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Google Deletes Artist's Blog and a Decade Of His Work Along With It (fusion.net)
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?
The blog ate my homework.
A rouge Right To Be Forgotten?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
until the lightning bolt comes out of it....
I mean...really? It's 2016. Your art is your passion, and you don't have it backed up ANYWHERE?
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.
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.
If you dont have a backup, then it must not have been important to you...
Actually, if you haven't successfully tested a restore of your backup, you don't have a backup (and it must not be that important to you.)
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?)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"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 ...
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?
http://archive.is/3tNs
Predictably, "experimental art" are trigger words for most of the crowd here. Wannabe programmers have a perfect target in artists against whom to direct their own insecurities regarding social acceptance and worth.
"Old man yells at systemd"
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/
Wait, WHERE is cloud?!!
shit.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
... 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...
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... You will probably never feel the same about "the cloud" again.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
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.
The problem is, people still don't understand that "the cloud" is just another name for "someone else's computer".
And so you have the problem of (a) a small, new company run by fucktards that goes out of business and takes your files with them or (b) a big company, like Google, that is really nothing more than the Internet version of a spoiled rich kid -- starting new businesses or buying existing companies and then discarding them after a while when they get bored with them.
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.
And fortunately he doesn't have a backup, sparing the rest of humanity from the risk of exposure to animated gifs. Now can we get to work on the kittens?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
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 seems like a good place to start, then click "Another error or problem".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
WayBackMachine has some of the pages from his blog
If you try the Blogspot's localized domains, there is more content saved there
.com
.co.uk
.ca
.com.es
.com.br
...and so on
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... Most people will be happy with Areca: http://www.areca-backup.org/in... 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.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Heh, good thing I actually went back and read more of the article before posting the below. Still, waste not, want not, and I still doubt a thorough examination of what archive.org actually preserved had been done. Then there's the matter of whether or not Google merely hid or deleted his work.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/... seems to say that archive.org has in fact been scanning the site, which is the first thing I check every time I discover content gone missing and should have been one of the things that someone at fusion should have done before running the piece. Besides, everyone knows you should back up the things that are important to you. I didn't care to click on any of the links
Well, if Google lost m kids' baby pictures you could say the same thing. The monetary and cultural value of those pictures is zero, but they're still important to me.
Important enough to back up?
The artist's "experiment" has made a "discovery". Its important to back up your data regardless of who your online storage "partner" is.
I'm a gen Xer and I sympathise with the millennials. The boomers screwed everything up, broke the economy, dragged me it if the EU, and have a massive sense of entitlement. If I hear "I've worked hard all my life" one more time I thought it was bad when I had to pay for the education that the boomers got for free. But then I look at the deal the millennials have, and realise they are even worse off.
Hate to break it to you but blame the 'greatest generation' as well. They developed many of the stupid business practices that led to the downfall of U.S. industry. They only seemed to know what they were doing in the 50s/60s because they effectively had no competition, literally blew it all up in the 40s, so many a foolish idea was allowed to persist and become entrenched. They started to push the costs onto future generations, for example the countering a demand for higher wages with increased retirement benefits. That bill won't come due for decades, but it eventually did, and such overhead made U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Combined with the trade policies they passed in Congress they share in the blame for exporting U.S. industrial production.
Let me tell you a story..
An experimental artist did some work, pinned it up to the public noticeboard at the load library.
He notice some people looking at it, so made more, kept pinning it up. Never kept any copies, just pinned the originals up.
The noticeboard had plenty of empty space, and he was enjoying this.
Some people even pinned up notes making comments on his work
After a few years, the noticeboard was taken down, because the library had been been reorganising, and there were now bookshelves there.
The artist stood in front of the library, complaining to everyone who walked past 'they took down my artwork!!! its not fair!!'
Perhaps he should have gone to librarian and asked very nicely if they still had the old noticeboard content, because he had been foolish enough to
not keep any copies, and would really like to actually have kept some of it.
But no, he just kept complaining to random passers by, hoping that would somehow help.
