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

Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

investingchannel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 211 posts

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#91

Post by Clubber »

b4ux1t3 wrote: post #80
Clubber wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that seems ... anticompetitive.

Er, no, it seems anti-spam. The fact of the matter is, plenty of people use dime-a-dozen hosting to make spam bots. These days, you're better off using a reputable mail service as opposed to rolling your own, unless you have a fairly large company.

It is anti-spam, but it is also anticompetitive to block anyone that isn't gmail or an already known big player in that space. Apparently lots of people are having trouble setting up a mail server on their own without getting blocked by Google. Can you see that as a problem for the intent at large? I wonder what kinda marketshare gmail has.

It's probably a problem they aren't in a hurry to solve either.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#92

Post by mirimir »

nxc18 wrote: post #84
b4ux1t3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they have _millions_ of users that have never had a problem. It's far more likely this is a mistake than any kind of malicious act, just given the sheer number of customers they have.

We've had multiple people prominent enough to make the front page of hacker news in the last few months. Maybe we should get some statistics on how many people are prominent enough and controversial enough to land on the front page of hn, then work back to how many of their millions of customers are actually affected. Its probably a lot more than just 1.

Yes, I suspect so. What it takes, arguably, is being just controversial enough to attract complaints and/or attention from algorithms. But not famous enough for a ban to attract huge attention in mainstream media.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#93

Post by Nomentatus »

pishpash wrote: post #39
xiaoma wrote: post #2

No idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market... Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very distur…

We're already beginning to see this effect in "customer service" fields: talking with intellectually deficient and apathetic bots to solve any problem is the worst experience ever, and Google is leading the charge.

Google's AI jumbling up my search queries and insisting on answering entirely different questions from the one I asked has finally pushed me to duckduckgo (which is greatly improved and not yet as botty.) So I bet you're right thinking it's a demented bot. Such bots (and especially, "forests" of bots) tend to punish anything that's sufficiently eccentric.

This could be countered by a separate forest of bots that looks for and identifies "mere eccentricity" (such as very heavy internet search use that will inevitably trigger many false bot hits re terrorism merely due to the law of averages.) But we're not that sophisticated yet, it would seem, judging by results. [Run to the patent office! First to file means anyone can steal this idea!]

Luckily, in this case, you won't be hit with a drone strike because you have an odd web site; but in other cases sudden death from the skies has been the result of bot analysis of mass intercepted communications targeting entirely innocent people.

Just to be clear, I actually rather like the idea of drone strikes on bad guys, just not idiotic-algorithm-triggered drone strikes, thanks so much.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#94

Post by amrrs »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #49
metalliqaz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry for being that guy, but what is AMP in this context?

Accelerated Mobile Pages It's a weird accelerator thing for mobile. I've never quite figured out its use case except to hoover up more metrics for Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages

The use case is simple: Transcend through adblockers and show ads in mobiles. Mobile users primarily use adblockers because websites suck their data and also speed. AMP ensures faster content delivery and lite data and also comes with ads.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#95

Post by cityhall »

b4ux1t3 wrote: post #78
xiaoma wrote: post #2

No idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market... Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very distur…

Er, Google has millions of users who have absolutely no problems. One (or even dozens) of bad stories is a tiny percentage of the interactions that take place on their services. It's _far_ more likely to be a mistake than anything untoward, just based on the sheer numbers.

Your Honor, please consider the thousands of banks I didn't rob.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#96

Post by deivid »

philipodonnell wrote: post #65
Clubber wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours. If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.

Its not the mail server, its deliverability. If you can set up a $5/month server to send email so can every spammer ever and the big mail providers know this. Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.

I did this. If you comply with some basic stuff like DKIM and ptr you get 100% accepted on everything but hotmail. I don't know how to get hotmail/outlook to stop greylisting me consistently.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#97

Post by jerf »

philipodonnell wrote: post #65
Clubber wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly recommend everyone to look into hosting your own mail server. DigitalOcean will rent you a Linux VM for $5 a month or something crazy like that. You can figure out how to install postfix/dovecot/squirrelmail it in a few hours. If nothing else, it keeps critical functionality decentralized, and you learn something and $5 a month for career insurance is pretty damn cheap.

Its not the mail server, its deliverability. If you can set up a $5/month server to send email so can every spammer ever and the big mail providers know this. Mail sent like this won't be delivered anywhere with even the most basic spam filtering which includes blacklists of known spam-source IP address blocks like Digital Ocean/AWS/Heroku.

I have a personal mail server that collects my mail, but use my "default" Comcast MX to send. I'm sure metric craptons of email flow through that, but a lot of ham does too, so I've never been blacklisted.

I'd suggest that rather than the goal being to instantly leave this service or that the instant that they offend you, that you envision your policy as one of being ready to leave if you ever need to. The biggest key to that is having your own domain name and using that as your email address. Right now having your own domain is the biggest superpower you can have on the net, even with the events of last week. Honestly, pretty much everyone reading this from the US ought to own a domain name and be using it at least for their email address, even if it's purely delegated to gmail for the time being. They're too cheap to pass up the flexibility they offer.

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#98

Post by jszymborski »

bartbutler wrote: post #90
jszymborski wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email providers that I would trust: * Fastmail.com -- good reputation and track record at reasonable prices * mailbox.org -- long track record, privacy-oriented, German-based. Some people describe the mail UI as aging (it's OX suite), but I like it just fine. * Protonmail.com -- UX & privacy focused email with fancy in-browser encryption. Protonmail-to-protonmail emails are E2E (OpenPGPjs). No IMAP, and in-browser (r…

ProtonMail is OpenPGP under the hood, not 'custom' encryption. Tutanota is custom.

My bad, will edit accordingly.

The in-browser, over-the-wire javascript crypto implementation still makes me nervous. I'd love to hear some compelling evidence to the contrary, but as I understand most of what has been stated before about in-browser crypto hasn't changed much [0].

[0] https://tonyarcieri.com/whats-wrong-with-webcrypto

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#99

Post by mmagin »

Having hosted my own email for about 18 years, I don't really think relying on free services from Google is any better than when we used to change ISPs (or when we graduated from college) and had to get a new email address.

I'm not seeing "google is evil" here as much as "we need to do more to inform people that free services from giant companies may change or go away at any time without notice."

Re: Statistics Professor Just Banned by Google: Here Is His Story

#100

Post by avip »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #8
xiaoma wrote: post #2

No idea what all was on his blog and other google accounts, but according to the article they were used for his work at the university. Also some credible sites like the NYT linking into the disabled blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/business/the-stock-market... Google may have had some good reasons or it may have just been an example of ML discriminating against a name like Salil. Either way, it's very distur…

This type of behavior + AMP has pushed me off google completely. I'm determined to cut them out of my technical life entirely, I've even switched myself and everyone I know/support off their DNS. I can't support their shady practices anymore.

> I've even switched myself off their DNS

So this is how tech-nerds revenge their nemesis.

Post reply on HN