Where Do You Go When Google Locks You Out? 332
Lobais sends in the cautionary tale of a man who was locked out of Google Groups for three years — losing the ability to administer his own open source project in the process. "After about a year of using Google Groups for the PyChess project, I started [noticing] a problem. When I wrote mails to the list, no one would answer. And when I answered other peoples' post[s], they seamed to ignore them and press for new answers. As I tried to check the online group to see what was happening, I got a 403 Forbidden error. After a short while I realized that this error was given for any page on the groups.google.com subdomain. The lockout meant that I was unable to manage the PyChess mailing list. I was unable to fight increasing spam level, and more importantly I couldn't reply to anybody in my community. I wasn't even able to visit the Google help forums, which are all on groups.google.com. As the services are free of charge, I never really expected any support options. ... How can we know how often this kind of thing happens? If any admin can lock you out by a sloppy click, and give you no option to defend yourself, then it is bound to happen once in a while."
free but not cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
Appeals process (Score:5, Insightful)
Newsflash: The companies don't give a damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't care about your chess hobby. They don't care about you. Not Apple, not Google, not Microsoft, not Donner, not Blitzen. You're a number, a nothing. The cloud will swallow you whole.
Set up your own damn server.
Re:free but not cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that the problem is that Google has a terrible support for their services.
My experience with them is that when things go wrong, you're screwed (unless you pay, it seems).
Re:free but not cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Software and services are entirely different in this context...
Once you have some free software the copy you have doesn't change unless you choose to change it, thus if it was working it will continue working the same.
A service on the other hand, is entirely under the control of a third party and can change at their whim.
This article is entirely about a service that started off working, and then the company providing it stopped providing it to the one particular user with no explanation as to why.
Re:anyone actually read the article ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite, with the free support they didn't fix the issue - they took a year to tell him he'd broken the Terms of Service, and then no reply as to why. Even then, when trialling the paid-for support, they still managed to bill him when they shouldn't have.
As for not being news-worthy, how else can people highlight these kinds of issues?!
Re:free but not cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
seems to be a common theme with free software and free services - it often starts out as the cheap option, but ends up costing more
And the evidence for that would be ... what?
i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
And how does complaining do you any good when commercial, expensive stuff blows up in your face? When Microsoft discontinues products? When Apple kills your app in their App Store? When DEC goes out of business? When Symbolics takes a research project, makes it proprietary, and then proceeds to kill it? Open source and free software were founded because commercial software had blown up in people's faces time and again. With open source, you at least have options for dealing with the problem, with proprietary software, you're stuck.
As for Google, if you want for-pay services, get a Google Apps domain. Those applications that you pay for are supported. And Google offers you the ability to download and backup your data so that you aren't stuck.
Even if you use the free services, so far, I have had a lot less trouble with free Google services than with any of the for-pay hosted web services I've used.
Re:gratis but not free (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you've misunderstood the term 'Free Software'. The word 'Free' in Free Software is used to refer to *freedom*, not the cost.
So with software the situation is actually the other way round to the way you present it. If you are using Free(dom) Software, then you have the source and can do whatever you need with it and you aren't held hostage by someone else's actions. If you're using non-Free Software, *then* you seriously shouldn't complain when it blows up in your face.
Using non-Free Software (even if it's gratis) often starts out as the 'cheap option' -- not necessarily in terms of cost, but in terms of local knowledge and training and effort. But it often ends up costing more, because of its inherent limitations and because you can't actually *fix* it to meet your requirements, or even get bug-fixes for it without having to replace it wholesale with a new version.
Everything google. (Score:3, Insightful)
They will impose a stricter map-refreshs-per-hour policy and charge a fee(albeit small) for that Google Maps Key. Next thing, that small Web House Company that did sites for those real estate agents, Rental Car Companies, and Motels will have to pay a fee, and need to recoup that.
Put all your eggs in someone elses basket at your peril I say. At least with hosting you can have backups and pick up another provider if things turn to custard.
Re:Newsflash: The companies don't give a damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
Depends - you can leverage the cloud without being dependent on it.
If you store your life on gmail, be sure to have a complete IMAP backup someplace. If you host your website on a provider, be sure you have everything you need to rapidly redeploy it elsewhere and make sure you own the domain and DNS/etc.
Go ahead and leverage the cloud, but be able to pick up and move at the drop of a hat.
Now, if downtime is super-precious then I'd probably go with a better-supported option. However, the reality is that most clouds provide better service than most individuals can provision themselves with. There are other reasons to go it alone, but reliability usually isn't one of them.
The real lesson (Score:3, Insightful)
So just make sure you always have a fallback email account. If your life really does revolve around being able to post to, or administer, a particular group of people then why not set up a secondary account with the same privileges? It's not that hard to do.
Now, if you'll just hang on a second I'll pop over to my alternate /. account and mod this up.
