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Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It (fusion.net) 465

Posted by msmash from the what's-happening dept.
Ethan Chiel, writing for Fusion: Artist Dennis Cooper has a big problem on his hands: Most of his artwork from the past 14 years just disappeared. It's gone because it was kept entirely on his blog, which the experimental author and artist has maintained on the Google-owned platform Blogger since 2002 (Google bought the service in 2003). At the end of June, Cooper says he discovered he could no longer access his Blogger account and that his blog had been taken offline. Along with his blog, Google disabled Cooper's email address, through which most of his correspondence was conducted, he told me via Facebook message. He got no communication from Google about why it decided to kill his email address and blog. Cooper used the blog to post his fiction, research, and visual art, and as Artforum explains, it was also "a platform through which he engaged almost daily with a community of followers and fellow artists." His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog, but they are only screenshots. Google Cache is also of not much help. Slashdot readers, just out of curiosity, is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?
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Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It More

Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It

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  • Good excuse. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:42PM (#52512877)

    The blog ate my homework.

  • Don't you have to Ask to be Forgotten? (Score:3)

    by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:43PM (#52512881)

    A rouge Right To Be Forgotten?

  • The Cloud Is Wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:44PM (#52512889)

    until the lightning bolt comes out of it....

    • Re:The Cloud Is Wonderful (Score:4, Informative)

      by the_povinator ( 936048 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:39PM (#52513611) Homepage
      I had the same problem as this guy at some point-- my homepage hosted on google pages was disabled because of some unspecified terms of service violation. I couldn't even fix the issue because they wouldn't tell me what the violation was about. And no luck contacting a real person.

      After that I moved my homepage to a machine I control (danielpovey.com)

  • Save often, make backups (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:45PM (#52512905)

    I mean...really? It's 2016. Your art is your passion, and you don't have it backed up ANYWHERE?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      What about the computer he used to create the GIFs in the first place? I mean, he had to have written and created most of his long fiction and GIFs offline, then uploaded them.

      Something seems amiss with this narrative.

      • Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:05PM (#52513149)

        is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

        Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

        Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

        • Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:29PM (#52513457)

          is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?

          Yes, it's called "don't be a fucking retard and save multiple copies of everything locally".

          Seriously. If you can't be bothered to make the tiniest bit of effort to preserve your work then it obviously has no value.

          Did you ever work in retail at any time in your life? One of the first things it teaches you is that there is an entire class of people who absolutely HATE lifting a finger to do anything at all for themselves, no matter how easy that thing may be, no matter how much sense it might make. They resent the notion of ever having to take care of their own affairs.

          It's sort of like the people who wait on hold for 30-45 minutes for tech support, only to ask a question that's answered in the manual, in the FAQ, in the help file, on the web site, and often, what they need is right there in the menu if only they'd click on it just to see what it contains. Plus, the people who really do need a technician (say, because the problem is on the ISP's end) get to wait extra long because of the backlog of useless people.

          I don't know what the percentage of them is, but a lot of people are just helpless. Entire industries play a role in helping them remain that way. The only thing left is for restaurants to offer them pre-chewed food.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 )

      Backups are for pussies. Real men just upload their shit to some FTP server... ehm, never mind.

    • Re:Save often, make backups (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pr0t0 ( 216378 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:12PM (#52513237)

      First, yes, local backups should absolutely be done. But also: doesn't Google have millisecond backups on every continent and two oceans? Just wondering if his lost data could be restored from one of those.

    • Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Funny)

      by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@@@gmail...com> on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:33PM (#52513529) Journal

      "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" ~ Linus Torvalds

    • Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Interesting)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:37PM (#52513597) Homepage Journal

      If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by drnb ( 2434720 )

        If anything I'd say this guy is ahead of his time. Those of us who started in this field in the 1980s are fully aware of value of backups, but m kids' generation trusts the cloud to always be there for them.

        That is a bit of revisionist history. The kids of the 80s had to learn that floppy diskettes and hard drives failed too and this developed an appreciation for backups, just as today's kids will learn that "bad things" happen in the cloud too, which is actually something the "kids" with the 1960s/70s learned on their centralized mainframe based storage. Every generation starts out "trusting" technology and is eventually relieved of that silly notion.

    • Re:Save often, make backups (Score:5, Informative)

      by Reaperducer ( 871695 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @06:20PM (#52514091)

      He was probably counting on Google, as the service provider, to backup his data for him. The way that (if you let it) Apple backs up all of your iPhone data constantly so that if you drop it in the toilet, you just get a new iPhone and everything in a few hours magically comes back the way you left it.

      That's the promise of "the cloud" we keep hearing about from the marketing departments. This artist, being an artist not a tech guy, believed it.

