I think people are jaded due to windows automated backup, where you tell it to keep only the latest backup and it still manages to fill your hard drive with 50 of them.
Sure, if we're talking about saving a copy of an image, I agree. I assumed that there was original content (i.e. writing) that had simply been entered directly into blogger, which a typical writer might not know how to backup at all.
Here is a one-click service to backup everything in your google account. Email, google drive, youtube, location history, blogger blogs, bookmarks, calendar, literally ever google service.
mbsync [1] is worth looking into. I found it to perform better than Offline IMHO and complained less. It will store downloaded emails in maildir format.
The one gap here, is that if Google closes down your email account you can still be dead in the water if you have any services that rely on that email. Such as email based 2-factor authentication, or any websites that you forgot your credentials for an need to rely on an emailed password reset.
You can mitigate this by having your own domain and host the email on Google Apps -- that way if they take away your access you just update your mx record to point to somewhere else. But you can also easily lose your domain name (due to malice or accident).
BTW, if an emergency does happen, anyone have a recommendation for a decent web email client that I can point my MX record to? Preferably one that has both hosted and self-hosted options. Or something that I can spin up easily on a cloud service such as AWS.
A couple of open source clients [1] and [2]- both self-hosted and deployable on AWS or any other cloud service, or any other hosting service with ssh root access:
As an aside, VestaCP [3] - an open source hosting admin panel that you can install within a few minutes via ssh - will install squirrelmail automatically:
I started deleting my emails and I feel really better that this big stack of crap is erased forever. The whole concept of archiving mail is disgusting. Everybody is concerned by climate change, but seriously, storing all these data is crazy and dirty, a datacenter is everything but clean.
No backups to deal with and no procrastination-until-the-end-of-your-life. Save the planet and get away from your past.
An easy way is to use an IMAP client like the macOS Mail.app that syncs raw email + metadata in .mbox format. You can find the files in ~/Library/Mail/V4. Combine with Time Machine for extra backups in case you’re worried that your mail server decides to clear your local copy over IMAP.
At least the article opens with the conclusion, saves scrolling.
Having said that, I did continue scrolling and the article goes on to say
> More generally, relying on the internet as an archive is dangerous.
And it is, at least, another point toward helping me feel vindicated for being that person who always says "and you have off site backups for when your house burns down, right?"
I believe it does traditionally, yes. Your data plus two backup copies. Personally I'd say no though, just for the sake of having more backups (3 2 1 is minimum, not strict!).
Partially unrelated I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups. On that note, their backups are not my backups. Their backups are never my backups.
If they save my butt one day, awesome. But that day was already terrible if I'd managed to lose all of my backups.
> But that day was already terrible if I'd managed to lose all of my backups.
I have two off-site backups located ~150 miles from each other. If I (we) lose everything, chances are that there are more important things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
Can you qualify what "2 different forms of media" means? I'm assuming one physical, one cloud. Do you consider two separate external HDD's with the data on it to fail that test because they are the same form?
When my music collection was smaller, I had everything backed up onto an external as well as had them all physically burned onto like 50 DVDs. Since my collection has grown beyond a terabyte, however, I haven't had the time or energy to keep that up. Now it's just an external, a travel external, a redundant external, and a cloud backup.
A few examples I can pull off the top of my head - DVD, Disk (HDD), Disk (SSD), Disk (Flash.. maybe?), Tape, Cloud
So Disk (HDD) and Cloud is fine. Two HDDs (spinny platter style) would indeed fail the test. If you want to argue it you could probably get away with different manufacturers or different batches but I'd prefer my backups to play nicely with the rules rather than try to avoid them! Far-fetched as it is but lets say for example you have a power surge that takes out your external disk (is that even possible?). Chances are high whatever did that would also do that to your other disk. Or maybe a wall caves in and decimates your PC (or you just sweep the desk somehow and knock everything off it. Maybe the desk has collapsed) - The spinny disks may be destroyed if they are both hit hard enough. Mixing an HDD and SSD, the SSD would probably be more hardy against shock damage.
From another comment I made in this thread somewhere "I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups [so it's different to just a raw disk]"
Edit: I use too many brackets here. I am going to attend my next available parenthesis anonymous support group.
One nice thing about the "2 different forms of media" rule is that it would protect you against bad batches of hard drives.
Sometimes, when people buy multiple drives at once for servers, they wind up with drives from the same batch. If the drives are subtly defective, and if they're always run under identical conditions (such as in a RAID array), then I've seen multiple drives fail within days of each other.
Running two identical disks in a RAID, or where the same desk could cave in and sweep them off, seems like it should be covered by "1 offsite" rather than requiring two different types of media.
Not that people ever listen. Backups are perhaps a lot like basic insurance in that way. In a lot of countries basic health and liability insurance policies are mandatory because a sizeable chunk of the population would refuse to have these without that requirement, even though it benefits the vast majority of people.
Silly if you consider how from a technical and practical standpoint nothing prevents you from carrying a backup of every important document you've ever owned and a good deal of photos and such with you in your wallet on an encrypted mini-SD-card. Wallet gets stolen? Make a new backup. House burns down? You have your backup. Drop off a card at friends or family, keep one at your employer, hell, stick them on the Christmas cards you send out each year to your nearest and dearest; with proper encryption you are the only one able to use them anyway.
It also doesn't help that people blindly trust the big tech companies to do this for them.
Cooper should’ve backed his work up, or known to be more cautious with drafts.
...
...
Admittedly, not everything has vanished. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has saved bits and pieces of Cooper’s blog dating back to January 3, 2012, but they are just snapshots of the blog’s front page for a given date, not capturing the blog in its entirety.
I think the GP meant to say that you can prevent future damage to some extent through regular backups. When things have already gone wrong, it's too late to start making backups. The cloud is no different from physical media in that regard, even if the data still exists in some data centre, you can't access it any more.
I'm not aware of any tool to automate regular backups of cloud services, even though many of them have “download everything” buttons like this now (awesome). That sounds like a thing that should exist.
If I could regularly have my computer auto-request a Takeout archive, and then auto-download it when Google notifies my email it's been completed, that'd be a tool I'd enjoy having.
Working someone else's land, rather than owning your own.
i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog.
This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.
Word (and pandoc and textedit and whatever else) exports HTML. Most GUI shells will mount (or do something like mount) a WebDAV or FTP server. This stuff is only complicated if you make it complicated.
For a counter argument, I like to read many blogs that are more or less defunct, but have valuable material. The author has moved on (or passed on) but the material is still sitting on Google servers instead of disappearing when a hosting contract lapses. perhaps using free services and making backups is the best option.
>Early last year Andy Baio wrote about how most of the archival projects Google touted in the early 2000s, such as Google News Archive and Google Groups, were quietly abandoned several years ago.
Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?
For all autistic people: this is not being autistic, I guess maybe sometimes arrogant, sometimes dumb (as an organisation) or rather "too big" for our own good would be better descriptions.
But at least not autistic, and definitely not with a follow up where that is used as an excuse for not feeling sorry for them. :-/
I'm pretty sure that the intended message was that we should not associate poor customer service with autism and then tar autistic people for whatever Google decides to do.
Also in addition to tarring autistic people I read the original post more or less as: because they behave in an autistic way I won't feel sorry for them, thus adding insult to injury.
instead of feeling "sorry for autistic people", perhaps you should treat us like human beings. Many of us love who we are and how we think, and don't need your pity, and certainly don't need you acting like our identity should be used as an insult.
This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time:
I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to do that.
There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things. My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like weebly would not exist.
The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
> There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file...
So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time.
The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site.
As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!!
Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define what he was doing, you might take the time to learn how to make a simple site.
Not case in point. Whether you make your own site is completely orthogonal to whether you have backups. There are people that use blogger or wordpress for free and back it up, and there are people that pay for hosting or servers to host customized websites and don't back them up.
You're right, I guess. I suppose I worded it poorly. I really just meant that if you're going to be a "web artist" you should probably be a bit more web savvy in general. Make your own site, learn about backing up, etc.
As a web dev/tech freelancer, I come across typical end-users very frequently and you would be _amazed_ at the amount of ignorance about the issues like domains, hosting etc. prevailing amongst them.
While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.
The problem is not necessarily the expense - there are a whole bunch of steps that need to be taken in order to ensure that the big hosts don't flag your mails as spam - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126.
And even if it seems to be working fine at the moment, there are no practical guarantees that this will not be subject to change: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA. Even someone as high profile as Linus Torvalds had to resort to the classic method of public shaming in order to get a prompt response.
Lastly, there is not much incentive even if I cared about privacy - my typical recipient is anyway a Gmail account, so Google can definitely construct a shadow profile for the sender even if the sender does not use Gmail.
Again, it is a classic problem of a heavily centralized internet.
Google doesn't ever provide warnings of imminent account closures like this. The history of HN and plenty of other sites is littered with cautionary tales of assuming Google would tell you before they take away all your stuff or give you a chance to appeal or contest it first.
This is a new age in customer support, if you can call it that. Amazon and I'm sure many other companies do the same thing. You don't even have to actually violate TOS. That's probably why no one can reverse the decision. They'd have to admit to closing the account on a whim (might be a bot's whim, but it's still a whim), unrelated to any actual TOS violations. They can choose to not do business with you anytime, even if you've paid them, and your only recourse is to sue them. Yeah, that's going to work out well ...
Since a few years loggin into Blogspot (former Blogger) became very difficult for me - I am constantly being bounced between the authentication pages, and most of the time I end up with an error. I think Google is just preparing for discontinuing it.
Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation.
And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?
This makes me laugh my ass off. This is a bit of a pet peeve I have with people and modern technology. They believe they have a right to use a service even though they're not paying for the usage of the service. Then they turn around shocked and angry when the free service is removed. `Why! why did they do this to me, this is the biggest injustice! How un-professional of them!`.
Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
To be fair, Google's ad dept. wants you to put everything about your digital life into their services, yet nowhere do they warn you about backing your stuff up with the same gusto that they put into getting you to use the service in the first place. It's not quite a "Chad's Garage" scenario.
"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities."
Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.
pyre is right, Google has fought tooth and nail to make their services indispensable.
It is a failure of ethics to then delete that indispensable thing.
