Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don’t Mess with The Google

dansdeals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 504 posts

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#391

Post by ocdtrekkie »

jdietrich wrote: post #346
perlpimp wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going on a tangent, there should probably be a set of universal backup formats that can be advertised as being somewhat portable. So that, if you need to can take your mail and other online business stuff elsewhere if need be. Beyond this article a user might start working for some place that does not allow external app use, but they can bring their data with, to be loaded onto the service. I guess like github and gi…

We do have those formats. Mbox for mail, iCalendar for calendars, vCard for contacts. They're all IETF standards. Google provide data export from nearly all of their services in standard formats. Where no established open standard exists, they provide clean HTML or JSON. https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout

I wouldn't actually call Mbox a standard. Thunderbird supports it, but I'd argue it sucks as a way to escape Gmail, because no competitor to Gmail supports it as an import method. In fact, even Gmail itself can't import from Mbox. It may be a standard in that it's defined somewhere officially, but it's not really a standard in the definition that it's commonly used.

As someone who has nearly completed their GExit, I'd say I found Takeout to be borderline useless as an export strategy.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#392

Post by icebraining »

distances wrote: post #306
joe563323 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for email ?

I'm myself using a non-profit email redirection service as my main e-mail address. They do not provide an email box, just the redirect, so they can keep the service lean with a very modest one-time fee for new members. This allows me to change the actual e-mail provider when needed. I already moved (successfully) away from Gmail, and I'm currently considering moving again as the spam protection of my current paid-for…

How does it work for sending, though?

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#393

Post by ocdtrekkie »

setq wrote: post #388
SonicSoul wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for posting this cautionary tale. I am completely dependent on Google today so if that happened i'd be F'd. Will look into exporting all my emails this weekend. But why was Google unable to re-instate you? Was it because you had no way to prove your identity to them? Were you able to reach anyone? for those in similar situation you can back up your email/calendar here: https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeo…

Contacting Google support, unless you're an Apps customer which I wasn't, is a complete waste of time. Unless you can, to quote a colleague, piss through the eye of a needle, when it comes to the security questions and details then you can't even get over the first hurdle.

From any situation where your account has been disabled, I've seen a grand total of two positive resolution strategies:

- Get a lawyer and have them contact.

- Know a Googler personally.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#394

Post by ocdtrekkie »

setq wrote: post #314
smonff wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self storage is fine but does it guaranty long term documents safety? I am very sceptical about my ability of maintaining it on the long term.

This is usually a difficult problem. Then I divided everything I have data-wise into two buckets: stuff I can't afford to lose, stuff I can. It's now simple. Also I mandate that 'everything is a file'. Turns out the former is only around 22Gb of mainly code, documents, videos and photos. The latter is 250Gb of music, films etc. The latter goes on a NAS with a mirror on the laptop. The important stuff lives on the lap…

Every six months is a very painful potential loss window. There are great sync tools that can work point-to-point over the Internet. The cost of having a NAS at home and a NAS at your parents, and then syncing between them is totally worth it.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#395

Post by ocdtrekkie »

Kristine1975 wrote: post #367
pmlnr wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a home server, which is then mirrored to a rented server. Anything critical and entirely irreplaceable goes onto blu-ray disks, because I can't accidentally delete those; though those are kept at home as well, which is not ideal. So: 2 backups, from which one is off-site and archives, just in case - this should keep you going for a while with self storage.

>Anything critical and entirely irreplaceable goes onto blu-ray disks, because I can't accidentally delete those There's bit-rot though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation#Decay_of_stor...

Check out M-Disc, most new drives, especially from LG, support burning them: http://www.mdisc.com/

They claim the discs should last 1,000 years. Obviously no-one has tested this.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#396

Post by setq »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #390
setq wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like the idea of Camlistore. But I really want something my family could actually handle if the worst came to the worst and that just happens to be bitlocker encrypted NTFS. Plug the stick in, plonk in a password and you have all my things.

What would prevent Camlistore from the same model? I guess if you're gone, the server might not be running properly, and they wouldn't know how to start it and etc. Ya? That's fair. I wonder if it would be worth it to write some type of camlistore extraction tool. Eg, plug in a USB, autoruns a script which mounts a blob store as a fuse FS. Hell, the blob store could be packed with the USB.. a sort of way to backup Ca…

Some interesting ideas but I've got to ask:

What if the ABI breaks, the CPU architecture changes or the project gives up at some point in the future?

