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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....
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.
Why not create another account to let your users know what's going on, and to contact Google support staff?
Why not read the fine article and discover the he did just that and it didn't help?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Well, i guess its normally and...................... on principal i guess........
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.
I have just read it, while he did create another account to let his group know what was going on. It really doesn't sound like he tried very hard to get in touch with Google for proper support, he just waited three years for an answer to fall into his lap.
He at one point complains that all the support pages linked into Groups so he couldn't access them, but he clearly could after creating his second account. The guy just sounds a bit lazy, the way he whines at the idea of moving to a different hosting/forum provider etc
which is totally what she said
Why not create another account to let your users know what's going on, and to contact Google support staff?
Why not read the fine article and discover the he did just that and it didn't help?
Because now everybody else (and we're quite a lot) knows the answer without having to RTFA. (thus your informative mod)
For me it's one of the greater virtues of Slashdot. In a quick browse I can have the news and all the most obvious questions and additional info, answered and linked. I even think, from time to time, about submitting something to Slashdot just to get the base analysis.
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
Stand outside a Google office with a sign for 10 mins outta do the trick!
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
I'm just surprised how, after all his issues, the length of time with no response, and being billed in error, he still ends with:
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 :-/
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!
Same here. This guy is a bit strange.
Will google pay for travel and related costs? Ah, thought so.
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.
Sounds a bit like Stockholm Syndrome.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
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.
An interesting thought; yet it seems necessary for the victim to co-exist with the captor. In this case Google didn't maintain communication with the victim.
Yes it did, the pychess google group continued to operate, he just didn't have administrative control over it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Travel time, from my work to the Google office, about 10 mins. Travel time from my house when I was in London to the Google office about 20 mins. Travel time from most places I have worked to a Google engineering / sales office, less than 20 mins. It's not THAT much of a burden.
Just to follow your logic, when you go to your bank branch, do they pay you for travel and related costs? Ah, thought so.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Wooooosh
GENERATION 24: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
The above was, IMO, incorrectly moderated "troll".
The guy waited for 3 YEARS to get an account issue resolved. He waited. He sent a couple e-mails, browsed a few pages, asked on a couple forums and that's pretty much it. Hell, I would've spammed support via e-mail 3 times a day and would have called EVERYONE all the time, if that issue would have been oh-so-important.
If you don't get a reply to a support request, send another. And another. And another. Go everywhere and tell everyone what happened to you. In 3 years you can learn legal stuff and sue their asses just to get the problem fixed.
Seems to me that his group/mailing list is a very sluggish thing going on, and he really didn't care what was happening. In 3 YEARS you can do an amazing amount of stuff to get your problem resolved. The above poster is 100% right. That guy was simply not trying. End of story.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
Thankyou! I am guessing the guys who modded me "troll" are also of the lazy type who would prefer their problems to magically go away without them putting any effort into it!
which is totally what she said
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?
Google locked me out of GMail because I was logging in while traveling (too many different IP addresses). It wasn't clear (to me) what was happening because I received no error messages and the page for PIN entry was malfunctioning. A message to the appropriate help address (after I finally found it) resulted in a response after a month. I actually found the solution earlier by Googling the problem and by that time the PIN page was fixed. YMMV
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
damn those subomains!!!!! damn them all to hell!!!!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
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
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...
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.
How many ip addresses did you use? I connect to my GMail account from a minimum of 10 different IP addresses per day and from at least 3 different countries every month. I have never encountered a restriction like this. Perhaps it is because I am using my own domain. Seems like an odd restriction though. Even a normal user accessing from a phone could easily use 10 different IPs in a day.
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()?
I would have called my lawyer, first.I would provide him/her all the documentation which would prove: how am I impacted, the extent of my losses, the support requests, the lack of answers to those support requests, and so on.
And FYI, they DO have a phone number, probably a looong, winding IVR, but check it here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/index.html
At the bottom, there are some numbers that look like phone numbers. I found them in 2 minutes. ANd one more click away, tens of phone numbers for individual offices: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/address.html
The "you can't call them" whine doesn't work. If it burns, it burns. You don't just wait for 3 YEARS to get the issue fixed. Geez.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
"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.
This is Slashdot. Everyone here knows at least one person who works at Google. Get them to bug the relevant person on your behalf. Works for me...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's probably not a problem for you because you do it regularly. These systems generally look for unusual patterns. If you always log in from one IP, and then log in from a load of different ones, this is suspicious. If you log in from a lot of IPs regularly, logging in from a load of IPs on a geographically distant subnet might be flagged as suspicious, but logging in from ones on the networks that you regularly use probably isn't.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
So because you tend to live near their offices, that is true for everyone else? Ah, thought so.