      But this is actually par for the course for Google. I moved all of my clients off of Blogger about five years ago after one of their Blogger blogs simply disappeared without a trace and no recourse. After a little digging, I turned up HUNDREDS of similar cases of people's Blogger accounts vanishing into thin air with zero help from Google. This has been going on for years, and Google is silent about it.

      After all, you get what you pay for.

  • Free (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's almost like he used a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.

    He sounds Millenial.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oh fuck off.

    • It's almost like he used a free service with no expectation of availability or warranty, to do all of his work.

      He sounds Millenial.

      Oooh, daaaaaang, [artforum.com] he looks so young! I guess aging creams are all the rage these days. Kids, eh, always being hip, stylin', funkaaaay freshhhh!

    • It sounds like he had high expectations of availability and warranty.

    • Re:Free (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chefmonkey ( 140671 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:29PM (#52513467)

      Free? No, the implicit agreement you have with Google is your privacy for its services. Google didn't uphold its end of the deal, so he should ask for his privacy back.

  • Contact Google? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm sure they still have it. And find out why it was taken down, may have been a violation of their terms or a copyright complaint.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ShaunC ( 203807 )

      "Contact Google," that's hilarious.

      • Sure you can. I contacted them because some dispshit was operating an online pharmacy targeting transsexuals in Canada. Aside from the stupidity of paying more than they would cost with a prescription, and the fact that doctors would do the necessary blood tests every 4 months to check for risks, it's illegal to operate an online pharmacy with a .ca domain.

        The site was gone within hours, and all the spam posts they had done all over the place were dead.

        "Experimental artwork" can be a euphemism for anythin

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Fwipp ( 1473271 )

          Not all trans people can get hormones through their doctor. They might live in an area with only shitty doctors who refuse to treat them, be unable to afford the doctor's visits, or be frustrated by the long lines for cheaper care.

          Also, I know you say they were targeting Canadians, but it's also pretty popular to target USA citizens with pharmaceuticals "from Canada" (not from some scary overseas place).

          I do recommend going through the "official" pipeline if it works for you, but a lot of people don't have

    • Contact Google? If you think it's actually possible to contact someone at Google who gives a shit, you must have just started using the Internet yesterday.

      • Re: Contact Google? (Score:5, Informative)

        by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:23PM (#52513367) Homepage

        Yes, it's trivial. When I had my GMail account pwned, I emailed them, and a human helpfully verified my identity, the suspicious activity, and restored my access. Don't just assume it's impossible without trying. And if it doesn't work, just be more persistent. The squeaky wheel, and all that.

  • This should serve as a reminder that backups are important.

  • you can't rely on it to do anything in particular; you are entirely dependent on the whims of whoever provides you with a free service.

    Everyone on slashdot should know that, I tell my friends to backup things from ''the cloud'' to some physical media that they can hold in their hand (preferably 2 copies), but I know that most ignore me ... 'Oh, that is just Alain sounding off again, I will be all right ...'

  • Experiment over (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:52PM (#52512967) Homepage Journal

    Now the experimental author knows the outcome of the experiment. That artistic work will disappear if you don't take efforts to preserve it.

    If we repeat the experiment we would be doing science. (would that make you a scientific author instead of an experimental one?)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Minupla ( 62455 )

      Sadly, 25 years in IT tells me that the experiment has been repeated a number of times, and that its results have been reproduced frequently.

      "Hey, I stuck this floppy to my filing cabinet with a big ol magnet and now it doesn't work, can you fix it? It has my only copy of my thesis on it"

      Min

  • "... consider suing ..." (Score:5, Informative)

    by Splat ( 9175 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:53PM (#52512989)

    "Cooper, who lives in France, told Artforum he’s consulted a French lawyer specializing in intellectual property. He told me he’s considering suing Google"

    Blogger TOS:

    "OTHER THAN AS EXPRESSLY SET OUT IN THESE TERMS OR ADDITIONAL TERMS, NEITHER GOOGLE NOR ITS SUPPLIERS OR DISTRIBUTORS MAKE ANY SPECIFIC PROMISES ABOUT THE SERVICES. FOR EXAMPLE, WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTIONS OF THE SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS. WE PROVIDE THE SERVICES “AS IS”."

    Oh would you look at that ...

    • That won't stop him from suing... That would just make the subsequent court case VERY brief.

    • TOS are not above the law, you know.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      On the other hand, disclaimers in a TOS can sometimes be found unenforceable depending on the laws governing the country you're in. In the US for example if Google deleted the content because the artist was a minority, Google could be sued even though it didn't promise not to delete anyone's data. Yes, Google wouldn't have broken contract law, but it'd have violated civil rights law.