Ergo, I prefer to leave just the data. The data is hard enough on its own: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13367398

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#397

Post by bujak »

eloisant wrote: post #221
kajecounterhack wrote: post #120

Disclaimer: I don't speak for Google and don't have any real context into why this occurred. Speaking as myself, a private citizen. I work in Spam & Abuse and it's possible that this is the result of some clustering algorithm that was trying to take down sharders / phone buying rings. It's very possible that the SWEs responsible didn't consider this possibility (that legitimate customers would be used to shard purcha…

I can confirm that I heard many stories of Android developers getting their Google Play dev account suspend for various reasons (which is already really bad in itself, if you have a popular app that makes a significant part of your revenue), but I rarely heard about full Google account suspension for a Play Store violation (maybe once or twice among dozens of Play Store suspensions stories). I'm still puzzled that th…

Yeah my account was wiped without warning after what I suspect was an automatic app review that Google introduced in Play Store at that time. It was just a niche hobby app but damn, it's not like I was a free user. I paid for the dev account. Good thing I had a separate google account for that.

I had some sloppy ndk computer vision running there, maybe it triggered something? I have no idea really. It's not like you can appeal anywhere. I was very busy with other things and let it slide at the time. I got away with a very cheap lesson I guess

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#398

Post by bawana »

This is a watershed moment for Google. Providing free email service was a way for them to get lots of data. The goal of course being to learn to massively scale computer networks, how to maintain them, back them up etc. Your data was the equivalent of 'cannon fodder' in their secret goal of controlling the world. Clearly, email has now become a burden. They can get orders of magnitude more data from the internet of things whose number now exceeds the human population on this planet. And all these things are talking to each other, sending data, etc. Our lives are inextricably dependent on these things - like automobiles, telephones, electricity, factories, etc- When google learns to optimize these networks, supply chains, distribution channels, etc. they will control the substrate on which we base our lives. People's behaviors, choices, values , etc will be manipulated without them even knowing it. Witness the first and most superficial attempt at this game - facebooks' 'fake news' campaign. Eventually, the AI that will inform these choices will be so complex that humans will not even know how to recognize it, let alone stop it.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#399

Post by rebootthesystem »

peller wrote: post #226
rebootthesystem wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll repeat what I said in my prior comment on this thread: We need a massive class action lawsuit against these companies ASAP. Google should not be allowed to cut someone off from all products without, at the very least, a reasonable period of time during which data is available in useful export formats, email still functions 100% so one can transition important accounts that use it, etc. Consumers are getting hurt…

While I don't disagree, and I'm not sure if this applies specifically to Google in this case, but as a general trend oftentimes users sign their class action rights away in the EULA by way of an arbitration clause.[0] This, in and of itself, is also IMO a huge abuse of power. But it's perfectly legal and only serves to further entrench the power of the monopolists. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration_clause

Agree and disagree.

Nobody reads these things. Ergo, nobody agrees to them.

Let's get it in front of a Jury. What do you want to bet that not one person in the Jury has ever read these incredibly one-sided, purposely obscure, usually incredibly long and complex agreements? Nobody. Not the Judge nor the Jury.

Not to get political, this is precisely one of those things that earned Democrats a defeat. Demeaning and diminishing others eventually has consequences. Being completely insensitive to the needs and plight of average folks. To hide behind EULAs crafted by the powerful, for the powerful and damn you little insignificant people is disgusting. To think so little about people and users that it is deemed OK to upend their lives instantly by a mindless, heartless algorithm.

This is the behavior of a mean vindictive totalitarian dictator, not of a business that purports to be guided by Democratic ideals and concepts such as "first do no evil". The hypocrisy is deep and wide.

Nah, a Jury would destroy them.

Re: Don’t Mess with The Google

#400

Post by jasim »

setq wrote: post #170

First post, might as well be a cautionary tale. My father, a pretty old programmer by anyone's standards, regularly warns me of this sort of thing. He was pretty much shafted by CompuServe many years ago on a miniscule scale compared to what is possible now. He lives his life in what I previously described as a paranoid bubble of data control. Until I inevitably burned myself with Google. I have no idea what happened…

https://github.com/gaubert/gmvault - backs up your gmail account to a local db, and lets you restore it to another account.
Post reply on HN