12 ms·

Why Did Google Erase Cooper's Beloved Literary Blog?

184 points by the_decider 10y ago

vertis 10y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 (of the fusion.net version of the same story)
yolesaber 10y ago
Interview with Dennis Cooper about the whole affair: https://frieze.com/article/unfriendly-hosts https://frieze.com/article/unfriendly-hosts
- Rexxar 10y ago
  Just a little warning: there are some NSFW images in this link.
AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Article reminded me how much I use my Gmail account for, and what a colossal inconvenience it would be were it to be deleted. Just off the bat: - E-mail - Calendar - Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc. - Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that) - Google Keep note-taking app - Blogspot blog - Domain host - Secondary phone number via Google Voice - Two-factor authentication device - Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music It's really, really unsettling how entangled that singular account is with my everyday workflow. I've begun trying to compile a list of how each of these components could be migrated to something self-controlled ala OwnCloud. Perhaps I'll make it into a website when I'm done. I am not sure what would happen to any of the Android apps I had downloaded, however. Do we as consumers get any more legal redress if the account is attached to things we actually paid for?
- Spearchucker 10y ago
  Some friends of mine have similar concerns, and it surprises me. I have multiple Exchange 360 accounts and multiple Gmail accounts, and OneDrive. I use offline .PST files in Outlook to copy everything older than 3 months into. Everything on my OneDrive is on my local hard drive. To be fair I don't do cloud music - my entire 80Gb collection is on my hard drive and duplicated on my phone. Do you just have so much stuff that something like what I described isn't feasible?
  - thinkingkong 10y ago
    Are you serious? Nevermind all the complexity your solution introduces, how is someone supposed to keep track of it? When we're able to identify problems and come up with solutions that only help people with tons of experience and obviously too much time on their hands, we do others a disservice.
    - pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
      are you joking? you call yourself "thinking", yet somehow can't see how having all your stuff directly on hand is the LEAST complex solution to keeping track of it? you're an idiot, kong.
    - chao- 10y ago
      I have a different, but effectively similar, setup to Spearchucker for managing and backing up my data, identity, etc. >how is someone supposed to keep track of it? Very carefully. No sarcasm intended. Same as one's personal finances, for example. >and come up with solutions... we do others a disservice. I can't speak for Spearchucker, but I devised my particular solution for my own sake, and "doing others a service" didn't factor into that process. Nor do I feel it necessarily should. If someone without experience asks how I navigate our messy digital world (and they have), I give them my honest answer and describe my system. Sometimes I propose a few less-effective, consumer-friendly alternatives, along with their drawbacks. Yes, my solution involves a lot of cobbled-together, semi-automated and semi-manual systems. That's because these systems change so frequently that it was the best I could do to get my own system working in the first place. It seems you are implying some obligation exists to do someone else the "service" of managing their personal digital hygiene, at some arbitrary ease of use that fits their level of expertise. It is not because I'm some blackhearted bastard with no regard for my fellow man that I don't feel that obligation. It is because that, even if I have crafted a solution that adds resilience to the failure of services X, Y and Z, which I use, I don't know what I could/would do when the other person begins to rely on service W, where W is a service I do not use and do not understand the intricacies of. In short, I find it strange that you frame someone having shared what works for them on a service-vs-disservice axis for the broader world. I'm happy that Spearchucker has a system for, and the discipline to, maintain his digital hygiene.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Even as a paying customer of Google Apps (albeit only for one user), I've got no way out without losing access to all my paid apps - and that's Support's official answer. I suspect in Australia I could take Google to small claims court and get some money back but I'm not sure I have the time or energy.
  - BostonEnginerd 10y ago
    That's my situation as well. The customer service agents pull the "it's not my department" card whenever I try to cancel my apps account and move my Play library over to a standard Google account.
- greggman 10y ago
  AFAIK your Two-Factor is not connected to your google account. Or maybe we're talking about different things. Mine is an app that happens to be made by Google but it has no connection to my google account. If I Google kicked me off the two factor app would keep running https://github.com/google/google-authenticator https://github.com/google/google-authenticator
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Eh, it should be highlighted that the Google Authenticator app on the Play Store is NOT the one on GitHub, which is a much older version. The current version is closed source, and cannot be assumed to keep working if a Google account is banned. (I strongly recommend people compile and switch back to the old open source version.)
    - lloeki 10y ago
      Maybe use an alternative TOTP 2FA app such as Authy (closed-source but not tied to a Google account)
      - tombrossman 10y ago
        Maybe for something important like account access, keep things open-source and use FreeOTP as a drop-in replacement. It's on F-Droid here: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.fedorahosted.freeotp https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.fedorahosted...
        xorcist 10y ago
        Is there a simple CLI TOTP client? Or what do you use a backup system if/when your phone fails?
