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

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

#221

Post by lostcolony » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 2:47 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…

I think if Google is going to decide to police the web like this, they need to alert people more proactively. The first the OP should have heard of this was Google emailing them through uploader.win's Contact Us email address. It's easy and obvious to find on the site; seems like that should be part of the automated process.

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

#222

Post by notriddle » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

megous wrote: post #183

notriddle wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want three things: 1. publishers want to be able to put content on the Web without undergoing background checks 2. everyone wants to be able to discover content with as little friction as possible 3. consumers don’t want to drown in unwanted crap The incomprehensible Algorithm is the result of trying to square that circle. Give up any of those requirements, and the arms race would end: Give up #1, and it’ll be…

> 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.

You’ll at least have to prove negligence if you want to sue for libel (assuming you count as a private figure).

Now, I’m not going to actually say that you’re wrong to claim that Google runs Safe Browsing in a negligent manner. But I will say that, if you’re going to go with that, then you’re going to have to say what they neglected to do. Have a human review all their entries? Apple does that, and they get just as many complaints. Get rid of Safe Browsing entirely? It was created to solve real problems, and those problems aren’t just going to go away.

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

#223

Post by hertzrat » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 2:56 AM UTC

system2 wrote: post #23

hertzrat wrote: post #3

I made a Wordpress site last year to start blogging that had this happen. The only reason I found out in this case was from visiting it in edge, which showed a warning pop up, so maybe it was a Microsoft flag instead of google in this case. I never figured out the cause or a way to remedy it and just took the site offline because it was invisible to all search engines. Pretty disappointing

What was your site about? Did you have uploaders or embedded 3rd party widgets?

Nope. It was about game programming. Text and images. A gif or two. Analytics configured to track as little as possible

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

#224

Post by brendoelfrendo » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:10 AM UTC

thayne wrote: post #217

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…

Surely there is a better way to address malicious content than blocking the entire domain. It also doesn't seem like sites like Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, Google photos, etc. run into this problem, even though they allow user uploaded content so there is some kind of bias against smaller companies.

You won't get away with uploading malware to your Google drive without Google noticing. The no-no here is that this guy is operating a demo site that allows anonymous file uploads without policing the content that goes there. That's just mind blowingly dumb and ripe for abuse.

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

#225

Post by at_a_remove » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:13 AM UTC

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…

That last line is unpleasantly wrong.

The coffee was not merely "hotter than you anticipated" (although that's at least sort of right), it was near boiling: McDonald's required franchisees to hold coffee at 180–190 °F, much closer to actual boiling than what other establishments hold coffee at, which is typically twenty degrees below that in that area. She had third degree burns on six percent of her body, six rather sensitive percent. She needed an eight day hospital stay just for skin grafts. I once dug up the photos, by the way, they're rather unpleasant, and I say that as someone who has attended autopsies.

Of course, the temperature differences may not seem like much, but a ten degree drop at that point changes the time from "skin graft city" from three seconds to perhaps four or five times that.

Final verdict, before settlement, was $640,000, not "millions." The parties settled out of court for an undisclosed final amount less than $600,000.

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

#226

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:23 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #167

whatshisface wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

> you cannot lose access to your basic bank account and money in that account unless a judge says otherwise.

"Losing access to the money in that account" is blatantly stealing from you. It's should be obvious that no company should be able to do this under any circumstances, but that is a separate issue from the question of adequate competition.

You still need competition because a monopoly can find an unlimited number of ways to abuse their customers and regulators can only address the ones they foresee ahead of time.

> The solution to the problem of "every citizen needs a bank account to function" wasn't "let the free market sort it out".

Which allows banks to remain an uncompetitive yet inherently necessary market. But how is that better than having enough competition between banks that anyone can find one willing to provide service?

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

#227

Post by noisy_boy » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:35 AM UTC

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…

Why not run a fully functional monitoring job i.e. upload file with a monitoring account and check the results to validate that it is working end to end. Doing this even once a minute shouldn't put any load and is a much more reliable test.

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

#228

Post by pier25 » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:36 AM UTC

> Don’t use base-64 images (or inline images)

For SVG just paste the markup on your HTML. Browser support is excellent and it will weight less than using a base64 encoded string.

You will be able to style it using CSS as if it was regular HTML, use JS, etc.

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

#229

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

notriddle wrote: post #182

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…

People want three things: 1. publishers want to be able to put content on the Web without undergoing background checks 2. everyone wants to be able to discover content with as little friction as possible 3. consumers don’t want to drown in unwanted crap The incomprehensible Algorithm is the result of trying to square that circle. Give up any of those requirements, and the arms race would end: Give up #1, and it’ll be…

> Give up #1, and it’ll be possible to do all of the rules enforcement reactively, with no algorithms and no inhumane call centers, because when someone is banned, they’ll stay banned.

This doesn't actually work because the people doing bad stuff are criminals with no qualms about committing crimes, like identity theft. Some large fraction of spam is sent from compromised but otherwise legitimate mail servers.

> Give up #2, and it won’t matter how much spam you make available on the web because nobody will fall victim to it. The web becomes less like a publishing platform and more P2P, because you basically only find content on there through your in-person social contacts.

This is the one you can actually fix because it's a spectrum rather than binary. It's also something that doesn't need to be a monopoly, and not being a monopoly would significantly reduce the consequences of mistakes.

Discovery is also fundamentally a search issue. Not putting something you suspect of being spam in the first page of your search results is a world away from shutting down some guilty until proven innocent third party's DNS or hosting.

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

#230

Post by noisy_boy » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 3:38 AM UTC

Another idea could be to maybe have a separate dedicated companion domain (not a sub-domain) for communication which can be mentioned in the main domain. Atleast if the main domain is affected, you can still have a working channel that is a single place of truth for updates/communications.