Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

uploader.win

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 296 posts

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#161

Post by edoceo »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #153
edoceo wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its the terms of service users agreed to. Prices not relevant

That doesn't sound right. If you charge money, you have to deliver a product that's fit for service. You can't take people's money then refuse to deliver. At least here in the UK, EULAs that say You have no recourse if we completely fail to deliver are generally disregarded in court, as it should be.

But this scenario is neither a refusal or complete failure (debatable). But again, the terms of service are more important than the price factor.

The big G say they can kick you off whenever/wherever.

That it's free in price is just another way to give the "customer" (really just user) less power.

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#162

Post by that_guy_iain »

imwillofficial wrote: post #141
that_guy_iain wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said their test scripts worked but people using Chrome got an error. So I take that as in their scripts weren't using Chrome at all. To be fair, I've not had this happen yet so I am going to try and find a site that chrome won't let me visit and see what happens when I visit it programmatically.

When that warning page is thrown, is a 200 returned? It could “load” ok, but be blocked by a flag for chrome that isn’t http flag. Total guess. Anyone have any insight on that page showing up?

After a bunch of searching I found a test URL. https://testsafebrowsing.appspot.com/s/malware.html via my Chrome script I get a 500. And when ignoring it in chrome manually it returns a 200 so the web url works.

This is totally an edge case I didn't even think of until I read that blog. Super happy that my monitoring approach picks up on it.

For others wanting to do the same I'm using chromedp. It does take up way more resources tho. I worked out I can do 90 per minute per 8-core 16gb server.

[1] https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#164

Post by hctaw »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #90
pja wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Google has set things be up so that they have no legal responsibility & even if they do it's an enormous legal mountain to climb to a) prove it and b) get any kind of reasonable recompense out of them. Currently they have all the benefits of their monopoly with none of the responsibility which is exactly the way they like it.

Go figure why nobody keeps them accountable. They have enough money to influence the USA government if anything changing the situation were to be introduced.

They're a frequent target of rhetoric and legislation by the republicans. Granted, nothing comes of it because the fundamental issue they have is that reality has a liberal bias.

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#165

Post by still_grokking »

aboringusername wrote: post #41

Anyone who thinks this is the functioning of a "normal" internet is mistaken. This is a symptom of a decades-in-the-making problem. It strongly appears those in charge of legislation are not technically minded and have no idea "how" the internet works. Or they do and they have data-sharing agreements with all the 'big tech' software and are okay to "appear" to legislate but cannot actually change anything substantial…

> It strongly appears those in charge of legislation are not technically minded and have no idea "how" the internet works.

Of course they know. Everybody knows, it's just a series of tubes.

But that's not the point. The people in charge also know:

> If Google dislikes you (or their baseless algorithms that are detached from reality) then you are toast.

Replace here Google with FAANG, and see how whole countries are completely depended on those companies. At this point those companies can blackmail any government on earth into almost anything they want. FAANG are actually even richer than most countries on this planet.

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#166

Post by C19is20 »

martin_a wrote: post #20

> But there are plenty of Google engineers and good helpful people on Hacker news. > (from a screenshot) I work at Google [...] so I escalated your issue [...] > I believe the HN thread getting on the homepage tremendously helped me and somebody from Google saw it and expedited the review after all So, once more an issue with FAANG could only be fixed because somebody knew somebody else and went out of his way to get…

Isn't that how life works?

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#167

Post by gambiting »

whatshisface wrote: post #137
superzamp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point they, and other giants, successfully demonstrated that they cannot regulate themselves over these random terminations and that the public needs to step in.

Rather than further secure their market positions by forcing them to treat their customers well, why not replace the entire company by competition from less insane providers?

No. Absolutely hard disagree.

To give you an example of this working well:

In some countries(UK) regulators recognized that you cannot operate in the society without a bank account. So a rule was made that a bank cannot close down your bank account without a court order. They can block your access to nearly all other services, block all of your cards, but at the end of the day, you cannot lose access to your basic bank account and money in that account unless a judge says otherwise. The solution to the problem of "every citizen needs a bank account to function" wasn't "let the free market sort it out". It was to force banks to maintain access to a basic checking account no matter what until a court order is given.

In my opinion, Google should be forced to do exactly the same - no matter what, you should never lose access to your google account without a court order. It might be placed under severe restrictions(no new uploads, restriction to storage etc) pending review, but until a lawful court agrees that you broke the rules somehow and google is free to kill your account? They should be forced by law to keep providing their service.

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#168

Post by mhio »

trinovantes wrote: post #148

How do cdn providers (Cloudflare, Cloudfront etc.) avoid the subdomain blacklisting problem? Do they just have some agreement with browser vendors to whitelist their all of their subdomains because they're big enough?

Mozilla maintains a public suffix list - https://publicsuffix.org/

https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/blob/master/public_suff...

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#169

Post by fefe23 »

matthewheath wrote: post #152
fefe23 wrote: post #32

Can someone explain to my why Google isn't being drowned in a torrent of lawsuits? We are getting stories like this on a weekly basis now. Google is clearly causing measurable harm to your company and you. And apparently to thousands before you. Considering how much money patent trolls manage to extract from Big Tech with considerably weaker cases, how is it that everybody is treating Google like a fragile grandmothe…

In the UK at least, these consequences (website going offline / certificate warning / unsearchable in the search engine) would likely be deemed "pure economic loss" following Spartan Steel & Alloys Ltd v Martin & Co (Contractors) Ltd [1973] QB 27 and Murphy v Brentwood District Council [1991] 1 AC 398 where the Court of Appeal and House of Lords respectively held that unless some sort of physical harm was suffered to…

I'm guessing the web site has telemetry and analytics and can show the conversion rate going down. If the web site sells something, you could even put a dollar amount on the damage.

I'm probably misunderstanding your argument here, but if, say, Google steals your bike that would be purely economic damage. Surely the UK legal system would still punish that...!?

Re: Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

#170

Post by klingon79 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #86

>Now we run automated tests to monitor server uptime and check server for problems every 30 seconds. Unfortunately automated test scripts were happily getting HTTP/200 replies while people using the Chrome browser were being told this is a scam business trying to steal their bank account information. I was surprised this wasn't part of the lessons learned. But it seems the monitoring basically failed but that wasn't…

How would Google know that a site is curling another site?

Why would they flag that as a phishing site?

I’m just having a difficult time determining how this situation is not the fault of the site/app; we don’t even know that any of this is true and it looks more scripted than an offended rant.

Post reply on HN