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        My recommendation for backing up 2FA is to print the QR code that you set up your phone with, and lock it in a very safe real world place. Do not keep a copy on a digital format.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  That's the big thing that stuns me every time Google does this. For people dependent on their services, Google is effectively giving them an online death sentence. Without access to your email, you may have a lot of difficulty regaining control of accounts of yours all over the Internet as well, depending on their email change policies. If you've been using Gmail for as long as a lot of us have, ten years of your online correspondence is just... gone. And if there was a clear avenue of appeal or communication, this wouldn't even be so bad, but when Google gets rid of you, they won't even give you a chance to talk to them about why they did.
  - tacostakohashi 10y ago
    Completely agree. The issue here is that Google accounts are a "free service" (obviously advertiser funded), and they're not even really tied strongly to real people. A given account could be shared between people, or change owners over time. I've always felt that, done right, this could be a revenue opportunity for Google - offer a premium account where you give them your proper identity details, and tick a few boxes about how you want your account to be managed if you lose login access (reset to someone who can show ID? destroy?). I'd gladly pay a non-trivial amount to get decent service like that in an emergency. As it stands, you're not paying Google anything. You're not the customer, you're the thing being sold. With no revenue from users, it's understandable that they won't entertainment appeals about their decisions. I suspect they wouldn't want to offer a premium account though, due to the bad press of admitting the problem.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Exactly. The cost of them making a premium option would pale in comparison to the loss of reputation they would gain for admitting they need one. That's why you'll never be able to pay for privacy with Google: Google doesn't want people to realize that using their free services compromises their privacy.
      - tacostakohashi 10y ago
        I'm not really talking about paying for privacy, just paying for manageability and support in the case of a problem.
- danieldk 10y ago
  Half a year ago I used a Google Apps for Business account for pretty much the same things (minus Blogspot, domains, voice, plus address book and Hangouts). Now I only have a non-apps account for Google Scholar. Besides that I have moved everything off Google. The most painful thing was losing all paid Android apps, but since I planned on moving back to iOS again I took the loss. All the other stuff was not hard: I switched to Fastmail for e-mail, who have a nice migration tool, calendars and contacts are on iCloud (since my wife uses iCloud as well), files are on Dropbox. If possible, I would like to switch away from Dropbox to something that is end-to-end encrypted. We used Bittorrent Sync for quite some time, but I had serious problems in the last few versions (basically, it corrupted its own metadata and re-added all shares from scratch). Syncthing is not really an option (too hard to share with family/colleagues).
  - fencepost 10y ago
    Regarding moving from Dropbox to something encrypted, you might look into SpiderOak - I've not used them, but they've been around for quite a while and "encrypted zero-knowledge" is basically their selling point. I don't believe they have a free tier, so I suspect they have a sustainable revenue model - basically everyone's on their equivalent of Dropbox Pro, with no free account leeches eating up their marketing budget. edit: minor grammar
- pmyjavec 10y ago
  That was the plan :) I've done it thought, I pay for my mail now etc. There is something about not feeling like a product that is so satisfying.
- tdkl 10y ago
  I was in the same place, when I started hating the Lollipop release, which turned the great working Nexus 5 with Kitkat into a piece of crap (Google Play Services drain, memory leaks). Being a Nexus, I could downgrade it back, but couldn't disable updates, since they're handled by GPS now. Then I realised what else beside the device I paid my money for Google owns. >- E-mail Already had a domain, so found a neat hosting in EU, 10GB of space with ActiveSync, CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP. >- Calendar Email hosting has DAV, which syncs to all clients. >- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc. This is the only thing the gmail account is still being used. >- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that) Using Dropbox (because I can rely on it) and MEGA >- Google Keep note-taking app Remember the milk todo app, I enter notes in a Notes list, or even make to-dos directly >- Blogspot blog Jekyll blog, hosted on github, with own domain >- Domain host Gandi >- Secondary phone number via Google Voice Don't have the in the land of dragons (outside US). >- Two-factor authentication device Authy >- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music Fuck the cloud, local music in iTunes synced by iSyncr Android app. At first it all looked like a pain to do, but now I can't imagine going back into the Google silo. The gmail/google account now serves only as Play Store account, YouTube account (when will G+ finally die), Chrome Sync account. The location, web search and targeted ads are paused and disabled.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Like you, I've moved away from relying on a Google account; the only exception is Keep, since I'm yet to find a decent FOSS alternative - not that they're bad, but Keep just fits so well with how I approach note-taking.
exolymph 10y ago
I don't understand why Google won't just explain what the problem was and give him a way to extract his data, even if they won't let him use Blogger anymore. Would the precedent really be so bad? They're getting some not-great PR — I feel like most companies would try to work something out.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  they obviously deemed the content unsuitable to host... considering that, they would have to host that data to make it available for him to extract it. it's a catch-22. you're all sheep.
