Slashdot Mirror
Where Do You Go When Google Locks You Out?
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."
Does anyone know why I'm just seeing a "403 Forbidden error" for this story!?
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. i'm fine with people using free stuff, but seriously don't complain when it blows up in your face.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Why not create another account to let your users know what's going on, and to contact Google support staff?
which is totally what she said
I've always felt that it's in the best interest of entities like Google to add some sort of official, all-service-reaching appeals process to rectify erroneous enforcement actions, or at least give an answer as to how customers broke the Terms of Use so that they can correct such behavior in the future. Being that Google is so huge and that many people's livelihoods depend on it, even if many of these critical services are free, it's in their best interest, and having a department that makes getting the ear of such a huge entity straightforward would really increase customer loyalty as well as reduce apprehension of arbitrary lock-outs.
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.
looks like none of the above actually read the article, its not asking for help as he has contacted support through the enterprise support option and all has been resolved, he's just saying on the free support it's taken google 3years to fix the issue.
to be fair to google, I wonder how many support calls from non paying customers they must get a day so probably from the work load 3 years is probably quite fast :-)
my only other comment would be, why has this made /. not exactly news worthy.
Private Legal Counsel.
As i read it: He was locked out, ignored it mostly for about 2.9 years and got it fixed within a few days. IMHO someone more determined would have been able to resolve the issue in very short time.
CU, Martin
You could consider upgrading your mac pro to snow leopard, you spent so much on the hardware so the extra $30 isn't really much...
You don't have to use google chrome, you already listed several other browsers you could run and each of them has good and bad points, or you could even run the open source chromium and ensure that no unwanted big brother features are enabled.
Chrome is no different to any other browser, it has its bad points namely how it sends data to google..
You don't need to use any google technology, there are alternatives to their search engine, alternatives to their mail service etc. On the other hand, do you really think any of the other free search engines or mail services don't mine your personal data just the same? These free services cost money to operate, servers cost money, bandwidth costs money, power costs money, they have to pay for the servers somehow. If you want an email service for instance which will not harvest your data, you can run your own server or pay for a service from someone and ensure the contract you have with them ensures they won't look at your data and just store it.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
So he persisted for *three years* instead of starting a moderated newsgroup on Usenet and pointing his support links thereto.
Many MUAs ( e.g. Thunderbird ) can seamlessly integrate newsgroups so that their users are largely unaware of the nature of the "mailing list" that they are using. Not ideal in terms of the spirit of Usenet but certainly better than leaving one's users adrift for that length of time. They could even have followed the newsgroup through Google Groups :-/
Don't feed the troll. No real person uses links like that.
yahoo?
Google has no support for anything. Not Youtube, poor support for Android it seems, and rather poor support for the Google Groups also it seems. I wonder what else is not supported properly at Google.
You have been warned!
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.
...he used "fora" as the plural for "forum" and triggered some kind of douchebag filter. These douchebag filters were first created as an experiment by Google in the late '90's to keep out the folks who wrote "boxen" as a plural for "box," but were later taken off-line. I fear that one of the filters may have missed the purge and now it is evolving, learning...
Whether it be google maps or other service, I feel the curtain will come down. I predict Gmail and shared docs will be a loss leader, but eventually I think google maps will be "called in".
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.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Keep it. No argument here but I would like to see a bit more of redundancy built in and I'm not seeing anything that can beat the wire. Hell, a stout bbs might find it's way back to relevance before too long.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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.
On my gmail account, I get e-mail sent to another gmail account that is similar to my account name but 3 letters longer. Whenever I send mail to that account, it goes directly to me. The e-mail header information says it went to that account so I'm assuming (possibly incorrectly) that it isn't a simple forward rule. The real problem is that I can't e-mail the owner of the other account to get him to look into it because he doesn't get it or doesn't read it, and google definitely has NO place for me to reach out to them securely to ask them to look into this issue.
I wonder what percentage of gmail mail is being sent to the wrong accounts.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Now, you may do a search on Google for "Technical Support".....
Sorry, i haven't been paying attention in recent years. Has the convention changed? - free as in beer, Free as in freedom...right?
