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I can attest to this kind of stuff happening back when I was a dev.

Another really insidious thing I ran across, I noticed when trying to build a forum site for a friend, for their writer pals.

Websites often require something called transactional emails to function. These are emails that do things like verify your new account, handle forgotten passwords, give warnings that someone tried to sign on with your account, let you know that someone replied to a comment, etc.

But google will flag any site that sends more than a small number of emails a day as spam, unless you go through a lengthy process of proving you are not a spammer, or sign up for partner services that charge you to send emails.

In the case of shared hosting, the cheap kind available to most individuals and small interest groups, the whole system can end up blacklisted as spammers, so these services, unable to fight google, just don't allow those users to send those emails.

These emails are not spam, or ads, or porn. They are small, system generated messages that allow a site to function. Google knows this.

Even though, with work, effort, and often additional expense, an it professional or very savvy user with it experience and patience can get around the setup required, it has had an obvious chilling effect on small business sites, interest group forums and bulletin boards, etc. This has contributed to an atmosphere where everyone just ends up on the handful of giant's sites, or paid, cookie-cutter sites.

And to those who say "oh, but nazis could have made their own sites, and now they have to go to the big services who can ban them..."

The nazi types spread and grew and thrived under big tech's watch, reached millions of new sycophants, and festered openly. And back in the old days, you could contact a host and they would shut down a customer with a site about blowing up jews or whatever, but now you go through some byzantine big tech process, where nothing is done except occasionally when it hits the news and is particularly far reaching, like the capitol insurrection.

If Google keeps blocking off websites in its search engine results and Chrome browsers, then there should be backlash from users to switch to alternatives so they can access the info and websites they want. So in essence, Google is shooting itself in the foot if it keeps this up.

This is why I do not use Google as my sole online search engine, and I do not even use Google Chrome as my primary browser.

The real problem with Google and Facebook is that they let themselves get massive while convincing themselves that dumbshit "AI" would solve all their problems and they wouldn't need real customer service, because Silicon Valley is run by the most sheltered, quixotic dipshits in the entire world. None of Google or Facebook's problems couldn't be solved by employing actual educated human beings to answer actual phones.

As a non technical person looking to build a website for my business, this is frankly terrifying.

Monopoly in America has become the standard and that's destroying our competitiveness.

BREAK UP THE MONOPOLIES

I just realized that Valve is more carefull with banning blatant cheaters in free to play games than Google banning legit buisnesses.

This email refers to the Search Console blacklist alert emails. What this second e-mail says is that G Suite’s automated phishing e-mail filter thinks Google Search Console’s email about our domain being blacklisted is fake.

I have absolutely no trouble believing this. My current employer's website got blacklisted from Google Ads as "MALICIOUS". Google Ads told us we could view details about which pages were affected in Google Search Console, but Google Search Console reported no issues.

We spent two weeks going back and forth with Google Ads support, and they eventually told us that the malicious URL was https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:300,400,500,700,900|Montserrat:100,200,300,400,500,600,700,800,900|Raleway. Yes, according to Google Ads, Google Fonts is malicious.

Several days later our SEO company managed to convince Google that Google wasn't serving malware and our ad privileges were reinstated. I also raised the issue with the Google Fonts team and they mentioned that they would pursue it internally.

Google, being the automated behemoth that Google is, does its thing: it ever so slightly adjusts the position of its own butt on its planet sized leather armchair, and, without really noticing, crushes a myriad of (relatively) ant-sized businesses in the process.

That is a great line

The article talks about Google flagging this guy's company's site as harmful without any evidence, essentially because of a rogue bot, but what they don't point out is that Google's own sites have mountains of content that would trip these checks... how much do you want to bet that they exempt their own services? Seems reasonable, right? After all, YOUR site doesn't make Google any money, so why would they care if they end up destroying it?

Totally level playing field... /s

So despite doing your best to avoid having anything to do with Google, the domain owners still need some form of Google account so that Google can verify and allow them to be on the internet?

(Hyperbole I know, but Google do seem to think they own the internet.)

https://archive.vn/Etja7 for backup

Original author here - this really blew up.

If you have any questions about the incident, happy to answer.

Keep in mind that this issue is not related to our company using any Google services.

tl;dr =

The Safe Browsing incident described in this post made it very clear that Google literally controls who can access your website, no matter where and how you operate it. With Chrome having around 70% market share, and both Firefox and Safari using the GSB (Google Safe Browsing) database to some extent, Google can with a flick of a bit singlehandedly make any site virtually inaccessible on the Internet.

