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Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

189 points by voidr 13y ago

DanBlake 13y ago
FWIW, all I ever read about on HN is how DO is constantly a disaster. Why you would choose to host there is beyond me. Just move your blog- It takes all of a few hours.
- Touche 13y ago
  I had an incident where there was a problem with one of my droplets and their response was to shut down all of my droplets, and only leave me a message saying they needed to verify my identity. I had to ask questions to even figure out why my droplets were shut down. After communicating with them for about a half a day they agreed to turn them all back on and in the future to only shut down the offending droplets (without giving them my identity, by the way). I'm still using DO but will definitely scale back in the future, they seem to be run like a hobbyist gaming clan forum.
  - JackFr 13y ago
    More information about the 'incident' would allow readers to make an informed judgement about whether this was reasonable behavior or not.
    - Touche 13y ago
      Not sure what information you want. Do you think it's ever reasonable for a VPS provider to suspend an account without telling the customer why the account was suspended? Doesn't the fact that they agreed to handle it differently in the future indicate that they even believe they handled it inappropriately?
      - mrjatx 13y ago
        This is not remotely rare in web hosting. If you're on a shared host and over consume resources you'll be shutdown before the admin has a chance to even generate a ticket. Some hosts don't even generate a ticket, they just suspend the account with a page that informs the owner that they've over consumed resources. Not saying it's great, but when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of VPS/cPanel accounts and one account affecting 5000 other accounts on a server you're sometimes forced into a corner where you have to act as quickly as possible.
        grogenaut 13y ago
        yes except these are independent hosts not one host in a shared hosting service. s/host/droplet/
- danpalmer 13y ago
  FWIW, this is one of only a few 'bad' DO incidents I've seen, among many very positive things. As a DO user for over a year, I can say I am mostly very happy with the service I have received, although I hope they issue a statement about this, apologising to the author and pledging to review their policies on this.
  - mark212 13y ago
    Same here. I've been very pleased with their service but DO is way out of line here. Shutting down content based on a single complaint, without a court order or any kind of injunction -- and then saying that the customer has to get a court order from a NY court to keep it open? Exactly the opposite of what I expect from a VPS.
  - OafTobark 13y ago
    Some of the bad I've read in the past couple months alone are bad enough that no amount of positives base on loose reviews of recent users is going to counter the few bads.
- viraptor 13y ago
  It's very cheap and very fast - ideal for testing your deployment scripts. I would never run a live service from there however. (you can't even do realistic HA on their service without involving some third-party for being the front-end)
- flavor8 13y ago
  I'm quite happy with them. I run two production servers and a development server on them. Way more barebones than the AWS ecosystem, but significantly cheaper, which gives me a better margin in my maintenance agreements with clients.
voidr 13y ago
So Digital Ocean could freely decide if a content is harassing without any legal court order or something? So if I decide to use their service(which I was considering btw) should I worry about wether or not they will deem my content inappropriate? So if I want to have a site where I would have users who can say/post whatever they want(freedom of speech and all that human right stuff) I can't host it on DO, because somebody might just send a bogus email to them and they would act on it?
- rsynnott 13y ago
  > So Digital Ocean could freely decide if a content is harassing without any legal court order or something? Their TOS presumably allow this, as do the TOSes of most hosts, but this seems like a pretty bizarre use of discretionary terms, and would definitely put a lot of people off using it for anything much.
  - voidr 13y ago
    It's perfectly fine for a TOS to allow a service provider to comply with the law. The problem is when they have their own highly ambiguous laws and lack a proper system to resolve violations.
    - untothebreach 13y ago
      I don't think what they are doing is the right thing to do, but they are perfectly within their right to enforce their TOS. If a person does not like that, they should use a different VPS provider.
comice 13y ago
Digital Ocean are going through all the kinds of problems that newbies to the ISP business go through in their early days, but DO are having to do it after having already got enormously popular. Not a lot of fun for them I'm sure.
venomsnake 13y ago
Enjoy the cloud. Nothing more to be said. With the current "Waiver all rights in the TOS and no legal protections for the customers" it is only going to get worse. I think that cloud services and telecoms and ISPs should be designated as common carrier with the protections and obligations that come from that.
- danpalmer 13y ago
  That depends (as one commenter hinted to) on the level of service that the cloud services provider is providing. If they are providing essentially a bare machine or VPS, then clearly they shouldn't have editorial control over your blog that happens to be hosted on the hardware. But when it gets to more managed services I think the issue is blurred. - Scenario 1: hire a VPS, set up a mail server on it, send emails that your host doesn't want you sending. - I'd say there's nothing they should be able to do here. - Scenario 2: using a scalable email service (like Amazon SES?) to send emails that the host doesn't like. - I'm much less sure about this.
- josephlord 13y ago
  How do you host content then? Don't most collocation facilities and ISPs have their own TOS that are not that different?
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    My theory was that they shouldn't be allowed to have such TOS and be given immunity from lawsuits about the way their services are used. So basicly the only reasons a hosting provider should have grounds to terminate/interfere with service are - court order/stopped payment/the way service is used actively disrupts other customers. We should have service "first sale doctrine" equivalent - once you have sold the access service etc you have no say in how it is used.
    - josephlord 13y ago
      I don't disagree but don't really get the relevance of your "Enjoy the cloud…" comment. Web hosting is something that needs some provider with terms of service and whether "cloud" or not doesn't seem to make much difference to me.
