8 ms·

This is just the general trend with things running on Google owned services. I don't think I've ever had to deal with a more customer/user hostile company. I've

by bilalq 6y ago

This is just the general trend with things running on Google owned services. I don't think I've ever had to deal with a more customer/user hostile company. I've had an Android app get payments blocked and had to deal with repeated back-and-forth resending of the same documents over and over before they unblocked it. I never did get an answer on why any of that was necessary or why it was impossible to ever speak to anyone about the details related to the issue. It's bad enough they just wholesale kill services that people love and rely on. The whole "the algorithm has decided to kill your account with no explanation" risk makes it feel like we're already dealing with a dystopian reality in some respects.

zamalek 6y ago
I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons.
- _jal 6y ago
  Or their free email. If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?
  - ekanes 6y ago
    If someone can't run their own mail system, what do you recommend? Are there better options?
    - wazanator 6y ago
      I've enjoyed using Proton Mail https://protonmail.com/pricing https://protonmail.com/pricing
      - jes 6y ago
        Same. I have been using it for a year now (I know, I'm a Late Adopter) and it's been completely smooth. No complaints.
    - fanf2 6y ago
      https://fastmail.com https://fastmail.com
    - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
      If you have a domain name you can forward *@yourdomain.tld to a free mail service and mark the mail service as an authorized sender. I have a Gmail inbox that sends and receives from dozens of addresses on 4 different domains. If Google locked me out, I could just update the forwarding rule on my domain to go to a different email.
      - ekanes 6y ago
        Thank you SO MUCH. I'll do this.
  - el_dev_hell 6y ago
    I managed to get myself temporarily locked out of a 10+ year old gmail account 2 months ago. I managed to get it back easily (finding my old phone sim and resetting). But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life. I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!
    - jethro_tell 6y ago
      Another option is to control the domain. That is what I recommend for any account that is used to make money in any way. In the event you have a dispute with your email host, you can simply change the domain MX records. You may lose a few hours or a couple days of email, but your name doesn't disappear out of thin air.
      - ryukafalz 6y ago
        Just make sure you don’t forget to renew the domain.
        smt88 6y ago
        And that your registrar is secure. GoDaddy had a lot of issues with social engineering a few years ago.
      - cortesoft 6y ago
        What happens if you have a dispute with your registrar?
        jethro_tell 6y ago
        That can happen for sure. You should do as little business with your registrar as possible. No hosting, just a domain and a couple DNS records. Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted. If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    I have been hosting my own email using mailinabox. The tool is so painless I suggest more people should use it. The only ongoing maintenance I have had to manage is rebooting it to apply updates. The whole thing is backed up with a built in backup tool that rsyncs the data to my home server. The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
    - colesantiago 6y ago
      ehh, no thanks, not quite keen on emails being sent into the spambox.
      - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
        Mailinabox configures everything in the way gmail likes. Unless you start your vps on a tainted IP address it should be no problem. I send to gmail and outlook emails fine.
        3131s 6y ago
        Depends on your hosting provider with Outlook still right? I run a mail server on Linode and I had thought that Microsoft was still blocking all their IPs.
        Polylactic_acid 6y ago
        I'm using vultr for my vps and it has been fine.
    - tacLog 6y ago
      > mailinabox How bad is life without that filter?
      - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
        Its not really then end of the world. It just means I need to unsubscribe from newsletters manually rather than letting google dump them in the trash automatically. I would like to see server side email filtering though since my thunderbird filters are useless when my desktop is off and I check with my phone. I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
  - graton 6y ago
    Well thanks to using rclone and gmvault (even though it is dead project it still keeps backing up my email) I am hoping it would be very minimal data loss. I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time. And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days. But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.
  - endgame 6y ago
    I was using G Suite on a personal domain, and woke up one morning to discover that google refused to let me IMAP into my account any more. The error message pointed me at a browser verification page which I did multiple times, to no avail, so I moved to a different email provider. Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.
- iagovar 6y ago
  This is my default stance too, and the advice I give to everyone that asks. If you're no big fish enough or you don't have contacts, you can have a serious problem. I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again. This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human. In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services. So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.
  - murgindrag 6y ago
    Big contracts too, surprisingly. We had a dedicated team of Google engineers supporting us, and we still ran into this !@#$%. Many, they could facilitate. Some, they could not.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons. It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to. It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.
  - jozzas 6y ago
    > actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call This doesn't help when Google decide to sunset one or more of the services that you're relying on, forcing you to migrate elsewhere or re-design
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  Yep, I blacklisted them as well and exclusively use Azure. It’s great and I know Microsoft makes its revenue on people like me, rather than on ad networks.
cced 6y ago
I’ve seen this type of behaviour before. To be completely honest, I have associated the release of new Google initiatives with headlines that say they are shutting down 12-24 months later.
DarkmSparks 6y ago
Exactly this reason I avoided firebase at all costs. There is quite a few services now that I wouldnt have minded paying google considerable sums of money for, if it weren't for their long history of this kind of nonsense. Its reached the point now this is just expected behaviour, and I feel sorry for anyone that has invested considerable effort into any of googles platforms.
titzer 6y ago
It's mostly because: A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it. B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money. C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable. D.) They don't want to leak any details that help scammers learn how to get around automated anti-fraud/abuse systems. edit to add: E.) The reason might be something utterly embarrassing about some really dumb internal snafu.
- titzer 6y ago
  Let me also add a counter-point to my own point: Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive. The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks. But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.
  - vvanders 6y ago
    What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.
city41 6y ago
I worry for all the youtube channels I enjoy who have gone all in and made it their full time job. If anything were to happen they'd be done. There's no realistic alternative.

