141–150 of 158 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone sued rackspace for that, chances are they'd get ignored. They're too big to bother with frivolous threats that would be thrown out immediately.
I wouldn't say you can so easily throw away a court order.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure what information you want. Do you think it's ever reasonable for a VPS provider to suspend an account without telling the customer why the account was suspended? Doesn't the fact that they agreed to handle it differently in the future indicate that they even believe they handled it inappropriately?
This is not remotely rare in web hosting. If you're on a shared host and over consume resources you'll be shutdown before the admin has a chance to even generate a ticket. Some hosts don't even generate a ticket, they just suspend the account with a page that informs the owner that they've over consumed resources. Not saying it's great, but when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of VPS/cPanel accounts and one…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. It's not really about having the resources of a news organization. The "resources" are the inertia and hard-won philosophical reasoning behind having a free press. An individual's free speech has just the same amount of weight behind it as a large organization's. So he's hardly fending for himself - he has the backing of all those who support free speech behind him. There are rather many of us. Also, if your opi…
Except this isn't a free speech issue. Just like Reddit disallowing the identifications of individuals in certain kinds of stories is not a free speech issue. There are no free speech issues when a company does not wish to be associated with certain kinds of discourse on their servers. DO may have policies against hosting sites with hate speech, or pornographic content - that's ok, even though neither is illegal. Thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand where you're coming from, but while the shape is similar, "editorial control" and "upholding a ToS" are essentially different things. For example. Suppose instead that DigitalOcean staff wanted him to write about penguins. If they said "write more about flightless antarctic birds or we will pull the plug", they would be trying to exercise editorial control, because they'd be making positive assertions ab…
> When I studied law I learnt that different things, even when they lead to identical outcomes, are different, and should be dealt with independently. That may be true in a court of law. This is not a court of law. Insistence on treating it like one is a great example of why people hate lawyers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All DigitalOcean asked him to do was to give them editorial control over his blog. That isn't a small thing to me. A nitpick. They didn't ask for editorial control; they asked for observance of the Terms of Service, with the option on their side to discontinue service. Nothing in the ToS gives DigitalOcean any right to editorial control and nothing in their communications says "give us control". It's a binary propo…
"You can't publish it if we don't like it"; is editorial control. "Change this or we will take it down"; is editorial control. They asked for a specific change: the removal of the name. That seems like editorial control to me. They took the view that anything embarrassing (even if not private) about someone who is not a public figure cannot be hosted on their servers. That is an editorial policy and they are assertin…
I also note that asking for particular changes was a mistake. They should have stuck with "take it down or we will take it down", to avoid people making the argument you just made.
If only because being seen to exercise editorial control might introduce significant new legal risks that the ToS, and its policing, is presumably meant to avoid in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> DigitalOcean can cancel the contract once others found the blog post to be defamatory. Well ... that's what's happening. It's not "policing content", it's holding up their side of the contract.
I see this sort of non-argument on HN a lot. Why do you believe that just because someone has the right to do something, that changes its nature? I have the right in the US to walk down the street shouting racist slogans. If I did so, should I be immune from criticism because it's within my rights? Is one magically not-racist just because the law says racist behavior is legal?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> DigitalOcean can cancel the contract once others found the blog post to be defamatory. Well ... that's what's happening. It's not "policing content", it's holding up their side of the contract.
and their contract, it seems like, says that they can police content. It's still policing content. As a customer I didn't expect that they would for anything short of illegal.
"Policing" incorrectly applies that they are actively trawling the site and telling people what to write about. That is clearly not true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. It seems to me that they wanted editorial control via proxy. "You change this for me or I'll delete your droplet." The thing in this which really irks me is that the staff were neither co-operative nor reasonable. If you're a paying customer, the least they could do is put the complaint into a state of investigation whilst they looked into the claim. Instant ultimatum seems a bit steep. I use Digital Ocea…
I understand where you're coming from, but while the shape is similar, "editorial control" and "upholding a ToS" are essentially different things. For example. Suppose instead that DigitalOcean staff wanted him to write about penguins. If they said "write more about flightless antarctic birds or we will pull the plug", they would be trying to exercise editorial control, because they'd be making positive assertions ab…
No, their mistake was being lazy. They did not effectively explain their application of the terms of service and how, specifically, his post violated those terms until far too late in the process. [1]
At first all he got was "your post violates section 2.8: harassment, defamatory content, etc.". If just anyone can claim harassment and have a blog shut down for any reason with no review that would be a serious issue for customers that wanted to host content on Digital Ocean. He said "please explain how this violates your terms of service" and it wasn't until several mails later in the exchange that he finally got a barely adequate answer (by my standards).
