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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

#161

Post by arundelo »

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…

I've had my own domain for quite a while and have been meaning to start using an email address on that domain. The main reason I haven't is that I'm procrastinating the initial trouble of setting it up, but I'm also a bit scared from hearing stories of people who do this and then occasionally have email to them or from them bounce or disappear. (Maybe this is not as common a problem as I get the impression it is.)

Edit: I'm not even considering running my own email server; I know that's a full-time job. Just something like forwarding my custom email to my Gmail address, which is the type of thing I've heard the aforementioned scary stories about (though a quick web search isn't turning up many such stories).

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

#162

Post by eitland »

willemojnr wrote: post #104
wstrange wrote: post #74

It looks like his work is not deleted, just not accessible due to possible TOS violations? I am guessing he can get it back. The title seems like click-bait.

My thoughts too. Annoying.

Still happy to upvote it as is creates healthy and useful discussions.

Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google service department.

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

#163

Post by wpietri »

janekm wrote: post #134

The fact that every single comment in this thread amounts to "should have backed up" makes me a little sad. Is this really what we want to expect from companies like Google? Is this acceptable? Is it just a "force of nature" that I should consider beyond the ken of man? What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I t…

Definitely. My dad, a now-retired programmer, was dealing with an error at his bank in the 80s. It was a bunch of work and frustration. At some point he asked why a thing happened and the rep said, "Oh, the computer just does that."

He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."

I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.

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

#164

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> 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.

But they cannot, at least not for a foreseeable future. Both are used in enterprise environments, who would flee the first platform in droves which would disable IMAP/POP3.

And even if they'd both disable IMAP, people would write adapters.

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

#165

Post by jessaustin »

sliverstorm wrote: post #151
andrey_utkin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Pots isn't open source...

Yeah I struggle to think of corporations more "unethical" than ATT and VZN.

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

#166

Post by daveloyall »

Arnt wrote: post #158
daveloyall wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effing rotating TLS keys. You missed that?

Cite RFC?

Back when I set up a client to pull from Gmail it would break twice a year: when the changed their TLS cert, and when the later changed it BACK.

My conclusion at the time was that they wanted to keep the percentage of users of the IMAP service below some value, and every time the jerked the config around, they'd see a dip in the graph on their end. My setup is currently non-functional. The maintenance cost was too high. Mission accomplished.

Note: now that I think about it, maybe the cert rotation issue was on (e)SMTP, not IMAP. Same diff.

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

#167

Post by webtechgal »

webtechgal wrote: post #28

This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time: http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...

Ha! Found a copy of the home page at last, cached just yesterday!! For those curious enough, here is the link:

http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...

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

#168

Post by hackits »

unimpressive wrote: post #137
hackits wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

No. That is not the situation here. Pretending like somebody using a 'free' service is equivalent to them being far behind on payments to a storage service is a ridiculous analogy. Google advertises their reliability and nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups or move out. You are not generally in an adversarial relationship with google like you would be to a company you're in debt to. EDIT: This post isn't…

`nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups`. Nowhere do they tell you that your data will be stored forever. You're making assumptions based on something they haven't even said they would provide `FOR FREE!`.

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

#169

Post by darryl42 »

arundelo wrote: post #161
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…

I've had my own domain for quite a while and have been meaning to start using an email address on that domain. The main reason I haven't is that I'm procrastinating the initial trouble of setting it up, but I'm also a bit scared from hearing stories of people who do this and then occasionally have email to them or from them bounce or disappear. (Maybe this is not as common a problem as I get the impression it is.) Ed…

Running your own mail server is a pain. Paying for google apps to handle your email is very easy. Other providers can do the same thing for you.

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

#170

Post by softawre »

eplanit wrote: post #127

More accurately stated: Artist stores (the sole copy of [1]) a decade of work on a service he doesn't pay for and which provides no guarantees of service or quality... Why is the title written to make it seem it was Google that did something wrong here? [1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.

Do you really need to "source" a post like this?
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