There were laws in the old USAmerican West about horse theft. Strict laws! And similarly strict laws throughout history in shepherding cultures, regarding livestock.
The justification for draconian punishments for livestock theft has always been that the animals (property, items) were indispensable. You can't go around drastically changing or possibly ending people's lives by taking the things they depend on away from them. It's wrong!
The problem is, Google actively advertises their reliability and does not actively encourage backing up your account to protect yourself from Google deleting you. As many people perceive that Google is incredibly unlikely to lose your data, this isn't usually thought of the way you immediately tend to think you need a backup of your hard drive in your PC.
Very few people backup their Google account regularly (or at all), even though Google Takeout is available. People should, but I'd argue part of the burden is on Google for misleading them into thinking they don't need to.
It's more than just Google, it's the whole tech press that pushes the glorious cloud future without covering these kinds of caveats. A big selling point of the cloud for average people is that supposedly they don't have to worry about having to protect their data as professionals will do it for them, but then these incidents come out and there's these "I told you so" where apparently they always need a self-hosted version as well.
Partially relevant. A more apt example would be 'xyz lets me put all my junk in his nice shelf garage, I can look at 'em whenever I want, my junk looks great. He also lets anyone come through his garage to see it. It's so popular he gets advertisers to spend money posting other items to sell there... now he just threw out all my stuff without warning because his advertising garage business wasn't worth maintaining anymore.'
That's a dick move through and through. We can wag our fingers and say 'you should have known better' but clearly if this were the case all the time, with all our free services, this model of business would fail. It is 'free' so long as it's profitable or has the potential to be profitable to them.
These services have no explicit guarantee that they will last, or protect your stuff, but we expect them to. It's implied in the marketing or usability of the thing. You pay a merchant for an item, you don't explicitly pay to secure your credit card with hashes and salts in a DB, it's implied in the service. I suppose it's your fault if your credit card is swiped because you should have used cash... or gold bullion.
Storage facility will charge for the service because storing physical goods and providing 24/7 security cost money. Last time I checked they will have a clause in the contract if X weeks go by and you have not paid your bill they will auction the items off to recover the debt.
Though could be different for different storage facilities.
For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?
No. That is not the situation here. Pretending like somebody using a 'free' service is equivalent to them being far behind on payments to a storage service is a ridiculous analogy. Google advertises their reliability and nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups or move out. You are not generally in an adversarial relationship with google like you would be to a company you're in debt to.
EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry.
As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that.
They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.
`nowhere do they tell you to make your own backups`. Nowhere do they tell you that your data will be stored forever. You're making assumptions based on something they haven't even said they would provide `FOR FREE!`.
>The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive.
Now compare that to what google did. They were owed exactly 0 dollars for 0 months, they make no attempt whatsoever to contact the client, and they shredded the data without trying to send it back.
It's more like Chad informed the police of the dead body he found in his garage, and they removed it. Chad called to let you know after the fact, because you are obviously not his first priority in that situation.
concerning to say the least considering every galaxy/Android phone I've owned backs up to google in such a seamless & effortless way. My wife backs up all our family photos to google. Google offers "Unlimited free storage" if you allow them to compress your photos.
It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.
> “Nothing on the blog is backed-up or archived anywhere else, as far as I know,” he explained in a Facebook message.
Cue sad trombone.
This had to happen to me a couple of times before I got to be a real Nazi about backup. I'd consider myself a fairly smart guy too, it's just one of those things you never want to take care of properly...until you lose stuff, then you get it.
Poor guy, hope he can get his work back but it doesn't seem too likely.
The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a sensible practice.
But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication.
That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect.
The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I used to use gmail (with me@mydomain.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since 2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain.
(Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens. I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.)
Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need meta-domains that can't be transferred, that are our identity, but I don't know how that would be implemented.
I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list.
Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is warranted by the importance of your communication.
Unfortunately, it's no longer possible to simply read the constitution to fully understand the rights afforded to an individual. The US Supreme Court has long upheld that a person has more fundamental rights than are explicitly enumerated in The Constitution.
Technically speaking, persons always had a freedom of association, but the court made it explicit during N.A.A.C.P. v. ALABAMA [1].
(In 1958, the State of Alabama banned the NAACP and tried to damage its finances and power by demanding its membership list. The Supreme Court saw through their "fig leaves" and overturned that.)
Brilliantly said. I think everyone, unless they intend to be a digital hermit, should have his or her own personal domain. I know people are not routinely educated about these things, and that is a problem; but when an otherwise serious person tells me that his email address is joe12345@stupidmail.com, a red flag about his competence is raised somewhere in the back of my mind, at least.
Personal domains won't help you if the state releases laws which enables providers to silence whole domains against unwanted opinions.
What we need is a new decentralized Internet. We need not only open source software (for security reasons), not only open hardware (for security reasons) but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored.
Could you elaborate on the non-commercial aspects of this proposed solution? I think it's especially important to make it clear where the money will come from.
From the users of course. Remember the modem times when the users had to pay for the phone bills. In the same way users could use their phone lines for the next internet. We could also build a wifi mesh with mobile devices.
Not to be negative, but last mile was a viable part of the internet because the government mandates that that system be reliable. I'm interested in a wifi mesh, but until this moment I haven't thought about whether the government, or the technology itself, focuses on high reliability in that area. I think all the government cares about is if you don't interfere, but they don't care if your bits get through.
It's not necessarily a competence issue. Obviously not for non-technical people. But competence (maybe awareness is a better term here) isn't binary, and you grow as you age.
Would be able to generate keys now that will be secure for a whole lifetime? For anyone older than about 40, even state-of-the-art crypto from the time of their birth has been broken. Will modern crypto hold up any better?
Problem is, what if somebody steals that private key, or if you lose it?
The solution clearly goes on that direction, but this is not enough. And I'd really like to see this one problem solved before we have to start asking something like "and what if somebody takes control of your brain, or you lose access to it?"
Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being ratified and used by large companies.
Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.
Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication.
I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication.
I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.
We need to follow Richard Stallman in his obsession with ehtics. "Sorry mate, I find FB/Google/Skype/etc. unethical, so I won't get in touch with you using this, let's better stick with email, phone call or meeting in person".
He is also a bit of a windbag. He likes to change words because the semantics don't suit his world view. Additionally, his rants are very alienating. The man is a genius in a lot of ways, but he really misses the mark on a lot of things.
I've heard stories from multiple people older than me about ATT physically entering people's homes (typically when their husbands were at work) because they had "illegal" extensions.
It's an open protocol and there are open source implementations of the technology. I can use asterisk to set up a phone system and have numbers routed to me from a provider. It's the same as the Internet in that regard.
It's like saying email isn't open source because it has to have a connection to the Internet to be useful.
No, we just need to stop trying to solve social problems with technical solutions.
Domain getting stolen by a registrar? That's a crime, treat it like theft, there ought to be some justice for that theft.
Big business doing something awful/scandalous/inappropriate? Change the laws, and work to persuade people that it ought to be societally unacceptable to violate those laws.
I see this a lot on tech-oriented forums, that you can "fix" social problems with the right kind of code, or you can get out of legal repercussions with the right set of legalese, and really, no, stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.
Treating business and law like a black box, or something to be worked around, as though there were sufficient cleverness to solve everything without engaging with larger society, well, no, that's not gonna get you anywhere.
This was a subject of large debate roughly 6-7 years ago at Twitter, back when Ev was CEO. This was before advertising existed on Twitter (except for a banner ad in Japan). At the time there were many strands to the debate but the tldr rolled up into three ways of being -- closed Twitter, the one that looked like FB then and Twitter today, open Twitter, the one Twitter looked like then without all the API restrictions and developer community difficulties and probably still with ads, and finally -- for lack of a better term -- Internet Twitter, which would be a federated service much like Diaspora has ended up working.
It was very hard to imagine how Twitter the company would make enough money to justify the investments it had taken by that point if Twitter the service looked more like Diaspora. You on,y have to look at Diaspora today to see that it's not obviously meeting the mission that Twitter serves today.
One interesting aspect of this is you had people like Alex Payne voting with their code in the form of the API and later with his feet after the company was clearly going down the ad-supported route (and hiring a lot to support that model -- you need to build a large amount of revenue-oriented infrastructure in that world). The API then had to be pulled substantially back because it didn't fit the revenue model, something the developer community still hasn't forgiven Twitter for.
It's amazing to me how much of what looks like corporate BS can be traced to individual personalities and their debates, or the echoes of their debates.
[to be clear, all of what I've outlined can be gleaned from media reports, books and presentations about Twitter over the years. While I am an ex-employee, this history is available to anyone who either was paying attention back then or has a small amount of investigatory skillset.]
If Twitter were an open protocol, I'd probably have had some interest in using it, but as a closed proprietary business service, it seems completely uninteresting, and I've never signed up or really paid any attention. Why would I want to let some random company own my communications like that?
I'm saying that while the technical lead may not be hostile towards IMAP, the "higher ranks" may decide it's not a business priority anymore and ask to get rid of it.
Judging by the actions of Google's people in IETF, any feature that's used by paying mail customers seems to have management support. Management seems to like income, as far as I can tell.
Back when I set up a client to pull from Gmail it would break twice a year: when the changed their TLS cert, and when the later changed it BACK.
My conclusion at the time was that they wanted to keep the percentage of users of the IMAP service below some value, and every time the jerked the config around, they'd see a dip in the graph on their end. My setup is currently non-functional. The maintenance cost was too high. Mission accomplished.
Note: now that I think about it, maybe the cert rotation issue was on (e)SMTP, not IMAP. Same diff.
But what that doesn't show is that they then changed it back, and forth... for a while. It was just a UX issue that only affected computer literate people. THE BEST KIND. :(
I remember when some combination of Gmail features* enabled me to upload my old mbox with years of personal email into my GAFYD account... emails from before Gmail publicly existed. And now I could SEARCH them! The future was bright.
I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)
* access external pop3 account and auto-rewrite message headers so messages would be associated with my gmail address even though they were originally delivered to a different domain... Brilliant.
>> "I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)"
Sorry I'm being a bit thick, but did this happen, or does the emoticon at the end mean it's hypothetical?