--- Mercutio was right.
I'm sorry but this does not ring true for me at all.
1. It is highly unlikely that a http 403 raw is presented to the "authenticated" user. Especially from someone like Google. Even the most basic of web infrastructures intercept 400 series and 500 series http responses and present the user a "formated" page that is human readable. I recon the company that basically controls most of the internet content on the planet would probably do this as well.
2. Did it not ever occur to the "admin" to create a fake account with google and rejoin his group and ask a couple of questions if he/she cared so much. I would have.
3. Ask questions via someone else on the groups and support channels?
The "fact" that it took 3 years to find such an obscure method voicing an issue with google seems fishy. I get a feeling that this persons actions have been "edited" to present a better light on the hard done by user.
According to the OED the plural of forum is forums. Fora is only use when referring to Roman public spaces.
So they're "fora" if the datacenter is in the capital of Italy and "forums" if elsewhere. What did I misunderstand?
Maybe they are not comfortable with transparent white pieces..
If your employer has an HR department then its already too late.
damn those subomains!!!!! damn them all to hell!!!!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
learn2ban evaid ?
seriously 3 years ?
Stop paying them. If you aren't paying them then, well, you get what you pay for, its pretty simple really.
Why do you think you're entitled to something for nothing? Why do you think Google should even bother to respond to you? Why do they owe you anything?
If you're a paying customer, stop paying and move your services elsewhere.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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.
People who have professionally built systems using such components know that this cuts both ways. Once you have some free software the copy you have doesn't change unless you are capable of changing it, thus if it was broken for conditions you haven't tried yet it will continue to be broken the same.
If you've built your system using a free software package and the development team maintaining it later decides to cease supporting it you are almost certainly boned. Commercial software houses, on the other hand, almost always give you plenty of advance warning before they stop producing bug fixes.
Really, if it was by accident, it never dawned on the guy to create a new user, then contact the admin and tell him his original user was blocked and ask why, if on purpose if by accident, could you fix it please....
Or he could have contacted the gmail support service (tied into newsgroups as well) to clarify why his emails were not getting there, and if this could be rectified. Contrary to many other companies, when you contact gmail service support, they actually can talk to other departments on your behalf seeing as most other services tie directly into your gmail account...
I never sought I would ever consider it, but I am seriously contemplating switching to bing.com for all my search needs. Google seems so scared of SEO manipulations and fighting them so aggressively, that search results quality deteriorated enormously in the last few years. Literally millions of sites are (semi-)automatically penalized by google, to the point that I can't find the info I am looking for anymore, while bing.com somehow finds it fine.
Just today, for example: I found some app on softpedia.com and the link to developer site was broken, so I went to Google for it. I Googled for the app (BabyMode) and there was NOTHING on the first three or four pages I bothered to check. When I Binged for it, the result I was looking for was #2. I don't care if Google thinks the site uses SEO manipulations or whatever. The end result is that I cannot find what I am looking for.
You don't have much leverage when using a free service. It's not like web hosting is all that expensive. He could have registered the .com, .org, and .net addresses for a total of $30 (as of today the .com and .net are still available), spend another $100 a year on hosting, and had a 1-800 phone number to call.
With both hosting and domain names so cheap, it doesn't make sense not to grab the "top 3" if you're going to be doing an open-source project, like I recently did for unjava.com/org/net How many times have you gone to the wrong TLD and gotten a crappy squatter page, like php.org instead of php.net, or groklaw.org instead of groklaw.net, or mysql.net.
It also gives you the possibility, at a later date, to move different content and services to different domains. For example, the developers wiki could eventually be located at yourdomain.org, the public wiki and things like "get paid support" at yourdomain.com, and any interactive services (like game servers) located at yourdomain.net.
In the case of chess software based on python:
They could all be hosted on the same machine, but if, for example, the game server became popular, it could be moved to its own box.
There are still plenty of good, short domain names that are available on the "big 3" TLDs. You just have to be a bit imaginative.
It's about economies of scale, and the convenience that comes with it.