petercooper 13y ago
The real issue here is whether Digital Ocean should be enforcing a term in their ToS to prevent users from using their network in various socially negative ways. As a liberal-ish European, I think they should, but I appreciate this stance doesn't necessarily play well in the US. Nonetheless, taking quotes from an informal chat room and turning them into a biased, borderline libelous blog post isn't cool. It's immaterial whether Collins told the author they didn't care about the post or not. If Collins made an official complaint as per the ToS, the post in question - http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-and-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks... - strikes me as defamatory and embarrassing enough to legitimately fall under term 2.8.. so the real question has nothing to do with the complaint but more is term 2.8 a good idea or not?
- Argorak 13y ago
  Thats interesting. As a liberalish European, I think DigitalOcean shouldn't be allowed to police their content, just as ISPs shouldn't be allowed to block websites at their whim. Thats clearly in the realm of courts and lawyers. DigitalOcean can cancel the contract once others found the blog post to be defamatory.
  - lvh 13y ago
    Perhaps the two of you are only disagreeing on what "liberal" means; it tends to mean something quite different in Europe than in the US :)
    - MaxGabriel 13y ago
      They said they're both European
      - hartator 13y ago
        I guess both are liberal in the US sense of term but are not agreeing about if they have to mandatory delete the contents or to mandatory do the reverse. :)
DiabloD3 13y ago
This is a spoof right? "One member of the community half-seriously (I assumed) threatened to harm me, proposing to “Godwins law this fucker."" "Another member of the community [...] had taken note of my browser “fingerprint” and was now offering to share it with everyone." So they were going to compare him to Hitler as punishment, and share with the community information used mainly for ad targeting?
ashley16 13y ago
This is the definition of online harassment. This guy Josh at vpsexperience.wordpress.com sounds like a real piece of work.
blueskin_ 13y ago
Don't use Digital Ocean. Every time I hear their name, it's a complete index of WTFs.
- nobodyshere 13y ago
  Find me another service that praises you for violation of their TOS. I'd be really pleased to find at least one.
  - andrewfong 13y ago
    TOSes are what they are, but at least Rackspace's TOS doesn't prohibit acts that "embarrass" someone.
    - nobodyshere 13y ago
      However a lawsuit against them would. And it is very logical to try and avoid having such a lawsuit as you'd have to spend quite a few bucks on a decent lawyer.
      - blueskin_ 13y ago
        If someone sued rackspace for that, chances are they'd get ignored. They're too big to bother with frivolous threats that would be thrown out immediately.
        nobodyshere 13y ago
        I wouldn't say you can so easily throw away a court order.
        blueskin_ 13y ago
        You need to win in order to get one of those.
retube 13y ago
So? DO is a private company offering a service. They're not obliged to accept your money. Don't like them, go elsewhere.
- Joeboy 13y ago
  I'm glad I found out what kind of service they offer before I signed up for it, which I might have been tempted to do otherwise.
danso 13y ago
1. Has none of the "alpha geeks" involved ever hear of or Google the "Streisand Effect"? 2. Though the issue raised is one that's worth debating, what Collins said wasn't particularly newsworthy or inflammatory and may not even disqualify him from some day winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet the way the OP referred to his remarks, by the time I clicked through to see the juicy details, I was expecting something on the order of "Let them eat cake", but with racial slurs thrown in. The purportedly shocking statements were, IMO, not terrible, give the concise format. And yet they may have very well been given the sinister connotations DO's alleged actions give them
- techwizrd 13y ago
  I thought the entire article sounded like a bit of an overreaction. It sounds like hashbrownchew (vpsexperience.wordpress.com) wrote this article with the intent of stirring up as much controversy as possible. However, when I read through it I was perplexed. Reading the article[1] that DO asked him to edit did not give me much sympathy for hashbrownchew either. He refers to Collins as "one obnoxious Googler" and then somewhat-creepily investigates (with instructions) where Collins is lives to use for another inflammatory point. This entire article sounds much like a hashbrownchew is a papparazzi trying to provoke a reaction from Collins and then trying to further stir up controversy after misrepresenting Collins gets him into trouble. I really do not see why he didn't just edit the article to be anonymous. Whether he _has_ to edit it or not isn't clear, but it is the polite thing to do. 1. http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-and-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks...
josephlord 13y ago
I'm not sure how valid this view is but I feel that the lower level (as in closer to infrastructure) the service provided the higher level the threshold for editorial interference should be. Against this feeling DO massively overstepped the mark here and have massively put me off using them. I'm not saying that they should never have control; at least spamming, illegal content and DOS attacks need to be dealt with but requesting editorial changes to blog posts just feels off the chart. Edit: Typos and clarifying that lower level referred to infrastructure.
- Joeboy 13y ago
  > the lower level (as in closer to infrastructure) the service provided the higher level the threshold for editorial interference should be That was my instinct too, but I see no real reason why we should expect that to be the case. We've grown up with the idea that servers are generally managed by reasonably "legit" entities. Now that it's trivial to sign up for a VPS, we probably have to expect providers to pay more attention to what goes on on their machines. This is thought provoking, for me anyway.
nbevans 13y ago
Solution: Stop using a 2-bit cloud provider. But none of this would have happened if the article author realised that companies all over the world are doing this. In the UK there are even "zero hour contracts". Welcome to capitalism and life not being fair :) Other than the Googler clearly being an unsympathetic simpleton. I'd hazard a guess that almost all other permies at Google, or any company, would be equally as disinterested and unversed in the subject at hand. It simply doesn't come on to the average, particularly the "well employed", person's radar.
