https://cloud.google.com/contact
It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get in touch with.
https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us
That seems to be what they want...
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-...
Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or phone.
Still there as of yet.
But maybe he means that he won’t be pushing any updates to Google Play?
Current Version 1.4.0.5.2.1
Updated December 8, 2020
Requires Android 4.4 and up
Time will tell I guess
* Respect the user
* Respect the opportunity
* Respect each other
The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""
" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]
Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.
AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.
People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly. They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama. Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
[1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-ov...
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
(Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.)
EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
[1]: https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01EAN3YGGXN93GFRM8XW...
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
For example, someone got banned from Ads for paying with Apple Credit Card https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586
I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171113150544/https://getstream...
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...
https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-meet-...
I look forward to this getting used against Google and everyone else banning customers without explanation and/or recourse.
Wow, didn't know this story. Imperialism at its finest from the Anglo-saxon world (well, actually started by the French with slavery but that was >200 years ago, I found way worse the decisions took 50 years ago).
https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
It includes support, but I'm not sure if that helps in cases where google thinks you have abused the service. I just use it because I like having my own domain, and so that I don't lose access to my email if google locks me out. The idea is that I can update my domain's MTX records and use another email service.
Very much agreed on .org.
[0] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/eu.html [1] https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement.
Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by vendors.
I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that could then be passed by states.
I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would specify some “don’t be evil on social cause X” that it almost smarts my conspiracy brain that the “corporations” started this trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can’t make meaningful economic and commercial policy.
The message reads:
My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay . I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
but used a gmail account instead of pro email account (that's not a good move on his part here).
and then he still can't get help from Stadia ?
Possible but very hard to believe.
Except for the part where someone has to answer phone calls, it could be automated if the account suspension itself is automated.
I'll also point out my later comment: "I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063399
And to forestall any replies that providing information to suspended accounts would help the spammers, I've already responded to that point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063660
Temporary account suspensions that you can quickly reverse on appeal are annoying but could be justified to fight abuse, as long as they don't happen too often. On the other hand, indefinite account suspensions that are impossible to reverse, such as the case of Andrew Spinks of Terraria, are simply indefensible, there's no justification whatsoever for that.
I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters.
Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I anticipated.
https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users, including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision"
This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting yourself into.
It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they will take steps to mitigate that traffic.
ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b) anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls).
1. OP specifically said offshore hires presumably for cheaper wages. Anywhere wages are currently cheap there's a greater incentive to run Internet scams: it's farther from law enforcement agencies that care, alternate employment doesn't pay as well, there's even a culture of acceptability in some countries where trickling money from richer nations is seen as a net benefit to the local society.
2. Google is a high profile target. Scammers will try to get hired, existing workers will get bribed or realize the opportunity they have.
I don't have any scientific evidence. https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.abs-cbn.com/amp/business/0... is one instance of Google having to switch vendors for fraud in a non-1st-world country.
"These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that.
2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones.
3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as...
4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction
Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful:
An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well.
That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that.
Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders).
And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.
But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.
Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-t...
https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/switched-to-verizon-iphone-...
AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.
At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".
You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?
(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])
Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?
There's a lot of money riding on that.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...
"Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is. Google got big because they competed well with the alternatives at the time.
This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis.
I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive as expected.
The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process ought continue.
Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
For those that don't know, phone companies are easily susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212
Edit: looks like OP changed their entire comment while I was replying.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/
I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?
My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.
Yes, here is the official statement:
> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.
"The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from Innocence is Irrelevant [1]
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_19... is what extended something similar (a 40 hour work week) nationwide.
For example, Google got a lot of flack for literally tracking its users' every move whether or not they consent to do so[1].
Is it "respectful"? Is that "the right thing"? You can justify everything by the value that Google provides.
But it's, you know... kind of evil.
Sadly, this not something one could refer to anymore in a meeting discussing this issue.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
Problem is: can we cultivate machine learning intelligence to be as good as some of the best human arbiters?
Found an article from a few years ago: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_respon...
Not all games are that bad, especially these days. And your overall point is correct: adding even a little bit on top of that already horrendous latency is going to be noticeable by players.
0: https://displaylag.com/best-low-input-lag-tvs-gaming-by-game...
And by 'seizure', I think it is pretty clear that I mean 'revoking access to', in the same way as in the OP Google has revoked access to the given Google account.
Google avoid this EU restriction by suspending accounts/app indefinitely instead of banning them.
You can see a Google employee explaining this here : https://github.com/moneytoo/Player/issues/37#issuecomment-76...
The Telcos never signed up to being a "secure verification code provider". Almost a decade ago, the local Telco industry group told us all:
"SMS is not designed to be a secure communications channel and should not be used by banks for electronic funds transfer authentication,"
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for...
Any company that uses SMS for 2FA is offloading risk and security to an industry that never expected it, and explicitly seeks to not provide it.
A Telco _desperately_ wants to be able to get you back up and running (making calls and spending money) on a new phone using your existing number before you walk out of the shop. And even more, they want to be able to transfer you across as a customer from a competitor - and have your existing number work on their network.
"Sim Swapping" is a valuable feature for Telcos. They have significant negative incentives to make it difficult. They don't want to secure your PayPal account, and nobody (least of all PayPal) should expect them to do a good job of it, certainly not for free...
Can't check other countries since Google automatically adjusts the country version to your location but you can check yours here: https://policies.google.com/terms
//edit: but you're correct considering this doesn't contain any service-specific ToS.
> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C
[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...
The difference is that now when they moderate, they call it something other than moderation and instantly permaban you and refuse to discuss it.
I also have a standing open offer of personal proxy for creating accounts for people for personal, non-shady use:
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
Edit: Godaddy is not just a (crappy) registrar. GoDaddy is also a (crappy) hosting provided which I moved an organization out of.
Edit again: I guess I ought to explain domain names to you. Most DNS providers are crappy (unlike Cloudflare), and have a non-negligible TTL. Even if AR15 had access to GoDaddy's account to change their DNS records (A record for the www subdomain and root domain), it takes a while for new records to propagate globally.
More likely, what happened is GoDaddy told AR15 to take their domain to someone else. And thats what they did.
Actually, out of curiosity I just looked up the bitrates for my local cable company. The quality seems to differ a lot: on average between 3 Mb/s MPEG-2 [1] and 12 Mb/s MPEG-4 [2]. So I guess my previous statement isn't really accurate and it depends on the channel.
That website appears to be quite interesting btw; it also tracks YouTube bitrates for live and non-live video and in different encodings! [3]
[1] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19126&li...
[2] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19130&li...
[3] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=...
