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Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

vpsexperience.wordpress.com

21–30 of 158 posts

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#21
post #14

So? DO is a private company offering a service. They're not obliged to accept your money. Don't like them, go elsewhere.

I'm glad I found out what kind of service they offer before I signed up for it, which I might have been tempted to do otherwise.

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#22
post #15

1. Has none of the "alpha geeks" involved ever hear of or Google the "Streisand Effect"? 2. Though the issue raised is one that's worth debating, what Collins said wasn't particularly newsworthy or inflammatory and may not even disqualify him from some day winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet the way the OP referred to his remarks, by the time I clicked through to see the juicy details, I was expecting something on the…

I thought the entire article sounded like a bit of an overreaction. It sounds like hashbrownchew (vpsexperience.wordpress.com) wrote this article with the intent of stirring up as much controversy as possible. However, when I read through it I was perplexed. Reading the article[1] that DO asked him to edit did not give me much sympathy for hashbrownchew either. He refers to Collins as "one obnoxious Googler" and then somewhat-creepily investigates (with instructions) where Collins is lives to use for another inflammatory point. This entire article sounds much like a hashbrownchew is a papparazzi trying to provoke a reaction from Collins and then trying to further stir up controversy after misrepresenting Collins gets him into trouble. I really do not see why he didn't just edit the article to be anonymous. Whether he _has_ to edit it or not isn't clear, but it is the polite thing to do.

1. http://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/googler-speaks...

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#23
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the two of you are only disagreeing on what "liberal" means; it tends to mean something quite different in Europe than in the US :)

They said they're both European

I guess both are liberal in the US sense of term but are not agreeing about if they have to mandatory delete the contents or to mandatory do the reverse. :)

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#24

FWIW, all I ever read about on HN is how DO is constantly a disaster. Why you would choose to host there is beyond me. Just move your blog- It takes all of a few hours.

I had an incident where there was a problem with one of my droplets and their response was to shut down all of my droplets, and only leave me a message saying they needed to verify my identity. I had to ask questions to even figure out why my droplets were shut down. After communicating with them for about a half a day they agreed to turn them all back on and in the future to only shut down the offending droplets (without giving them my identity, by the way). I'm still using DO but will definitely scale back in the future, they seem to be run like a hobbyist gaming clan forum.

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#25

The real issue here is whether Digital Ocean should be enforcing a term in their ToS to prevent users from using their network in various socially negative ways. As a liberal-ish European, I think they should, but I appreciate this stance doesn't necessarily play well in the US. Nonetheless, taking quotes from an informal chat room and turning them into a biased, borderline libelous blog post isn't cool. It's immater…

Libel implies it's not true. If it is true then it is legal (as far as I am aware).

The original blog post strikes me as possibly slightly biased, but probably true, therefore not libellous.

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#26

FWIW, all I ever read about on HN is how DO is constantly a disaster. Why you would choose to host there is beyond me. Just move your blog- It takes all of a few hours.

FWIW, this is one of only a few 'bad' DO incidents I've seen, among many very positive things.

As a DO user for over a year, I can say I am mostly very happy with the service I have received, although I hope they issue a statement about this, apologising to the author and pledging to review their policies on this.

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#27
Solution: Stop using a 2-bit cloud provider.

But none of this would have happened if the article author realised that companies all over the world are doing this. In the UK there are even "zero hour contracts". Welcome to capitalism and life not being fair :)

Other than the Googler clearly being an unsympathetic simpleton. I'd hazard a guess that almost all other permies at Google, or any company, would be equally as disinterested and unversed in the subject at hand. It simply doesn't come on to the average, particularly the "well employed", person's radar.

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#28

The real issue here is whether Digital Ocean should be enforcing a term in their ToS to prevent users from using their network in various socially negative ways. As a liberal-ish European, I think they should, but I appreciate this stance doesn't necessarily play well in the US. Nonetheless, taking quotes from an informal chat room and turning them into a biased, borderline libelous blog post isn't cool. It's immater…

Libel implies it's not true. If it is true then it is legal (as far as I am aware). The original blog post strikes me as possibly slightly biased, but probably true, therefore not libellous.

Indeed; political campaigning 101 (at least here in the UK) is that libel must both:

    * contain false statements AND
    * be designed to damage reputation.
If only the latter, then it's not libel.

However, if it's the former as well, then both the author and the publisher/printer can be sued, so DO in this case are protecting their own legal status by removing libelous material.

Saying you don't like someone online, quoting them and making inferences, are all part of normal political debate and are not libelous.

Quoting somebody out of context, or changing the quote, and implying that they believe the direct opposite of what they actually said, would be untrue and therefore would be libelous. True quotes, backed up by screenshots, would not fall into this category, at least in the UK.

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#29
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats interesting. As a liberalish European, I think DigitalOcean shouldn't be allowed to police their content, just as ISPs shouldn't be allowed to block websites at their whim. Thats clearly in the realm of courts and lawyers. DigitalOcean can cancel the contract once others found the blog post to be defamatory.

Perhaps the two of you are only disagreeing on what "liberal" means; it tends to mean something quite different in Europe than in the US :)

Looking in the dictionary, I see liberal as "willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own", which is what I (as a European) had always thought -- what does it mean in America?

Re: Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.

#30

Enjoy the cloud. Nothing more to be said. With the current "Waiver all rights in the TOS and no legal protections for the customers" it is only going to get worse. I think that cloud services and telecoms and ISPs should be designated as common carrier with the protections and obligations that come from that.

That depends (as one commenter hinted to) on the level of service that the cloud services provider is providing.

If they are providing essentially a bare machine or VPS, then clearly they shouldn't have editorial control over your blog that happens to be hosted on the hardware. But when it gets to more managed services I think the issue is blurred.

- Scenario 1: hire a VPS, set up a mail server on it, send emails that your host doesn't want you sending. - I'd say there's nothing they should be able to do here. - Scenario 2: using a scalable email service (like Amazon SES?) to send emails that the host doesn't like. - I'm much less sure about this.

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