Google Intrusion Detection Problems • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#51

Post by tlogan » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:02 PM UTC

redstripe wrote: post #12

This is the google M.O. - optimize all processes through cheap machine learning and heuristics and accept that some people will get screwed along the way. The number of people that can be served at very little cost without any human involvement is apparently very lucrative. Google just considers customer service as an archaic relic that predates the invention of behavioral algorithms.

And it works quite well from them. Yes, people on HN and on internet will complain...

Also it could be that customer support is just overrated.... The problem is that 95% of support calls / issues are anyway just people complaining about things which are not at all related to the actual Google service.

But, on the other hand, hackers which try Google Cloud and are bitten by lack of Google support do have influence on decision making process in big corporations.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#52

Post by x0x0 » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

burgreblast wrote: post #15

blakeyrat wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if it's something like YouTube you can kind of "forgive" their awful customer service in exchange for the free hosting and search features. It's a heck of a lot less forgivable for a product you pay actual money to use. The support page telling you to use a widget that doesn't exist is really going above and beyond in the realm of user-hostility.

FWIW, Dropbox also points you to buttons that don't exist. When you delete an account, DB keeps charging you. There's a nice FAQ that explains to push a "review subscription" button and blah blah, but in reality that button doesn't exist. The button isn't there. Support will "fix"it for you one-off, but not change the button. Wonder if this dark pattern is worth 3-4% of revenue.

The easiest way to fix it is to click the fraud button on your cc account =P

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#53

Post by Animats » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

Intrusion detection false alarms can be a problem if you run anything like a web crawler. I have one running at "sitetruth.com", which is a site rating system hosted on a leased server. (Not a cloud service, a leased rackmount server). One of the things it does is to find the home page of a site by trying "example.com" and "www.example.com", with and without HTTPS. Some sites will block access for 30-45 seconds if those requests are made too fast.

About once a year, there's a serious intrusion complaint, as the crawler, which obeys robots.txt, examines about 20 pages on a site in a few seconds. No more than three connections at once, but some sites are touchy. The server leasing company sends me a warning letter, I reply and call tech support, and there's no big problem.

I can recommend leasing servers from Codero as an alternative to dealing with the Borg of Mountain View. I've been a customer for five years, and nothing bad has happened. They now have "cloud services" too, but I haven't used them.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#54

Post by x0x0 » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:07 PM UTC

tscanausa wrote: post #22

My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance

So what's the support process when you screw someone but they can't hit the front page of a social media site?

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#55

Post by tscanausa » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:14 PM UTC

nikanj wrote: post #49

eadz wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does one reach someone at google in an emergency when you have no access* to any google services? * locked out of your account

Write a good blog post and get it to the front page of a news aggregator

We became aware of Fred's problem before we knew it was here.

-Terrance

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#56

Post by bpicolo » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:17 PM UTC

sargun wrote: post #47

0xmohit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's put me seriously off it vs. AWS. Can't really compare, but AWS isn't great either. I've experienced instances when an instance (1) shut down, (2) rebooted on it's own. AWS support would point you to the SLA if you were to report the incident.

EC2 instances are meant to be ephemeral.

That doesn't sound factual at all. Got docs which support that? They send us emails every time they plan on doing intentional maintenance on our instances.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#57

Post by arkitaip » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:20 PM UTC

tscanausa wrote: post #22

My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance

You know that Google has a serious problem with handling complaints and feedback when people take every opportunity to interact with an actual Google representative no matter what the topic is or if they are indeed interacting with a real Google employee.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#58

Post by oneloop » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:22 PM UTC

numbsafari wrote: post #10

CaptSpify wrote: post #4

Lol Sorry to be so harsh, but Google has always been this way. Why do people keep putting essential stuff in someone else's sandbox? Your effectivly adding a SPoF, that you have no control over

Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different? I've had similar problems in the past with Amazon shutting down services and providing little to no support to get it remediated. Even after paying for technical support, it was impossible to recover (in our case, it was a billing issue that was entirely Amazon's fault). My general recommendations are: - be sure you have fully scripted your deployment process, - be s…

> Is Amazon or Azure or Heroku really any different?

In my last work place we had paid AWS customer service, and they were outstanding.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#59

Post by oneloop » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:23 PM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #24

markstos wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a project that costs about $5k/month to self-host. After moving it to AWS, it was about $2k/month. So $36k/year savings in hosting costs. In our case outgoing bandwidth at AWS was about 10x cheaper than what our ISP offered. Having spent years help running a physical hosting company, working with virtualized servers saves LOTS of time. I still find it amazing and much, much cheaper in staff-hours to reboo…

Right, I'm not saying hosted solutions are never the answer, they are just less often the answer than people seem to think. Too many people buy into the cloud-hype, and never look at the numbers until it's too late. And that doesn't even touch the trust you have to have in your provider. And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.

> And I love virtual more than physical. But I set up my own virtual server and run them myself.

Where do you keep the machines? In your bedroom?

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#60

Post by andmarios » Mon, Aug 22, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

tscanausa wrote: post #22

My name is Terrance and I work on Google's Cloud Support Team. Our team mission is to Reduce Customer Anxiety. We take that very seriously, and Fred's experience obviously shows that we fell short this time. The process should have been an easy flow to follow, and it was not. We are reviewing this incident in detail to ensure that we make the process less error prone and quicker in the future. Best, Terrance

As someone who had a similar experience[1] with Google Cloud, I would like you to understand that in Google Cloud people place their businesses. When you switch off a project, you switch off someone's business. For anyone else, even for a goverment agency, such action would never be taken hastily. Since downtime could be catastrophic for a company, you should err on its side. Technical prowess isn't all that matters for business.

That said, we still use Google Cloud for some part of our infrastructure and enjoy its technical side.

[1] The billing credit card for one of our projects expired weeks before any invoicing would happen. Instead of informing us —after all we were paying customers for many months before, there should be at least some good faith— all our projects were disabled many minutes (maybe 15 or 30) before we got a confusing email about the issue at hand and the total downtime was two days.