      It's significant that this action is being brought in France, which takes the preservation of cultural objects and artists

  • Another Reminder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by painandgreed ( 692585 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:54PM (#52513001)

    Remember that "on the cloud" just means "on somebody else's server". They may say you'll never lose it, but they have been known to lie, or go under, or change their service. Remember the Sidekick which advertised all your phone data would be in the cloud and backed up so you'd never risk losing it?

  • D. Cooper you say? Maybe the FBI commandeered his Google account years ago and shut it down when they closed their investigation into the famed hijacker.

  • He'd need the URL of a publicly accessible page(s). And then only maybe.

  • archive.is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 14, 2016 @04:56PM (#52513035)

    http://archive.is/3tNs

  • "is there anything -- any service -- Mr. Cooper could use to get his artwork back?"

    Yes. Restore from backup in his backup software.

    Whoops. You didn't do the thing that EVERYONE talks about every time they lose something, that schoolkids are taught to do, that everyone needs to use at some time in their digital lives?

    Shame.

    Call it "temporal art", forget it existed and move on. The rest of the world already has. The only people who thought it important didn't think it important enough to save BEFORE it wa

    • I was never taught to backup in school. It took a large data loss for me to understand that I should backup my data.

      It's a shame that this guy didn't learn sooner....

  • A single copy is an accident waiting to happen, whether that copy is on Google, OneDrive, or your 10 y/o laptop.

  • Maybe someone in the UK filed a right to be forgotten request and Google just got the wrong person. I'd call the NSA and ask them for a restore (since they snoop on everything anyway).

  • This should not be a surprise to anyone here, but it's a very good example that, unless you have a specific document signed by both parties promising some level of service, you don't have that service.

    I'm in the middle of a "cloud conversion" for one of our core applications. I get incredulous looks and blank stares when I ask application developers how they've planned for redundancy and potential data loss. The other day, I actually had a senior application architect tell me "the cloud takes care of that."

  • Probably one flash drive could have held the contents of his art and blog. Who doesn't keep the original sources, though? I create games, and the assets I create always have source in the form of Illustrator, Photoshop, Corel PhotoPaint or Corel Draw files - all religiously uploaded to several destinations as backups. House fire? I have cloud backups and off-site discs at another location. Cloud goes offline? I have several backup drives locally.

    It's dumb and tempting fate to put all your eggs, as they say,

  • https://support.google.com/blo... [google.com]

    "Quote"Check your email to see if you got a message from support@blogger.com. If your blog was deleted by Google, the email will explain what happened."End Quote"

    didn't the author/blog owner of this do any kinda research? why is this story on slashdot really....

  • Try Resurrect Pages plugin (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:05PM (#52513137)
    I'll join the chorus of voices saying it was incredibly stupid to use an online service as your only copy of your materials, with no local backup. But what's done is done. If the Wayback Machine doesn't have a copy, try installing the Resurrect Pages add-on to Firefox. It links to a lot more caching and archiving services than just the Wayback Machine.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/ [mozilla.org]
  • Personally, I am seeing a big business opportunity for the NSA here. As I envision it, anytime, anywhere, just say "NSA, back me up please". A link to the backed up files will then appear on your computer screen, and your credit card or bank account will automatically be deducted.
  • I'm sure the submitter is surprised that the answer to the impromptu ask slashdot tail on the story got such a wonderful response. But regardless, how did this story warrant posting on Slashdot? Dennis Cooper can go figure out with Google why they removed it. If he finds out it is for some newsworthy reason, go right ahead and have some random article written about it. There is literally nothing of value in this story. It doesn't expose some major concern with Google's services. It doesn't highligh
  • Only way this guy is gonna see his shit again is with a time machine. Sorry bro.

    Uncle Al says "Save early, save often".

  • And this is why... (Score:3)

    by Archtech ( 159117 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:11PM (#52513227)

    ... it's unwise to entrust anything of value to "the cloud". Put your work and your intellectual property on Google - and it may vanish, leaving you with nothing except the dusty prospect of sueing one of the world's biggest and most powerful corporations. Buy books from Amazon in Kindle format, and one day they may simply vanish too - as, with supreme irony, copies of "1984" and "Animal Farm" vanished in 2009. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]

    Keep what is important to you under your own eye and your own control, and of course back it up judiciously and perhaps store copies in a few other places. But blithely assuming that your intellectual property is safe on computers owned and controlled by people whom you do not know, and who have fundamentally no obligation to you, is risky.

    If you enjoy thrillers and would appreciate a dramatic fictional presentation of these ideas, try Michael Connelly's novel "The Scarecrow". https://www.amazon.co.uk/Scare... [amazon.co.uk] You will probably never feel the same about "the cloud" again.

