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Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

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Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#221

Post by gumby »

stevehawk wrote: post #206
Causality1 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's fetish for not providing human support is so counter-productive it makes me think there must be a single powerful individual executive maintaining the policy. It's too stupid to have widespread support among Googlers.

Counter productive? To what? Their market cap continues to climb. No one gives a shit about their customer support, or lack there of.

Oh they love their customers and are quite solicitous as to their needs.

People using search, gmail, drive etc aren’t the customers.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#222

Post by boomboomsubban »

Aeolun wrote: post #213
barbazoo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I buy an ebook I go through the painful process of downloading it to my laptop either directly from the store (e.g. Kobo) or via Calibre [0] if I bought it from Amazon which I try to avoid, removing DRM via some tool I found somewhere and uploading it to the ebook again via Calibre. It's annoying an probably illegal but no one can take my ebooks away that way. [0] https://calibre-ebook.com/

Wait, you can convert Amazon’s format to something DRM free?

It's text, even the best DRM would be foiled by OCR. It's definitely illegal in the US though.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#223

Post by weq »

version_five wrote: post #111
ecshafer wrote: post #2

I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum. Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someo…

I saw comment in another one of these discussions saying you should treat google as a potentially hostile adversary and have a contingency plan for what to do when they turn on you. I agree with this really in relation to every cloud provider. If your business continuity and data are important, there should be a plan for how to keep the lights on if a provider through malice or incompetence stops playing nice. The go…

I work for a smaller tech company and we do large scale events periodically with our customers. We do lots of perf testing and ensure our servics can handle these sustained bursts of usage which can reach upto ~500k users concurrent.

Google flagged our main event site as a phishing site during a large event that was lasting multiple weeks. No matter how many load tests you do, always have contingency for Google.

TDLR: Even if you DONT USE GOOGLE as YOUR CLOUD provider, always be aware of its impacts on your customers/busisness!

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#224

Post by dgudkov »

croes wrote: post #16

How many times does that have to happen before people realize there is no cloud, only other people's computers. The data that is stored there is no longer yours, just as thanks to Apple and Co. your hardware no longer really belongs to you, but you only enjoy a temporary right of use. It will be interesting to see when hardly anything remains of an entire generation because everything comes from the cloud: Photos, vi…

This is what baffles me in the cloud story: you think you get a servant, but you get a master.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#225

Post by barbazoo »

Aeolun wrote: post #213
barbazoo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I buy an ebook I go through the painful process of downloading it to my laptop either directly from the store (e.g. Kobo) or via Calibre [0] if I bought it from Amazon which I try to avoid, removing DRM via some tool I found somewhere and uploading it to the ebook again via Calibre. It's annoying an probably illegal but no one can take my ebooks away that way. [0] https://calibre-ebook.com/

Wait, you can convert Amazon’s format to something DRM free?

You can remove the DRM, no need to do any OCR shenanigans. But yes, it's of course illegal but I've paid for the book so I don't really care.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#226

Post by tyingq »

quantumBerry wrote: post #183
tyingq wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan of that analogy. Walmart can't brick your home thermostat, voice assistant, tv box, cable service, federated logins to Uber, DoorDash, your email account, cloud storage account, and so on.

So you think if google really thinks you're a terrorist that they are obliged to go on supporting you? There's a big difference between having no idea terrorists use your platform, and actually supporting them by enabling those you believe to be terrorists.

They seem to be banning accounts that are clearly not terrorists.

Also, I get there are some black and white cases here. But there's plenty of grey also. I imagine a lot of terrorist videos aren't posted by terrorists, but rather by some disenfranchised/angry person who hasn't done anything illegal.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#227

Post by katbyte »

shoto_io wrote: post #83
ecshafer wrote: post #2

I will upvote and comment to hopefully gain visibility at the minimum. Google really has an unfortunate customer support set up, in that there isn't one. Your best bet when Google does something bad to their customers like this (And regardless if its a bad AI or bad bot, its still Google doing it), is to post it on twitter or hackernews and hope it gets the visibility for a Google employee to fix it, or contact someo…

I recently decided against G Drive and for office.com for our tiny startup. One reason being the unreliable customer support often mentioned here on HN. I hope MS customer support is better…

in my experience no, and you will require it more.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#228

Post by no_butterscotch »

ajb wrote: post #97

One of the simplest functions of a justice system - before impartial judgement, before detailed laws, before qualified advocates - is simply the right to summon a powerful person to justify their actions. Increasingly it seems that we will need this to be applied here, ideally in some simpler and less costly way than a full trial. It is just wrong for companies to make money by inviting people to rely on them , and t…

I agree. But I'm not sure what the solution is. A lot of people will say "Hey, it's a private company", and as a libertarian minded person I tend to agree. But increasingly these private companies have more power of my life than my own government does, and it's accelerating further it seems.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#229

Post by dude187 »

garmaine wrote: post #204
verisimi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, when you're making an omelette you have to break some eggs. There has been a literal, yet largely silent, book burning going on with Google services in recent years. On youtube, many alternative voices are silenced, billions of comments deleted. I know its a private company, but in the US there are free speech laws + the possibility of using the court system (if someone makes a libellous statement). But no, sil…

“Free speech” laws only apply to government restrictions on speech.

Except that the only reason that these large platforms can sustainably exist, is government granted immunity from the content posted to them as a common carrier. Currently they're trying to have it both ways, where they can both be immune from any liability from bad content that gets uploaded, while selectively censoring whatever content they don't like.

It's not like the government doesn't play a role. These platforms can only exist because of government protections, and those protections should come with protections to the public against censorship.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#230

Post by sneak »

amelius wrote: post #112
croes wrote: post #16

How many times does that have to happen before people realize there is no cloud, only other people's computers. The data that is stored there is no longer yours, just as thanks to Apple and Co. your hardware no longer really belongs to you, but you only enjoy a temporary right of use. It will be interesting to see when hardly anything remains of an entire generation because everything comes from the cloud: Photos, vi…

Apple is still ok, just don't use iCloud.

They still have censorship power over the App Store. You can't even have reader apps that show titties, as Tumblr learned, or show UGC expressing wrongthink, as Gab and Parler learned, or offer VPNs in China, or protest apps in Hong Kong.

The topic of this discussion is cloud-based censorship.

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