macspoofing 13y ago
Am I the only one who sees Digital Ocean as acting ethically here? This guy is a jerk. He harassed a guy, because the guy works at Google, into giving him his opinion about a semi-controversial topic in a private forum. Then he writes a blog hit-piece in which he explicitly identifies him and disparages him for the opinion he gave! I don't know if he has a legal right to do this, but you don't just do things like that. This Googler is not a spokesperson for the company. He's not in a public forum. He's just some guy who works at Google as a developer, who gave you his opinion "off the record", and you do something like that!? He could lose his job over this if somebody at Google PR overreacts. He may have a family, a mortgage, car payments, school debts, and without any reason, you decided to just screw him over. Don't do things like that!!!! Be nice! All DigitalOcean asked him to do is to anonymize references to this Googler. This is the ethical move because this jerk didn't get the Googler's permission to have him "on the record". Depending on your jurisdiction, you are in a legal grey area anyway.
- voidr 13y ago
  It doesn't matter if they were ethical or not, what they did is not right. They are not law enforcement. If everybody would be allowed to enforce the law, then I would be free to shoot you in the head just because you made a negative comment about my cat, because I feel that's ethical.
  - perlpimp 13y ago
    I totally concur if a group of people decides to go all out in asshattery, the worst thing is for business is to participate - they become partial which is never good when you start taking sides in this sort of thing. If you get court order to take a page down do that - probably because it is illegal. IMO the more drama the more your business is visible. For one I heard very good things about Digital Ocean - however I am very libertian minded and I think whatever people go going between themselves - they should figure it out. If things turn criminal let police deal with it.
  - untothebreach 13y ago
    What 'law' are they enforcing here? They are enforcing their own TOS, which is perfectly within their right. I'm not saying this is the right thing for them to do, but he is using their service, so they have a right to enforce their TOS. He is perfectly able to move his blog post, unedited, to another VPS provider if he does not like what they are asking him to do.
farginay 13y ago
Freedom of press is guaranteed only to those who own one. -- A. J. Liebling
- hect0r 13y ago
  Freedom of press and freedom of speech are complete red herrings here. DO is a private company and they are free to agree to whatever they want in their contracts. They don't owe anyone any obligation other than to adhere to the agreements they form with their customers.
gaius 13y ago
This is no different from asking someone a question, slyly videoing their answer on your Google Glass, and uploading it to Youtube.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  And then having your ISP drop you as a customer.
MaysonL 13y ago
Did Digital Ocean just lose any DMCA safe harbor status it had, by policing client content in this way?
awk23 13y ago
This is basically a ploy by someone who is seeking publicity for his attack on this other individual by taking his words out of context and altering their meaning. Here is a previous submission of HN of the disputed post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6984487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6984487 http://www.firstlooksy.com/frustrated-googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://www.firstlooksy.com/frustrated-googler-speaks-out-on-... His is a repost under another date of the same bat-shit crazy "nothing" that makes Gawker seem reasonable. The author is an attention monger who probably has some sort of a personal vendetta against the person he is attacking, I suggest not to take his account of things on face value.
gizzlon 13y ago
Does their TOS really say you can't embarrass anyone? That seems totally retarded, some people get embarrassed about the stupidest things. I guess as a DO customer I should have read their TOS more carefully =/
callesgg 13y ago
He is a dickhead and Digital ocean might be a bit contradicting when allowing harassment on the forum. That was however harassment towards his alias/username not to a specific individual. I still think digital ocean did the right thing and contacted him, And asked him to fix the ToS breakage he committed.
donniezazen 13y ago
When companies decide to get into personal matter of two unknown individuals which could have been easily went unnoticed, DO did a disfavor of putting them both on face of social media bringing bad words for both themselves and Travis Collins.
zobzu 13y ago
freedom of speech much
- camus2 13y ago
  freedom of speech protects your speech from the government , not from a private business where you host your blog. Did they shut down his blog ? no.
colinbartlett 13y ago
It saddens me to see this petty bullshit on the front page of Hacker News.
fuziontech 13y ago
Get this off of HN. This blog doesn't deserve the publicity.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
boskonyc 13y ago
This clown covertly recorded (spied on) an established engineer who was casually conversing in a well-known if niche and informal chat room. He then decided he was justified to publish the excerpts of the covertly recorded conversation as if they were journalistic quotes provided to a media outlet. This is the most pathetic kind of muckraking by a would-be engineer drawing attention to himself by attacking an established figure. Unwise, perhaps, for Digital Ocean to TOS him like this, but certainly within their rights as a service provider. As for the original poster, he may in turn feel violated by DO's TOS, but the violation of privacy he committed is without question much more severe.
dmdeller 13y ago
For the sake of comparison, it seems worth mentioning a hosting provider that takes an explicit stance in their policies against things like this happening, to the extent that they actually named their company around the idea: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse Unfortunately, NFSN's technology stack is so far behind the times that it's hard to use them for much of anything these days. I'm not affiliated with them, just a long time customer.
ddebernardy 13y ago
It's surprising that wordpress.com leaves this petty post up. OP is likely violating their ToS too...
- rsynnott 13y ago
  How's that surprising? Most blogging providers (Wordpress, Blogger etc.) and indeed large ISPs in general are pretty tolerant of things that are merely potentially offensive to an individual, as opposed to libellous.
zedpm 13y ago