- Sylos 10y ago
  I think, it's simply less of a hassle for Google to deal with this by way of their automated PR machinery than to get an actual human into their system. They just need to open-source one Parsey McParseface and poof, the entire world thinks that Google is their cuddly big brother who would never do such a thing as ruin a man's livelihood without really giving a fuck about it.
- amelius 10y ago
  Perhaps because they then have to accuse him of something, which could make matters worse.
  - eumoria 10y ago
    This seems most likely maybe it's not worth the hassle for them but legally releasing any illegal material back to him cannot happen so they're stuck doing essentially nothing.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  Because Google is too big to care, both organizationally (too many people, too many hands that don't know what the other is doing) and in terms of its market reach. It's much like too big to fail for banks, really: they assume they can get away with anything they do, so they have no real incentive to not do it.
rdtsc 10y ago
> “saw something on the blog they interpreted as out-of-bounds from Google policy and took it down.” The disastrous consequences probably stemmed from “just a stupid mistake,” she said. So it is a bit like when the cat trips, falls down the stairs in some undignified way, then immediately stands up keeps walking like nothing happens, looking like "Yeah I totally planned to do that, it was not an accident" Perhaps after so much time has passed and so much stonewalling, it is just too late to admit that they made a mistake apologize and restore content. (Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). It seems in their best interest to keep quiet and stonewall the issue until it goes away. But on the other side, given that content there -- which included slightly edited explicit ads, it is probably not surprising Google did what they did. I imagine for every site with content like that, Google employees would go out of their way to see maybe the user is a known artist or writer and this is just art. That's understandable, however what is not understandable is not having a way to restore, warn before, or explain what happened afterwards and have a way to revert the action. I imagine at this point Google is pretty much a monopoly. If it decided to charge to use GMail, or force me to listen to a 5 minute ad every, I don't know if there is an alternative that has email, docs, calendar, and others at the same level of quality.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  >(Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). Google never deletes anything. Ever. The "deletion" is just another data point for them. The content is certainly retained.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    Can you please cite this or is this just BS speculation.
    - paul 10y ago
      It's BS speculation. (and false)
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
kevingadd 10y ago
Another example in the long, sad history of algorithm-driven companies having no respect for art or creativity or culture. It's not really something out of spite or distaste, but eventually you end up leaving a trail of bodies in your wake because you can only solve so many problems by having people watch over the algorithms, and your revenue takes priority over protecting culture. Google ends up catching a lot of heat for this (rightfully so) if only because so many people use their services. High-traffic youtube videos filled with racial slurs and abuse staying up for 2 months before the abuse department finally takes action, or important pieces of cultural history getting nuked without explanation or recourse, or people's gmail accounts getting utterly destroyed with no ability to transfer the address or take a backup. In the end nothing can be done about this stuff because in many cases, nobody actually knows what happened. The youtube case was especially troublesome because I went to great lengths to get it dealt with, and in the end it was a result of policy issues combined with bad technology - the human oversight was prevented from doing anything about the problem, and as a result vulnerable kids were exposed to torrents of hate and the uploaders reaped the ad revenue all while stealing another person's work.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Did you even read the previous comments from the earlier submission of this article? People likely complained about the nature of his content in addition to it being against their TOS.
  - kevingadd 10y ago
    I did not, no. Can you link to the dupe?
    - dgacmu 10y ago
      This comment has a great summary of the multiple discussions going on about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100891
fatdog 10y ago
Brings up the question of what are some good tools to manage this kind of risk. You need your contacts, email archive, another credible email address to re-establish contact, alternate credentials for SSO sites, and it needs to be somewhere outside the political sphere that could cause this. What does a resilient online identity look like? These companies own the primary media of your relationships, which are the things people need to survive.
- heliumcraft 10y ago
  The solution probably lies in a decentralized/distributed platform such as Ethereum or Maidsafe.
  - fatdog 10y ago
    a blockchain social network? Someone has to have done this already and then abandoned it because it failed to thrive.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Not really. All the low-level pieces simply don't exist as usable code yet - yes, you can pay money in a convoluted way (compared to buying almost anything else) to have a piece of data added to a globally distributed ordered list, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to build every piece of interaction on the network on top of that system. "Pay 5 cents to send a tweet!" You also need a decentralized publish/subscribe system and a useful decentralized search system, both resistant to attacks. The former has some good solutions buried in people's PhDs, the latter not so much. Then you need a lot of UX research and people working on the low-level protocol, high-level domain logic, and the UI. It'd be a project on the scale of one of the largest open-source projects currently in existence, IMHO.
