Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

561–570 of 1001 posts

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

#561

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.

Same here. We're only in the high six figures in annual spend, but we wanted to do some low-level multi-cloud replication of our data and database read replicas, maybe looking toward compute multi-cloud in the future. Google Cloud entered and exited the discussion within a day.

We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.

We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.

Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.

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

#562

Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours…

Yes, in practice you always have to rely on someone. Even before the internet you'd have to rely on the USPS to carry your letters. Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.

Well you can always just create your own courier. If you want true free speech these days you need to build your own stack from the ground up anyway.

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

#563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit. They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to wa…

There's no reason they can't put a reasonable support ticket price in place. Hell - MS has been doing it for ages. Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's…

That's pretty much an impossible (or at the very least, asymmetric) amount of money in much of the world.

So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places.

How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?

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

#564
There are some pretty straightforward solutions for this;

1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.

2. Don't mix different business units on the same account. (Your 5-year old adsense page you forgot about probably isn't compliant anymore).

3. If your personal account gets banned, hire someone whose job it is to manage your business google accounts and don't touch them.

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

#565

Here's the thing people need to realize: your email address, phone number, and any other digital identifier can be stripped and taken from you by whoever owns the service at any time. It doesn't matter if you host your own domain/mailer daemon, the host and/or registrar can choose to suspend your account as well. So really, there is no solution. Other than the realization that our communications channels are not ours…

The PGP trust graph is the ultimate fallback here. As long as your public key is out there you can even not have DNS and change your IP address and still be able to prove the identity.

Self-custody has risks too, most notably theft or loss of the private key. It's tradeoffs all the way down.

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

#566

Hey Google here is a feature: account reputation, anyone doing business with you, has that flag enabled and human reviewers will be supporting them

> anyone doing business with you If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that? Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.

> If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?

You can't please everyone; here is how I would frame it.

Stadia developers and business partners receive Enterprise Support.

It's absurd that they aren't already doing something like this.

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

#567
post #285

It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies. At the very least, companies must be legally required to present you in writing with the so-called violation of terms they're accusing you of, evidence of the violation, and a phone # or other immediate contact so that you can dispute the accusations. It's insane that these basic legal rights don…

> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.

Nope. That gives players like Google a platform to negotiate from now and in the future, and it won't curb abuses long term. These abuses are a symptom of economic concentration and a lack of competitive markets. The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.

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

#568
post #528

I feel like Google is a case study in an engineering only company. Everything is reduced to a technical problem. Incentives are aligned to solve technical problems. No one wants to work on something unless it is technically interesting and new. There is no incentive at all for delivering an excellent user experience over the long term - which usually can't be done with tech only, and involves a lot of dredge work of…

Brilliant comment

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

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine any serious new project starting on Google Cloud with their lack of human support? I wonder if Google knows this is why they will never compete with Azure or AWS.

I use Google Cloud and the support has been pretty good. We have an account manager, engineering support contacts, all sorts. We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account. There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.

> We also have SLAs so they can't just cut off our account.

hold my datacenter

Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?

I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.

I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.

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

#570
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hosted Nextcloud with OnlyOffice/Collabora and a Mail Server? There's quite a few providers for that.

Yes, I did consider this option. The only issue is the Mail Server. It has to be secure & maintained. + SSO for all services would be ideal.

Consider cloudron if you want an easy to maintain mail server. It works really well.
Post reply on HN