Given his sensationalist writing style, I'm not at all surprised to see that it was a Gawker piece he questioned Travis Collins about. Gawker is Yellow Journalism[1] and as such deserves no response. The larger issue makes for interesting discussion, however. I believe he's right that the complain ought to have been directed at the author initially, rather than at the hosting provider. I doubt it would have accomplished anything to complain to this individual, but it is nonetheless the correct procedure. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
hect0r 13y ago
All DO are asking the blog author to do is to just honour the Terms of Service that he himself agreed to. I don't see any controversy here; it is all very simple. Maybe, the blog author is attention-seeking and trying to manufacture outrage by trying to cast himself as a "victim". The real victim, if there is one, is the Googler who has had his conversations in a closed forum relayed to the world and editorialised by someone who obviously didn't explain his true intents. Anyway, if the blog author disagrees and doesn't feel that he wants to honour his contract then he can just move his blog or, as DO suggest, launch legal action and get an injunction. I suspect though he will just skulk off and look for some other controversy to rant about.
- jasonlotito 13y ago
  Replace DO with AWS and the Googler with Jeff Bezos, and the blog format with the NYTimes.
  - Sidis 13y ago
    ...and it wouldn't make any difference. If the NY Times signed an agreement with AWS that stated that they couldn't do X against anyone and, at a later date, they did X against Jeff Bezos then AWS would be well within their rights to demand that either NYT adhere to their agreement or leave. I note that you use the example of two related entities (AWS and Jeff Bezos). Are you implying that there is a relationship between DO and the Googler equivalent to that between Jeff and AWS?
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
      No one is suggesting DO shouldn't enforce their ToS. Rather, it's their ToS that is at issue. The use of AWS and NYTimes was too look at it another way. Everything the NYTimes prints would fall afoul of the ruling from DO. More importantly, NYTimes wouldn't agree to such a stipulation from their provider precisely because of an issue like this. That should be a warning sign. As for the use of Jeff Bezos, it was because I had mentioned AWS. Replace Bezos with anyone. It was merely the first name that popped into my head. Here, I'll make it easy: AWS is the hosting provider, NYTimes is the site, and a member of the NSA is mentioned in the article.
smazero 13y ago
All a bit petty and grubby isn't it? I don't think the claims of libel or defamation really hold much water given the evidence presented (I am not a lawyer), but it seems to me DOs clause of avoiding embarrassment could cover pretty much anything. That said the tone and approach of the original poster's blog posts leave an unpleasant taste in my mouth in that way that something can be technically correct, whilst simultaneously feeling morally repugnant; more self aggrandising than injustice fighting, and it's interesting how keen the original poster is to explicitly name and shame the random dude from Google, while remaining conveniently anonymous himself. Bah, I feel grubby just from having commented on this.
jdhendrickson 13y ago
How many times is this story going to be killed and reposted? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015191 I get that he is trying to get this to go viral and thereby bring attention to his pathetic muck raking but maybe a ban for gaming the system is in order I believe it's been submitted three times and killed or flagged each time, how many times can you submit the same lame, self aggrandizing content?
ommunist 13y ago
Leave DO. Go to goip.com, publish whatever you want. Its Netherlands. To those who say the guy is jerk and his blog does not deserve the publicity. This is typical orwellian situation with some animals more equal than others. DO hosts a lot of things and does not police them, but this one was voluntary attempt of editorial control (censorship) and it is not acceptable from infrastructure provider. As it seems, DO is not behaving ethically (nor does the guy).
Sidis 13y ago
So, let's be clear: 1. The blogger signed up with DO and agreed to some TOS that prohibit certain types of activities. 2. He then, by his own admission, lurks in a chatroom. 3. He asks a Googler a question but does not disclose what he intends to do with it. By his own admission, he had no plans to write a piece. 4. He takes the Googler's comments, contorts them, and constructs a poorly written screed in which he, amongst various other calumnies against good taste, investigates the home address of the Googler and uses that to add dramatic effect to his hit piece. 5. The hoster -- whose TOS he explicitly agreed with at the start -- asks him politely to edit his piece to comply with the agreement. They seem to only require him to remove the personal identifying information. 6. Despite the fact that removing the name of the person would not really diminish the albeit half-baked and poorly thought out idea that the author is trying to get promote, he acts as though he is the one that should feel aggrieved and outraged for removing the Googler's name. 7. By doing so, he reveals his true intent. He isn't interested in making a point about Google; he is interested primarily in presenting the said Googler in a negative light and personally maligning him or inciting others to malign him. Or, the shorter version, the blog author is an odious and obnoxious attention-whore and troll who is trying to build a reputation by demolishing the reputation of an innocent engineer; and then who is so blinded by his desire to get attention that he doesn't realise that he looks like an ignorant jackass by whinging and whining that DO are asking him to simply adhere to the TOS that he himself agreed to.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  Exactly. What's this bully's motivation? Does he want this Googler to be fired? To be disciplined at work? To apologize publicly? Or simply to embarrass him publicly and move on to something else? I don't know anything about DO, but it aggravates me that they are being disparaged here when all they did was make a reasonable request. Most services frown upon posting identifying information in certain kinds of stories. Reddit, for example, had issues with vigilantism against innocent people after certain inflammatory posts.
DanBC 13y ago
DO are not unusual in having AUP/TOS that is more restrictive than the law allows. A number of people here are saying that they feel uncomfortable with DO's stance, but plenty of other providers would come close to that level of policing. Luckily there are options if you want someone to just host stuff with tolerant AUP/TOS. Tldr: contracts mean stuff.