In addition, what Google claims is an "SMTP server" does surprising things in violation of the relevant RFCs, in furtherance of Google's business models:
That blog posting is from 2012, so I think it's surprising that its author clearly hadn't read RFC 4409, published in 2006.
The first paragraph about message modification is: "Sites MAY modify submissions to ensure compliance with standards and site policy. This section describes a number of such modifications that are often considered useful." From is typically modified to comply with SPF and/or DKIM.
RFC 4409 is obsoleted by RFC 6409 (Nov. 2011), which is the one I refer to. The sections therein on header rewriting do not allow the modifications that Google makes to the From: header, which can, as I point out, lead to mismatches of personal names and email addresses and falsification of sender identity, with all the easily foreseeable damage that may result.
6409 contains the same wording: "MAY modify submissions to ensure compliance with standards and site policy" and gives examples.
The sections on header rewriting are essentially examples of what the document describes as "modifications that are often considered useful", they're not an exhaustive list. The only MUST NOT rule that concerns email address rewriting is about destination addresses.
Is it your opinion that a reasonable interpretation of 6409 is that a submission agent may falsify the sender of an email? Or create false associations between personal names and email addresses?
No RFC rule prevents that, and as far as I know no RFCs even try to define what constitutes a true or false association between a personal name and an email address. But RFC 6409 gives site policy unrestricted permission to allow or deny that.
(Well, almost unrestricted. The results have to be syntactically valid.)
I don't think your interpretation of the RFCs is natural or remotely reasonable; in fact it leads to absurd consequences. We'll have to leave it at that. I stand by everything in the article.
I've seen IMAP certificates changing back and forth, too.
There's an explanation of this phenomenon that doesn't assume malice: there are N (> 1) servers with different certificates, and you're not hitting the same one every time.
The impression I have formed is that gmail will have whatever features google's gmail-for-businesses product needs. If a considerable percentage of customers (ie. the ones who pay per month and user) use a particular feature, then that feature stays and is maintained.
Does not the ol' Don't-Be-Evil corporation owe it to society to maintain features that support the common good?
I know from my experience in hwops that plenty of people on the corp domain DO believe that they are working towards a better world--and that making more money will only accelerate progress towards that goal.
The question is: are they wrong? Has Google lost its way?
Let's look not just at this IMAP issue but also at the OP as we ponder that.
Rumour had it that they tore down the federation due to an unmanageable spam wave. Something about friend requests from spam puppets. I've never heard details. Has anyone else here?
This is a gestalt response, but leonroy, I hope you don't mind if I put it here. You are talking about what I want to talk about: solving a problem. ...
Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.
Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email?
Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!"
Sounds like a utility to me.
The law isn't always right. Times change, for example.
I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account.
If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change!
One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society.
Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process.
Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives.
This kind of thing is what Government is FOR.
Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.
> Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.
That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way.
I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc.
In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider.
It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least!
Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services.
I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.
> Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.
But they cannot, at least not for a foreseeable future. Both are used in enterprise environments, who would flee the first platform in droves which would disable IMAP/POP3.
And even if they'd both disable IMAP, people would write adapters.
Luckily, everyone's happy to come to the compromise of doing nothing and letting the dominant paradigm figure out what should happen, because that's such a great solution. /s
Why not just get a stable, world-reachable[1] IP address? All the services you use have them. You can too.
When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed.
1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party.
Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties.
Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content."
You: "Agreed."
You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content."
Google: "Sorry".
Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information.
"Middleman" or "service"?
2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection.
Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search.
Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?
What you'd need to get is provider independent (PI) address space and you're not going to get that, at least not for v4, as an individual, anymore. You're then going to have to find someone that will announce that prefix for you (Amazon could) or do that yourself (which also means getting an AS number and peering with people at internet exchanges, assuming you can get away with that without also getting some paying transit) and then start building out your infrastructure. That's a rather unreasonable amount of hoops to put someone without a strong technical background through.
Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.
So the intent of the meta-domains I mentioned in my original might be better served by a personal IPv6 block, that doesn't come from a corporation's reserved blocks.
Just as I move my domain around between email (and other) providers, I could then move my IPv6 block around. Instead of asking Linode for an IP address out of their block, I could tell them "serve this block." (Or can we already do that? For a reasonable price?)
Yet with only a personal IPv6 block half the world can't access your resources so that's not a reasonable method at this time.
If you control the DNS there's no real need for owning your own IP addresses as you can just change what they point to. That's usually also much faster to do in a pinch than find a new party that will announce your block and convince the old one to stop doing so. That's usually hours if not days in lead time.
Though if you truly care enough about it you'll also want your own DNS servers and own gTLD in order to own the whole chain.
IP addresses are meant to be addresses; if you move your address around everyone else has to update their routing tables. To do what you want you probably want to get your own AS Number and actually participate in routing (BGP etc). I've heard of quite small businesses doing that, but not individuals.
I was looking to do this, but it was just too hard. I believe you need to have a company / association of some kind with a VAT number to get registered. The closest I have found is going with the IPv6 tunnels from someone like Hurricane Electric, but speed is a bit limited.
It's a lot easier than you might think to set up a company and get a VAT number (I'm a contractor so have done that already), though it does cost some money (IIRC something like 40 quid).
I only meant "renting" a reachable IP from some third party. I think that's realistic.
However what you describe -- building out your own infrastructure -- still remains a lofty but worthy endeavor for anyone with the skills and determination.
No, third parties can change your IP address on fairly short notice (days or weeks) for their own reasons. And of course you can't change provider without changing IP either.
But if and how frequently such changes occur depends on the third party. And as you say, the terms should require adequate notice.
Businesses of all sizes rent stable IP addresses. Some ISPs in some countries also provide them to non-business subscribers as part of the standard subscription.
It's really not too difficult to have a persistent IP address for an individual who only needs reachability and is not trying to run a high traffic, global enterprise. Avoid the popular large, high-volume providers. Obviously do not use something like AWS.
Yeah, at that point, in this day and age, running email either has to be your day job to keep that running, or you as an individual have to at least be capable of doing that job; most people aren't, and I pay Fastmail to get that done.
I did it for 2 years until November last year. Its not... too hard. You find the pages where you can keep an eye on you address etc. Issues normally happen because of two things:
1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc.
2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :)
I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.
Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer.
For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers".
This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.
An ISP will block ports -- the goal is top stop spam -- but nothing requires you to use the traditional SMTP ports that are used for spam. Because you're not sending spam.
You are sending email to people you know, on a port you have agreed to, who also have reachable IP addresses and will accept connections from your IP address.
ISP's are not going to do DPI on open ports like 22, 80, or 443 or any high port, in order to filter out SMTP traffic. Why would they bother?
If you must use the existing "email provider" system -- e.g., you need to send commercial email -- then you must use the standardized ports they use, and yes, you must jump through their hoops. And you will experience spam and other nuisances. It's supposed to be open and decnetralized, but the reality is it's quite centralized because everyone relies on "major email providers".
But there's nothing about SMTP protocol that requires anyone to use an "email provider" or any specific port, nor to accept email from all IP addresses.
Two people can communicate directly via SMTP on a non-standard port and can choose to filter by IP address.
Maybe no one does this anymore, but I've done it; it's possible.
It's not that difficult to set up. The showstopper is not the set up, nor the ISP filtering port 25. It's that most people do not have a reachable IP address.
It is being disappeared. The exact same deployment of power, with practically no recourse other than a revolution (which I doubt fora such as HN can trigger).
> That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect.
If the internet didn't exist, an artist would have bought storage for his art. Why this artist feels that a service he didn't pay for owes him anything is baffling to me.
Turn it around, though: if Google feels like it's not responsible for anything it hosts, shouldn't it say so, loud and clear? Say, a banner that says, "Hey, we'll delete your stuff any time we feel like it," at the top of every Gmail page?
Google's users aren't parasites. There is both a relationship and an exchange of economic value. That's why Google has worked very hard to be trusted by everybody, to be seen as responsible stewards of vast amounts of often very personal information.
If Google doesn't want people to trust them, they should not work so hard to be seen as trustworthy. That the artist believed them is not an error on his part.
Most services, but especially Gmail, promote themselves as something you can safely go all-in on. I recall an advertisement for Gmail where a father left messages to his just-born child, with the idea that when they were an adult they would be able to read them. The archive (vs delete) feature in gmail similarly reinforces that "we'll always have your stuff for you", as does the fact that they want your mail to stay on their servers, rather than fetched with IMAP/POP.
Sure, the TOS says "we can delete it whenever"/"no promises", but the advertising and general pitching of the product have heavily indicated otherwise. I don't see the service going away, and when you have so much identity tied to your email, it's pretty shocking to realize that it could all disappear in a flash.
If Google were to kill my email accounts, I would be _seriously_ disadvantaged.
Saying that only fools trust Google to keep your things forever is true, but also lacks empathy.
And if the artist had bought that storage, and then the storage company said "oh, we burned all your art for a terms of use violation," the artist would be rightly outraged.
Sure, he's not paying, but Google doesn't ask for payment. They provide a service which is backed by Google's implicit guarantee that their web hosting is safe and reliable, and they've broken that guarantee. Google may not have a legal responsibility to not delete everything this artist made, but every time something like this happens, the rest of us should notice it and reconsider whether Google is a good platform to trust with our work.
I've had my own domain for quite a while and have been meaning to start using an email address on that domain. The main reason I haven't is that I'm procrastinating the initial trouble of setting it up, but I'm also a bit scared from hearing stories of people who do this and then occasionally have email to them or from them bounce or disappear. (Maybe this is not as common a problem as I get the impression it is.)
Edit: I'm not even considering running my own email server; I know that's a full-time job. Just something like forwarding my custom email to my Gmail address, which is the type of thing I've heard the aforementioned scary stories about (though a quick web search isn't turning up many such stories).
I have a domain, serviced by a registrar. When I change email providers, I go to the registrar's site and point my email address at my new provider. That might take a little time (way less than a day, by observation) to propagate. I then go to my new provider and set things up to "send mail as me@mydomain." If you run a local client like Thunderbird (rather than run exclusively through your provider's web interface), then you'll need to do similar there (like point it at your provider's smtp and imap/pop3 servers).
Problems arise when you run your own server, because of fairly detailed authentication settings. If you pay a provider to run their servers, they take care of that.
