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Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

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

#81

Post by childintime »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #76
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…

I can't access my 13+ year old gmail account because Google now requires I verify I have access to a phone number I've never owned. There is no 2FA on this account, I know my password, and have access to the "Recovery Email" (which gets emailed a "Somebody knows your password" warning whenever I attempt to sign in to the account with my password). I reached a real person at Google Domains and managed to get things es…

+1

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

#82

Post by kjrose »

Everyone in this thread is clearly stating how this is not a properly functioning system and there is story after story of the kafkaesque disasters to which Google is not responsible at all.

The question I have is what can anyone do to really change things? If we all agree this is a major issue why can't we find a reasonable solution to it.

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

#83

Post by jokethrowaway »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #76
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…

I can't access my 13+ year old gmail account because Google now requires I verify I have access to a phone number I've never owned. There is no 2FA on this account, I know my password, and have access to the "Recovery Email" (which gets emailed a "Somebody knows your password" warning whenever I attempt to sign in to the account with my password). I reached a real person at Google Domains and managed to get things es…

I'm in a similar situation with Apple. I can't access my 10 years old account even though I know the password and control the email attached to it because I don't remember my security questions and I don't have my recovery email anymore. I probably put rubbish data in the security questions as they weaken the security of the account.

Funnily enough that password leaked and someone managed to take over my account (I wonder how they manage to bypass the security questions, sounds like a security vulnerability on Apple) and they're using it to register (I assume) stolen devices and install software. I get email notifications every time these people do something.

I reached Apple support but they're unwilling to help, they even refuse to nuke the account as a last resort.

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

#85

Post by stonecraftwolf »

bilater wrote: post #74

Glad you got a resolution. Google recently banned my ad account for running ads to my landing page templates and I still don't know what was wrong with that. They just gave me a bs corporate answer and that was it.

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

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

#86

Post by that_guy_iain »

>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 a lesson.

I feel like majority of uptime monitors are falling for this same trap. One of the reasons why for my monitoring service I choose to do full page load monitoring via Chrome instead of just a http request via Curl or whatever. Main reason, people care if the webpage loads or not. People care how long it takes for their webpage to load. Having a website respond in 200ms is great but if it takes 8000ms for all the JS to load and process your website is still slow. I get why sites are just doing curl requests because it's way cheaper but really you're monitoring one part of the stack while really caring about all of it. If your website starts producing javascript errors you want to know, etc.

[1] https://www.ootliers.com (The landing page and everything are terrible and I'm working on improving that)

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

#87

Post by justAnIdea »

ttt0 wrote: post #37
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…

Probably something something along the lines of "private company and they can do whatever they want".

Sure, but this is not a Google issue per se, this is a browser issue. If they f** up and put you on a phishing list and your business just evaporates because people's browsers literally stop working with your site, that goes far beyond what google does as a private company on its private platform. I think this is totally worth suing for and probably winning.

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

#88

Post by ncann »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #76
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…

I can't access my 13+ year old gmail account because Google now requires I verify I have access to a phone number I've never owned. There is no 2FA on this account, I know my password, and have access to the "Recovery Email" (which gets emailed a "Somebody knows your password" warning whenever I attempt to sign in to the account with my password). I reached a real person at Google Domains and managed to get things es…

Same thing with my Skype account. I have it logged in on both my phone and my laptop. One day it decides to automatically log me out on both and when I try to log in it insists on requiring sending a code to a phone number that I no longer have access to. So just like that I lost access to my long time Skype account even though I know the password, even though there's no 2FA setup, even though I'm trying to log in on 2 devices that I've logged in previously, from the same IP address. All support requests went nowhere.

I wonder how many people lost their account like me because of these overzealous security measures.

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

#89

Post by jokethrowaway »

uh_uh wrote: post #66
bitcharmer wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the norm with FAANG and it really annoys me. How many of these cases never saw the light of day because of that? Even with HN it's a complete lottery what contents reaches the front page, so getting issues like these resolved is a matter of extreme luck for a common person.

Probably naive idea: Would it be possible to set up an insurance fund for this? As in, the money would be used to sue FAANG for damages in cases when businesses are lost due to them being flagged/blacklisted by FAANG incorrectly. If enough companies contribute to this, it might put some pressure on FAANG to take things seriously.

Another idea is to stop supporting FAANG.

Apple or Google won't see a cent from me.

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

#90

Post by jokethrowaway »

pja wrote: post #35
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…

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.

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