189 points by voidr 13y ago

FWIW, all I ever read about on HN is how DO is constantly a disaster. Why you would choose to host there is beyond me. Just move your blog- It takes all of a few hours.

Touche 13y ago
I had an incident where there was a problem with one of my droplets and their response was to shut down all of my droplets, and only leave me a message saying they needed to verify my identity. I had to ask questions to even figure out why my droplets were shut down. After communicating with them for about a half a day they agreed to turn them all back on and in the future to only shut down the offending droplets (without giving them my identity, by the way). I'm still using DO but will definitely scale back in the future, they seem to be run like a hobbyist gaming clan forum.
- JackFr 13y ago
  More information about the 'incident' would allow readers to make an informed judgement about whether this was reasonable behavior or not.
  - Touche 13y ago
    Not sure what information you want. Do you think it's ever reasonable for a VPS provider to suspend an account without telling the customer why the account was suspended? Doesn't the fact that they agreed to handle it differently in the future indicate that they even believe they handled it inappropriately?
    - mrjatx 13y ago
      This is not remotely rare in web hosting. If you're on a shared host and over consume resources you'll be shutdown before the admin has a chance to even generate a ticket. Some hosts don't even generate a ticket, they just suspend the account with a page that informs the owner that they've over consumed resources. Not saying it's great, but when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of VPS/cPanel accounts and one account affecting 5000 other accounts on a server you're sometimes forced into a corner where you have to act as quickly as possible.
      - grogenaut 13y ago
        yes except these are independent hosts not one host in a shared hosting service. s/host/droplet/
danpalmer 13y ago
FWIW, this is one of only a few 'bad' DO incidents I've seen, among many very positive things. As a DO user for over a year, I can say I am mostly very happy with the service I have received, although I hope they issue a statement about this, apologising to the author and pledging to review their policies on this.
- mark212 13y ago
  Same here. I've been very pleased with their service but DO is way out of line here. Shutting down content based on a single complaint, without a court order or any kind of injunction -- and then saying that the customer has to get a court order from a NY court to keep it open? Exactly the opposite of what I expect from a VPS.
- OafTobark 13y ago
  Some of the bad I've read in the past couple months alone are bad enough that no amount of positives base on loose reviews of recent users is going to counter the few bads.
viraptor 13y ago
It's very cheap and very fast - ideal for testing your deployment scripts. I would never run a live service from there however. (you can't even do realistic HA on their service without involving some third-party for being the front-end)
flavor8 13y ago
I'm quite happy with them. I run two production servers and a development server on them. Way more barebones than the AWS ecosystem, but significantly cheaper, which gives me a better margin in my maintenance agreements with clients.

voidr 13y ago

So Digital Ocean could freely decide if a content is harassing without any legal court order or something? So if I decide to use their service(which I was considering btw) should I worry about wether or not they will deem my content inappropriate? So if I want to have a site where I would have users who can say/post whatever they want(freedom of speech and all that human right stuff) I can't host it on DO, because somebody might just send a bogus email to them and they would act on it?

rsynnott 13y ago
> So Digital Ocean could freely decide if a content is harassing without any legal court order or something? Their TOS presumably allow this, as do the TOSes of most hosts, but this seems like a pretty bizarre use of discretionary terms, and would definitely put a lot of people off using it for anything much.
- voidr 13y ago
  It's perfectly fine for a TOS to allow a service provider to comply with the law. The problem is when they have their own highly ambiguous laws and lack a proper system to resolve violations.
  - untothebreach 13y ago
    I don't think what they are doing is the right thing to do, but they are perfectly within their right to enforce their TOS. If a person does not like that, they should use a different VPS provider.

comice 13y ago

Digital Ocean are going through all the kinds of problems that newbies to the ISP business go through in their early days, but DO are having to do it after having already got enormously popular. Not a lot of fun for them I'm sure.

venomsnake 13y ago

Enjoy the cloud. Nothing more to be said. With the current "Waiver all rights in the TOS and no legal protections for the customers" it is only going to get worse. I think that cloud services and telecoms and ISPs should be designated as common carrier with the protections and obligations that come from that.

danpalmer 13y ago
That depends (as one commenter hinted to) on the level of service that the cloud services provider is providing. If they are providing essentially a bare machine or VPS, then clearly they shouldn't have editorial control over your blog that happens to be hosted on the hardware. But when it gets to more managed services I think the issue is blurred. - Scenario 1: hire a VPS, set up a mail server on it, send emails that your host doesn't want you sending. - I'd say there's nothing they should be able to do here. - Scenario 2: using a scalable email service (like Amazon SES?) to send emails that the host doesn't like. - I'm much less sure about this.
josephlord 13y ago
How do you host content then? Don't most collocation facilities and ISPs have their own TOS that are not that different?
- venomsnake 13y ago
  My theory was that they shouldn't be allowed to have such TOS and be given immunity from lawsuits about the way their services are used. So basicly the only reasons a hosting provider should have grounds to terminate/interfere with service are - court order/stopped payment/the way service is used actively disrupts other customers. We should have service "first sale doctrine" equivalent - once you have sold the access service etc you have no say in how it is used.
  - josephlord 13y ago
    I don't disagree but don't really get the relevance of your "Enjoy the cloud…" comment. Web hosting is something that needs some provider with terms of service and whether "cloud" or not doesn't seem to make much difference to me.

petercooper 13y ago

The real issue here is whether Digital Ocean should be enforcing a term in their ToS to prevent users from using their network in various socially negative ways. As a liberal-ish European, I think they should, but I appreciate this stance doesn't necessarily play well in the US. Nonetheless, taking quotes from an informal chat room and turning them into a biased, borderline libelous blog post isn't cool. It's immaterial whether Collins told the author they didn't care about the post or not. If Collins made an official complaint as per the ToS, the post in question - http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-and-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks... - strikes me as defamatory and embarrassing enough to legitimately fall under term 2.8.. so the real question has nothing to do with the complaint but more is term 2.8 a good idea or not?