If you set up a project on Sourceforge, or Google Code, or Github, you get a VCS server (with a web-based browser), a forum, a wiki, a mailing list manager, and a bug tracker, all integrated together. Setting that up takes a few minutes. How long would it take you to set all those things up on your own server?
The trade-off is that you give up control of the project hosting. But for most of us, that's a good deal, since we can spend time coding (or drinking beer) instead of dealing with the infrastructure.
... is to wait until a Google recruiter contacts me. I then explain I have trouble trusting Google as an entity because of that particular bad experience I had with them. Then my problem gets magically solved. And I respectfully decline the job offer.
Disclaimer: I own nimp.org.
God, root, what is difference ?
..meaning, they are too big too boycott..
I can understand that they cannot possibly provide personal service to all their (non-paying) customers. Yet they make mistakes every now and then. There is no way for you to completely avoid being banned except to stop using their services altogether. They never respond to or interact with queries, not even to public queries in their own newsgroup. Their motto should be "we'll take good care of you, but if you want support, get a (wonder)bra".
The problem is not so much Google, but rather the fact that nobody comes even close to offering their services at the price they do, which means that there aren't real alternatives.
I wrote about my own experience in google wuoves me – NOT!.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
This is why I don't like service bundles. They ban you for a group/blog/whatever violation, and suddenly you lose access to your email, profile, etc. etc. So I do use gmail, but I use a different account for google groups, and a different account for App Domain. It's the only way to defend yourself from their free, unmonitored, unsupported, 100% auto-managed services.
I had an open source project hosted on Kenai -- Sun's answer to Google Code and Git Hub. I was happily using it for mercurial, wiki, mailing lists, etc, ad nauseum.
Until one day I woke and could not.
Not only could I not push changes, I couldn't authenticate to the wiki, or the bug tracker either. I couldn't even create a new account, because every new account I created mysteriously didn't work either.
I sent an email into the support guys, and they looked into it.... eventually. It turns out Sun has some kind of "no fly list" and my name was on it. It turns out that I was also unable to access any other Sun services -- including Solaris patch updates on SunSolve.com!
So, I have to send an e-mail to Sun, and wait. And wait and wait and wait. Weeks go by, then months. I had to move my project, being unable to push to my public repo was killing me. Happy Google Code customer now.
Anyhow, finally months later, I get a message from Sun: "Whoops, sorry, we've turned you back on"
Like I'm going back.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
"Cloud" companies are really just hosting providers. Hosting providers have their ups and downs; quite often they start out OK and get worse. You need to have a second source and a migration strategy.
In 12 years I've been through four hosting companies for one site. The first one started small, was acquired, was acquired again, and was eventually spun off to Earthlink. The second one was a good hosting company until they got into "permission-based email marketing" (i.e. spamming) and went downhill from there. The third one offered both dedicated servers and shared servers, then spun off the dedicated server business, leaving the shared business in bad shape. The fourth one is doing reasonably well right now.
I have a few things that use "cloud" type services. One uses a search API, and I have both Yahoo and Google versions. Another uses an SMS gateway, and I have both Google Voice and Twilio versions.
I own all my own domains, and the domain registrars are in no way affiliated with the hosting providers. For the important domains, I have registered U.S. trademarks. I've had to switch registrars on one occasion.
All servers are Linux, and all necessary tools are open source.
You have to assume that your suppliers can fail. Stay in this business for a few years, and some of them will fail.
Sorry, i haven't been paying attention in recent years. Has the convention changed? - free as in beer, Free as in freedom...right?
Generally speaking, that is the case. However, there's nothing preventing you from writing a piece of software, licensing it under the GPL, and then charging for it.
:-P
However, there's nothing preventing any of your customers from doing the same
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Hey now, my girlfriend is in HR.
I do so love the stories the tells me about her company's IT dept. I have to admit that I die a little inside every time she tells me a story about their network and I recall what her company's head of IT makes.... sigh.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
There's no reason why you can't run svn on your own server, and this way you can review code changes before they're committed. Post only tarballs of releases to the general public. Devs can take the tarball, untar it and svn update on their local vcs to stay in sync. They shouldn't be pushing updates willy-nilly anyway. One person should do the reviews.