by bilalq 6y ago

zamalek 6y ago

I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons.

_jal 6y ago
Or their free email. If you use them, ask yourself, if they locked you out, what data would you lose? And how many accounts at other services are going to give you grief because you can't reply from that address now?
- ekanes 6y ago
  If someone can't run their own mail system, what do you recommend? Are there better options?
  - wazanator 6y ago
    I've enjoyed using Proton Mail https://protonmail.com/pricing https://protonmail.com/pricing
    - jes 6y ago
      Same. I have been using it for a year now (I know, I'm a Late Adopter) and it's been completely smooth. No complaints.
  - fanf2 6y ago
    https://fastmail.com https://fastmail.com
  - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
    If you have a domain name you can forward *@yourdomain.tld to a free mail service and mark the mail service as an authorized sender. I have a Gmail inbox that sends and receives from dozens of addresses on 4 different domains. If Google locked me out, I could just update the forwarding rule on my domain to go to a different email.
    - ekanes 6y ago
      Thank you SO MUCH. I'll do this.
- el_dev_hell 6y ago
  I managed to get myself temporarily locked out of a 10+ year old gmail account 2 months ago. I managed to get it back easily (finding my old phone sim and resetting). But it was a traumatic experience. I signed up for Fastmail that day and did a complete download of all data. I'm still in the migration phase (which is a pain), but I'm aiming to go completely gmail free for the rest of my life. I implore anyone reading this: DO NOT USE A FREE EMAIL SERVICE FOR ANYTHING REMOTELY IMPORTANT!
  - jethro_tell 6y ago
    Another option is to control the domain. That is what I recommend for any account that is used to make money in any way. In the event you have a dispute with your email host, you can simply change the domain MX records. You may lose a few hours or a couple days of email, but your name doesn't disappear out of thin air.
    - ryukafalz 6y ago
      Just make sure you don’t forget to renew the domain.
      - smt88 6y ago
        And that your registrar is secure. GoDaddy had a lot of issues with social engineering a few years ago.
    - cortesoft 6y ago
      What happens if you have a dispute with your registrar?
      - jethro_tell 6y ago
        That can happen for sure. You should do as little business with your registrar as possible. No hosting, just a domain and a couple DNS records. Your registrar is unlikely to do any automated patrolling and algorithmically stop doing business with you. Registrars don't have the profit margins to police every domain they own and the tech parse every type of content to decide you should be delisted. If they do decide that you are too distasteful to do business with, it will likely be a person, responding to a complaint of some kind. That is a significantly lower risk than an automated google sweep or say getting your email turned off because your YouTube channel was tagged by a bot.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I have been hosting my own email using mailinabox. The tool is so painless I suggest more people should use it. The only ongoing maintenance I have had to manage is rebooting it to apply updates. The whole thing is backed up with a built in backup tool that rsyncs the data to my home server. The only downside is you lose that automatic email filtering thing gmail does.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    ehh, no thanks, not quite keen on emails being sent into the spambox.
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      Mailinabox configures everything in the way gmail likes. Unless you start your vps on a tainted IP address it should be no problem. I send to gmail and outlook emails fine.
      - 3131s 6y ago
        Depends on your hosting provider with Outlook still right? I run a mail server on Linode and I had thought that Microsoft was still blocking all their IPs.
        Polylactic_acid 6y ago
        I'm using vultr for my vps and it has been fine.
  - tacLog 6y ago
    > mailinabox How bad is life without that filter?
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      Its not really then end of the world. It just means I need to unsubscribe from newsletters manually rather than letting google dump them in the trash automatically. I would like to see server side email filtering though since my thunderbird filters are useless when my desktop is off and I check with my phone. I think I largely have a herd immunity from spam since no one sends spam that will automatically be filtered by what 99.99% of users use.
- graton 6y ago
  Well thanks to using rclone and gmvault (even though it is dead project it still keeps backing up my email) I am hoping it would be very minimal data loss. I also use borg back up every day on my backups so that I keep data for a fairly long time. And I have setup a schedule to do Google Takeout every 90 days. But I would guess less than 1% of people do what I do to ensure they could handle losing access to their Google account.
- endgame 6y ago
  I was using G Suite on a personal domain, and woke up one morning to discover that google refused to let me IMAP into my account any more. The error message pointed me at a browser verification page which I did multiple times, to no avail, so I moved to a different email provider. Thanks for the final push, Google. I've been meaning to move for years.
iagovar 6y ago
This is my default stance too, and the advice I give to everyone that asks. If you're no big fish enough or you don't have contacts, you can have a serious problem. I remember some years ago Adsense cancelled the Meneame.net (largest news aggregator in Spain) account, and they had to resort to contacts inside Google to get it back again. This was even before it got ridiculous, when there was some chance to get a human. In the past 10 years I've seen enough instances of people screwed on Adsense, Youtube and other services. So it's clear for me, too much risk to rely on google services, even more if money is on the line.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  Big contracts too, surprisingly. We had a dedicated team of Google engineers supporting us, and we still ran into this !@#$%. Many, they could facilitate. Some, they could not.
outworlder 6y ago
> I wouldn't touch GCP with a barge pole for these reasons. It all depends on how big you are. If you have a sizable account there will be actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call, on top of the normal ticketing system that you already have access to. It is the same on AWS. Although AWS is on top of the game, followed by Azure.
- jozzas 6y ago
  > actual people you assigned to your account and that you can call This doesn't help when Google decide to sunset one or more of the services that you're relying on, forcing you to migrate elsewhere or re-design
flyinglizard 6y ago
Yep, I blacklisted them as well and exclusively use Azure. It’s great and I know Microsoft makes its revenue on people like me, rather than on ad networks.

