11 ms·

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 iden

by 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.
- a3n 10y ago
  It's not just income, it's speech and association (which are capitalized words in the US Constitution).
  - schoen 10y ago
    "Association" doesn't appear in the Constitution at all. "Speech" appears twice, but is only capitalized when referring to legislators' speeches: "and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place" "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
    - Spivak 10y ago
      Unfortunately, it's no longer possible to simply read the constitution to fully understand the rights afforded to an individual. The US Supreme Court has long upheld that a person has more fundamental rights than are explicitly enumerated in The Constitution. Technically speaking, persons always had a freedom of association, but the court made it explicit during N.A.A.C.P. v. ALABAMA [1]. [1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/357/449.html http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/357/449.html
      - throwaway_xx9 10y ago
        It's well worth reading the above court case. (In 1958, the State of Alabama banned the NAACP and tried to damage its finances and power by demanding its membership list. The Supreme Court saw through their "fig leaves" and overturned that.)
    - a3n 10y ago
      Poetic license. I could have more accurately said that they're specifically protected rights.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  It's not better at all. There are plenty of paid services that will lock you in and will terminate your account if something big enough happens.
naveen99 10y ago
Namecoin is a little more censorship resistant.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Namecoin isn't used in production anywhere, is it?
leephillips 10y ago
Brilliantly said. I think everyone, unless they intend to be a digital hermit, should have his or her own personal domain. I know people are not routinely educated about these things, and that is a problem; but when an otherwise serious person tells me that his email address is joe12345@stupidmail.com, a red flag about his competence is raised somewhere in the back of my mind, at least.
- progman 10y ago
  Personal domains won't help you if the state releases laws which enables providers to silence whole domains against unwanted opinions. What we need is a new decentralized Internet. We need not only open source software (for security reasons), not only open hardware (for security reasons) but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored. Why does it need to be non-commercial? Personally I see commercial (with healthy competition) as a good sign that something will stick around for a while.
    - progman 10y ago
      > Why does it need to be non-commercial? We already have a commercial Internet, we don't need a second one. Commercial interests would make the second Internet also a target of control.
  - gtirloni 10y ago
    Could you elaborate on the non-commercial aspects of this proposed solution? I think it's especially important to make it clear where the money will come from.
    - progman 10y ago
      From the users of course. Remember the modem times when the users had to pay for the phone bills. In the same way users could use their phone lines for the next internet. We could also build a wifi mesh with mobile devices.
leonroy 10y ago
Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies. Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could. Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication. I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication. I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.
- andrey_utkin 10y ago
  We need to follow Richard Stallman in his obsession with ehtics. "Sorry mate, I find FB/Google/Skype/etc. unethical, so I won't get in touch with you using this, let's better stick with email, phone call or meeting in person".
  - discordianfish 10y ago
    Which is, maybe, the reason nobody knows or cares about Richard Stallman and his ideas beyond us tech folk.
    - michaelvoz 10y ago
      He is also a bit of a windbag. He likes to change words because the semantics don't suit his world view. Additionally, his rants are very alienating. The man is a genius in a lot of ways, but he really misses the mark on a lot of things.
__b__ 10y ago
Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties. Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content." You: "Agreed." You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content." Google: "Sorry". Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information. "Middleman" or "service"? 2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection. Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search. Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?
- daenney 10y ago
  What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying transit) and then start building out your infrastructure. That's a rather unreasonable amount of hoops to put someone without a strong technical background through. Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.
  - 10y ago
DavidWanjiru 10y ago
It is being disappeared. The exact same deployment of power, with practically no recourse other than a revolution (which I doubt fora such as HN can trigger).
mbesto 10y ago
> That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect. If the internet didn't exist, an artist would have bought storage for his art. Why this artist feels that a service he didn't pay for owes him anything is baffling to me.