Maybe because he connects to Google at Starbucks stores, he thinks that they're the local Google offices.
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.
It's probably not a problem for you because you do it regularly. These systems generally look for unusual patterns. If you always log in from one IP, and then log in from a load of different ones, this is suspicious. If you log in from a lot of IPs regularly, logging in from a load of IPs on a geographically distant subnet might be flagged as suspicious, but logging in from ones on the networks that you regularly use probably isn't.
A reasonable assumption, but given how opaque many of Google's operations are it's hard to know for sure, and of course they can change their criteria at any time.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Posting to remove a misclicked moderation. Sorry, man, you're not redundant.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
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
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.
That guy was simply not trying. End of story.
Not quite. True, he was simply not trying. Maybe he had other things going on in his life, maybe it just wasn't that important to him. But, after years (and the number "3" seems to use some interesting date math), he found an easy solution, one that was within his desired effort level. It worked, and he blogged about that. If he did so thinking there would be others in the same boat who would appreciate it, he's probably right. And that is the end of the story.
I just submit things to my teddy bear. That works, too.
I might be redundant. Not sure about my post though :)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Yeah, but think about this: the key (and only) thing that makes the story "worthwhile" is the time spent since the problem inception. Those three years that have passed ARE the key. If the guy would have said "...and three DAYS later I found this solution/method/workaround", nobody would have cared. That little blog entry wouldn't have made Slashdot news page. Ever. :)
So, since the whole hype is based on "took me 3 years to get this fixed", I felt like pointing out WHY it took three years. Now I don't say Google isn't to blame. It is, but not so much.
I work in support and I know that support mentality (especially towards US-based customers) for small issues such as "I can't log in" is somewhat similar: "don't answer that e-mail, wait until the customer squirms a bit, and then we'd know he tried whatever's in the documentation, followed the steps from self help tools, so we can use some resources to help him if he insists". Maybe it's the wrong approach, but when a support organization shows that a large amount of reported issues (76% in mine) could have been solved via self-help, just by reading the damn help pages, it kind of proves to be the correct one. Just sayin'
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Travel time from my work or house to the closest Google office? About 6 hours (consisting of a drive to the airport, a plane trip to another country, followed by another drive to the office).
You are not everyone.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
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.
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), 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.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Sure, after you've waved the sign for 10 minutes, they will make a couple calls and complimentary travel arrangements will be made on your behalf. Upon arriving at your destination, I'm told you are entitled to a free phone call as well.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
ITYM to reply to my parent :)
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?
Crowdsourcing your research? That's not a bad idea...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
People like who?
Your expectations might not be appropriate. Of course, everybody would love getting the best support there is, instant replies, speedy resolutions and such. Welcome to real life, where you need to squirm quite a bit to obtain support. It's not outrageous, it's life.
All support organizations have different "values" assigned to a customer. There are Platinum customers, and if you are one of them, you probably have a dedicated team assigned only to you, they wait all day and don't do anything else than be ready to help you, because you are paying shitloads of money for support. But if you're a regular simple customer who gets free support for free, don't get your hopes high. There are support teams out there who consist of 2-3 people supporting literally millions. They weed out the support requests based on how desperate you are. And the measurement method? they simply count the number of e-mails received from you. if it's ten a day, they will prioritize your request. Otherwise, you are in the gutter.
Now you will obviously say "but-but-but Google makes billions! They should afford providing better support!" - and they do: to those actually paying them those billions.
I just tried obtaining support from Google related to Ad Sense - got an e-mail reply within 30 minutes, and it was a rather dumb question from my side. Of course, I also know how to get them galloping to answer, I thrown in there a mention of me being willing to spend about 30K Euro for ads. All it takes is to be a little smart and know how to obtain support.
Within my support organization, I often receive support requests saying "It doesn't work" or "I need access to the application" - nothing else. Of course, customers expect support to know what they are asking for. Guess what, we don't. And if the customer is unwilling or unable to properly explain what the issue is, well, tough luck. They will eventually come back and throw in some details.
In the end, the customer-support relationship is 2-sided. Each side has to put up. If someone comes and says "but I'm the customer, I need my ass wiped, kissed and sprayed with cologne", they better find someone else to do that for them. Unless, of course, they're a platinum customer. Then they will get it immediately.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)