This is an extraordinary amount of power, and one that is not suitable for Google's "an AI will review your problem when and if it finds it convenient to do so" approach.

The government has to stop this.

That is absolutely disgusting

This is what happens when companies as powerful as Google have zero real competition. They control everything.

I love how switching domains is the real trick here. I mean, basically if you behave like a malicious actor and switch domains around you can get your business back up and running.

A company that I was working for used google cloud services for every aspect of their site. Static hosting, databases, web server, email smtp provider... our entire platform was built with google products. This was a huge business that processed and shipped thousands of subscriptions for prescription drugs to customers daily and provided virtual doctor and nurse support to new and existing patients. One day, google accidentally decided to flag our newsletter emails (which were sent to subscribed, paying customers) as spam. Instead of sending a warning or revoking our ability to send emails, google disabled EVERY SINGLE GOOGLE SERVICE that was linked to our corporate gmail identity. Our site completely disappeared from the web. We couldn't process or receive orders, and customers had no way to reach our medical support team. There was no warning, no process to challenge their decision, and no way to contact a human being to resolve the issue. They arbitrarily crippled the entire business for several days until our attorney contacted the legal department directly and started threatening lawsuits.

Feel like I'm hearing more bad than good things about Google these days.

Would this make the case to subdomain for internationalization with regards to search engine optimization?

Terrifying. Google needs to get sued, there should be a landmark process that will stop this shit once and for all.

We need new Larry Flynt.

This is why less Apple (it's very ironic Google were concern with Apple's walled garden when Google is blissfully ignorant about it's own walled garden) and more foundations is the way to go.

Since I fail to see why there can't be a non-partisan foundation handling the actual blacklist, while corporations can do whatever fancy pancy programming with said list.

On a similar note, I simply hate how Google flags sites and other products that depend on their services without much care.

I'm an app developer and I created a rather successful TV guide in my home country. Around 1 year after I published my app in the Play Store I got a message from Google saying that my app was suspended for promoting pirated content.

The thing is, my TV guide definitely has never promoted any pirated content. So I opened a dispute on Play Store console and asked them to explain what happened. Then a human being replied saying that after "careful analysis" they determined that my app was streaming illegal content from TV channels...

But my app never did that! If you search for "TV guide" in the Play Store you will find many apps that actually do this, but my app is not one of those, yet it was classified as an app that streams illegal content. What infuriated me the most is how they wrote that my app was deemed illegal after "careful analysis".

I sent a second appeal and asked them to point out exactly what part of my app was streaming illegal content, or any type of streaming at all. For my surprise, after this second appeal they restored my app in Play Store with neither a proper explanation nor an apology for their mistake.

I was mad but at least my problem was solved, right?

Actually no. Even though my app was restored in the Play Store, my Google Ads account got banned for the same stupid reason: I was supposedly displaying ads in an app that was promoting illegal content. So I could no longer monetize my app by displaying ads there. Actually I lost the ability to monetize ANY app and ANY website because they banned my entire Google Ads account.

I wrote a third appeal to Google, this time through the Google Ads site and I explained that whatever mistake was done by Google when they flagged my TV guide as illegal is now fixed because my TV guide was restored in the Play Store so I was expecting Google to also restore my Google Ads account.

But to my surprise Google replied saying that they wouldn't restore my Google Ads account because they have zero tolerance for illegal content... (insert confused Jackie Chan meme)

TL;DR: Google wrongly banned my app and my Google Ads account; after 2 appeals Google un-banned my app without any explanation or apology; but Google still kept the ban on my Google Ads due to a mistake that I never committed.

Using aws cloudfront, which anyone can abuse, without a custom domain seems a bit shortsighted.

Could you sue Google for something like this?

The blogpost pertains a SaaS getting blocked, not a set of static webpages.

The fundamental shift here is that the Web isn't just pages with content anymore, it's also fully featured, complex applications that interact with your filesystem, your GPU, your camera, and so on.

These are the "Rich Web Applications" which used to be implemented through software like Silverlight or Java Web Applets. This time around, the entire stack of browser API's is more then mature enough to allow this natively in the browser.

The entire premise of SaaS, of course, would be that customers don't have to install separate applications on their computer anymore. You just browse to a URL and boom. User's computers become thin clients.

The issue here is the browser that gives you those nifty API's... is engineered and distributed by a gatekeeper: Google.