  • Same problem with an ultra-niche blog (Score:4, Informative)

    by cliffjumper222 ( 229876 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:12PM (#52513247)

    I had been using a blog to record my pond over a period of a year. I specifically wanted to have a timeline record of pictures and notes. I knew no one would be reading it for a while until I completed the year and used it essentially as a notebook that I could easily upload to using my phone. I got about 10 months in and Wordpress deleted it all. Greeeeat. I still have the photos on my phone, but not the notes I took.

  • Get off my lawn! (Score:5, Informative)

    by mattyj ( 18900 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:19PM (#52513319)

    This is just a case of someone that doesn't know how the Internet works, and maybe can't read. It's documented elsewhere that his account was disabled because of a violation of Google's terms, and when that happens, after you try to log into google there's a prominent message saying as much with instructions on how to get more info, etc.

    Nothing has been deleted. Nothing is gone. He just needs to take care of whatever violation he triggered with Google.

    And, as stated elsewhere by everybody and their mothers, back your stuff up someplace else in the physical world. Hard to believe it took this guy 63 years to learn that lesson.

  • Don't use Google for anything (Score:3)

    by John Jorsett ( 171560 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:25PM (#52513387)
    After the numerous services that Google has created and subsequently terminated, I don't use anything of theirs unless it's for the most noncritical, temporary, ephemeral, or throwaway purpose. They've screwed me too many times for me to get sucked in again.

  • Account locked for abuse? (Score:3)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:26PM (#52513409) Journal

    If both his blog and his e-mail have stopped working, it sounds to me like his entire account has been shut down. AFAIK, that's only done in cases of pretty egregious abuse... kiddie porn and the like. It's possible he didn't do the abuse, though, so he should contact Google to go through the account recovery process. This [google.com] seems like a good place to start, then click "Another error or problem".

    • As mentioned above in a link to the guardian his blog featured "he would take ads by escorts and highlight their literary qualities. Cooper’s work often depicts sexuality and violence in graphic terms, and some of the writing and images dealt with similar themes"

      So yes. Stock standard breach of terms of service, which include no advertising of such services, and the general knowledge that by doing anything depicted above you're skating on thin ice of having breached the terms of service but having the

  • There is more on WayBackMachine (Score:3)

    by wahaa ( 1329567 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:30PM (#52513477)

    WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog

    If you try the Blogspot's localized domains, there is more content saved there
    .com [archive.org]
    .co.uk [archive.org]
    .ca [archive.org]
    .com.es [archive.org]
    .com.br [archive.org]
    ...and so on

  • It's a sign of the times.. (Score:3)

    by evolutionary ( 933064 ) on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:33PM (#52513533)
    I have told people in my circles for years that relying on "cloud" backups is an invitation for disaster for a few reasons: 1. It's not your server, even with legal agreements (how enforcible they are can vary from country to country), someone could hit the "rm" script and bye-bye data. Suing (even if it is an option) can't get the data back. 2. If you lose your connectivity to the Internet or the site, or the service provider is out of business, your data is effectively gone temporarily or permanently). 3. Any staff member can view that data. encryption (which can be intentionally weak or have a back door) can be used against you without you even knowing it...(until it's too late to do anything) We are a culture taught to "set and forget" and this artist, like most of us, got caught up on the idea that is data would be kept safe, which is exactly the mindset on that groups like Google, Iron Mountain, DropBox, Microsoft, Apple and many other "cloud providers" intentionally provide.The only way to be sure your data is secure (assuming you don't care who views it as much as making sure it's preserved) is to have your OWN local backup in addition to a cloud drive. You can create your own cloud drives to reduce the number of people likely to have access to the data (remember encryption is NOT a guarantee of security). There are many programs (free and commercial) that can help with your backups. Areca (open source/free/user friendly), Acronis (commercial, user friendly) and other products like Bacula (less user friendly), Bareos (Bacula fork). there are others, list here: http://www.enterprisestoragefo... [enterprise...eforum.com] Most people will be happy with Areca: http://www.areca-backup.org/in... [areca-backup.org] We all have to remember we have to protect our own data and not get "headlight" frozen by everybody repeating "cloud storage" in our ears to the point it overrides our common sense. We have so many tools available to the public to protect ourselves and our data now. All we need to do is turn on our common sense/brains. I feel for this artist, but he should at least be a reminder to all of us of the truth we all know but somehow keep ignoring. Oh, at $150 CAD for 2 TB, we don't really have price as an excuse. Oh, also remember hard drives often die between 3-5 years (enterprise, Western Digital Black, Hitachi Ultrastar) or 1-3 years (Western Digital Black, i.e, green blue, red, purple, Hitachi Deskstar series). I don't mention Seagate because I've had too many bad experiences with them. I assume 1-2 years for their drives based on experience and test of Meantimes between failure, but Seagate drives are the cheapest, so for datacenters they are popular with their RAID 6 and RAID 10 setups.

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