Forum software is quick to set up - you just untar it, go to the appropriate url (something like yourdomain.tld/admin/install/), click on a few things, fill in a few more things, and you're done.
Same with a wiki.
Most hosting providers have a control panel so that you don't even need to look for the tarball to install - just pick it from the list of install scripts.
Ditto for mailing lists, bug tracking, etc.
Say you devote an entire evening to it (2-3 hours). You can pick the cms, bug tracker, wiki, mlm, etc., that YOU prefer, or try out a bunch of them.
And if there's a problem, or you want to do some customization, you can fix it yourself. Locked yourself out of the cms because you forgot your password? Create a new account, use a new password, then use your control panel to access the database back end and copy the encrypted password from your new account to your old account and the problem is fixed. No 3-hour wait, never mind 3 years.
Sure, post it to Freshmeat and Sourceforge, but don't be dependent on them. Things don't break often, but when they do, it's nice to be able to just go in and fix it.
It a pain because no one to call and they never email me back at my alt email address. I did find a page where I could get a code text to a cell phone that got me back in after changing my password. When I got back in all the way down where it says details (gmail) it showed my account was hacked from overseas 2 times early in the day. The rest were US ip's. There has to be a better way then just locking an account. They should also have a help page to call someone or make it less harder to get back in. I use a friend cell to get back in.
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.
Google and Sun are far from being rare in the use of blacklist and cloaked censorship.
The nastier of such censorship techniques are those that are well cloaked in that the only thing you see is a lack of anything indicating you are actually being seen by others. There are message boards that seem to allow you to participate, posting messages etc. But in reality the only ones seeing what you are posting is you and maybe a few admins aware of the cloaked censorship. Some of these censored cloaks happen because some police or authorized (by who?) personal are to fat to get off their ass and actually do something meaningful and real, but instead try to justify their pay sitting behind a computer as a cyber sleuth.
And you thought spammers were bad. There are those who by authority promote spamming by suppressing what is not spam.
Imagine a patent troll applying such techniques so to take claim over something being done in the open, the illusion of in the open.
Imagine the prior art resources Google has in usenet archives that they can selective suppress.
Just shut your pie hole and buy an Android device so Google can influence even more of your life.
Speaking English properly is not. Speaking Latin properly in the middle of English sentences often is. Pleb.
I don't think that epithet had quite the effect you're hoping for. Given that the plebs did the work of Rome while the patricians profited off their work, and that the plebs invented the general strike, I'm proud to be called a pleb.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
... is always let all disabled accounts access the help forum, unless and until those accounts specifically abuse the help forum. There should not be a need to create alternate accounts to do this.
They (and lots of other companies) should also tell people what specific term of service was violated (e.g. spamming vs. posting kiddie porn vs. uploading movies with someone else's copyright, etc, whatever the case may be). If it is necessary to kill all the lawyers to get this done, then that would be a good start.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
A: "Back Into The Light."
Leave the darkness of Google.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Actually, it means freedom to take other people's ideas that they have spent much time and money on and sell or give it away to others for your own profit (financial or otherwise). Meanwhile the poor sod who actually did the work loses the money he put into it since he won't be able to recoup it in sales (since you just took it from him for free and undercut him). Especially since it is not an enterprise app or otherwise large enough to sell support services for. It is the reason you see relatively few apps whose nature doesn't lend to income from support contracts but take serious R&D to develop being available for Linux. Or when any do show up, they aren't supported long.
Do you provide your own DNS? Email? Do you use any mobile devices (they pretty much all use other peoples services). The cloud is here and you're already using it all the time; it's just extending where it gets used. Personally I moved all my stuff to cloud like facilities ages ago (VPS hosting, I don't want to maintain hardware, web hosting to he.net since they can provide IPv6, Gmail because I don't want to maintain mail servers and spam filtering, and so on).
/nod
I was trying to be...tactful...
I see the guy I was responding to was even modded 'insightful' for aiming his righteous indignation at someone for misunderstanding 'Free Software'. Even though they were quite careful to use 'free software' (going so far as to use 'free' when it was the first word of the subject).