Argorak 13y ago
Thats interesting. As a liberalish European, I think DigitalOcean shouldn't be allowed to police their content, just as ISPs shouldn't be allowed to block websites at their whim. Thats clearly in the realm of courts and lawyers. DigitalOcean can cancel the contract once others found the blog post to be defamatory.
- lvh 13y ago
  Perhaps the two of you are only disagreeing on what "liberal" means; it tends to mean something quite different in Europe than in the US :)
  - MaxGabriel 13y ago
    They said they're both European
    - hartator 13y ago
      I guess both are liberal in the US sense of term but are not agreeing about if they have to mandatory delete the contents or to mandatory do the reverse. :)

DiabloD3 13y ago

This is a spoof right? "One member of the community half-seriously (I assumed) threatened to harm me, proposing to “Godwins law this fucker."" "Another member of the community [...] had taken note of my browser “fingerprint” and was now offering to share it with everyone." So they were going to compare him to Hitler as punishment, and share with the community information used mainly for ad targeting?

ashley16 13y ago

This is the definition of online harassment. This guy Josh at vpsexperience.wordpress.com sounds like a real piece of work.

blueskin_ 13y ago

Don't use Digital Ocean. Every time I hear their name, it's a complete index of WTFs.

nobodyshere 13y ago
Find me another service that praises you for violation of their TOS. I'd be really pleased to find at least one.
- andrewfong 13y ago
  TOSes are what they are, but at least Rackspace's TOS doesn't prohibit acts that "embarrass" someone.
  - nobodyshere 13y ago
    However a lawsuit against them would. And it is very logical to try and avoid having such a lawsuit as you'd have to spend quite a few bucks on a decent lawyer.
    - blueskin_ 13y ago
      If someone sued rackspace for that, chances are they'd get ignored. They're too big to bother with frivolous threats that would be thrown out immediately.
      - nobodyshere 13y ago
        I wouldn't say you can so easily throw away a court order.
        blueskin_ 13y ago
        You need to win in order to get one of those.

retube 13y ago

So? DO is a private company offering a service. They're not obliged to accept your money. Don't like them, go elsewhere.

Joeboy 13y ago
I'm glad I found out what kind of service they offer before I signed up for it, which I might have been tempted to do otherwise.

danso 13y ago

1. Has none of the "alpha geeks" involved ever hear of or Google the "Streisand Effect"? 2. Though the issue raised is one that's worth debating, what Collins said wasn't particularly newsworthy or inflammatory and may not even disqualify him from some day winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet the way the OP referred to his remarks, by the time I clicked through to see the juicy details, I was expecting something on the order of "Let them eat cake", but with racial slurs thrown in. The purportedly shocking statements were, IMO, not terrible, give the concise format. And yet they may have very well been given the sinister connotations DO's alleged actions give them

techwizrd 13y ago
I thought the entire article sounded like a bit of an overreaction. It sounds like hashbrownchew (vpsexperience.wordpress.com) wrote this article with the intent of stirring up as much controversy as possible. However, when I read through it I was perplexed. Reading the article[1] that DO asked him to edit did not give me much sympathy for hashbrownchew either. He refers to Collins as "one obnoxious Googler" and then somewhat-creepily investigates (with instructions) where Collins is lives to use for another inflammatory point. This entire article sounds much like a hashbrownchew is a papparazzi trying to provoke a reaction from Collins and then trying to further stir up controversy after misrepresenting Collins gets him into trouble. I really do not see why he didn't just edit the article to be anonymous. Whether he _has_ to edit it or not isn't clear, but it is the polite thing to do. 1. http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-and-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks...

josephlord 13y ago

I'm not sure how valid this view is but I feel that the lower level (as in closer to infrastructure) the service provided the higher level the threshold for editorial interference should be. Against this feeling DO massively overstepped the mark here and have massively put me off using them. I'm not saying that they should never have control; at least spamming, illegal content and DOS attacks need to be dealt with but requesting editorial changes to blog posts just feels off the chart. Edit: Typos and clarifying that lower level referred to infrastructure.

Joeboy 13y ago
> the lower level (as in closer to infrastructure) the service provided the higher level the threshold for editorial interference should be That was my instinct too, but I see no real reason why we should expect that to be the case. We've grown up with the idea that servers are generally managed by reasonably "legit" entities. Now that it's trivial to sign up for a VPS, we probably have to expect providers to pay more attention to what goes on on their machines. This is thought provoking, for me anyway.

nbevans 13y ago

Solution: Stop using a 2-bit cloud provider. But none of this would have happened if the article author realised that companies all over the world are doing this. In the UK there are even "zero hour contracts". Welcome to capitalism and life not being fair :) Other than the Googler clearly being an unsympathetic simpleton. I'd hazard a guess that almost all other permies at Google, or any company, would be equally as disinterested and unversed in the subject at hand. It simply doesn't come on to the average, particularly the "well employed", person's radar.

