advertises their reliability and does not actively encourage backing up your account to protect yourself from Google deleting you. As many people perceive that Google is incredibly unlikely to lose your data, this isn't usually thought of the way you immediately tend to think you need a backup of your hard drive in your PC. Very few people backup their Google account regularly (or at all), even though Google Takeout is available. People should, but I'd argue part of the burden is on Google for misleading them into thinking they don't need to.
- klagermkii 10y ago
  It's more than just Google, it's the whole tech press that pushes the glorious cloud future without covering these kinds of caveats. A big selling point of the cloud for average people is that supposedly they don't have to worry about having to protect their data as professionals will do it for them, but then these incidents come out and there's these "I told you so" where apparently they always need a self-hosted version as well.
joyeuse6701 10y ago
Partially relevant. A more apt example would be 'xyz lets me put all my junk in his nice shelf garage, I can look at 'em whenever I want, my junk looks great. He also lets anyone come through his garage to see it. It's so popular he gets advertisers to spend money posting other items to sell there... now he just threw out all my stuff without warning because his advertising garage business wasn't worth maintaining anymore.' That's a dick move through and through. We can wag our fingers and say 'you should have known better' but clearly if this were the case all the time, with all our free services, this model of business would fail. It is 'free' so long as it's profitable or has the potential to be profitable to them. These services have no explicit guarantee that they will last, or protect your stuff, but we expect them to. It's implied in the marketing or usability of the thing. You pay a merchant for an item, you don't explicitly pay to secure your credit card with hashes and salts in a DB, it's implied in the service. I suppose it's your fault if your credit card is swiped because you should have used cash... or gold bullion.

transfire 10y ago

It's NOT like that. Rather Chad already sold it all off to Craigslist and informed the owner after the fact. If Google was a storage facility and did this, free or no, they would be liable.

hackits 10y ago
Storage facility will charge for the service because storing physical goods and providing 24/7 security cost money. Last time I checked they will have a clause in the contract if X weeks go by and you have not paid your bill they will auction the items off to recover the debt. Though could be different for different storage facilities. For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?
- unimpressive 10y ago
  No. That is not the situation here. Pretending like somebody using a 'free' service is equivalent to them being far behind on payments to a storage service is a ridiculous analogy. Google advertises their reliability and nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups or move out. You are not generally in an adversarial relationship with google like you would be to a company you're in debt to. EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry. As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that. They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.
  - hackits 10y ago
    `nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups`. Nowhere do they tell you that your data will be stored forever. You're making assumptions based on something they haven't even said they would provide `FOR FREE!`.

FeepingCreature 10y ago

Also relevant https://xkcd.com/743/ https://xkcd.com/743/