- wpietri 10y ago
  Ah, blaming the victim, always easy. Turn it around, though: if Google feels like it's not responsible for anything it hosts, shouldn't it say so, loud and clear? Say, a banner that says, "Hey, we'll delete your stuff any time we feel like it," at the top of every Gmail page? Google's users aren't parasites. There is both a relationship and an exchange of economic value. That's why Google has worked very hard to be trusted by everybody, to be seen as responsible stewards of vast amounts of often very personal information. If Google doesn't want people to trust them, they should not work so hard to be seen as trustworthy. That the artist believed them is not an error on his part.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    > Ah, blaming the victim, always easy. Typing out words on a forum and hitting "reply" is easy regardless whether you support the victim or not. Don't see your point?
    - gknoy 10y ago
      Most services, but especially Gmail, promote themselves as something you can safely go all-in on. I recall an advertisement for Gmail where a father left messages to his just-born child, with the idea that when they were an adult they would be able to read them. The archive (vs delete) feature in gmail similarly reinforces that "we'll always have your stuff for you", as does the fact that they want your mail to stay on their servers, rather than fetched with IMAP/POP. Sure, the TOS says "we can delete it whenever"/"no promises", but the advertising and general pitching of the product have heavily indicated otherwise. I don't see the service going away, and when you have so much identity tied to your email, it's pretty shocking to realize that it could all disappear in a flash. If Google were to kill my email accounts, I would be _seriously_ disadvantaged. Saying that only fools trust Google to keep your things forever is true, but also lacks empathy.
arundelo 10y ago
I've had my own domain for quite a while and have been meaning to start using an email address on that domain. The main reason I haven't is that I'm procrastinating the initial trouble of setting it up, but I'm also a bit scared from hearing stories of people who do this and then occasionally have email to them or from them bounce or disappear. (Maybe this is not as common a problem as I get the impression it is.) Edit: I'm not even considering running my own email server; I know that's a full-time job. Just something like forwarding my custom email to my Gmail address, which is the type of thing I've heard the aforementioned scary stories about (though a quick web search isn't turning up many such stories).
- darryl42 10y ago
  Running your own mail server is a pain. Paying for google apps to handle your email is very easy. Other providers can do the same thing for you.
- a3n 10y ago
  I have a domain, serviced by a registrar. When I change email providers, I go to the registrar's site and point my email address at my new provider. That might take a little time (way less than a day, by observation) to propagate. I then go to my new provider and set things up to "send mail as me@mydomain." If you run a local client like Thunderbird (rather than run exclusively through your provider's web interface), then you'll need to do similar there (like point it at your provider's smtp and imap/pop3 servers). Problems arise when you run your own server, because of fairly detailed authentication settings. If you pay a provider to run their servers, they take care of that.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I do that. It's actually not too bad, I think the occasional missing email is overblown. At least, I don't typically have problems. Of course, it's important to keep backups of everything (configs, logs, mail, etc), and test. Just slowly port everything over, as you gain more confidence that your not missing anything. Most email providers also will let you put a rule in place that lets you bounce mail to both addresses.
- jpna66dd 10y ago
pjc50 10y ago
> Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Good point; your domain can be seized for various sorts of percieved IP violation.
- a3n 10y ago
  Or by mistake or fraud, or other reasons that you the renter had nothing to do with.
- morninj 10y ago
  For trademark violations, yes. But the risk is extremely low if you use yourname.com (or some other U.S. TLD).
voltagex_ 10y ago
I've got 8 years of emails, logins and now Android apps associated with a Google Apps domain (1 user, $6AUD a month). I've got an exit plan for my email, but I'd lose at least $200 of apps. It's really easy to become dependent on a service.
djsumdog 10y ago
I've had my own domains for over a decade and I switched my mail off Google to my own servers as well. One thing I worry about thought: what happens when I die? My credit cards will eventually shut down, my Linode will turn off when my card gets declined, and my domains will fail to renew. But the same thing happens the other direction. Github could shut down Github pages one day, or they could even go out of business. Geocities is gone (although I think Archive.org backed up a lot of it) and there are tons of services that have gone belly-up over the years. Even in our age of massive data retention, it's still interesting to see what's gone, and what may never be recovered if it wasn't indexed by the Wayback machine.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  If it was/is culturally relevant it lives on in future works. I don't think google looses anything internally. They need that stuff one day to teach AI some tricks.