I do that. It's actually not too bad, I think the occasional missing email is overblown. At least, I don't typically have problems.
Of course, it's important to keep backups of everything (configs, logs, mail, etc), and test. Just slowly port everything over, as you gain more confidence that your not missing anything. Most email providers also will let you put a rule in place that lets you bounce mail to both addresses.
I had my own domain-based email address rerouted to yahoo email. Started to get a LOT of spam that would not get filtered out at all, not even close from the the yahoo-based email filtering. Gave up the forward. Maybe should try gmail?
Hosting your email with an established provider is easy, set up SPF records and the existing IP reputation of your provider will get you past spam filters quite easily.
Where you run into problems is when you do what I just did, I was using Google Apps, then Outlook.com with a custom domain and decided I was tired of giving other people access to my data - since I have a decent business-class cable connection at home including a static IP I bought a couple GroupWise licenses for myself, my wife and my daughter and moved our email in-home where all our data sits comfortably on my FreeNAS storage array. Since I rarely send email, and my home IP is 'unknown' to any IP reputation services at the moment getting past spam filters will require some time. It's a non-issue for me, it's a personal email account and I can tell my friends and family to check their spam folders the first time I contact them to whitelist my address, but it's not something everyone wants to deal with.
Tho FWIW I use Postmark to do my email delivery because then at least I know my email will end up in the inbox of the recipient vs their spam box which my hosted server was having problems with.
I've had my own domains for over a decade and I switched my mail off Google to my own servers as well.
One thing I worry about thought: what happens when I die? My credit cards will eventually shut down, my Linode will turn off when my card gets declined, and my domains will fail to renew.
But the same thing happens the other direction. Github could shut down Github pages one day, or they could even go out of business. Geocities is gone (although I think Archive.org backed up a lot of it) and there are tons of services that have gone belly-up over the years.
Even in our age of massive data retention, it's still interesting to see what's gone, and what may never be recovered if it wasn't indexed by the Wayback machine.
If it was/is culturally relevant it lives on in future works.
I don't think google looses anything internally.
They need that stuff one day to teach AI some tricks.
Everyone should occasionally use Google Takeout to back up their stuff, but non-tech users don't understand this.
I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger. But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like how comments are handled.
Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a small add-on to my own web properties.
Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.
I love Takeout. Given how much of our lives is invested into digital platform, I wish every Internet company had something similar to Takeout for user data.
I too have never heard of Takeout. It seems like it's been in around since 2011 with a much smaller set of supported services [1]. One of the top results when you search for 'Google Takeout' is one from 2011 titled 'The Silent Release of Google Takeout' [2].
It looks like it used to be closely associated with the Google Plus branding more so than Account Management, so that may explain why it's not as widely known.
Friendly reminder that your stuff is not "backed up" in the cloud unless you have a local copy. Otherwise it just lives in the cloud, meaning it lives on someone else's server.
Well, if you have read-only copies on different enough servers, owned by different enough people, it's a backup to some degree. Security is never an absolute.
But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated risks in the ways that matter".
If it's really due to some kind of erotic pictures, then I don't understand why often american companies like Google act like iranian. Is there any laws in USA that allows to punish Google for hosting images of woman nipples? Why both App store and Google play's TOS include sins from Old Testament?
I've wondered the same over an over. Maybe it's ads but maybe they simply do it because many people outside the liberal western would would indeed feel offended (and those companies would face legal issues in very conservative countries).
Other people here are saying those erotic pictures (or story depictions) were of kids, where there _are_ laws that allow punishing Google for hosting and not immediately reporting them.
Google is in competition with a lot of other companies, and they've decided they're in a stronger position if they don't set off a firestorm of criticism that gives people an excuse to move to a different service.
Even if you personally don't care about erotic pictures, if your grandma starts associating google with porn (because a case like this became high enough profile to get covered by the local news), and then you e-mail her from your google account, now you're having an uncomfortable conversation with your grandma. Or your wife or mother or sister or really conservative friend or whatever. Which isn't enough to make everyone leave, but it's enough to make some people leave, and pretty soon Bing or Yahoo would have bigger mindshare.
It's a lot easier for Google to just say "ToS violation = deleted" and be done with it, and occasionally have to reverse a decision if there's too much fallout.
Ultimately this is where the decentralized web should go. Having a built-in archive function, will not only prevent work from being lost... the decentralization might prevent it form being shut down.
More accurately stated: Artist stores (the sole copy of [1]) a decade of work on a service he doesn't pay for and which provides no guarantees of service or quality... Why is the title written to make it seem it was Google that did something wrong here?
[1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.
The fact that every single comment in this thread amounts to "should have backed up" makes me a little sad.
Is this really what we want to expect from companies like Google? Is this acceptable? Is it just a "force of nature" that I should consider beyond the ken of man?
What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think worth having a conversation about.
Definitely. My dad, a now-retired programmer, was dealing with an error at his bank in the 80s. It was a bunch of work and frustration. At some point he asked why a thing happened and the rep said, "Oh, the computer just does that."
He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."
I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.
I don't think the problem is software necessarily, it's scale. Software allows for scale but it's not the underlying cause. Google is responsible for the content of maybe hundreds of millions of people; if even a small fraction of them have issues that's overwhelming. At that scale it's impossible for you to be anything other than nothing to them.
> At that scale it's impossible for you to be anything other than nothing to them.
Even if that's the case, it is not impossible. It's just a choice that they made about how to structure things. The US government has hundreds of millions of citizens, but each one of those persons has rights, responsibilities, and privileges. The Catholic Church has hundreds of millions of members, but each one can have a personal relationship with a priest.
If Google is really indifferent to what people have entrusted to them, that's a choice.
>"Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."
I think the angle your father was coming at this was, computers are deterministic. There are lots of times when computers don't act deterministicly, flipped bits for one, also edge cases like Race Conditions etc
Flipped bits don't follow any pattern where you can say "oh it does that". Race conditions are the responsibility of the programmers just like anything else programmed in.
Sure, but even companies like Google make mistakes or suffer disasters. In the case it seems like Google intentionally deleted the data because it was a TOS violation. But imagine the data loss was the result of a coordinated, multi-site terrorist attack. The advice would be the same - you need to have a copy of your cloud data.
Google have, AFAIK, lost data (Gmail glitch if memory serves), but they try really, really, really hard not to, and mostly succeed. Odds are exceptionally high that some technical storage error is vasrptly more likely on your own kit.
Loss of access, or unauthorised access, I'm not so sure of.
Actually, I suspect Google can do better than almost anyone at keeping black hats out. It's the risk of getting denied access yourself that's probably greatest. Some or much of which is outside Google's hands, via legal requirements based on activity.
But that should operate under law enforcement, not as administrative fiat.
My argument is that if using an online service isn't safe for a child pornograpger or terrorist, it's not safe for anyone.
(Substitute rights activist or homosexual in a highly conservative country if the morality of the first examples blocks yor thinking.)
No it's not, but not backing up the majority of your work some way or another is really really bad practice. Worse than google losing one of trillions of datasets.
Look up the case of "Thomas monopoly". Google is legally not allowed to give notice or even reason in the case of child porn. I have no idea if this is the case this time, but seems not impossible.
It is a force of nature. Other people won't always act with your best interests in mind.
There are several things we can do to reduce the risks, but after a certain point they become counter-productive. That's also a force of nature, by the way. At least of "human nature", what means, it's a force of nature as long as you are dealing with humans.
But yeah, there's plenty of room for arguing about that optimum level of risk. Software industry contracts are beyond absurd for decades already.
In addition, nobody sensible relies on an SLA. If I need 99.999% data integrity and you deliver that as your SLA, great! But if the SLA is violated, the contract probably gives you just some extra weeks on your contract for a violated SLA. That doesn't make me whole, I need to plan for SLA violations.
I'm an artist - though not well known or anything, nor do I sell often or anything. I do post in a few places online, however. And I have everything backed up, on my computer and an external hard drive. My work isn't digital, so I have that. not all do.
It isn't what we should expect from google, but it still stands that the artist shouldnt have relied on simply one thing to keep his stuff safe. Accidents happen places, perfectly reasonable (albeit unfortunate) ones. This is the main reason for having backups. The fact that the guy didn't have some of this already in place is, indeed, his fault. It is unfortunate that there is little to no human interface.
The interrupt to his interaction with fans/customers is more unfortunate - that is more difficult to replace. However, if he had another website or public communication form, Some of these folks would look him up. The main problem with this seems to be the sort of art he produced, which wasn't welcome on all platforms.
When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You get the picture.
That correspondence was, and remains, important to me.
Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it?
The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have.
But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want.
From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me.
That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership.
The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.
Good point, but not unsolvable. I can imagine the law would require user specifically giving permission to delete the data afterwards, maybe even mandating a certain form of presenting the gist of the deal, instead of lengthy and indecipherable TOS.
I don't know the legal language, but requiring a text box with a tick mark or equivalent that presents a legally mandated predefined statement designed as a short and simple (unlike most TOS and EULAs), in clear and visible text, should not be impossible.
For example, "I agree that $corp may delete my data without notice and opportunity to back it up" if the $corp isn't willing to offer a TOS that grants the user those rights. Possibly another similar one about privacy.
Imagine how much better the world would be if a majority of people took the time to think about these issues as you have AND were also willing to simply boycott facebook until the ToS were changed.
This level of personal responsibility would be much better, IMO, than falling back on the government to coerce facebook into better behavior.
Yes, because you gave them those rights when you agreed to their terms of service. The US Post Office makes no similar claim of ownership over the mail that i'm aware of, so the metaphor really doesn't work.
We do have a problem because Facebook and Gmail are huge, and because people are starting to assume the convenience and size of them somehow means Facebook and Gmail should be considered public services and regulated as such.
While I see the same problem you do- that we're all at risk of losing the correspondence and history that we care about, man do I think your reaction is super weird.
Facebook and Gmail are private web sites, and always have been. You are mistaking them for public services, when they are not and never were public services. Your mistake in no way means that laws should change or that Facebook should be required to archive and provide you access in perpetuity. You made a choice, and if you realize now that your choice comes with implications you don't like, you should start correcting that choice yourself. You should collect and gather your digital assets out from Facebook and Gmail, and archive them yourself.
