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Google Intrusion Detection Problems

fredtrotter.com

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Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#121

Post by foxylad »

colinbartlett wrote: post #37

If Google is ever going to fix their cloud market share problem[1], they need to reverse the deeply engrained perception that they don't support or maintain their services for the long term. The majority of Hacker News pundits will all have the same gut reaction to these kinds of anecdotes: complete and total lack of surprise. And although not all of us are in a position to control the vast budgets of the enterprises…

I just want to say that Google's supposed lack of support is just a perception, despite all the usual comments below.

Real example: we use Appengine, and the other day I spotted a bug in a request handler. I filed an issue on the Appengine issue tracker, and have been having a back and forth conversation with a a very real (and very skilled) engineer about how to resolve it. This is outside our support contract, so anyone with an software issue has exactly the same access.

This doesn't cover situations such as the OP experienced, of course - but if they had a support contract, I think they'd have found the issue was resolved quickly and efficiently. We pay $150 a month for a silver support contract, and when we've needed help, we've got personal, prompt and effective support.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for. If your organisation depends on any service, you need effective support, and you need to pay for it. That goes for Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce or anyone else - good support costs a lot, and they all have to cover costs. Each company uses a different model, and some include more support costs in their base charges than others.

I happen to like Google's model where dipping your toe in the water costs very little, and when your service proves itself you can ramp up support as you need it. But it leaves Google open to criticism like this the OPs, who let their small project grow big without contingency planning and then complains when something goes wrong.

Finally, the only reason I'm commenting here is that I was so impressed with the support from the engineer mentioned above that I said I would mention him next time Google's perceived lack of support came up on HN. Promise kept!

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#122

Post by tscanausa »

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

HN is limiting my post rate. So I can't respond to all of you. If anyone would like to chat about reducing customer anxiety or feedback on what you would like to see on this process, you can send me an email and I will respond when I can.

Tscanausa @ Google

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#123

Post by hga »

lowleveldrone wrote: post #99
bitmapbrother wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolute BS. I've had nothing but stellar support from the Play store and you can easily contact them via chat, email or even voice.

I just tried publishing my first app to the Play store and am in the middle of a horrible experience. I wrote a little app to help myself learn birdsong. You copy some mp3s to a folder on your sdcard, open the folder in the app, and it will shuffle them and only show you the name of the file if you ask. Pretty simple, but I found it useful and thought it might be useful to other people. So I pay my $25, upload my app…

It's this linkage with the rest of your accounts that can make doing business with them particularly dangerous. After the Google+ real names debacle started, which included people using their real names which Google didn't believe, and shutting down all their Google services, I stopped using every one of their services except for ephemeral zero stickiness ones like search (fortunately I'd discovered Fastmail some time previously, and they're beyond wonderful).

Buying a house built in 1910 and having to remodel and move to it financially prompted me to buy a smart phone, and Project Fi was clearly the best match, so I've now seriously reversed that ... but that also means I now won't even think about increasing my exposure to these sorts of risks by trying to write apps for the Play store, using any of their cloud offerings, etc. My main phone and its number are too valuable, too sticky to risk.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#124

Post by hga »

ne01 wrote: post #120

I hate that Google don't give a damn about its users. To them interacting with humans is a waste of time and money... They prefer to automate everything and manage servers, robots and programs instead. The same thing happened to us in 2013 luckily had backup servers at Linode.. took them 2 weeks to solve the problem it was a bug in their billing system. Google gave us $8k credit and I gave them another try and convin…

Google, why can't you have support like DigitalOcean and Linode?

Because it's totally not in their DNA?

Because GCE and company are relatively low priority offerings? Would you agree these are higher:

Ad Words etc., which make the bulk of their money.

Search etc. which among other things has you seeing those ads.

Android and all their other efforts to keep themselves from losing their access to the users of the above.

For a while, Google+ was an anomalous offering they were pushing very hard (with this sort of brain damage with linked accounts that hit hard with their real names policy), but they might try such a stunt again.

Compared to the two service providers your mentioned, which only do one thing. Even AWS is I gather rather like that, there's it + all the Amazon selling stuff which is significantly separate. Some of the DNA is shared, but that's not all bad, such as the focus on customers.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#125

Post by noja »

1_2__3 wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love the "Reduce Customer Anxiety" phrase. Reminds me of the emergency telephone signs on the Golden Gate Bridge. They once read "Emergency Telephone in case of Breakdown", so people could call a tow truck. Then they were changed to "Emergency Telephone for Psychological Counseling" and now connect to suicide prevention. I can see someone with a flat tire on the phone, "And how does having a flat tire make you feel?"…

It's the new fad of marketing support as being an advocate for the customer. They use language and phrasing to imply they exist to make the customer happy/relaxed/productive which if it were true would be a great thing. But it's just marketing, at the end of the day support is still a large expense that some companies believe they don't have to bear. This seems to work for some companies better than others, likely du…

Don't worry dear customer, the company "understands your concerns". Great! (But that doesn't hel me get my problem solved.)