Exactly, Google was under no SLA to ensure the datas integrity. It was the artists personal responsibility to backup all of his data. Now it's curious why the person's account was removed and no answer was offered by Google.
I was doing IT support many years ago as an undergrad. I was called to someone's office because their hard drive had failed. When I arrived, she had already purchased a new hard drive, and was quite pleased with herself for having made backups. She had a tape backup drive and multiple tapes that she swapped on a schedule so they'd wear evenly, stored the tapes in different locations, and so on. So all she needed me to do was install the new hardware and restore the backup onto it.
I put the new HDD in, booted off the recovery floppy disk, and went to restore the backup off the tape. In her backup software, she had checked the box next to 'C:\'. Turns out, the software defaulted to not backup subdirectories. So all she had on all of her backup tapes was the contents of her root directory: autoexec.bat, config.sys, and that sort of junk. That was a depressing trip.
I have been on the other side of this (in a previous job), and have had some insight into what's happening in these situations. Yes, accidents do happen and data occasionally gets lost. That's why you always should keep backups. And unlike other providers, Google does make that relatively easy with its "Takeout" service. Also, if you do contact Google as soon as the problem happens (preferably, within the first month), data will usually be restored. Admittedly, Google doesn't make it easy to contact them. So, that's unfortunately a bit of a challenge.
Now, for the ugly side of things. From my experience, a full 90% of the users who complain loudly and publicly, really only tell half the story. A provider such as Google won't publicly comment, as that's a battle that can't be won. The court of public opinion is merciless that way. But I swear, the vast majority of cases, the complainant is really at fault themselves. They just conveniently omit those details when they go public. "What? I should have mentioned that I ran a child-porn ring from my Google account before it was shut down? Why? Is that relevant? I still deserve all my data! And besides, I should sue for disruption of business. My child-porn business partners don't like their e-mails bouncing!".
Not saying that this is exactly what happened in OP's case. But I'd honestly be surprised, if he told us all there is to his story.
I wouldn't be surprised if a DMCA complaint made by a 3rd party (and likely one hired on behalf of him) is behind this.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Also this is a good lesson for those using cloud storage, have more than one and mirror all your personal files across both and "with different passwords" . If one cloud provider does lose all your data you have a fall back.
The blog was taken down for repeated violations of the TOS. The Guardian can offer you some insight: If you scroll down a bit, you'll see this:
He had a featured post, twice a month, where 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.
He has no reason to whine.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
That was Socrates, Greece as a whole never had an empire as such, and their influence certainly didn't collapse a generation after Socrates.
His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.
And nothing of value was lost.
GIF novel. I have several of them I think. All at 25 fps. Some call them movies.
Better! The artist's experiment with a new medium has revealed that it is ephemeral, as are all things in life. While you might think you are working digital marble, like the sculptors of the ancients, the cyber medium is more akin to shifting sand.
I threw up in my mouth a little writing that.
Last night, my Gmail account was temporarily disabled by Google. Upon login, a screen greeted me with the message that Google has temporarily locked down my account after detecting some unusual activity. Some reasons were provided, as to what they thought could be deemed as suspicious - I was either accessing my account from multiple geolocations/was sending bouncing emails/was downloading emails with large attachments/was continuously fetching my mail via Imap/POP or most inexplicably, my browser cache was the problem. All the reasons, save the last one weren't valid in my case. I keep several tabs open and have Adblock Plus in my browser , dunno if they had a problem with any of that. They did re-enable my account the next morning, but there was nothing I could have done had they chosen to shut off my account permanently. There was no support email or phone number mentioned anywhere, and anyway I wasn't entitled for any support whatsoever. The point being, Google can be worse then the Federal Government in terms of service. You can never be sure when you run afoul of their vaguely defined TOS. Users need to be careful while entrusting their data to free service provider, that's the entire point.
You are missing the point.
This isn't really about the content. This is about the fact that he violated (possibly knowingly) the TOS for the platform he was using.
Even if he didn't know he was violating the TOS he should have backed up his stuff.
14+ years on the Interwebs... he has no excuse for remaining ignorant about backups.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.