gallerytungsten 10y ago
We see these stories over and over. The lesson is obvious: host your most important content on your own server that you control; and make backups. Some people will say that self-hosting isn't a practical solution. But when the alternative is the potential for devastating data loss, it seems eminently reasonable.
- rwallace 10y ago
  More practically, or instead of and will suffice. That is, if you lack the expertise to set up your own server, it's okay to use someone else's provided you also keep local backups of all your work. For most people, keeping local backups is far more practical than running your own server.
  - adzicg 10y ago
    since reading the prag prog book a decade ago, I started putting everything I can in version control. saved my ass several times so far. used my own svn server for a while, now using a combination of GitHub and AWS git (I think it's called codesource)
  - Sylos 10y ago
    There's one problem with that. If your hosting provider throws you out, you may not lose your work, but your followership will still be dispersed.
    - erelde 10y ago
      Emotionaly I think I'd care more for my creations :/
- jamesrcole 10y ago
  Also, there's a startup opportunity here -- making self-hosting super easy and convenient.
  - simplehuman 10y ago
sethherr 10y ago
Change.org petition to restore his blog and email: https://www.change.org/p/google-restore-dennis-cooper-s-blog-and-email https://www.change.org/p/google-restore-dennis-cooper-s-blog...
advisedwang 10y ago
This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056) from the previous discussion is interesting: > 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.. https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper....
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago
  Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad.. I thought we'd finally (already) won this fight in the US with Howl/Naked Lunch, but maybe not?
  - eng_monkey 10y ago
    Freedom of speech protects you from Government prosecution for expressing your opinions. Google is a private company.
    - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
      Today, Google controls more public discourse than the US government, if they are censoring freedom of speech - it IS a big deal.
      - netheril96 10y ago
        I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".
mgraczyk 10y ago
Yep, definitely child pornography and solicitation thereof. https://web.archive.org/web/20091003234700/http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2009/09/greet-dcs-topnotch-international-male.html https://web.archive.org/web/20091003234700/http://denniscoop... EDIT: DC has also been untruthful in interviews about the blog's removal, claiming "I never used pornographic imagery and most didn’t even show the escort’s genitals. " From the above link, that is clearly not true.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  These escort site ad reviews are mentioned in the article as being the exception in terms of erotic content. Regardless of sexual explicitness though, all the men appear to be of legal age. How are you concluding 'child pornography and solicitation thereof'?
  - mgraczyk 10y ago
    It is possible that Google or some governmental entity believed that one of the many naked "18 year olds" was not actually 18 when the posted photos were taken. The comments on the linked post suggest that at least one reader of the blog believed that at least one escort was not 18. That seems like adequate evidence for scrutiny, and it is possible that Google plays it safe in cases like these (I have no idea what their official policy is).
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Indeed - as anyone hosting pornography knows, it's generally on the people who took the photo, the people who uploaded it, and the people who are hosting it to have proof that their models are over age. If it turns out they're not, there's a risk of everyone who handled the photo being complicit in distribution of child pornography.
    - Sylos 10y ago
jmspring 10y ago
The only thing that stands out for me here, and I think directly applies to Google's business overall, is the lack of a human factor. Google wants to move into the enterprise, enterprises generally like talking to people -- especially when dealing with support -- that isn't a strong suit. I will take some time and read the other links someone posted below, but the story and the lack of human response parallels many other postings around Google support.
transfire 10y ago
Why don't they just send him a backup of his data and be done with it?
seesomesense 10y ago
Imagine the headlines if Google did not remove the blog : "Google hosting child porn site."
seesomesense 10y ago
Will Hacker News ban you if you post the kind of material that Mr Cooper hosted on his "beloved literary blog"?
DoubleGlazing 10y ago
As an EU resident he can simply fire off a subject access request (referencing the local Data Protection Acts) to Google and they have to tell him everything they have on file about him.
ksec 10y ago
Slightly off topic: I think someday may be, once our Internet connection are fast enough, we will go a full circle and have our own server and the Cloud will be a dump storage or backup. Think iCloud for example. My Router; Airport Server / Time Capsule Server. Will have all my iOS / macOS backup, as well as Photos, video, game saves etc. All iOS update and macOS update, App update are done through this proxy / cache. I will have all my documents inside this little server. And a Backup of these files will be done in the Cloud. So in the worst possible scenario, You can cut off my Cloud backup and wipe it. I will still have all the info inside my Router / Server. You can provide me a Blog platform on my little server, and insert ads on it all you want when it reaches your cache/proxy/CDN. But when you take down my blog, all the content i spend my time writing is still on my server. In my procession. Sometimes with Cloud, i just get the feeling my precious data are being held as hostage.
- programmer_dude 10y ago
  > Internet connection are fast enough And if our storage options are more reliable we might not need the could at all!

