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

Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#181

Post by TeMPOraL »

p410n3 wrote: post #70
apexalpha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning. A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the A…

These are exactly the cases that worry me. ML / AI is not ready to be used like that. IDK if it ever will be, but they are already using it in production anyways.

Worse than that, these systems are perfect for decision laundering. You can make the system do arbitrary judgements, and blame negative consequences on "bias in the training data" or such.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#182

Post by theshrike79 »

gundmc wrote: post #95
euph0ria wrote: post #17

The company I work for has banned the use of Google Cloud due to how they treat their Play Store developers, in particular that there never seems to be any human being that you can talk to and find out what you need to do to fix the situation. We do not want the same to occur to our servers or if there is an overflow from Play Store ban to GCP etc.

Google Cloud actually has pretty good and reachable support including by phone in case you have login issues.

What if my Google Cloud account gets nuked because of something not related to it? Can I still contact the Cloud support to get my account back open again?

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#183

Post by londons_explore »

arnaudsm wrote: post #4

As usual, some Googler browsing HN will reactivate his account, everyone will forget and Google won't change a thing to his unbanning process.

People at Google really do want to fix this... But it's a minefield of:

* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)

* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)

* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.

* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.

* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.

* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.

* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.

Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#184

Post by novok »

dankboys wrote: post #128
jug wrote: post #55

This makes me anxious about my long time Gmail address. Back then I got it just because it and Google was cool, and their services had a good reputation. It was a different Google back then. If they had launched it this year I would never have got one because chances are it would have been cancelled by 2025. Gmail is really the only valuable thing that actually ties my life to Google. And it's not that hard to replac…

This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)

The best thing is using your own domain, then you can change your providers whenever you need to.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#185

Post by blntechie »

krageon wrote: post #177
theshrike79 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/

If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".

Is .dev or .io considered a well-known gTLD by now? I’m in process of setting up email for my .dev domain.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#186

Post by krajzeg »

I just wish that regulation would step in and make behavior like this illegal for the corporate giants. It is definitely possible to limit the power of the TOS, and it's already done in some cases in Europe (certain common TOS clauses are just void and do nothing).

One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination.

But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#187

Post by akvadrako »

krageon wrote: post #177
theshrike79 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start the process of getting out right now. Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product. I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995. [1] http://www.iki.fi/

If you get your own domain, get one on a well-known TLD (e.g. .com, .org or your own country code). If you get a gTLD that's not well-known, there are some endpoints that will block you because your email is "not valid".

It's not a big deal. I've had a .so domain for a decade and have only had to use a different email a couple times.

There is a different danger however — after about 8 years the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#188

Post by sadmann1 »

The only thing scarier than the thought that Google has algorithms that track your every move is that these algorithms are fundamentally faulty and furthermore they take decisions based on these algorithms. Case in point Google ads thinks I'm 70 years old and married

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#189

Post by demurgos »

jonbon2 wrote: post #98
warent wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been considering getting a new email address on a personal domain so it can be more portable and I can change providers. Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?

Take a look at migadu.com

I second this. Migadu has great support and affordable prices. I also like the fact that you can link any number of domains to your account without extra costs.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#190

Post by berdario »

SXX wrote: post #34
newbie578 wrote: post #19

I just don’t understand Google leadership, how can you allow stuff like this to happen and just ignore it? Your brand keeps getting more and more tainted, people make jokes out of your strategy and tendency to give up like a little child... I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did t…

What Eric Schmidt would do to help with Google Account bans? Bans without any appeal process were a problem since foundation of Google and it's exactly how Schmidt built that company. The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.

> were a problem since foundation of Google

You might be right, but Google changed as a company.

They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)

They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)

And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)

The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)

(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)

Post reply on HN