by a3n 10y ago

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.

a3n 10y ago
It's not just income, it's speech and association (which are capitalized words in the US Constitution).
- schoen 10y ago
  "Association" doesn't appear in the Constitution at all. "Speech" appears twice, but is only capitalized when referring to legislators' speeches: "and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place" "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
  - Spivak 10y ago
    Unfortunately, it's no longer possible to simply read the constitution to fully understand the rights afforded to an individual. The US Supreme Court has long upheld that a person has more fundamental rights than are explicitly enumerated in The Constitution. Technically speaking, persons always had a freedom of association, but the court made it explicit during N.A.A.C.P. v. ALABAMA [1]. [1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/357/449.html http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/357/449.html
    - throwaway_xx9 10y ago
      It's well worth reading the above court case. (In 1958, the State of Alabama banned the NAACP and tried to damage its finances and power by demanding its membership list. The Supreme Court saw through their "fig leaves" and overturned that.)
  - a3n 10y ago
    Poetic license. I could have more accurately said that they're specifically protected rights.
marcosdumay 10y ago
It's not better at all. There are plenty of paid services that will lock you in and will terminate your account if something big enough happens.

naveen99 10y ago

Namecoin is a little more censorship resistant.

reitanqild 10y ago
Namecoin isn't used in production anywhere, is it?

leephillips 10y ago

Brilliantly said. I think everyone, unless they intend to be a digital hermit, should have his or her own personal domain. I know people are not routinely educated about these things, and that is a problem; but when an otherwise serious person tells me that his email address is joe12345@stupidmail.com, a red flag about his competence is raised somewhere in the back of my mind, at least.

progman 10y ago
Personal domains won't help you if the state releases laws which enables providers to silence whole domains against unwanted opinions. What we need is a new decentralized Internet. We need not only open source software (for security reasons), not only open hardware (for security reasons) but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored. Why does it need to be non-commercial? Personally I see commercial (with healthy competition) as a good sign that something will stick around for a while.
  - progman 10y ago
    > Why does it need to be non-commercial? We already have a commercial Internet, we don't need a second one. Commercial interests would make the second Internet also a target of control.
- gtirloni 10y ago
  Could you elaborate on the non-commercial aspects of this proposed solution? I think it's especially important to make it clear where the money will come from.
  - progman 10y ago
    From the users of course. Remember the modem times when the users had to pay for the phone bills. In the same way users could use their phone lines for the next internet. We could also build a wifi mesh with mobile devices.

leonroy 10y ago

Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies. Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could. Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication. I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication. I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.

andrey_utkin 10y ago
We need to follow Richard Stallman in his obsession with ehtics. "Sorry mate, I find FB/Google/Skype/etc. unethical, so I won't get in touch with you using this, let's better stick with email, phone call or meeting in person".
- discordianfish 10y ago
  Which is, maybe, the reason nobody knows or cares about Richard Stallman and his ideas beyond us tech folk.
  - michaelvoz 10y ago
    He is also a bit of a windbag. He likes to change words because the semantics don't suit his world view. Additionally, his rants are very alienating. The man is a genius in a lot of ways, but he really misses the mark on a lot of things.

__b__ 10y ago

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties. Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content." You: "Agreed." You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content." Google: "Sorry". Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information. "Middleman" or "service"? 2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection. Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search. Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?

daenney 10y ago
What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying transit) and then start building out your infrastructure. That's a rather unreasonable amount of hoops to put someone without a strong technical background through. Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.
- 10y ago

DavidWanjiru 10y ago

It is being disappeared. The exact same deployment of power, with practically no recourse other than a revolution (which I doubt fora such as HN can trigger).

mbesto 10y ago

> That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect. If the internet didn't exist, an artist would have bought storage for his art. Why this artist feels that a service he didn't pay for owes him anything is baffling to me.