Facebook is not the post office. If you want the post office, use the post office. The post office services cost you money, and Facebook's don't. The post office does not archive your correspondence at all, while Facebook does. The post office delivers physical goods, while Facebook only delivers digital goods. I am just not seeing any reasonable way to conclude that you can treat Facebook like the post office in order to suggest that Facebook be required to provide you what you wish for.
Your language is so strange to me - "That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff". You gave them your stuff. If you don't want them to have it, don't give it to them.
I'm completely lost as to how the laws are unfairly balanced in this situation. I'm normally in favor of all kinds of regulation, but this just seems unreasonable to me to suggest that we should have laws that require Facebook to provide you with permanent archive access. Do you want to pay for that archive access, or are you demanding that the government ensure that Facebook has to pay for it forever? The post office isn't required to keep archives for you, how how does your analogy work here?
To be fair, Facebook and Google profit from this misunderstanding.
I do see your point, but I don't feel they should be able to advertise themselves, effectively, as utilities and then refuse to carry the burden of that claim. If Google says you'll be able to store their email with them in perpetuity, one of two things should be true: either they should be legally treated as a utility, or they should be taken to court for false advertisement.
Are they falsely advertising, pretending to be public utilities? And is that what's going on - people actually being tricked and thinking they're public services?
To be honest, I can't say I've ever seen an ad for Facebook or Gmail. They entered my world like I imagine most people -- because I heard about them from friends.
I don't think there's any "effective" advertising as utilities. Where do they say you can store email with them in perpetuity?
One of the biggest problems, I think, is user education: the average user sees these widely-adopted services online and assumes they're equivalent to meatspace, where real utilities have been created over time by institutions -- not private corporations. If anything, we need a legally enforceable way to set up true virtual utilities, or for more people to internalize what the media has been telling anyone who listens carefully for years: your data, once handed over, no longer belongs to you.
The utility of Facebook to me is exactly the same as that of the post office. The post office derives value from me by directly charging me for it. Facebook doesn't, but it's not because they asked and I said I won't and so they offered to offer me the utility anyway out of their benevolence. It's because they found a way to have advertisers pay for it on my behalf, in return for me looking at the advertisements of those advertisers. My attention and my presence on Facebook has value, just as my cold, hard cash has value. The reason I'm on Facebook is because it has a utility for me. If it didn't have that utility, I wouldn't be on it, and advertisers wouldn't pay for my being on it. When Facebook unilaterally takes away that utility from me, it feels akin to the post office closing my P.O. Box with my mail still in it.
Facebook and Gmail are private websites. What is privacy we talk about? Ownership? Investment? Is that all there is to it? Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would. Why would the public object at the closing of a private website? After all, they don't own it, so what's in it for them? Whatever is in it for them is what I'm arguing needs to be protected, and not necessarily under Facebook's or Google's terms.
My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute. I receive payments for work I do using PayPal. My ownership of my PayPal account, and hence access to money I've worked for, is directly tied to my Gmail address. If Google can take away my Gmail address, they are, effectively, taking away my PayPal "bank account." Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is "a private website"? I don't think so.
I didn't give Gmail my stuff. They offered to carry my communications between me and those I communicate with. I derive value from it, and so do they. It's a business transaction like any other, even though no money changed hands between them and myself. The world has come to know that David Wanjiru can be found at dwanjiru@gmail.com. That arrangement has suited David Wanjiru. That arrangement has also suited Gmail.
The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"? If a prospective employer who's had my CV for three months wishes to talk to me, they'll fire an Email to dwanjiru@gmail.com. If my PayPal account becomes compromised, PayPal will send remedial steps of action to dwanjiru@gmail.com. When the higher education loans body in my country wants to pursue me for my college student loans, they send Emails to dwanjiru@gmail.com.
How then can it be proper that Gmail owns dwanjiru@gmail.com, so much so that at the press of a button, dwanjiru@gmail.com ceases to exist? And that this is done without any reference whatsoever to this David Wanjiru person?
Do I pay for Gmail and Facebook? No I don't. But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.
If they no longer wish to provide me that service, fine. But they can't block me out at their own will. They can, and the terms of service I agreed to say as much, but that's what I'm saying should change.
I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if ...
> Facebook and Gmail are private websites. What is privacy we talk about? Ownership? Investment?
Yes. Ownership. Operational funding as well. Not paid for by tax dollars, but paid for with income from the products sold by the private company, as well as private investments.
> Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would.
That's speculative, but the government has shut down many private companies, with and without objection. Should public objection prevent the government from shutting down a private company that is breaking the law? If Google was selling your private email, should they be required to continue to do so, simply because a lot of people enjoy the convenience?
> My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute... Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is a "private website"? I don't think so.
Did you catch the part about the person who's email address that was shut down may have been violating child pornography laws? Not only can Google shut that down at will, they are literally compelled by law to turn it off immediately.
But even in general, Yes, I do think private companies can and should be able to discontinue their products at will, as do many, many people. I'm not hearing a compelling argument why they should be required to provide a public service without tax funding. You are suggesting a public service.
> The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"?
Google does, plain and simple. If you have organized your life so that you depend on your gmail address, and loss of it would compromise your livelihood, I humbly suggest that we stop talking right now and you go make some backup plans.
> But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.
Facebook is making money by showing you ads. Their primary business transaction is with advertisers, not with you. They are selling your browsing habits and information about your social network to the advertisers, and that's how they make money. They protect their advertiser's interests first, your interests are only protected as far as it keeps you on the site looking at ads.
I'm not sure what you mean about protected business transactions, but your business transaction is already protected as far as it can be. The transaction is that Facebook delivers your message to your friends in return for your allowing them to tell advertisers about your behavior. That's what they agreed to do, that's what they did, and the transaction ends once they did what they agreed to do. Why are you expecting the government to extend the scope of the transaction beyond what the company promised?
> I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf
You have that opportunity right now. Take care of it right now!
If they have to shut down your account for you violating the law, then they cannot legally offer you the option to download your content.
If they have to shut down because they run out of money, then they can't legally force employees to stay there and provide this service to you.
If they decide to shut down your account because the service is losing money, then leaving it on means losing more money. Why should they be required to pay to leave it on? Your dependence on the service and failure to plan doesn't, and shouldn't, bind them to anything.
> My argument is that the opportunity to save my stuff should be mine by right...
Still as wild an idea as before, and I just don't get where you're coming from, I'm sorry. I agree about the problem, but this proposed solution baffles me. I'm sure you're not the only one, and you're clearly a sm...
> I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if I wished to).
There is "Gmail for Work" which does provide some of the guarantees you are looking for. Though none regarding illegal content, as per the laws.
If you want Gmail to act like a post office, treat it like one: fetch the emails on your computer, keep an archive. I pop my mail (pop(keep off)->spamassassin&clamav->maildirs, via procmail) and my archive is on my computer, so whatever service I use can't do anything with it. AFAIK there are software to fetch from IMAP too.
With Facebook, well, I guess you agree to them being able to delete your data at their will via the little box you tick on sign-up. And as long as you accept those terms, law won't help.
You can - and should - archive your FB data. There's a built-in feature for that and I periodically archive everything for the same sentimental reasons.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 455 ms ] thread> It’s gone because it was kept entirely on his blog
Take backups.
0. It's not a backup unless you know it restores
1. Always take backups
2. Backup the backup
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
Now, if they only could add a periodic option...
Easily installable via homebrew.
[1]: http://www.offlineimap.org/
[2]: https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap
[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Isync
You can mitigate this by having your own domain and host the email on Google Apps -- that way if they take away your access you just update your mx record to point to somewhere else. But you can also easily lose your domain name (due to malice or accident).
BTW, if an emergency does happen, anyone have a recommendation for a decent web email client that I can point my MX record to? Preferably one that has both hosted and self-hosted options. Or something that I can spin up easily on a cloud service such as AWS.
[1] https://squirrelmail.org/about/ [2] https://www.horde.org/apps/webmail
As an aside, VestaCP [3] - an open source hosting admin panel that you can install within a few minutes via ssh - will install squirrelmail automatically:
[3] http://vestacp.com/
No backups to deal with and no procrastination-until-the-end-of-your-life. Save the planet and get away from your past.
I happen to like my past and want to keep it, even if I don't habitually refer to it.
Having said that, I did continue scrolling and the article goes on to say
> More generally, relying on the internet as an archive is dangerous.
And it is, at least, another point toward helping me feel vindicated for being that person who always says "and you have off site backups for when your house burns down, right?"
3 copies
2 different forms of media
1 offsite
Partially unrelated I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups. On that note, their backups are not my backups. Their backups are never my backups.
If they save my butt one day, awesome. But that day was already terrible if I'd managed to lose all of my backups.
I have two off-site backups located ~150 miles from each other. If I (we) lose everything, chances are that there are more important things to worry about, like what's for dinner.
When my music collection was smaller, I had everything backed up onto an external as well as had them all physically burned onto like 50 DVDs. Since my collection has grown beyond a terabyte, however, I haven't had the time or energy to keep that up. Now it's just an external, a travel external, a redundant external, and a cloud backup.
So Disk (HDD) and Cloud is fine. Two HDDs (spinny platter style) would indeed fail the test. If you want to argue it you could probably get away with different manufacturers or different batches but I'd prefer my backups to play nicely with the rules rather than try to avoid them! Far-fetched as it is but lets say for example you have a power surge that takes out your external disk (is that even possible?). Chances are high whatever did that would also do that to your other disk. Or maybe a wall caves in and decimates your PC (or you just sweep the desk somehow and knock everything off it. Maybe the desk has collapsed) - The spinny disks may be destroyed if they are both hit hard enough. Mixing an HDD and SSD, the SSD would probably be more hardy against shock damage.
From another comment I made in this thread somewhere "I consider "cloud" as its own media type to avoid the pedantics of me storing files on a spinning disk and the cloud provider does too. Chances are they have server grade disks and their own backups [so it's different to just a raw disk]"
Edit: I use too many brackets here. I am going to attend my next available parenthesis anonymous support group.