184 points by the_decider 10y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 (of the fusion.net version of the same story)

yolesaber 10y ago

Interview with Dennis Cooper about the whole affair: https://frieze.com/article/unfriendly-hosts https://frieze.com/article/unfriendly-hosts

Rexxar 10y ago
Just a little warning: there are some NSFW images in this link.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

Article reminded me how much I use my Gmail account for, and what a colossal inconvenience it would be were it to be deleted. Just off the bat: - E-mail - Calendar - Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc. - Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that) - Google Keep note-taking app - Blogspot blog - Domain host - Secondary phone number via Google Voice - Two-factor authentication device - Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music It's really, really unsettling how entangled that singular account is with my everyday workflow. I've begun trying to compile a list of how each of these components could be migrated to something self-controlled ala OwnCloud. Perhaps I'll make it into a website when I'm done. I am not sure what would happen to any of the Android apps I had downloaded, however. Do we as consumers get any more legal redress if the account is attached to things we actually paid for?

Spearchucker 10y ago
Some friends of mine have similar concerns, and it surprises me. I have multiple Exchange 360 accounts and multiple Gmail accounts, and OneDrive. I use offline .PST files in Outlook to copy everything older than 3 months into. Everything on my OneDrive is on my local hard drive. To be fair I don't do cloud music - my entire 80Gb collection is on my hard drive and duplicated on my phone. Do you just have so much stuff that something like what I described isn't feasible?
- thinkingkong 10y ago
  Are you serious? Nevermind all the complexity your solution introduces, how is someone supposed to keep track of it? When we're able to identify problems and come up with solutions that only help people with tons of experience and obviously too much time on their hands, we do others a disservice.
  - pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
    are you joking? you call yourself "thinking", yet somehow can't see how having all your stuff directly on hand is the LEAST complex solution to keeping track of it? you're an idiot, kong.
  - chao- 10y ago
    I have a different, but effectively similar, setup to Spearchucker for managing and backing up my data, identity, etc. >how is someone supposed to keep track of it? Very carefully. No sarcasm intended. Same as one's personal finances, for example. >and come up with solutions... we do others a disservice. I can't speak for Spearchucker, but I devised my particular solution for my own sake, and "doing others a service" didn't factor into that process. Nor do I feel it necessarily should. If someone without experience asks how I navigate our messy digital world (and they have), I give them my honest answer and describe my system. Sometimes I propose a few less-effective, consumer-friendly alternatives, along with their drawbacks. Yes, my solution involves a lot of cobbled-together, semi-automated and semi-manual systems. That's because these systems change so frequently that it was the best I could do to get my own system working in the first place. It seems you are implying some obligation exists to do someone else the "service" of managing their personal digital hygiene, at some arbitrary ease of use that fits their level of expertise. It is not because I'm some blackhearted bastard with no regard for my fellow man that I don't feel that obligation. It is because that, even if I have crafted a solution that adds resilience to the failure of services X, Y and Z, which I use, I don't know what I could/would do when the other person begins to rely on service W, where W is a service I do not use and do not understand the intricacies of. In short, I find it strange that you frame someone having shared what works for them on a service-vs-disservice axis for the broader world. I'm happy that Spearchucker has a system for, and the discipline to, maintain his digital hygiene.
voltagex_ 10y ago
Even as a paying customer of Google Apps (albeit only for one user), I've got no way out without losing access to all my paid apps - and that's Support's official answer. I suspect in Australia I could take Google to small claims court and get some money back but I'm not sure I have the time or energy.
- BostonEnginerd 10y ago
  That's my situation as well. The customer service agents pull the "it's not my department" card whenever I try to cancel my apps account and move my Play library over to a standard Google account.
greggman 10y ago
AFAIK your Two-Factor is not connected to your google account. Or maybe we're talking about different things. Mine is an app that happens to be made by Google but it has no connection to my google account. If I Google kicked me off the two factor app would keep running https://github.com/google/google-authenticator https://github.com/google/google-authenticator
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  Eh, it should be highlighted that the Google Authenticator app on the Play Store is NOT the one on GitHub, which is a much older version. The current version is closed source, and cannot be assumed to keep working if a Google account is banned. (I strongly recommend people compile and switch back to the old open source version.)
  - lloeki 10y ago
    Maybe use an alternative TOTP 2FA app such as Authy (closed-source but not tied to a Google account)
    - tombrossman 10y ago
      Maybe for something important like account access, keep things open-source and use FreeOTP as a drop-in replacement. It's on F-Droid here: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.fedorahosted.freeotp https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.fedorahosted...