What are you complaining about? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google does not owe you anything. When will people realize that? You outsource everything to Google, then complain when they lock you out. This is why one should avoid services like Googles, and it will be worse when they will try to convince you you should use some Web 2.0 computer operating system. In fact, this has nothing to do with computers - if you sleep, drink, eat and work at somebody elses property, don't expect to feel like home. It's sort of surprising (or maybe not!) to even encounter such questions on Slashdot - you actually expect everything to work fine, when you are but a mere invisible client to a benemoth that Google has become. If you want to be smart, rent your own domain name and website for 100$ a year, spend a week coding it (obviously if you can do PyChess, you should be able to do some PHP and databases), and tap yourself on your shoulder - you have just achieved independence from Google, and are now part of a distributed Internet model, instead of the ugly, error-prone, monopolized client-server system, where even contacting support is a reason for headache. Now, c'mon - WHAT DID YOU EXPECT? Google has millions of users, they have bold ambitions, but you cannot server the entire planet EFFICIENTLY with one corporation, no matter how large (bureaucracy takes over), you just can't. This was ought to happen, either to you or somebody else, and it will happen again, make no mistake about it.
Re:Newsflash: The companies don't give a damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
I still don't get why people think this "cloud" thing is a step forward, given it means less privacy, less control, less reliability, and requires constant net access, not to mention shifting terms of service and the like. And for what? Cross-device access? I can see this being good for some people but I'll pass.
Re:No support from Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:free but not cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure but... why do you care? It seems to me that you should filter/tune your alert messages. You must get tons of spew from all sorts of IPs all the time. Every single one of my servers sees all manner of shit. Attempts to exploit IIS vulnerabilities (I guess I shouldn't be surprised that its more time efficient to spam vulnerabilities at every host than to check what you are connected to), exploit software that isn't even installed etc... google cache rechecks seem like they would be the least of your worries.
I mean... it is essentially a false alarm, and you want google to make an exception for you when, its your alarm that you setup thats really bothering you. Tune the alarm.
-Steve
Re:free but not cheap (Score:5, Insightful)
BS. Unless the path they're trying is excluded by robots.txt, why shouldn't they try links? Because you say so? Well, then you'd at least need to argue for it.
It's your job to properly configure your webserver, and it's trivial. Worrying about bots trying out stuff is just a waste of time IMHO: If there is a hole, fix it - if there is no hole, there is no need to keep track of every squirrel sneaking around the premises.
What does that even mean haha??
Re:Newsflash: The companies don't give a damn... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Fortunately I had a backup of the registration emails. "
Well done, and a step many would overlook.
Re:Newsflash: The companies don't give a damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
I still don't get why people think this "cloud" thing is a step forward
Two words: MEDIA HYPE
Re:free but not cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
It is about intention in the Netherlands: you do not have to succeed to break the law.
Are you implying Google's intent is to actually change something on your website?
Re:free but not cheap (Score:0, Insightful)
Oh what utter fricking bullshytt. Misdirection at best. "A googler" == "a child born after the great renaming"
Google Groups is just another cheap-ass nntp-web gateway with a lot of branding and ads.
The user should move his dev crew to usenet proper. Which is also free, by the way.
Re:free but not cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt it's true. There is certainly not enough diagnostic info posted that proves the fault lies with Google.
One person's confusion about configuring a website (robots.txt is part of the configuration) does not constitute a breach of any sort by automated skimmers.
...Even links that may modify your site. It's the admin's responsibility to lock it up -- and test -- before release.
Anon (Score:1, Insightful)
For this situation, use an anony server to get through to fix the problem.
As to idiots, Google is not alone. Yahoo.com is filled with assholes in tech. I just dealt with one who can't understand problems.
Re:free but not cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
In the Netherlands you can view http://example.com/command=view&id=12345 [example.com] but you are not allowed to change that to http://example.com/command=edit&userid=5&id=12345 [example.com] because you are pretending to be someone you are not (like a failed login attempt). It is about intention in the Netherlands: you do not have to succeed to break the law.
First, Google's an American company, and even though our IP laws are screwy, it's generally recognized that it's the server's responsibility to block unwanted requests, and not the client's responsibility not to make them (especially in this case where it's obvious that there's no intent of wrongdoing). Second, I guaran-freakin'-tee that no one at Google said, "know what, it's Tuesday and I'm bored; let's fuzz CBravo's CMS to see what happens". Despite your protests, either now or at some point in the past, Google spidered the "edit" URL and is now trying to fetch it. Somehow they found a bunch of links to my site like ".../filtering-spam-postfix?SESS37ae[...]" and try to fetch those. Technically, I'm not publishing those URLs. Who cares? It doesn't hurt anything and I'm not going to whine that Google keeps trying to fetch them.
Seriously, of all the things in the world to get upset about, a search engine's automatic spidering of a URL that got published sometime (even if you don't think it did) is below the noise floor.
Re:"No option to defend yourself"? (Score:3, Insightful)
And your lawyer's claim would have been what, exactly?
"They stopped giving me free stuff, without giving a good reason. It's ILLEGAL for them to not give me free stuff!"
Believe me, I've been there, and it sucks (my domain - predating Google - was once misclassified as a spam site by Google's search algorithm; the preferred/only method of resolving this is to know-a-guy who's facebook friends with Matt Cutts [google.com]), but I don't know any legal theory that entitles anyone to monetary damages for not letting you play with their toys, even if the reason is silly/nonexistent.