macspoofing 13y ago

Am I the only one who sees Digital Ocean as acting ethically here? This guy is a jerk. He harassed a guy, because the guy works at Google, into giving him his opinion about a semi-controversial topic in a private forum. Then he writes a blog hit-piece in which he explicitly identifies him and disparages him for the opinion he gave! I don't know if he has a legal right to do this, but you don't just do things like that. This Googler is not a spokesperson for the company. He's not in a public forum. He's just some guy who works at Google as a developer, who gave you his opinion "off the record", and you do something like that!? He could lose his job over this if somebody at Google PR overreacts. He may have a family, a mortgage, car payments, school debts, and without any reason, you decided to just screw him over. Don't do things like that!!!! Be nice! All DigitalOcean asked him to do is to anonymize references to this Googler. This is the ethical move because this jerk didn't get the Googler's permission to have him "on the record". Depending on your jurisdiction, you are in a legal grey area anyway.

voidr 13y ago
It doesn't matter if they were ethical or not, what they did is not right. They are not law enforcement. If everybody would be allowed to enforce the law, then I would be free to shoot you in the head just because you made a negative comment about my cat, because I feel that's ethical.
- perlpimp 13y ago
  I totally concur if a group of people decides to go all out in asshattery, the worst thing is for business is to participate - they become partial which is never good when you start taking sides in this sort of thing. If you get court order to take a page down do that - probably because it is illegal. IMO the more drama the more your business is visible. For one I heard very good things about Digital Ocean - however I am very libertian minded and I think whatever people go going between themselves - they should figure it out. If things turn criminal let police deal with it.
- untothebreach 13y ago
  What 'law' are they enforcing here? They are enforcing their own TOS, which is perfectly within their right. I'm not saying this is the right thing for them to do, but he is using their service, so they have a right to enforce their TOS. He is perfectly able to move his blog post, unedited, to another VPS provider if he does not like what they are asking him to do.

farginay 13y ago

Freedom of press is guaranteed only to those who own one. -- A. J. Liebling

hect0r 13y ago
Freedom of press and freedom of speech are complete red herrings here. DO is a private company and they are free to agree to whatever they want in their contracts. They don't owe anyone any obligation other than to adhere to the agreements they form with their customers.

gaius 13y ago

This is no different from asking someone a question, slyly videoing their answer on your Google Glass, and uploading it to Youtube.

darkarmani 13y ago
And then having your ISP drop you as a customer.

MaysonL 13y ago

Did Digital Ocean just lose any DMCA safe harbor status it had, by policing client content in this way?

awk23 13y ago

This is basically a ploy by someone who is seeking publicity for his attack on this other individual by taking his words out of context and altering their meaning. Here is a previous submission of HN of the disputed post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6984487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6984487 http://www.firstlooksy.com/frustrated-googler-speaks-out-on-manny-cardenas-second-class-citizens-at-the-plex/ http://www.firstlooksy.com/frustrated-googler-speaks-out-on-... His is a repost under another date of the same bat-shit crazy "nothing" that makes Gawker seem reasonable. The author is an attention monger who probably has some sort of a personal vendetta against the person he is attacking, I suggest not to take his account of things on face value.

gizzlon 13y ago

Does their TOS really say you can't embarrass anyone? That seems totally retarded, some people get embarrassed about the stupidest things. I guess as a DO customer I should have read their TOS more carefully =/

callesgg 13y ago

He is a dickhead and Digital ocean might be a bit contradicting when allowing harassment on the forum. That was however harassment towards his alias/username not to a specific individual. I still think digital ocean did the right thing and contacted him, And asked him to fix the ToS breakage he committed.

donniezazen 13y ago

When companies decide to get into personal matter of two unknown individuals which could have been easily went unnoticed, DO did a disfavor of putting them both on face of social media bringing bad words for both themselves and Travis Collins.

zobzu 13y ago

freedom of speech much

camus2 13y ago
freedom of speech protects your speech from the government , not from a private business where you host your blog. Did they shut down his blog ? no.

colinbartlett 13y ago

It saddens me to see this petty bullshit on the front page of Hacker News.

fuziontech 13y ago

Get this off of HN. This blog doesn't deserve the publicity.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

boskonyc 13y ago

This clown covertly recorded (spied on) an established engineer who was casually conversing in a well-known if niche and informal chat room. He then decided he was justified to publish the excerpts of the covertly recorded conversation as if they were journalistic quotes provided to a media outlet. This is the most pathetic kind of muckraking by a would-be engineer drawing attention to himself by attacking an established figure. Unwise, perhaps, for Digital Ocean to TOS him like this, but certainly within their rights as a service provider. As for the original poster, he may in turn feel violated by DO's TOS, but the violation of privacy he committed is without question much more severe.

dmdeller 13y ago

For the sake of comparison, it seems worth mentioning a hosting provider that takes an explicit stance in their policies against things like this happening, to the extent that they actually named their company around the idea: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse Unfortunately, NFSN's technology stack is so far behind the times that it's hard to use them for much of anything these days. I'm not affiliated with them, just a long time customer.

ddebernardy 13y ago

It's surprising that wordpress.com leaves this petty post up. OP is likely violating their ToS too...

rsynnott 13y ago
How's that surprising? Most blogging providers (Wordpress, Blogger etc.) and indeed large ISPs in general are pretty tolerant of things that are merely potentially offensive to an individual, as opposed to libellous.