      - xorcist 10y ago
        Is there a simple CLI TOTP client? Or what do you use a backup system if/when your phone fails?
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        My recommendation for backing up 2FA is to print the QR code that you set up your phone with, and lock it in a very safe real world place. Do not keep a copy on a digital format.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
That's the big thing that stuns me every time Google does this. For people dependent on their services, Google is effectively giving them an online death sentence. Without access to your email, you may have a lot of difficulty regaining control of accounts of yours all over the Internet as well, depending on their email change policies. If you've been using Gmail for as long as a lot of us have, ten years of your online correspondence is just... gone. And if there was a clear avenue of appeal or communication, this wouldn't even be so bad, but when Google gets rid of you, they won't even give you a chance to talk to them about why they did.
- tacostakohashi 10y ago
  Completely agree. The issue here is that Google accounts are a "free service" (obviously advertiser funded), and they're not even really tied strongly to real people. A given account could be shared between people, or change owners over time. I've always felt that, done right, this could be a revenue opportunity for Google - offer a premium account where you give them your proper identity details, and tick a few boxes about how you want your account to be managed if you lose login access (reset to someone who can show ID? destroy?). I'd gladly pay a non-trivial amount to get decent service like that in an emergency. As it stands, you're not paying Google anything. You're not the customer, you're the thing being sold. With no revenue from users, it's understandable that they won't entertainment appeals about their decisions. I suspect they wouldn't want to offer a premium account though, due to the bad press of admitting the problem.
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    Exactly. The cost of them making a premium option would pale in comparison to the loss of reputation they would gain for admitting they need one. That's why you'll never be able to pay for privacy with Google: Google doesn't want people to realize that using their free services compromises their privacy.
    - tacostakohashi 10y ago
      I'm not really talking about paying for privacy, just paying for manageability and support in the case of a problem.
danieldk 10y ago
Half a year ago I used a Google Apps for Business account for pretty much the same things (minus Blogspot, domains, voice, plus address book and Hangouts). Now I only have a non-apps account for Google Scholar. Besides that I have moved everything off Google. The most painful thing was losing all paid Android apps, but since I planned on moving back to iOS again I took the loss. All the other stuff was not hard: I switched to Fastmail for e-mail, who have a nice migration tool, calendars and contacts are on iCloud (since my wife uses iCloud as well), files are on Dropbox. If possible, I would like to switch away from Dropbox to something that is end-to-end encrypted. We used Bittorrent Sync for quite some time, but I had serious problems in the last few versions (basically, it corrupted its own metadata and re-added all shares from scratch). Syncthing is not really an option (too hard to share with family/colleagues).
- fencepost 10y ago
  Regarding moving from Dropbox to something encrypted, you might look into SpiderOak - I've not used them, but they've been around for quite a while and "encrypted zero-knowledge" is basically their selling point. I don't believe they have a free tier, so I suspect they have a sustainable revenue model - basically everyone's on their equivalent of Dropbox Pro, with no free account leeches eating up their marketing budget. edit: minor grammar
pmyjavec 10y ago
That was the plan :) I've done it thought, I pay for my mail now etc. There is something about not feeling like a product that is so satisfying.
tdkl 10y ago
I was in the same place, when I started hating the Lollipop release, which turned the great working Nexus 5 with Kitkat into a piece of crap (Google Play Services drain, memory leaks). Being a Nexus, I could downgrade it back, but couldn't disable updates, since they're handled by GPS now. Then I realised what else beside the device I paid my money for Google owns. >- E-mail Already had a domain, so found a neat hosting in EU, 10GB of space with ActiveSync, CalDAV, CardDAV, IMAP. >- Calendar Email hosting has DAV, which syncs to all clients. >- Android account, and all purchased apps, games, etc. This is the only thing the gmail account is still being used. >- Drive storage (Somewhere around 1TB, although I don't even use 1/10th that) Using Dropbox (because I can rely on it) and MEGA >- Google Keep note-taking app Remember the milk todo app, I enter notes in a Notes list, or even make to-dos directly >- Blogspot blog Jekyll blog, hosted on github, with own domain >- Domain host Gandi >- Secondary phone number via Google Voice Don't have the in the land of dragons (outside US). >- Two-factor authentication device Authy >- Cloud music storage player via Google Play Music Fuck the cloud, local music in iTunes synced by iSyncr Android app. At first it all looked like a pain to do, but now I can't imagine going back into the Google silo. The gmail/google account now serves only as Play Store account, YouTube account (when will G+ finally die), Chrome Sync account. The location, web search and targeted ads are paused and disabled.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Like you, I've moved away from relying on a Google account; the only exception is Keep, since I'm yet to find a decent FOSS alternative - not that they're bad, but Keep just fits so well with how I approach note-taking.