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#126

Post by noja »

Animats wrote: post #53

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 th…

> the crawler, which obeys robots.txt, examines about 20 pages on a site in a few seconds.

That seems like something that could be slowed down slightly with little negative impact, and a big positive impact (no annoyed people, no interaction with support).

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#127

Post by Johnny555 »

CaptSpify wrote: post #88
Johnny555 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because few companies can own their entire infrastructure? I'd rather restart my server in a different AZ and have Amazon deal with tracking down an intermittent networking issue than to pay a senior network administrator to open a ticket with Cisco and try to replicate it on our lab. Likewise, I really don't want to pay a power engineer to troubleshoot why our automatic transfer switch failed to transfer after a pow…

Nobody said it eliminates problems, but moving to the cloud doesnt either, it just hides them away. If that's what you want, that's OK, but at the same time, don't expect much sympathy when you make a blog-post like this and bitch about the lack of transparency on a system you don't manage. You may want to give up control of your infrastructure to someone else, but my personal (not statistical, mind you) experience i…

I have my primary services spread across 3 separate datacenters (AZ's), and backup services across 3 separate AZ's in a region on the opposite side of the country. I pay far less than I would if I put my equipment in only 3 datacenters (2 primary + one secondary) since most of my backup infrastructure is powered off.

And I have far more control than I had with colocated equipment, if I find I need to scale up my services by 2X, 5X or 10X, all it takes is a little more money during the time I need the extra hardware (i.e. end of month processing, plus holiday shopping season), I don't need to order hardware a month or two in advance and pay for it all even when I don't need it.

What I used to pay for my network infrastructure alone (hardware + support + network engineers) pays for most of my entire AWS compute infrastructure.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#128

Post by [deleted] »

foxylad wrote: post #121
colinbartlett wrote: post #37

If Google is ever going to fix their cloud market share problem[1], they need to reverse the deeply engrained perception that they don't support or maintain their services for the long term. The majority of Hacker News pundits will all have the same gut reaction to these kinds of anecdotes: complete and total lack of surprise. And although not all of us are in a position to control the vast budgets of the enterprises…

I just want to say that Google's supposed lack of support is just a perception, despite all the usual comments below. Real example: we use Appengine, and the other day I spotted a bug in a request handler. I filed an issue on the Appengine issue tracker, and have been having a back and forth conversation with a a very real (and very skilled) engineer about how to resolve it. This is outside our support contract, so a…

[deleted]

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#129

Post by breakingcups »

tscanausa wrote: post #122
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

HN is limiting my post rate. So I can't respond to all of you. If anyone would like to chat about reducing customer anxiety or feedback on what you would like to see on this process, you can send me an email and I will respond when I can. Tscanausa @ Google

I think the response has been pretty clear and near-unanimous. Here's a bullet-point version:

1. It's absurd that an automated process accuses you of trying to intrusions of third parties without providing details of what has been detected. This leaves the "accused party" (your paying customer) without ANY idea what is wrong or how to fix it.

2. The automatic suspension of the entire project within 3 days is similarly out or proportion, especially without Google attempting actual human contact first (a phone call, for example).

3. The appeal-process is apparently literally broken. Even if this weren't the case, disabling a customers entire project in an automated fashion requires WAY more ways of directly reaching Google to prevent this. Give a direct phone number in "emergencies" like this. We know it costs money and training. We expect you to accept this as a cost of doing business.

The above leads to the (at the moment rightful) impression that Google Cloud isn't ready for business, especially not small business. Turning off what could be someone's livelihood is a testament to the (possibly unintentional) arrogance that is widely perceived from Google.

Re: Google Intrusion Detection Problems

#130

Post by ufmace »

bigiain wrote: post #108
ufmace wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your help and for responding here, but I hope you guys at Google know that this seems like a major organization-level problem. There's a big perception that Google has no real customer support for anything, even if there's pretty serious amounts of money involved, fueled by a regular drumbeat of blog posts about people who had their entire livelihood shut down for unexplained reasons with no possible recou…

Even the phrase "Reduce Customer Anxiety" would increase my anxiety if I were a customer (and steels my resolve not to become one of their "acceptably-anxious customers"). "Reduce", not "remove" - it's stinks of implying there's an acceptable level of "customer anxiety" that their platform should generate, and someone's set some easily-measurable metrics and a bunch of people's KPIs - and those people are now all wor…

> "Hey, my bonus depends on reducing the clicks on the "Request an appeal" button..."

That sounds entirely too plausible as the real root cause of this problem.

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