Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by mceachen » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:39 AM UTC

bilater wrote: post #192

mguerville wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI you’re also blocked by some lists on NextDNS, consequently I couldn’t view your site. I bet that’s a consequence of the google issue, best of luck solving this.

Oh no! But how would they know? Now I'm worried some malware is running on my site or something...

Check the webmaster tools on Google, Bing, and any other relevant search engine. If they've detected malware on your site, the webmaster tooling will highlight it.

Virustotal.com also supports URL scanning, of you're concerned about a specific payload.

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

#202

Post by listenallyall » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:40 AM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #146

imwillofficial wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

McDonald’s did not “burn off a woman’s labia” That’s some dumb shit right there.

She had full thickness burns requiring debridement and skin grafts. You probably need to read up on her injuries before calling it dumb shit.

This incident happened, however the initial post is highly misleading. "McDonald's" (a corporation) did not burn anything. An elderly woman was served a cup of coffee -- the same coffee their restaurants serve to millions of people every day, without incident -- and in this woman's case, she spilled it on herself which caused severe burns. Not claiming McDonald's is faultless, probably the coffee was in fact dangerously hot, however the OP makes it sound like the woman was assaulted with a blowtorch or something where an employee intended to harm the victim.

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

#203

Post by bilater » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

mceachen wrote: post #201

bilater wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh no! But how would they know? Now I'm worried some malware is running on my site or something...

Check the webmaster tools on Google, Bing, and any other relevant search engine. If they've detected malware on your site, the webmaster tooling will highlight it. Virustotal.com also supports URL scanning, of you're concerned about a specific payload.

Thanks - at least the online tools like Virustotal don't show anything.

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

#204

Post by jimmont » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #179

So, clearly Google has too much power over the internet, it's arbitrary and opaque, etc. I agree. However, I think it is worth pointing out that: 1) malware is often very aggressive and fast-spreading, and once it's on a user's computer it's hard to get off, therefore... 2) the system to detect it and stop access to the site has to be automated, not a human-in-the-loop system that might take hours or days to shut off…

The things this situation posed in the article illuminate are that proper government oversight and distribution of concerns are a necessary part of balancing power. The tensions designed into a system help address its edge cases to varying degrees. And the article points out how to manage one of these situations generally--it's an excellent list of insights. Automation should be balanced with humans in the loop, automated systems are imperfect, humans are too. Balanced systems with separations of concerns yield good results. Discretion can be exercised and applied appropriately and the relationships with their respective concerns can sort out these edge cases and share that info when and where it furthers common interest.

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

#205

Post by brigandish » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #189

gambiting wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

And how helpful is that when they can stop card access? That seems like a perfect example of a regulation that ended up being almost entirely useless.

They actually supply a type of card that is limited in what it can do, and you can always go in and use the counter service.

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

#206

Post by arp242 » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:55 AM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #179

So, clearly Google has too much power over the internet, it's arbitrary and opaque, etc. I agree. However, I think it is worth pointing out that: 1) malware is often very aggressive and fast-spreading, and once it's on a user's computer it's hard to get off, therefore... 2) the system to detect it and stop access to the site has to be automated, not a human-in-the-loop system that might take hours or days to shut off…

I absolutely agree, and the same applies to things like moderating YouTube and such. The scale is mind-boggling, and people will do anything to get past any measures you put in place. It's a hard problem to solve, and I feel people are too quick to jump to the "Google bad" bandwagon.

But that being said, by far the biggest problem is just the lack of recourse and communication. Compare this to email spam prevention and the like, which solves a very similar problem but if you accidentally get blacklisted you can just talk to the SpamHaus people or whatnot and get the problem sorted.

It's not hard to imagine how Google could improve here: send better notifications when something is blacklisted, provide a reason why, and offer a better procedure to get your problem fixed.

Yes, this will cost time and money due to the large scale of things. But if you have the ability to block parts of the internet for much of the population then you also have some responsibility here; you can quite literally kill companies with this. Email spam prevention usually step up to this responsibility. Google ... not so much.

Mistakes will still happen, and that's okay. I appreciate the hard job they're doing, which does provide a lot of value. It's how you deal with those mistakes that matters, and Google deals with them terribly across all of their products.

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

#207

Post by ambivalence » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:56 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #189

gambiting wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

And how helpful is that when they can stop card access? That seems like a perfect example of a regulation that ended up being almost entirely useless.

What's up with the loaded rhetoric?

You can still do most things without card access:

- keep standing orders flowing;

- transfer your money out through the mobile app or website;

- withdraw money from an ATM using an authenticator (nation-wide example in Poland: https://www.blik.com/);

- if push comes to shove, go to a branch and withdraw your money in person.

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

#208

Post by imwillofficial » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #202

DanBC wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She had full thickness burns requiring debridement and skin grafts. You probably need to read up on her injuries before calling it dumb shit.

This incident happened, however the initial post is highly misleading. "McDonald's" (a corporation) did not burn anything. An elderly woman was served a cup of coffee -- the same coffee their restaurants serve to millions of people every day, without incident -- and in this woman's case, she spilled it on herself which caused severe burns. Not claiming McDonald's is faultless, probably the coffee was in fact dangerou…

Exactly.

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

#209

Post by dannyw » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 2:04 AM UTC

teclordphrack2 wrote: post #198

megous wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order to sue them, you need to come up with something that they should’ve done but didn’t. How so? If you sue for damages, you only have to prove you were harmed by Google's actions, no? And actively misrepresenting your website as dangerous and deceptive to your customers is sort of libelous and clearly damaging.

Google has no obligation to list you on their search results or allow access to your site through their browser. > ctively misrepresenting your website as dangerous and deceptive to your customers is sort of libelous and clearly damaging. Except the OP even said someone uploaded a malicious file that was put in a place publicly accessible. Google was not being libelous. There was a malicious file.

Although if it was a mistake without a malicious file, I can see a libel lawsuit going.

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

#210

Post by jhugo » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

bilater wrote: post #91

stonecraftwolf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m so sorry this happened to you. Can you show us the site?

The site is https://nextails.com/ I just ran ads with headlines like Nextjs + TailwindCSS Landing Pages Apparently somehow I ran afoul of their Circumventing Systems policy. I don't know how this qualifies and when I appealed they came back saying the same thing.

I’ve been banned by the Circumventing Systems policy before (a few years ago), with no explanation of what system I circumvented or how the ban was triggered. Two appeals via the Google system failed (with generic responses) so I reached out to an ex-colleague who now works there and she escalated it internally, and I was magically unblocked, but still have no idea why it happened.

Recently launched a new startup and decided to look at Facebook ads, set up a brand new business account and page and the ad account was instantly banned. An appeal resulted in the message “your account has been consistently promoting ads that do not comply with our policies” but I’ve never run a single ad since they banned the account before I could even create one. The whole ecosystem feels like a bad joke at this point!