exolymph 10y ago

I don't understand why Google won't just explain what the problem was and give him a way to extract his data, even if they won't let him use Blogger anymore. Would the precedent really be so bad? They're getting some not-great PR — I feel like most companies would try to work something out.

pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
they obviously deemed the content unsuitable to host... considering that, they would have to host that data to make it available for him to extract it. it's a catch-22. you're all sheep.
Sylos 10y ago
I think, it's simply less of a hassle for Google to deal with this by way of their automated PR machinery than to get an actual human into their system. They just need to open-source one Parsey McParseface and poof, the entire world thinks that Google is their cuddly big brother who would never do such a thing as ruin a man's livelihood without really giving a fuck about it.
amelius 10y ago
Perhaps because they then have to accuse him of something, which could make matters worse.
- eumoria 10y ago
  This seems most likely maybe it's not worth the hassle for them but legally releasing any illegal material back to him cannot happen so they're stuck doing essentially nothing.
bzbarsky 10y ago
Because Google is too big to care, both organizationally (too many people, too many hands that don't know what the other is doing) and in terms of its market reach. It's much like too big to fail for banks, really: they assume they can get away with anything they do, so they have no real incentive to not do it.

rdtsc 10y ago

> “saw something on the blog they interpreted as out-of-bounds from Google policy and took it down.” The disastrous consequences probably stemmed from “just a stupid mistake,” she said. So it is a bit like when the cat trips, falls down the stairs in some undignified way, then immediately stands up keeps walking like nothing happens, looking like "Yeah I totally planned to do that, it was not an accident" Perhaps after so much time has passed and so much stonewalling, it is just too late to admit that they made a mistake apologize and restore content. (Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). It seems in their best interest to keep quiet and stonewall the issue until it goes away. But on the other side, given that content there -- which included slightly edited explicit ads, it is probably not surprising Google did what they did. I imagine for every site with content like that, Google employees would go out of their way to see maybe the user is a known artist or writer and this is just art. That's understandable, however what is not understandable is not having a way to restore, warn before, or explain what happened afterwards and have a way to revert the action. I imagine at this point Google is pretty much a monopoly. If it decided to charge to use GMail, or force me to listen to a 5 minute ad every, I don't know if there is an alternative that has email, docs, calendar, and others at the same level of quality.

yolesaber 10y ago
>(Well and compounded by the fact that there is probably no content left to restore). Google never deletes anything. Ever. The "deletion" is just another data point for them. The content is certainly retained.
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  Can you please cite this or is this just BS speculation.
  - paul 10y ago
    It's BS speculation. (and false)
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago

kevingadd 10y ago

Another example in the long, sad history of algorithm-driven companies having no respect for art or creativity or culture. It's not really something out of spite or distaste, but eventually you end up leaving a trail of bodies in your wake because you can only solve so many problems by having people watch over the algorithms, and your revenue takes priority over protecting culture. Google ends up catching a lot of heat for this (rightfully so) if only because so many people use their services. High-traffic youtube videos filled with racial slurs and abuse staying up for 2 months before the abuse department finally takes action, or important pieces of cultural history getting nuked without explanation or recourse, or people's gmail accounts getting utterly destroyed with no ability to transfer the address or take a backup. In the end nothing can be done about this stuff because in many cases, nobody actually knows what happened. The youtube case was especially troublesome because I went to great lengths to get it dealt with, and in the end it was a result of policy issues combined with bad technology - the human oversight was prevented from doing anything about the problem, and as a result vulnerable kids were exposed to torrents of hate and the uploaders reaped the ad revenue all while stealing another person's work.

bitmapbrother 10y ago
Did you even read the previous comments from the earlier submission of this article? People likely complained about the nature of his content in addition to it being against their TOS.
- kevingadd 10y ago
  I did not, no. Can you link to the dupe?
  - dgacmu 10y ago
    This comment has a great summary of the multiple discussions going on about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100891

fatdog 10y ago

Brings up the question of what are some good tools to manage this kind of risk. You need your contacts, email archive, another credible email address to re-establish contact, alternate credentials for SSO sites, and it needs to be somewhere outside the political sphere that could cause this. What does a resilient online identity look like? These companies own the primary media of your relationships, which are the things people need to survive.

heliumcraft 10y ago
The solution probably lies in a decentralized/distributed platform such as Ethereum or Maidsafe.
- fatdog 10y ago
  a blockchain social network? Someone has to have done this already and then abandoned it because it failed to thrive.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Not really. All the low-level pieces simply don't exist as usable code yet - yes, you can pay money in a convoluted way (compared to buying almost anything else) to have a piece of data added to a globally distributed ordered list, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to build every piece of interaction on the network on top of that system. "Pay 5 cents to send a tweet!" You also need a decentralized publish/subscribe system and a useful decentralized search system, both resistant to attacks. The former has some good solutions buried in people's PhDs, the latter not so much. Then you need a lot of UX research and people working on the low-level protocol, high-level domain logic, and the UI. It'd be a project on the scale of one of the largest open-source projects currently in existence, IMHO.

gallerytungsten 10y ago

We see these stories over and over. The lesson is obvious: host your most important content on your own server that you control; and make backups. Some people will say that self-hosting isn't a practical solution. But when the alternative is the potential for devastating data loss, it seems eminently reasonable.