Sometimes, when people buy multiple drives at once for servers, they wind up with drives from the same batch. If the drives are subtly defective, and if they're always run under identical conditions (such as in a RAID array), then I've seen multiple drives fail within days of each other.
Disks exists in two states: failed and failing.
[0]: please feel free to let me know if you know any previous references to this rule.
He had 2 copies on floppy two on disk (in a separate building) and another set at home on floppy's
That's why in 1979 I used to by 8 inch floppy's in multiples of thousands
Silly if you consider how from a technical and practical standpoint nothing prevents you from carrying a backup of every important document you've ever owned and a good deal of photos and such with you in your wallet on an encrypted mini-SD-card. Wallet gets stolen? Make a new backup. House burns down? You have your backup. Drop off a card at friends or family, keep one at your employer, hell, stick them on the Christmas cards you send out each year to your nearest and dearest; with proper encryption you are the only one able to use them anyway.
It also doesn't help that people blindly trust the big tech companies to do this for them.
From the article:
Cooper should’ve backed his work up, or known to be more cautious with drafts. ... ... Admittedly, not everything has vanished. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has saved bits and pieces of Cooper’s blog dating back to January 3, 2012, but they are just snapshots of the blog’s front page for a given date, not capturing the blog in its entirety.
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping
i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog.
This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_ aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you should keep backups.
http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/
Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?
But at least not autistic, and definitely not with a follow up where that is used as an excuse for not feeling sorry for them. :-/
I do feel sorry for autistic people, though.
Also in addition to tarring autistic people I read the original post more or less as: because they behave in an autistic way I won't feel sorry for them, thus adding insult to injury.
Who's saying that?
And Google does it because of incompetence, not because of a condition they have no control over. That's the main difference
I'm not implying Google does it because they suffer from autism, and maybe there's a better adjective to describe what they do.
Yes you are. Here's what you said:
> Given that Google's customer support has autistic tendencies to put it mildly
Beyond that, tendency is defined as: an inclination towards a particular characteristic or type of behaviour
More importantly, it does not mean "it (Google) is that (Autistic)"
If I had said "Google is literally autistic" I would agree with you.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...
http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...
But now I'm really confused. That page still exists as of this minute: http://www.dennis-cooper.net
The link from the fusion.net story is: http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/
That blog does not exist. So maybe we're talking about two different things?
The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the real problem is that he didn't use that.
So, essentially, a paid version of archive.org, which would be a _great_ startup idea - something that I've been mulling over for quite some time.
The technical (and infrastructural/logistical) challenges in implementing/executing something like this, however, would be rather steep, imo. In most cases, a simple crawl just won't cut it, as most sites today would have been built using some sort of CMS, with a database backend, so a simple crawl and archive of the public-facing site would leave you with a (horribly) broken version of the site.
As a freelancer, I routinely come across inquiries/gigs where people changed hosts, took a backup of the webroot (and not the database), discontinued the old host and ended up with a DOA site!!
Coming back to the matter of an archiving/backup service, this could be doable notwithstanding the challenges I mentioned above. Something I would _love_ to have a go at, but beyond the means of an ordinary web tech wahm from India. (Any takers? :-))
While people like us (you, me, and all others here) take such things in our stride, the scenario is vastly different so far as average end-users at large are concerned.
And even if it seems to be working fine at the moment, there are no practical guarantees that this will not be subject to change: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/DiG9qANf5PA. Even someone as high profile as Linus Torvalds had to resort to the classic method of public shaming in order to get a prompt response.
Lastly, there is not much incentive even if I cared about privacy - my typical recipient is anyway a Gmail account, so Google can definitely construct a shadow profile for the sender even if the sender does not use Gmail.
Again, it is a classic problem of a heavily centralized internet.
Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve".
The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final.
Edit: Clarity
Google really should have an option to freeze the account while allowing the user to download their content, but it seems that they don't.
Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation.
And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?
Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no responsibilities."
Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their hearts. It's a business.
It is a failure of ethics to then delete that indispensable thing.
There were laws in the old USAmerican West about horse theft. Strict laws! And similarly strict laws throughout history in shepherding cultures, regarding livestock.
The justification for draconian punishments for livestock theft has always been that the animals (property, items) were indispensable. You can't go around drastically changing or possibly ending people's lives by taking the things they depend on away from them. It's wrong!
Very few people backup their Google account regularly (or at all), even though Google Takeout is available. People should, but I'd argue part of the burden is on Google for misleading them into thinking they don't need to.
That's a dick move through and through. We can wag our fingers and say 'you should have known better' but clearly if this were the case all the time, with all our free services, this model of business would fail. It is 'free' so long as it's profitable or has the potential to be profitable to them.
These services have no explicit guarantee that they will last, or protect your stuff, but we expect them to. It's implied in the marketing or usability of the thing. You pay a merchant for an item, you don't explicitly pay to secure your credit card with hashes and salts in a DB, it's implied in the service. I suppose it's your fault if your credit card is swiped because you should have used cash... or gold bullion.
If Google was a storage facility and did this, free or no, they would be liable.
Though could be different for different storage facilities.
For example, lets reverse this a little bit. Lets say you're storing a clients data, backups, 100tb of data with offsite redundancy. The client doesn't pay for 6 months. You've taken all course of action to contact the client but they're unresponsive. It's now costing you money to maintain and service this data. What do you do?
EDIT: This post isn't as well written as I'd like it to be, but parent is bullshit and I think the core argument of "This is not an analogous situation" holds. I need to leave in a few minutes though so I don't have time to write a better argument, sorry.
As a short version though, if this was an analogous situation where google had tried to contact this person to take down whatever was objectionable, and warned them that they should back up their stuff immediately since they could decide to take it down on any business day, I bet this guy would have been right on that.
They didn't though. Giving them social credit like they did is ridiculous.
You always have to inform the user first, even if it's in the contract.
Now compare that to what google did. They were owed exactly 0 dollars for 0 months, they make no attempt whatsoever to contact the client, and they shredded the data without trying to send it back.
It's more like Chad informed the police of the dead body he found in his garage, and they removed it. Chad called to let you know after the fact, because you are obviously not his first priority in that situation.
https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en
It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this help.
Cue sad trombone.
This had to happen to me a couple of times before I got to be a real Nazi about backup. I'd consider myself a fairly smart guy too, it's just one of those things you never want to take care of properly...until you lose stuff, then you get it.
Poor guy, hope he can get his work back but it doesn't seem too likely.
But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity, location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online communication.
That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going to take a long time for him to reconnect.
The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I used to use gmail (with me@mydomain.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since 2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain.
(Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens. I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.)
Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need meta-domains that can't be transferred, that are our identity, but I don't know how that would be implemented.
I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list.
Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is warranted by the importance of your communication.
"Speech" appears twice, but is only capitalized when referring to legislators' speeches:
"and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place"
"or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
Technically speaking, persons always had a freedom of association, but the court made it explicit during N.A.A.C.P. v. ALABAMA [1].
[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/357/449.html
(In 1958, the State of Alabama banned the NAACP and tried to damage its finances and power by demanding its membership list. The Supreme Court saw through their "fig leaves" and overturned that.)
There are plenty of paid services that will lock you in and will terminate your account if something big enough happens.
What we need is a new decentralized Internet. We need not only open source software (for security reasons), not only open hardware (for security reasons) but also a new open non-commercial Internet which cannot be censored.
Why does it need to be non-commercial?
Personally I see commercial (with healthy competition) as a good sign that something will stick around for a while.
We already have a commercial Internet, we don't need a second one. Commercial interests would make the second Internet also a target of control.
This is a great question. Possibly related: I don't know the answer. :)
The solution clearly goes on that direction, but this is not enough. And I'd really like to see this one problem solved before we have to start asking something like "and what if somebody takes control of your brain, or you lose access to it?"
Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.
Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew email for other forms of communication.
I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and provide standards based communication.
I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push for it to get better.
It's like saying email isn't open source because it has to have a connection to the Internet to be useful.
Domain getting stolen by a registrar? That's a crime, treat it like theft, there ought to be some justice for that theft.
Big business doing something awful/scandalous/inappropriate? Change the laws, and work to persuade people that it ought to be societally unacceptable to violate those laws.
I see this a lot on tech-oriented forums, that you can "fix" social problems with the right kind of code, or you can get out of legal repercussions with the right set of legalese, and really, no, stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.
Treating business and law like a black box, or something to be worked around, as though there were sufficient cleverness to solve everything without engaging with larger society, well, no, that's not gonna get you anywhere.
So you effectively agree that solid ethic opinions help fighting this. Then why you started your comment with "No, ..."? :)
Fastmail et al. show that you can run a business on a protocol, even if it won't necessarily make you a unicorn.
It was very hard to imagine how Twitter the company would make enough money to justify the investments it had taken by that point if Twitter the service looked more like Diaspora. You on,y have to look at Diaspora today to see that it's not obviously meeting the mission that Twitter serves today.
One interesting aspect of this is you had people like Alex Payne voting with their code in the form of the API and later with his feet after the company was clearly going down the ad-supported route (and hiring a lot to support that model -- you need to build a large amount of revenue-oriented infrastructure in that world). The API then had to be pulled substantially back because it didn't fit the revenue model, something the developer community still hasn't forgiven Twitter for.
It's amazing to me how much of what looks like corporate BS can be traced to individual personalities and their debates, or the echoes of their debates.
[to be clear, all of what I've outlined can be gleaned from media reports, books and presentations about Twitter over the years. While I am an ex-employee, this history is available to anyone who either was paying attention back then or has a small amount of investigatory skillset.]
My conclusion at the time was that they wanted to keep the percentage of users of the IMAP service below some value, and every time the jerked the config around, they'd see a dip in the graph on their end. My setup is currently non-functional. The maintenance cost was too high. Mission accomplished.
Note: now that I think about it, maybe the cert rotation issue was on (e)SMTP, not IMAP. Same diff.
But what that doesn't show is that they then changed it back, and forth... for a while. It was just a UX issue that only affected computer literate people. THE BEST KIND. :(
I remember when some combination of Gmail features* enabled me to upload my old mbox with years of personal email into my GAFYD account... emails from before Gmail publicly existed. And now I could SEARCH them! The future was bright.
