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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

#251

Post by raverbashing »

emodendroket wrote: post #122
raverbashing wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think I really should feel sorry for a megacorp that can't be bothered to treat their customers like human beings? I do feel sorry for autistic people, though.

I'm pretty sure that the intended message was that we should not associate poor customer service with autism and then tar autistic people for whatever Google decides to do.

> then tar autistic people for whatever Google decides to do.

Who's saying that?

And Google does it because of incompetence, not because of a condition they have no control over. That's the main difference

I'm not implying Google does it because they suffer from autism, and maybe there's a better adjective to describe what they do.

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

#252

Post by dahart »

DavidWanjiru wrote: post #139

When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You get the picture. That correspondence was, and remains, important to me. Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it? The answer, at least as far as…

We do have a problem because Facebook and Gmail are huge, and because people are starting to assume the convenience and size of them somehow means Facebook and Gmail should be considered public services and regulated as such.

While I see the same problem you do- that we're all at risk of losing the correspondence and history that we care about, man do I think your reaction is super weird.

Facebook and Gmail are private web sites, and always have been. You are mistaking them for public services, when they are not and never were public services. Your mistake in no way means that laws should change or that Facebook should be required to archive and provide you access in perpetuity. You made a choice, and if you realize now that your choice comes with implications you don't like, you should start correcting that choice yourself. You should collect and gather your digital assets out from Facebook and Gmail, and archive them yourself.

Facebook is not the post office. If you want the post office, use the post office. The post office services cost you money, and Facebook's don't. The post office does not archive your correspondence at all, while Facebook does. The post office delivers physical goods, while Facebook only delivers digital goods. I am just not seeing any reasonable way to conclude that you can treat Facebook like the post office in order to suggest that Facebook be required to provide you what you wish for.

Your language is so strange to me - "That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff". You gave them your stuff. If you don't want them to have it, don't give it to them.

I'm completely lost as to how the laws are unfairly balanced in this situation. I'm normally in favor of all kinds of regulation, but this just seems unreasonable to me to suggest that we should have laws that require Facebook to provide you with permanent archive access. Do you want to pay for that archive access, or are you demanding that the government ensure that Facebook has to pay for it forever? The post office isn't required to keep archives for you, how how does your analogy work here?

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

#253

Post by niroze »

x0x0 wrote: post #248
falcolas wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing about incest, necrophilia, sex with children; these are not child pornography. Neither are artistic renderings about such subjects. Only obscene photographs of actual children (and apparently 3d models with photographic skins) are considered to be child pornography (and those primarily because they are artifacts of child abuse). Unless he crossed that line, there's still no legal cause to pull down his materi…

It's perfectly reasonable for Google to not wish to host drawings of naked children, nor sex stories about underage children. That isn't censorship.

Exactly.

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

#254

Post by daveloyall »

wtetzner wrote: post #212
daveloyall wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hi…

Why did changing the TLS cert break things? Were you pinning it in your client?

I don't remember. Oh, it was this: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.mail.imap.offlineimap.genera...

But what that doesn't show is that they then changed it back, and forth... for a while. It was just a UX issue that only affected computer literate people. THE BEST KIND. :(

I remember when some combination of Gmail features* enabled me to upload my old mbox with years of personal email into my GAFYD account... emails from before Gmail publicly existed. And now I could SEARCH them! The future was bright.

I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)

* access external pop3 account and auto-rewrite message headers so messages would be associated with my gmail address even though they were originally delivered to a different domain... Brilliant.

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

#255

Post by elif »

falcolas wrote: post #245
modeless wrote: post #196

From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)." [1] I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with extreme prejudice. And of course they're…

Writing about incest, necrophilia, sex with children; these are not child pornography. Neither are artistic renderings about such subjects. Only obscene photographs of actual children (and apparently 3d models with photographic skins) are considered to be child pornography (and those primarily because they are artifacts of child abuse). Unless he crossed that line, there's still no legal cause to pull down his materi…

Google doesn't need a legal cause. It is their service, so they only need a cause defined in their own terms of service.

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

#256

Post by clevernickname »

x0x0 wrote: post #248
falcolas wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing about incest, necrophilia, sex with children; these are not child pornography. Neither are artistic renderings about such subjects. Only obscene photographs of actual children (and apparently 3d models with photographic skins) are considered to be child pornography (and those primarily because they are artifacts of child abuse). Unless he crossed that line, there's still no legal cause to pull down his materi…

It's perfectly reasonable for Google to not wish to host drawings of naked children, nor sex stories about underage children. That isn't censorship.

>Censorship is the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions. Governments, private organizations and individuals may engage in censorship.

Sounds like censorship to me, just a socially acceptable form of it. The "only governments are capable of censorship because my understanding of the idea of freedom of speech deliberately stops at the First Amendment" meme needs to die.

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

#257

Post by wmil »

_Understated_ wrote: post #43

Why did Google take him down with (presumably) no warnings? Or did they? Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve". The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final. Edit: Clarity

Google keeps per user costs low by trying to avoid all tech support. Sending an email like that invites the user to try to start a conversation.

Google really should have an option to freeze the account while allowing the user to download their content, but it seems that they don't.

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

#260

Post by frou_dh »

sliverstorm wrote: post #218
andrewclunn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would also explain why he wouldn't have local back-ups, to avoid prosecution. Though this may be something of a case of, "Innocent until algorithms say otherwise."

Considering how few people actually take backups, I'm willing to assume laziness. You wouldn't believe how many people I know who say things like, "Yeah I'd lose my entire PhD project if this laptop died, because I haven't taken a backup in X years" (and proceed to continue not backing up their work)

This seems a step before that sense of the word "backup". The guy's PC did not die.

He apparently created "GIF novels", which presumably involved using some application to work on a file on his local hard drive. What did he do after uploading the finished GIF to his blog? Manually delete it from his hard drive? Why?

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