cced 6y ago

I’ve seen this type of behaviour before. To be completely honest, I have associated the release of new Google initiatives with headlines that say they are shutting down 12-24 months later.

DarkmSparks 6y ago

Exactly this reason I avoided firebase at all costs. There is quite a few services now that I wouldnt have minded paying google considerable sums of money for, if it weren't for their long history of this kind of nonsense. Its reached the point now this is just expected behaviour, and I feel sorry for anyone that has invested considerable effort into any of googles platforms.

titzer 6y ago

It's mostly because: A.) They don't know why, algorithms did it. B.) They can't be bothered looking into it, because you aren't spending enough money. C.) Their systems have now classified you as a scammer and you are now irredemable. D.) They don't want to leak any details that help scammers learn how to get around automated anti-fraud/abuse systems. edit to add: E.) The reason might be something utterly embarrassing about some really dumb internal snafu.

titzer 6y ago
Let me also add a counter-point to my own point: Google is subject to an absolute metric crapton of abuse. With a revenue stream that massive and warchest that huge, they are a constant target for scammers the world over. It's a total warzone out there, not just in terms of cybersecurity but also in terms of fraud and abuse. If you think Nigerian prince scams are bad, just put some serious (nefarious) brainpower behind that and huge botnets, clickfarms, payment fraud, stolen credit cards, identity fraud, the whole mess. There are literally tens of thousands of criminals out there trying to cash out in big and small ways every single second of every day. With little to no global prosecution of cybercrimes, Google has no recourse but to clam up when they sense a threat. So they are kind of within their rights to be so aggressively defensive. The catch is the scale of this problem is so massive it absolutely must be automated. Responses have to be lightning quick to respond to scams at the speed of light. Risk analysis constantly charts the potential for lost revenue vs associating with fraud risks. But counter-point to my own counter-point. That's really no excuse for being so unresponsive to actual users. Scaling to a billion users worldwide, everything a moonshot--this mindset underlies all of their failings. The thinking within Google is too focused on scaling up and Larry's mantra of "focus on the user and all else will follow" is complete doublethink, because Google fails at this so, so horribly.
- vvanders 6y ago
  What makes Google unique here? I can think of many other companies who have similar scale or even larger incentives for abuse but never seem to fail to engage to the same degree as Google does.

city41 6y ago

I worry for all the youtube channels I enjoy who have gone all in and made it their full time job. If anything were to happen they'd be done. There's no realistic alternative.