Now, maybe in legal/asshole world, a service provider is not obligated to explain to a user in a reasonable fashion how the ToS has been violated (or even discouraged because that would make them liable for some bullshit or another). But in the human world, such neglect is a gross violation of customer service. If you are a potential customer of Digital Ocean, "friendliness" is not the takeaway from how they handled this.
The key issue is the risk of a service provider shutting you down because someone complained about your content. No one, no matter what sort of content they host, wants that risk if they can avoid it. From that perspective, the distinction between "Editorial Control" and "Threat of Account Termination for violation of section 2.8" is most definitely nitpicking.
[1] Note, of course, that we are seeing only one side of the story here. There may be unpublished emails that address my accusations that DO was lazy (although I don't personally believe there are)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You can't publish it if we don't like it"; is editorial control. "Change this or we will take it down"; is editorial control. They asked for a specific change: the removal of the name. That seems like editorial control to me. They took the view that anything embarrassing (even if not private) about someone who is not a public figure cannot be hosted on their servers. That is an editorial policy and they are assertin…
See my reply further down. I disagree with that characterisation. I also note that asking for particular changes was a mistake. They should have stuck with "take it down or we will take it down", to avoid people making the argument you just made. If only because being seen to exercise editorial control might introduce significant new legal risks that the ToS, and its policing, is presumably meant to avoid in the firs…
I don't like the article and if I was editing a paper or a website I would not publish the article in that form but DO is not a publisher but an infrastructure provider and for something that is not clearly illegal it seems highly inappropriate.
However they have guaranteed that I would not use them for any public facing service or content by stepping in this way (I might consider them for testing, internal or pure compute workloads).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. It's not really about having the resources of a news organization. The "resources" are the inertia and hard-won philosophical reasoning behind having a free press. An individual's free speech has just the same amount of weight behind it as a large organization's. So he's hardly fending for himself - he has the backing of all those who support free speech behind him. There are rather many of us. Also, if your opi…
Except this isn't a free speech issue. Just like Reddit disallowing the identifications of individuals in certain kinds of stories is not a free speech issue. There are no free speech issues when a company does not wish to be associated with certain kinds of discourse on their servers. DO may have policies against hosting sites with hate speech, or pornographic content - that's ok, even though neither is illegal. Thi…
As usual, it's difficult to discuss this when there's no distinction between first-amendment style free speech and the general concept of it and various interim consequences.
A site like Digital Ocean is a general-purpose hosting provider. As a general-purpose provider, their perspective on censorship and free speech is important to anyone who would be a customer of their service. "How are they going apply their ToS?" is a legitimate and important question to any user of their service. Will they be rigorous and fair? Or Will they be biased towards people who complain? Will they be biased towards certain political factions? Will they be biased towards the whims of their executives? When they apply their ToS, what recourse will you have? What is their appeal process like?
In other words, it's a "free speech" issue in the sense of "is Digital Ocean's behavior and policy adequately permissive for the content I want to host?"
This guy clearly crossed a line with the content and tone of his blog post.
How do you 'cross a line' with tone? If I am looking for a hosting provider, I am not looking for one who takes a complaint at face value, then scans my content carelessly trying to get a feel for the 'tone'. I want a specific, incontrovertible infraction that is fair and explained to as precisely as they are able.
Honestly this guy seems like a jerk to me and just from the two posts I've seen I don't like him. But it doesn't matter how I feel, it matters whether he violated the terms of service (both the letter and the spirit).