I certainly felt confident that I would be a gmail user for life. I certainly didn't consider the possibility that they'd one day just deny my access to the whole thing because I spoke ill of them in a HN comment. ;)
* access external pop3 account and auto-rewrite message headers so messages would be associated with my gmail address even though they were originally delivered to a different domain... Brilliant.
Sorry I'm being a bit thick, but did this happen, or does the emoticon at the end mean it's hypothetical?
http://lee-phillips.org/gmailRewriting/
The first paragraph about message modification is: "Sites MAY modify submissions to ensure compliance with standards and site policy. This section describes a number of such modifications that are often considered useful." From is typically modified to comply with SPF and/or DKIM.
The sections on header rewriting are essentially examples of what the document describes as "modifications that are often considered useful", they're not an exhaustive list. The only MUST NOT rule that concerns email address rewriting is about destination addresses.
(Well, almost unrestricted. The results have to be syntactically valid.)
There's an explanation of this phenomenon that doesn't assume malice: there are N (> 1) servers with different certificates, and you're not hitting the same one every time.
The impression I have formed is that gmail will have whatever features google's gmail-for-businesses product needs. If a considerable percentage of customers (ie. the ones who pay per month and user) use a particular feature, then that feature stays and is maintained.
I know from my experience in hwops that plenty of people on the corp domain DO believe that they are working towards a better world--and that making more money will only accelerate progress towards that goal.
The question is: are they wrong? Has Google lost its way?
Let's look not just at this IMAP issue but also at the OP as we ponder that.
Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility.
Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email?
Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!"
Sounds like a utility to me.
The law isn't always right. Times change, for example.
I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account.
If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change!
The USAmerican Congress does have a history of designing rules to serve the common good and forcing tech giants to play by those rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society.
Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process.
Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives.
This kind of thing is what Government is FOR.
Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.
That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way.
I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc.
https://todoport.com/index.html
In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider.
It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least!
Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services.
I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.
But they cannot, at least not for a foreseeable future. Both are used in enterprise environments, who would flee the first platform in droves which would disable IMAP/POP3.
And even if they'd both disable IMAP, people would write adapters.
Fundamentally life is about trade offs. For most people closed platforms are the better choice.
When you have your own, then you can run your own "services", not to mention many other possibilities, such as true decentralized communications -- no third party servers needed.
1. "World-reachable" means you control the firewall, not a third party.
Alternatively, be satisfied and keep depending on third parties.
Google: "Let us make many consecutive requests to your webserver, download and store copies of your content." You: "Agreed." You: "Let me make many consecutive reuqests to your webserver, download and store copies of my own or other people's content." Google: "Sorry".
Then Google makes your content available to others, but only for a few searches at time[2]. To add insult to injury, it sells advertising and, if the regulators are correct, promotes its own websites -- all serving user-generated content -- as people are searching through publicly available information.
"Middleman" or "service"?
2. Any attempt to collect in bulk results in IP ban. Compare Internet Archive who encourages users to crawl their collection.
Organizing public information sounds like a lovely goal for a company, until you realize it will be access controlled (it's public information), laden with ads (because the company cannot support itself without advertisers), user tracking for the advertisers and that the changes to the algorithms that include or exclude results are secret. And there will be no index. You can only access the data through search.
Moving beyond the first page of results is OK only so long as you do not go "too fast" or go too deep -- you will never get to page 100 witout first being banned. WTF?
Having a custom domain would get your far enough in this case, owning your own IP address isn't really needed.
Just as I move my domain around between email (and other) providers, I could then move my IPv6 block around. Instead of asking Linode for an IP address out of their block, I could tell them "serve this block." (Or can we already do that? For a reasonable price?)
If you control the DNS there's no real need for owning your own IP addresses as you can just change what they point to. That's usually also much faster to do in a pinch than find a new party that will announce your block and convince the old one to stop doing so. That's usually hours if not days in lead time.
Though if you truly care enough about it you'll also want your own DNS servers and own gTLD in order to own the whole chain.
However what you describe -- building out your own infrastructure -- still remains a lofty but worthy endeavor for anyone with the skills and determination.
Businesses of all sizes rent stable IP addresses. Some ISPs in some countries also provide them to non-business subscribers as part of the standard subscription.
It's really not too difficult to have a persistent IP address for an individual who only needs reachability and is not trying to run a high traffic, global enterprise. Avoid the popular large, high-volume providers. Obviously do not use something like AWS.
1. Misconfigured servers: This is the hardest part. Rule number 1: keep it as small as possible. Disable everything, and then only enable what you need. Rule 2: READ, I mean read every document, blog post etc you can find about e-mail, email attacks, etc.
2. IP address: The normal address you get from Digital Occean or Linode for example, are normally horrible as a lot of spam has been sent from them. If your lucky it might work, but check the lists for those IPs. Try to change if you can, until you find one with low scores. Also, I dont know if this helped, but i had my domain on both Gmail and Outlook servers for a while before migrating to my own servers. I dont know if this helped me to not get stuck in their filters etc? Or I was just lucky i guess :)
I finally moved because I did not have the energy to keep up with the server etc, and when i noticed that i had not even logged on to the server for 3 months, i just moved it to gmail. I am however looking at migrating away from google, as i don't like the web interface (use it from the iPad now). So who knows where I'll end up next.
Email dates back to timesharing, when people shared computers, each user having an "email account" on a single computer.
For people today, each with their own computer, it's still possible to do email without store and forward, with each user running SMTP servers that talk directly to each other instead of connecting to "email providers".
This is grassroots. Not meant to leverage existing "email provider" ecosystem.
What's America's largest ISP? I think Comcast? Good luck passing SMTP in either direction over Comcast's residential network: https://customer.xfinity.com/help-and-support/internet/list-...
I agree with your general point, but it's hard to keep up with this sort of thing, even for geeks. For the Muggles it's impossible.
You are sending email to people you know, on a port you have agreed to, who also have reachable IP addresses and will accept connections from your IP address.
ISP's are not going to do DPI on open ports like 22, 80, or 443 or any high port, in order to filter out SMTP traffic. Why would they bother?
If you must use the existing "email provider" system -- e.g., you need to send commercial email -- then you must use the standardized ports they use, and yes, you must jump through their hoops. And you will experience spam and other nuisances. It's supposed to be open and decnetralized, but the reality is it's quite centralized because everyone relies on "major email providers".
But there's nothing about SMTP protocol that requires anyone to use an "email provider" or any specific port, nor to accept email from all IP addresses.
Two people can communicate directly via SMTP on a non-standard port and can choose to filter by IP address.
Maybe no one does this anymore, but I've done it; it's possible.
It's not that difficult to set up. The showstopper is not the set up, nor the ISP filtering port 25. It's that most people do not have a reachable IP address.
If the internet didn't exist, an artist would have bought storage for his art. Why this artist feels that a service he didn't pay for owes him anything is baffling to me.
Turn it around, though: if Google feels like it's not responsible for anything it hosts, shouldn't it say so, loud and clear? Say, a banner that says, "Hey, we'll delete your stuff any time we feel like it," at the top of every Gmail page?
Google's users aren't parasites. There is both a relationship and an exchange of economic value. That's why Google has worked very hard to be trusted by everybody, to be seen as responsible stewards of vast amounts of often very personal information.
If Google doesn't want people to trust them, they should not work so hard to be seen as trustworthy. That the artist believed them is not an error on his part.
Typing out words on a forum and hitting "reply" is easy regardless whether you support the victim or not. Don't see your point?
Sure, the TOS says "we can delete it whenever"/"no promises", but the advertising and general pitching of the product have heavily indicated otherwise. I don't see the service going away, and when you have so much identity tied to your email, it's pretty shocking to realize that it could all disappear in a flash.
If Google were to kill my email accounts, I would be _seriously_ disadvantaged.
Saying that only fools trust Google to keep your things forever is true, but also lacks empathy.
Sure, he's not paying, but Google doesn't ask for payment. They provide a service which is backed by Google's implicit guarantee that their web hosting is safe and reliable, and they've broken that guarantee. Google may not have a legal responsibility to not delete everything this artist made, but every time something like this happens, the rest of us should notice it and reconsider whether Google is a good platform to trust with our work.
Edit: I'm not even considering running my own email server; I know that's a full-time job. Just something like forwarding my custom email to my Gmail address, which is the type of thing I've heard the aforementioned scary stories about (though a quick web search isn't turning up many such stories).
Problems arise when you run your own server, because of fairly detailed authentication settings. If you pay a provider to run their servers, they take care of that.
Of course, it's important to keep backups of everything (configs, logs, mail, etc), and test. Just slowly port everything over, as you gain more confidence that your not missing anything. Most email providers also will let you put a rule in place that lets you bounce mail to both addresses.
Where you run into problems is when you do what I just did, I was using Google Apps, then Outlook.com with a custom domain and decided I was tired of giving other people access to my data - since I have a decent business-class cable connection at home including a static IP I bought a couple GroupWise licenses for myself, my wife and my daughter and moved our email in-home where all our data sits comfortably on my FreeNAS storage array. Since I rarely send email, and my home IP is 'unknown' to any IP reputation services at the moment getting past spam filters will require some time. It's a non-issue for me, it's a personal email account and I can tell my friends and family to check their spam folders the first time I contact them to whitelist my address, but it's not something everyone wants to deal with.
Tho FWIW I use Postmark to do my email delivery because then at least I know my email will end up in the inbox of the recipient vs their spam box which my hosted server was having problems with.
Good point; your domain can be seized for various sorts of percieved IP violation.
I've got an exit plan for my email, but I'd lose at least $200 of apps.
It's really easy to become dependent on a service.
One thing I worry about thought: what happens when I die? My credit cards will eventually shut down, my Linode will turn off when my card gets declined, and my domains will fail to renew.
But the same thing happens the other direction. Github could shut down Github pages one day, or they could even go out of business. Geocities is gone (although I think Archive.org backed up a lot of it) and there are tons of services that have gone belly-up over the years.
Even in our age of massive data retention, it's still interesting to see what's gone, and what may never be recovered if it wasn't indexed by the Wayback machine.
The title seems like click-bait.
Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google service department.
I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger. But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like how comments are handled.
Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a small add-on to my own web properties.
Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.
I have "Feature announcements" on from Google, but never heard of this. Anyway, thanks mucho!
