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Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

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Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#101

Post by daenney »

__b__ wrote: post #97
a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third partie…

What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying transit) and then start building out your infrastructure. That's a rather unreasonable amount of hoops to put someone without a strong technical background through.

Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#102

Post by DavidWanjiru »

a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

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

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#103

Post by vroombaprime »

__b__ wrote: post #97
a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third partie…

Good luck getting email to work with that setup though.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#105

Post by progman »

leephillips wrote: post #89
a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

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

Personal domains won't help you if the state releases laws which enables providers to silence whole domains against unwanted opinions.

What we need is a new decentralized Internet. We need not only open source software (for security reasons), not only open hardware (for security reasons) but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#106

Post by a3n »

daenney wrote: post #101
__b__ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third partie…

What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying t…

So the intent of the meta-domains I mentioned in my original might be better served by a personal IPv6 block, that doesn't come from a corporation's reserved blocks.

Just as I move my domain around between email (and other) providers, I could then move my IPv6 block around. Instead of asking Linode for an IP address out of their block, I could tell them "serve this block." (Or can we already do that? For a reasonable price?)

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#107

Post by hackits »

transfire wrote: post #93
clishem wrote: post #50

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

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

Storage facility will charge for the service because storing physical goods and providing 24/7 security cost money. Last time I checked they will have a clause in the contract if X weeks go by and you have not paid your bill they will auction the items off to recover the debt.

Though could be different for different storage facilities.

For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#108

Post by andrey_utkin »

leonroy wrote: post #91
a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies. Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could. Furthermore a lot of…

We need to follow Richard Stallman in his obsession with ehtics. "Sorry mate, I find FB/Google/Skype/etc. unethical, so I won't get in touch with you using this, let's better stick with email, phone call or meeting in person".

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#109

Post by a3n »

vroombaprime wrote: post #103
__b__ wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too. When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed. 1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party. Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third partie…

Good luck getting email to work with that setup though.

Yeah, at that point, in this day and age, running email either has to be your day job to keep that running, or you as an individual have to at least be capable of doing that job; most people aren't, and I pay Fastmail to get that done.

Re: Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work

#110

Post by a3n »

leonroy wrote: post #91
a3n wrote: post #71

The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice. But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication. That person…

Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies. Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could. Furthermore a lot of…

I have wished from the beginning that Twitter was a protocol, and not a business. (I wonder if Twitter investors wish that? :)

Fastmail et al. show that you can run a business on a protocol, even if it won't necessarily make you a unicorn.

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