I agree with his points, but they weren't germane to the post he pointed them at.
--- Mercutio was right.
This is why The Cloud is a trap, stick with your own domain using local storage and the "problem" is solved.
The guy didn't even manage to put capital letters at the beginning of his sentences. I'm reluctant to read too much into the fact that he didn't capitalise 'free'. Especially as I've never heard of this 'free' vs. 'Free' convention, which doesn't make much sense to me. Most people just use 'gratis' and 'libre' which is far less ambiguous.
So no, I don't think that timmarhy was talking about 'gratis but non-libre software'; I think he was spouting a common misconception about Free Software, which I attempted to correct. No righteous indignation; just an observation.
I work in a large organization that uses transparent routing of all TCP port 80 traffic to squid caching web proxies. As a result, all web requests appear to come from the same IP but Squid provides a standard "X-Forwarded-For" in each HTTP header.
One day, almost all attempts to do searches on Google would bring up a generic warning page that the machine attempting to search was infected, to disinfect and then fill out a CAPTCHA to continue. There was specific details such as the name of the worm was not provided.
Our helpdesk and techs where flooded with users requesting help to manually and virus scan the computers that Google convinced the users of where infected. Each of the manual update of the virus database and virus scans run by the IT department turned up nothing. But the CAPTCHA still would declare the machine infected.
Then we made an interesting discovery. Systems running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even newly re-installed systems where equally considered infected by Google and required on-going CAPTCHA submissions.
At this point, the IT department had blown through over 100 man-hours of work on this issue and users where greatly upset that we didn't seem any closer to getting rid of the Google error message and CAPTCHA. So, since the error message Google provided was unhelpful, we tried to seek out how to get in touch with someone at Google. After all, whatever infected machine was making search requests via the Squid was having a "X-Forwarded-For" forced into the HTTP headers via the web proxy so Google should be able to give us the actual internal IP of the infected machine (instead of blindly deciding everything via the proxy was infected). At the very least, they should be able to hopefully tell us the name of the virus or worm that was the problem. Then we could try to modify our Snort or Squid rules accordingly to stop it.
But, getting in touch with someone at Google that could provide any helpful answers proved impossible. We got canned replies that lacked as much useful information as the generic error message provided to begin with. Even our payed support for the Google Enterprise Search appliance (an over-priced Linux box that ht://dig could produce similar results for) just let us know that what we where asking about was not a problem with the Google appliance so they couldn't help. So the rest of the day was spent going through Squid logs, trying experimental Snort rules and other things to try to track the machine down.
The next day, without explanation the CAPTCHA crap just stopped. It wasn't clear if it was gone for good. And it was clear we needed a better solution for the future. So, an official policy decision was made: the next time Google decides multiple OS platforms are infected with an unspecified malware then the Squid configuration will be modified to transparently rewrite all requests to Bing.
Bottom line: Google has hidden *COSTS* in IT support hours to make up for their lack of communication. Bing so far has been actually *FREE*.
My friend was recently locked out of his gmail account. Everytime you would go to gmail on his laptop it would give you a 404 error, the rest of the Internet worked fine even google search just not gmail. To fix this I went through disabling firewalls, uninstalled virus protection. Added https://google.com/ and gmail and a host of other address to his trusted sites. I allowed cookies and turned security down. I even enabled ssl and and other security for gmail. I wiped his cache ran mal warebytes, reinstalled his browsers. I ran malwarebytes and finally I reset both his and his neighbors wireless routers to ensure no dns blocking. The only way I could get his gmail on his computer was to install windows live and set him up with pop3 access. After all of this with no luck I backed up his files and wiped his disk and did a fresh install of windows 7. Voilà gmAil works again can any one tell me whAt was wrong?
If a company has an email link to contact support I expect them to read it in a speedily manner and come back to me asap.
Why should i have to spam them with messages, chase with phone calls and try to find out somebody that wants to help?
Nope. I often email only once a company I have to deal with.
When I email the second time is only to let them know I am stopping doing business with them (like if they care).
It is the fault of people like you that we have the horrendous costumer service tech companies have grown accostumed to provide (or more accurately, not to provide).