zedpm 13y ago

Given his sensationalist writing style, I'm not at all surprised to see that it was a Gawker piece he questioned Travis Collins about. Gawker is Yellow Journalism[1] and as such deserves no response. The larger issue makes for interesting discussion, however. I believe he's right that the complain ought to have been directed at the author initially, rather than at the hosting provider. I doubt it would have accomplished anything to complain to this individual, but it is nonetheless the correct procedure. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

hect0r 13y ago

All DO are asking the blog author to do is to just honour the Terms of Service that he himself agreed to. I don't see any controversy here; it is all very simple. Maybe, the blog author is attention-seeking and trying to manufacture outrage by trying to cast himself as a "victim". The real victim, if there is one, is the Googler who has had his conversations in a closed forum relayed to the world and editorialised by someone who obviously didn't explain his true intents. Anyway, if the blog author disagrees and doesn't feel that he wants to honour his contract then he can just move his blog or, as DO suggest, launch legal action and get an injunction. I suspect though he will just skulk off and look for some other controversy to rant about.

jasonlotito 13y ago
Replace DO with AWS and the Googler with Jeff Bezos, and the blog format with the NYTimes.
- Sidis 13y ago
  ...and it wouldn't make any difference. If the NY Times signed an agreement with AWS that stated that they couldn't do X against anyone and, at a later date, they did X against Jeff Bezos then AWS would be well within their rights to demand that either NYT adhere to their agreement or leave. I note that you use the example of two related entities (AWS and Jeff Bezos). Are you implying that there is a relationship between DO and the Googler equivalent to that between Jeff and AWS?
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    No one is suggesting DO shouldn't enforce their ToS. Rather, it's their ToS that is at issue. The use of AWS and NYTimes was too look at it another way. Everything the NYTimes prints would fall afoul of the ruling from DO. More importantly, NYTimes wouldn't agree to such a stipulation from their provider precisely because of an issue like this. That should be a warning sign. As for the use of Jeff Bezos, it was because I had mentioned AWS. Replace Bezos with anyone. It was merely the first name that popped into my head. Here, I'll make it easy: AWS is the hosting provider, NYTimes is the site, and a member of the NSA is mentioned in the article.

smazero 13y ago

All a bit petty and grubby isn't it? I don't think the claims of libel or defamation really hold much water given the evidence presented (I am not a lawyer), but it seems to me DOs clause of avoiding embarrassment could cover pretty much anything. That said the tone and approach of the original poster's blog posts leave an unpleasant taste in my mouth in that way that something can be technically correct, whilst simultaneously feeling morally repugnant; more self aggrandising than injustice fighting, and it's interesting how keen the original poster is to explicitly name and shame the random dude from Google, while remaining conveniently anonymous himself. Bah, I feel grubby just from having commented on this.

jdhendrickson 13y ago

How many times is this story going to be killed and reposted? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015191 I get that he is trying to get this to go viral and thereby bring attention to his pathetic muck raking but maybe a ban for gaming the system is in order I believe it's been submitted three times and killed or flagged each time, how many times can you submit the same lame, self aggrandizing content?

ommunist 13y ago

Leave DO. Go to goip.com, publish whatever you want. Its Netherlands. To those who say the guy is jerk and his blog does not deserve the publicity. This is typical orwellian situation with some animals more equal than others. DO hosts a lot of things and does not police them, but this one was voluntary attempt of editorial control (censorship) and it is not acceptable from infrastructure provider. As it seems, DO is not behaving ethically (nor does the guy).

Sidis 13y ago

So, let's be clear: 1. The blogger signed up with DO and agreed to some TOS that prohibit certain types of activities. 2. He then, by his own admission, lurks in a chatroom. 3. He asks a Googler a question but does not disclose what he intends to do with it. By his own admission, he had no plans to write a piece. 4. He takes the Googler's comments, contorts them, and constructs a poorly written screed in which he, amongst various other calumnies against good taste, investigates the home address of the Googler and uses that to add dramatic effect to his hit piece. 5. The hoster -- whose TOS he explicitly agreed with at the start -- asks him politely to edit his piece to comply with the agreement. They seem to only require him to remove the personal identifying information. 6. Despite the fact that removing the name of the person would not really diminish the albeit half-baked and poorly thought out idea that the author is trying to get promote, he acts as though he is the one that should feel aggrieved and outraged for removing the Googler's name. 7. By doing so, he reveals his true intent. He isn't interested in making a point about Google; he is interested primarily in presenting the said Googler in a negative light and personally maligning him or inciting others to malign him. Or, the shorter version, the blog author is an odious and obnoxious attention-whore and troll who is trying to build a reputation by demolishing the reputation of an innocent engineer; and then who is so blinded by his desire to get attention that he doesn't realise that he looks like an ignorant jackass by whinging and whining that DO are asking him to simply adhere to the TOS that he himself agreed to.

macspoofing 13y ago
Exactly. What's this bully's motivation? Does he want this Googler to be fired? To be disciplined at work? To apologize publicly? Or simply to embarrass him publicly and move on to something else? I don't know anything about DO, but it aggravates me that they are being disparaged here when all they did was make a reasonable request. Most services frown upon posting identifying information in certain kinds of stories. Reddit, for example, had issues with vigilantism against innocent people after certain inflammatory posts.

DanBC 13y ago

DO are not unusual in having AUP/TOS that is more restrictive than the law allows. A number of people here are saying that they feel uncomfortable with DO's stance, but plenty of other providers would come close to that level of policing. Luckily there are options if you want someone to just host stuff with tolerant AUP/TOS. Tldr: contracts mean stuff.