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

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

#731

Post by throwaway19937 »

sparkling wrote: post #91
scrollaway wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utterly untrue. AWS is not a 'systematic risk', that's absolutely ridiculous and I can't even begin to address that statement.

The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.

> The recent Parler incident is proof otherwise. If you happen to cause any inconvenience for them, you are at risk of being cut off.

AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.

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

#732

Post by spullara »

falcolas wrote: post #698
remus wrote: post #684

While I agree with the broader point that there should be avenues for someone who's account is incorrectly closed this article is pretty vapid. There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there…

> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users Who cares? No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc…

The justice system isn't even close to error free even with a fair trial, as we define it, so I'm not sure that this is a good analog.

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

#733

Post by CivBase »

jennyyang wrote: post #658

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow v…

> We need to politicize this issue.

We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.

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

#734

Post by AceJohnny2 »

If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives.

At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".

You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?

(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])

Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?

There's a lot of money riding on that.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...

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

#735

Post by eldavido »

jennyyang wrote: post #658

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow v…

No!

What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.

I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.

Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.

Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.

"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.

"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.

"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.

Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.

What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".

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

#736

Post by gerash »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #673
robotresearcher wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors). Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want? Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad e…

Counter-counterpoint They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.

I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse.

That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.

If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history?

The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario.

Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.

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

#737

Post by jtbayly »

spullara wrote: post #718
shakezula wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get v…

For better or for worse, that is good customer support with clear remediation procedures.

Not answering a simple question about what the options are, followed by irrevocably deleting data the user wants. That’s what you think good customer support looks like? I never want to be your customer.

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

#738

Post by sneak »

gumby wrote: post #729

As with mobile phone companies, airlines, and ISPs you need to treat google as your enemy. All of the above consider you a necessary evil or risk. (Unlike airlines and telecommunications companies I don't believe google actively hates its users at all. It just sometimes behaves like those who do, due to the nature of things). For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small custo…

> 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.

How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a different Google account links them (and could cause multiple accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice number.

For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone numbers several times.

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

#739

Post by jVinc »

People complaining they they want the game on stadia and blaming the creator are really just being assholes. Imagine if you spent 3 full weeks figthing some extremely obvious extremely silly but on some system, like adding two integers causing a runtime error. Would you really continue to work even harder trying to support that platform?

The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn shit together.

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

#740

Post by esja »

eldavido wrote: post #735
jennyyang wrote: post #658

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow v…

No! What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want. I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process does…

Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
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