wpietri 10y ago
Ah, blaming the victim, always easy. Turn it around, though: if Google feels like it's not responsible for anything it hosts, shouldn't it say so, loud and clear? Say, a banner that says, "Hey, we'll delete your stuff any time we feel like it," at the top of every Gmail page? Google's users aren't parasites. There is both a relationship and an exchange of economic value. That's why Google has worked very hard to be trusted by everybody, to be seen as responsible stewards of vast amounts of often very personal information. If Google doesn't want people to trust them, they should not work so hard to be seen as trustworthy. That the artist believed them is not an error on his part.
- mbesto 10y ago
  > Ah, blaming the victim, always easy. Typing out words on a forum and hitting "reply" is easy regardless whether you support the victim or not. Don't see your point?
  - gknoy 10y ago
    Most services, but especially Gmail, promote themselves as something you can safely go all-in on. I recall an advertisement for Gmail where a father left messages to his just-born child, with the idea that when they were an adult they would be able to read them. The archive (vs delete) feature in gmail similarly reinforces that "we'll always have your stuff for you", as does the fact that they want your mail to stay on their servers, rather than fetched with IMAP/POP. Sure, the TOS says "we can delete it whenever"/"no promises", but the advertising and general pitching of the product have heavily indicated otherwise. I don't see the service going away, and when you have so much identity tied to your email, it's pretty shocking to realize that it could all disappear in a flash. If Google were to kill my email accounts, I would be _seriously_ disadvantaged. Saying that only fools trust Google to keep your things forever is true, but also lacks empathy.

arundelo 10y ago

I've had my own domain for quite a while and have been meaning to start using an email address on that domain. The main reason I haven't is that I'm procrastinating the initial trouble of setting it up, but I'm also a bit scared from hearing stories of people who do this and then occasionally have email to them or from them bounce or disappear. (Maybe this is not as common a problem as I get the impression it is.) Edit: I'm not even considering running my own email server; I know that's a full-time job. Just something like forwarding my custom email to my Gmail address, which is the type of thing I've heard the aforementioned scary stories about (though a quick web search isn't turning up many such stories).

darryl42 10y ago
Running your own mail server is a pain. Paying for google apps to handle your email is very easy. Other providers can do the same thing for you.
a3n 10y ago
I have a domain, serviced by a registrar. When I change email providers, I go to the registrar's site and point my email address at my new provider. That might take a little time (way less than a day, by observation) to propagate. I then go to my new provider and set things up to "send mail as me@mydomain." If you run a local client like Thunderbird (rather than run exclusively through your provider's web interface), then you'll need to do similar there (like point it at your provider's smtp and imap/pop3 servers). Problems arise when you run your own server, because of fairly detailed authentication settings. If you pay a provider to run their servers, they take care of that.
CaptSpify 10y ago
I do that. It's actually not too bad, I think the occasional missing email is overblown. At least, I don't typically have problems. Of course, it's important to keep backups of everything (configs, logs, mail, etc), and test. Just slowly port everything over, as you gain more confidence that your not missing anything. Most email providers also will let you put a rule in place that lets you bounce mail to both addresses.
jpna66dd 10y ago

pjc50 10y ago

> Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Good point; your domain can be seized for various sorts of percieved IP violation.

a3n 10y ago
Or by mistake or fraud, or other reasons that you the renter had nothing to do with.
morninj 10y ago
For trademark violations, yes. But the risk is extremely low if you use yourname.com (or some other U.S. TLD).

voltagex_ 10y ago

I've got 8 years of emails, logins and now Android apps associated with a Google Apps domain (1 user, $6AUD a month). I've got an exit plan for my email, but I'd lose at least $200 of apps. It's really easy to become dependent on a service.

djsumdog 10y ago

I've had my own domains for over a decade and I switched my mail off Google to my own servers as well. One thing I worry about thought: what happens when I die? My credit cards will eventually shut down, my Linode will turn off when my card gets declined, and my domains will fail to renew. But the same thing happens the other direction. Github could shut down Github pages one day, or they could even go out of business. Geocities is gone (although I think Archive.org backed up a lot of it) and there are tons of services that have gone belly-up over the years. Even in our age of massive data retention, it's still interesting to see what's gone, and what may never be recovered if it wasn't indexed by the Wayback machine.

Pica_soO 10y ago
If it was/is culturally relevant it lives on in future works. I don't think google looses anything internally. They need that stuff one day to teach AI some tricks.