[1] http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/cautionary-tale-google-decides-...
It looks like it used to be closely associated with the Google Plus branding more so than Account Management, so that may explain why it's not as widely known.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Data_Liberation_Front
[2] http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/the-silent-release-o...
But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated risks in the ways that matter".
Even if you personally don't care about erotic pictures, if your grandma starts associating google with porn (because a case like this became high enough profile to get covered by the local news), and then you e-mail her from your google account, now you're having an uncomfortable conversation with your grandma. Or your wife or mother or sister or really conservative friend or whatever. Which isn't enough to make everyone leave, but it's enough to make some people leave, and pretty soon Bing or Yahoo would have bigger mindshare.
It's a lot easier for Google to just say "ToS violation = deleted" and be done with it, and occasionally have to reverse a decision if there's too much fallout.
Whew.
[1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work on the blog was only on the blog.
What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms, TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think worth having a conversation about.
He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."
I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world" and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.
Even if that's the case, it is not impossible. It's just a choice that they made about how to structure things. The US government has hundreds of millions of citizens, but each one of those persons has rights, responsibilities, and privileges. The Catholic Church has hundreds of millions of members, but each one can have a personal relationship with a priest.
If Google is really indifferent to what people have entrusted to them, that's a choice.
I think the angle your father was coming at this was, computers are deterministic. There are lots of times when computers don't act deterministicly, flipped bits for one, also edge cases like Race Conditions etc
Loss of access, or unauthorised access, I'm not so sure of.
Actually, I suspect Google can do better than almost anyone at keeping black hats out. It's the risk of getting denied access yourself that's probably greatest. Some or much of which is outside Google's hands, via legal requirements based on activity.
But that should operate under law enforcement, not as administrative fiat.
My argument is that if using an online service isn't safe for a child pornograpger or terrorist, it's not safe for anyone.
(Substitute rights activist or homosexual in a highly conservative country if the morality of the first examples blocks yor thinking.)
There are several things we can do to reduce the risks, but after a certain point they become counter-productive. That's also a force of nature, by the way. At least of "human nature", what means, it's a force of nature as long as you are dealing with humans.
But yeah, there's plenty of room for arguing about that optimum level of risk. Software industry contracts are beyond absurd for decades already.
It isn't what we should expect from google, but it still stands that the artist shouldnt have relied on simply one thing to keep his stuff safe. Accidents happen places, perfectly reasonable (albeit unfortunate) ones. This is the main reason for having backups. The fact that the guy didn't have some of this already in place is, indeed, his fault. It is unfortunate that there is little to no human interface.
The interrupt to his interaction with fans/customers is more unfortunate - that is more difficult to replace. However, if he had another website or public communication form, Some of these folks would look him up. The main problem with this seems to be the sort of art he produced, which wasn't welcome on all platforms.
That correspondence was, and remains, important to me.
Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me from accessing it?
The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have.
But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want.
From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail, and agree to store my archive for me.
That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every sense of ownership.
The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.
What is a reasonable law that won't, say, make services like Snapchat illegal (which many people seem to find useful)?
I don't know the legal language, but requiring a text box with a tick mark or equivalent that presents a legally mandated predefined statement designed as a short and simple (unlike most TOS and EULAs), in clear and visible text, should not be impossible.
For example, "I agree that $corp may delete my data without notice and opportunity to back it up" if the $corp isn't willing to offer a TOS that grants the user those rights. Possibly another similar one about privacy.
This level of personal responsibility would be much better, IMO, than falling back on the government to coerce facebook into better behavior.
Unfortunately it is not. Issues like this are the reason why government and state occasionally can be useful.
Yes, because you gave them those rights when you agreed to their terms of service. The US Post Office makes no similar claim of ownership over the mail that i'm aware of, so the metaphor really doesn't work.
While I see the same problem you do- that we're all at risk of losing the correspondence and history that we care about, man do I think your reaction is super weird.
Facebook and Gmail are private web sites, and always have been. You are mistaking them for public services, when they are not and never were public services. Your mistake in no way means that laws should change or that Facebook should be required to archive and provide you access in perpetuity. You made a choice, and if you realize now that your choice comes with implications you don't like, you should start correcting that choice yourself. You should collect and gather your digital assets out from Facebook and Gmail, and archive them yourself.
Facebook is not the post office. If you want the post office, use the post office. The post office services cost you money, and Facebook's don't. The post office does not archive your correspondence at all, while Facebook does. The post office delivers physical goods, while Facebook only delivers digital goods. I am just not seeing any reasonable way to conclude that you can treat Facebook like the post office in order to suggest that Facebook be required to provide you what you wish for.
Your language is so strange to me - "That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff". You gave them your stuff. If you don't want them to have it, don't give it to them.
I'm completely lost as to how the laws are unfairly balanced in this situation. I'm normally in favor of all kinds of regulation, but this just seems unreasonable to me to suggest that we should have laws that require Facebook to provide you with permanent archive access. Do you want to pay for that archive access, or are you demanding that the government ensure that Facebook has to pay for it forever? The post office isn't required to keep archives for you, how how does your analogy work here?
I do see your point, but I don't feel they should be able to advertise themselves, effectively, as utilities and then refuse to carry the burden of that claim. If Google says you'll be able to store their email with them in perpetuity, one of two things should be true: either they should be legally treated as a utility, or they should be taken to court for false advertisement.
To be honest, I can't say I've ever seen an ad for Facebook or Gmail. They entered my world like I imagine most people -- because I heard about them from friends.
One of the biggest problems, I think, is user education: the average user sees these widely-adopted services online and assumes they're equivalent to meatspace, where real utilities have been created over time by institutions -- not private corporations. If anything, we need a legally enforceable way to set up true virtual utilities, or for more people to internalize what the media has been telling anyone who listens carefully for years: your data, once handed over, no longer belongs to you.
Facebook and Gmail are private websites. What is privacy we talk about? Ownership? Investment? Is that all there is to it? Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would. Why would the public object at the closing of a private website? After all, they don't own it, so what's in it for them? Whatever is in it for them is what I'm arguing needs to be protected, and not necessarily under Facebook's or Google's terms.
My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute. I receive payments for work I do using PayPal. My ownership of my PayPal account, and hence access to money I've worked for, is directly tied to my Gmail address. If Google can take away my Gmail address, they are, effectively, taking away my PayPal "bank account." Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is "a private website"? I don't think so.
I didn't give Gmail my stuff. They offered to carry my communications between me and those I communicate with. I derive value from it, and so do they. It's a business transaction like any other, even though no money changed hands between them and myself. The world has come to know that David Wanjiru can be found at dwanjiru@gmail.com. That arrangement has suited David Wanjiru. That arrangement has also suited Gmail.
The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"? If a prospective employer who's had my CV for three months wishes to talk to me, they'll fire an Email to dwanjiru@gmail.com. If my PayPal account becomes compromised, PayPal will send remedial steps of action to dwanjiru@gmail.com. When the higher education loans body in my country wants to pursue me for my college student loans, they send Emails to dwanjiru@gmail.com.
How then can it be proper that Gmail owns dwanjiru@gmail.com, so much so that at the press of a button, dwanjiru@gmail.com ceases to exist? And that this is done without any reference whatsoever to this David Wanjiru person?
Do I pay for Gmail and Facebook? No I don't. But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.
If they no longer wish to provide me that service, fine. But they can't block me out at their own will. They can, and the terms of service I agreed to say as much, but that's what I'm saying should change.
I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if ...
Yes. Ownership. Operational funding as well. Not paid for by tax dollars, but paid for with income from the products sold by the private company, as well as private investments.
> Suppose the government wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course they would.
That's speculative, but the government has shut down many private companies, with and without objection. Should public objection prevent the government from shutting down a private company that is breaking the law? If Google was selling your private email, should they be required to continue to do so, simply because a lot of people enjoy the convenience?
> My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's email address. Think about that for a minute... Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is a "private website"? I don't think so.
Did you catch the part about the person who's email address that was shut down may have been violating child pornography laws? Not only can Google shut that down at will, they are literally compelled by law to turn it off immediately.
But even in general, Yes, I do think private companies can and should be able to discontinue their products at will, as do many, many people. I'm not hearing a compelling argument why they should be required to provide a public service without tax funding. You are suggesting a public service.
> The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"?
Google does, plain and simple. If you have organized your life so that you depend on your gmail address, and loss of it would compromise your livelihood, I humbly suggest that we stop talking right now and you go make some backup plans.
> But me and Facebook, or me and Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should be protected too.
Facebook is making money by showing you ads. Their primary business transaction is with advertisers, not with you. They are selling your browsing habits and information about your social network to the advertisers, and that's how they make money. They protect their advertiser's interests first, your interests are only protected as far as it keeps you on the site looking at ads.
I'm not sure what you mean about protected business transactions, but your business transaction is already protected as far as it can be. The transaction is that Facebook delivers your message to your friends in return for your allowing them to tell advertisers about your behavior. That's what they agreed to do, that's what they did, and the transaction ends once they did what they agreed to do. Why are you expecting the government to extend the scope of the transaction beyond what the company promised?
> I'm asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing to keep it on my behalf
You have that opportunity right now. Take care of it right now!
If they have to shut down your account for you violating the law, then they cannot legally offer you the option to download your content.
If they have to shut down because they run out of money, then they can't legally force employees to stay there and provide this service to you.
If they decide to shut down your account because the service is losing money, then leaving it on means losing more money. Why should they be required to pay to leave it on? Your dependence on the service and failure to plan doesn't, and shouldn't, bind them to anything.
> My argument is that the opportunity to save my stuff should be mine by right...
Still as wild an idea as before, and I just don't get where you're coming from, I'm sorry. I agree about the problem, but this proposed solution baffles me. I'm sure you're not the only one, and you're clearly a sm...
There is "Gmail for Work" which does provide some of the guarantees you are looking for. Though none regarding illegal content, as per the laws.
Since they are paying to store this data, and you agreed to let them do that for you, then yes they can.
But it's not in some kind of escrow. They even make it easy for you to get all of it for your own storage:
https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467/ https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
With Facebook, well, I guess you agree to them being able to delete your data at their will via the little box you tick on sign-up. And as long as you accept those terms, law won't help.