rwallace 10y ago
More practically, or instead of and will suffice. That is, if you lack the expertise to set up your own server, it's okay to use someone else's provided you also keep local backups of all your work. For most people, keeping local backups is far more practical than running your own server.
- adzicg 10y ago
  since reading the prag prog book a decade ago, I started putting everything I can in version control. saved my ass several times so far. used my own svn server for a while, now using a combination of GitHub and AWS git (I think it's called codesource)
- Sylos 10y ago
  There's one problem with that. If your hosting provider throws you out, you may not lose your work, but your followership will still be dispersed.
  - erelde 10y ago
    Emotionaly I think I'd care more for my creations :/
jamesrcole 10y ago
Also, there's a startup opportunity here -- making self-hosting super easy and convenient.
- simplehuman 10y ago

sethherr 10y ago

Change.org petition to restore his blog and email: https://www.change.org/p/google-restore-dennis-cooper-s-blog-and-email https://www.change.org/p/google-restore-dennis-cooper-s-blog...

advisedwang 10y ago

This comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12102056) from the previous discussion is interesting: > 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.. https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper....

forgotpwtomain 10y ago
Pedophilia and necrophilia in writing is protected as freedom of speech. If google is now censoring literature (as opposed to pictures/media) -- that's pretty bad.. I thought we'd finally (already) won this fight in the US with Howl/Naked Lunch, but maybe not?
- eng_monkey 10y ago
  Freedom of speech protects you from Government prosecution for expressing your opinions. Google is a private company.
  - forgotpwtomain 10y ago
    Today, Google controls more public discourse than the US government, if they are censoring freedom of speech - it IS a big deal.
    - netheril96 10y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree with this. First Amendment was written at the time when government was almost the only organization powerful enough to silence dissenters. Nowadays corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc have more effective control of the venue of speech, and they should be subject to the same scrutiny then, not be given leeway as "private entities".

mgraczyk 10y ago

Yep, definitely child pornography and solicitation thereof. https://web.archive.org/web/20091003234700/http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2009/09/greet-dcs-topnotch-international-male.html https://web.archive.org/web/20091003234700/http://denniscoop... EDIT: DC has also been untruthful in interviews about the blog's removal, claiming "I never used pornographic imagery and most didn’t even show the escort’s genitals. " From the above link, that is clearly not true.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Freak_NL 10y ago
These escort site ad reviews are mentioned in the article as being the exception in terms of erotic content. Regardless of sexual explicitness though, all the men appear to be of legal age. How are you concluding 'child pornography and solicitation thereof'?
- mgraczyk 10y ago
  It is possible that Google or some governmental entity believed that one of the many naked "18 year olds" was not actually 18 when the posted photos were taken. The comments on the linked post suggest that at least one reader of the blog believed that at least one escort was not 18. That seems like adequate evidence for scrutiny, and it is possible that Google plays it safe in cases like these (I have no idea what their official policy is).
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Indeed - as anyone hosting pornography knows, it's generally on the people who took the photo, the people who uploaded it, and the people who are hosting it to have proof that their models are over age. If it turns out they're not, there's a risk of everyone who handled the photo being complicit in distribution of child pornography.
  - Sylos 10y ago

jmspring 10y ago

The only thing that stands out for me here, and I think directly applies to Google's business overall, is the lack of a human factor. Google wants to move into the enterprise, enterprises generally like talking to people -- especially when dealing with support -- that isn't a strong suit. I will take some time and read the other links someone posted below, but the story and the lack of human response parallels many other postings around Google support.

transfire 10y ago

Why don't they just send him a backup of his data and be done with it?

seesomesense 10y ago

Imagine the headlines if Google did not remove the blog : "Google hosting child porn site."

seesomesense 10y ago

Will Hacker News ban you if you post the kind of material that Mr Cooper hosted on his "beloved literary blog"?

DoubleGlazing 10y ago

As an EU resident he can simply fire off a subject access request (referencing the local Data Protection Acts) to Google and they have to tell him everything they have on file about him.

ksec 10y ago

Slightly off topic: I think someday may be, once our Internet connection are fast enough, we will go a full circle and have our own server and the Cloud will be a dump storage or backup. Think iCloud for example. My Router; Airport Server / Time Capsule Server. Will have all my iOS / macOS backup, as well as Photos, video, game saves etc. All iOS update and macOS update, App update are done through this proxy / cache. I will have all my documents inside this little server. And a Backup of these files will be done in the Cloud. So in the worst possible scenario, You can cut off my Cloud backup and wipe it. I will still have all the info inside my Router / Server. You can provide me a Blog platform on my little server, and insert ads on it all you want when it reaches your cache/proxy/CDN. But when you take down my blog, all the content i spend my time writing is still on my server. In my procession. Sometimes with Cloud, i just get the feeling my precious data are being held as hostage.

programmer_dude 10y ago
> Internet connection are fast enough And if our storage options are more reliable we might not need the could at all!