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When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

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Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#111

Post by kulahan »

Sleaker wrote: post #23
linsomniac wrote: post #12

Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made hard…

I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?

Is that what that was? I had sent myself an email the day before it started happening to me, so I thought it was just the system glitching out. That’s such a nefarious scheme!

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#112

Post by jongjong »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #77
afandian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly Firebase auth (a Google product) has such a bad reputation with GMail that standard procedure is to bring your own mail service. Or your password-reset emails are binned.

Firebase technicians allegedly attempted to contact gmail support, but found that gmail did not have an inbound support contact and thus the firebase technicians were unable to rectify their issue.* *This entire post is fabricated satire. Though, I would not be shocked if it were true.

Even inside a big corporation, even as an employee, it's hard to figure out who to talk to about various issues. So as an outsider, it feels impossible.

For security reasons, corporations don't want staff talking directly with customers. So the corporation is a blackbox with very limited communication abilities; both internal and external. It does a lot of things which affect a lot of people but if you fall through some crack, there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#113

Post by underlipton »

Sleaker wrote: post #23
linsomniac wrote: post #12

Google, especially Google Corp, is very much that way too. One of my users is currently getting a fair bit of spam because a spammer figured out that if they send a message with envelope sender @google.com, rcpt @gmail.com, google.com MX will accept it, then bounce it with NoSuchUser and gmail will accept it. I spent an hour yesterday looking for a way to contact Google about it, but couldn't find anything. Made hard…

I saw these spam mails start showing up a few months ago, and I was like WOW how is google infra just letting nefarious actors use their own domain to bounce spam/fishing emails?

I would not be surprised to discover that much of the rest of the company is collapsing because of the amount of resources that have to be poured into AI. There's precedence for this: look at how many game studios have fallen to, "Let's make an MMO!". Even in cases where it succeeds (Square Enix) and becomes a money-printer, most of the rest of the business suffers; because it's the cash-cow, nothing - nothing - is more important than keeping it running (including the judicious production of the last half-dozen games in two of SE's flagship franchises). It's easy to imagine Google diverting and squeezing resources, trying to first catch up and then stay ahead in the LLM AI race, leading to terminal enshittification of Search, and then YouTube, and now Gmail.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#114

Post by Ensorceled »

freedomben wrote: post #102
barbazoo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them. Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.

I fully agree that it is shameful that we can't contact these companies, but suppose you want to send 2fa tokens as a startup. Should you not be allowed to offer 2fa through email unless you're at a scale where you can answer every reply email?

So your startup is also ignoring info@ and postmaster@ and ...

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#115

Post by alex1138 »

chicagojoe wrote: post #74
_-_-__-_-_- wrote: post #16

I lost my facebook account about five years ago--total outright account ban. No recourse at all. It happened to a group of about 10 people that had been administrators of a local non-profit's facebook page and who had managed groups for the organization in the past. Our non-profit was non-denominational and helped local teens with after school type programs. We never knew why our personal accounts were banned. Best w…

Buying an Oculus actually did allow me to successfully restore my wife's Facebook after it was hacked, thanks to finding probably the same thread you're referencing. The amount of emotional capital held in various platforms is terrifying when you consider how easy it is to be locked out. I now regularly "takeout" all of our actively used platforms and store them on physical media.

This is corporate fraud and I would love there to be an internal email discovered, "Hey, our game plan is to control the Oculus ecosystem purely so people have to buy it if they want their Facebook account unbanned (which we'll randomly do on occasion, to ensure this happening)"

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#116

Post by j45 »

pndy wrote: post #86
j45 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The online "sign in with X/Y/Z" services are a digital identity provider. We are citizens of private corporations that are social networks. There are not many laws there for recourse or communication.

OpenID was aiming to be a decentralized digital identity solution for everyone but then companies opted out for own solutions. I'm seeing more and more sites pushing for signing with facebook/apple/google accounts and I'm afraid how the Internet may look like in a few years. It seems we're on path on total sanitization of online services, sites and content to the point where everything will be "safe", verified and au…

I'm sure there's enough folks here who have gone through the single sign on fun, which anecdotally can expose you to the independent ID hosting.

I believe it's still possible to run independent identity services and route it through one of the cloud providers in some cases.

Creating your own email address on your own domain and then enrolling your own domain in identity accounts seems to be one practice I saw being mentioned the last time I was brushing up on SSO.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#117

Post by j45 »

ryandrake wrote: post #85
j45 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies. Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability. You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself. If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.

And VPS providers are mostly interchangeable. If one of them goes crazy and starts using AI to randomly ban customers, just take all your toys over to the next one. At the end of the day it's just a commodity root shell.

It seems so obvious to those who know, and non-obvious to those who don't.

I wonder how that bridge at least awareness wise can be improved.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#118

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

freedomben wrote: post #102
barbazoo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty shameful that these large companies have no real way to contact them. Along the same lines, I think organizations shouldn't be allowed to send out email but not receive email at the same address, e.g. noreply@. That's just hostile in general.

I fully agree that it is shameful that we can't contact these companies, but suppose you want to send 2fa tokens as a startup. Should you not be allowed to offer 2fa through email unless you're at a scale where you can answer every reply email?

> Should you not be allowed to [send email at all, for any reason] unless you're at a scale where you can answer every reply email?

Hell yeah. Don't threaten me with a good time.

Re: When Knowing Someone at Meta Is the Only Way to Break Out of "Content Jail"

#120

Post by alex1138 »

a5c11 wrote: post #92
diebeforei485 wrote: post #5

It's important to have your own website, so you can post updates there. Use Meta to let people know that there is an update on the site.

Back when the internet was a nice place, I mean years 1999-2010, it was full of websites managed by individuals. Each site was different, some were pretty-hideous, quite frequently with unusual knowledge and curiosities. It was so much fun to Google them (Google was a damn good search engine back then too). Most people knew how to use FTP to upload a basic HTML page. Now it's an expert level knowledge, especially amo…

Brainless as in "We'll just make an account for you"
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