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Protection From Online Eviction?
AOL has been shutting down its free Web services, in some cases with little or no notice to users, and they are not the only ones. This blog post on the coming "datapocalypse" makes the case that those who host Web content should be required to provide notice and access to data for a year, and be held strictly accountable the way landlords are before they can evict a tenant. Some commenters on the post argue that you get what you pay for with free Web services, and that users should be backing up their data anyway. What do you think, should there be required notice and access before online hosts take user data offline for good?
What is needed are clear terms of usage. If those state the owner of the free service can take the site down with no advance warning and without providing access to the data, they can do so. The site owner in turn can decide whether he wants to deal with such a free service or not.
You obviously have to have a local copy of your data at some point. Why are you deleting it?
Huh? As far as I can tell from the links, they gave about 6 weeks' notices for all these things. That seems to me like a very reasonable amount of advance notice, considering this is a free service. If users had a small amount of content, then they can just cut and paste it into a word processor to preserve it. If they had the world's most extensive blog, with hundreds of thousands of words scattered through thousands of posts, and six weeks isn't enough time to evacuate ... well, they shouldn't have entrusted such an important part of their life to a free service without making regular backups.
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This is a good warning at a time when cloud computing is becoming a popular concept to both businesses and software developers. Businesses will hopefully make it a priority to invest in and expect cross-compatible solutions and keep local backups. Software developers will hopefully listen and make these options available, even though it may be in their interest to lock up that data.
In addition, it will probably affect a lot of users who store important information or contacts lists or conversation histories that may need to be referred to daily by these individuals, and serve as a warning to them as to what can happen if they start to store a lot of important data that they cannot easily backup for use in applications that may not always be available.
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Okay, politeness is nice and all. As long as we can agree it's not actually legally required.
This is not so much about AOL as it about and it is more about what the author of the article is stating. From the article, the gentleman makes it sound like a call to arms for the oppressed and downtrodden. He is making into some sort of social injustice issue and that only laws will force the web hosting providers into doing the "right thing".
So it would be in the best interest of those providing free services to treat their subscribers nicely since they get plenty of ad revenue from it. That's fine and dandy. It's just not legally required.
Okay, politeness is nice and all. As long as we can agree it's not actually legally required.
Correct. As stated many times, there is no law against being a dick.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
I remember MP3.com around the year 2000, when it was actually cool. Indie bands could post their music in any of zillions of genres, and you could listen with a click. I fell in love with one particular genre, the New Age genre, which consists of lots of trance tracks. But when MP3.com started down the "we host your CD library for you!" I knew that the game was about up and that they were about to be sued into oblivion (which happened), and wrote a bash/wget script to download everything I could of the MP3s. I still have this collection of MP3s today, almost 10 years later. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.
Aren't backups great?
If you care, take a look at the SLA. And if it's free, don't cry about not getting what you didn't pay for in the first place.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Uhhh, Sorry but a "payment" must be non-zero by it's very definition. What you are trying to say is that you can construct a contractual agreement (TOS) without any sort of compensation. "Free" and "Payment" are mutually exclusive in any language on Earth.
May be a nice solution and a polite one, but it should never be a legal requirement in a contract for web hosting providers that offer free service.
The law is clear. If you are staying someplace without any contractual agreement or non-zero form of compensation the property owner can have the police forcibly remove you at will. No judge will support your claims for damages either. They will throw your case out of court since you never paid anything.
There is a big difference between the law (various contract laws which govern contracts) and what is the "nice and warm fuzzy" way of doing things. It is often in companies best interests to get as close to possible as the "nice and warm fuzzy" way of doing things since it increases customer satisfaction, but it is not required by law.
I own a few servers, and both sell hosting to paying customers, and give free hosting to some friends.
I try to always keep everyone informed on what's going on. Last time I upgraded one server to a newer model, I gave everyone on that server 4 months notice and kept the old server running for 2 more months after the new server was up and in regular service. And I keep meticulous daily backups, and have been known to mail DVDs of their own data to those who ask for them, even for those who host on my servers for free.
But on a free service, people, you don't have "rights" to "demand" jack shit. If you don't like my terms for free hosting, then shuffle your cheap ass off to another host. Web hosting is one of those services where you get what you pay for. If you want guarantees and a formal policy, then you're going to give me some of those little American government generated pictures of dead presidents in return.
It never ceases to amaze me how people with no financial investment or payments at stake are so readily willing to tell equipment owners what to do. And because of them, I'm just as readily willing to tell freeloaders to kiss my web hosting ass.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Violation of TOS is pretty different than a site closing itself down. Still, I agree, it's kind of silly to require them to keep it up. We'd just see
1) Free hosting services stop because of liability
2) Use of loopholes to circumvent this ill-conceived law
3) Legal challenges (unlikely)
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
GMail is a good example - I can't help thinking that if Google decided to delete all the GMail accounts without warning, there'd be an uproar on Slashdot. I wonder how many of the "It's free, and they should've backed up" commenters here have full backups of their GMail accounts?
And yet, very similar rent control laws here in the UK give us a spread of very expensive rentals (where property prices are high anyway) to relatively cheap rentals (where property prices are low anyway). Which suggests that the difference isn't because of rent control laws. So the rental market in NYC is expensive? How about if I wanted to purchase a place in NYC? Would that be nice and cheap?
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