And that's exactly part of the end game.

Microsoft used to be chastised in the 1990's and early 2000's for creating a restrictive environment which restricted people from doing whatever they want with their hardware, on an operating system level. To them, the advent of Netscape Navigator was a threat to them: It allowed people to escape the Windows sandbox. That's why they started bundling Internet Explorer with Windows: as a way of gatekeeping what you could do and build online.

Microsoft almost got broken up through anti-trust litigation over that.

Well, the same exact thing happens here again. Almost 25 years later. Now it's Google. And it's the exact same issue. Only far more complex since software on your machine can now be monitored and controlled remotely through all kinds of automatic update and telemetry systems.

In a way, you have to wonder as a user: If you install software on your personal machine whose behavior can be changed and controlled remotely - like Chrome - are you really fully in control over your machine and what happens on it? Isn't such software - even though locally installed - then also just a part of the SaaS model at the end of the day?

And if we can assert that, doesn't that mean that any SaaS application runs through another SaaS application making it possible for the latter to control access to the fromer?

So, how does one eliminate this risk entirely as a SaaS business?

You can't. More specifically, you can't if you build front-end applications which rely on browser API's controlled by these big corporations.

As per the blogpost: If you build on top of a platform controlled by some other actor, you are at their whim. And all you can do is apply mitigating strategies such as dabbling with multiple domain names.

The only way to dispense entirely with the gatekeeping would be moving back towards native applications once again, build your own UI's using system libraries and such. And you would have to use system libraries whose design and development are governed in an open fashion.

Of course, that's not a desirable option since the benefit of using SaaS for the vast majority of humanity is the convenience of externalizing all the costs of having to deploy and maintain software installed locally: whether that's on a personal machine, or on 1000's of machines in a corporate context.

Stallman clearly was onto something: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html

Nice one.. this is emulatable.

tldr; Stephen Harper, who served as the Prime Minister of Canada for nine years, said there may be a place for Bitcoin and central bank digital currencies as part of a basket of reserve currencies to replace the U.S. dollar. He added that he was concerned about central banks becoming "kind of a general banker" rather than a financial monitor.

This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.

tldr; Stephen Harper, who served as the Prime Minister of Canada for nine years, said there may be a place for Bitcoin and central bank digital currencies as part of a basket of reserve currencies to replace the U.S. dollar. He added that he was concerned about central banks becoming "kind of a general banker" rather than a financial monitor.

This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.

because there's an arbitrage attack on fiat.

The fed is desperate to keep interest rates low. In order to do that, they are monetizing corporate debt. Large companies can issue debt, monetize it by selling it to the fed, then use the money to buy bitcoin.

There's really no way to lose. In order to keep rates low, the fed has to create new money which means corporations load up with free bitcoin. If the fed ever lets rates mark to market they won't be able to service the debt and the stock market plummets.

If something can't continue, it won't.

Because Theter hasn't yet collapsed.

demand and math is a nice combo

Unprecedented levels of USDT creation.

The macroeconomic conditions might as well be rocket fuel and it's hard to see these conditions changing any time in the near future.

lots of whales(institutions) are buying

Because people keep buying it.

I see a Nic Carter article, I upvote.

Good article which doesn't need pre-existing knowledge about bitcoin.

100/0 allocation of BTC/ETH - Ouch

Why is this downvoted?

I think Alden fatally misreads a fair bit, not just with Ethereum's upsides but with the risks. This is not really a surprise because smart contract cryptos are paradigm disrupters and traditional analysis calls for conservative assumptions, meaning it is inherently bad at analyzing paradigm shift.

removing this, because sub reddit rule:

Keep price discussion and market talk, memes & exchanges to subreddits such as /r/ethfinance/ or /r/ethtrader

--

with that said, it was mostly a rehash of dumb BTC maximalist narratives from 2016.

I'm a big fan of Lyn's and I am glad to see her digging into some research even if I disagree with most of the conclusions and she is largely repeating old bitcoin opposition talking points.

Keep in mind, she thought bitcoin was too confusing and risky last cycle as well, but is now a big supporter. The most important thing for more conservative oriented financial analysts is time to get familiar with things. And she is right in that Ethereum is more risky and ambitious in the upgrades it is taking, so is more speculative in nature.

The biggest problem I had was that she recommended that people who wanted to speculate on ETH buy some and sit on it for five years to see how things turn out. Go take that ETH and use it in a DeFi protocol - earn some yield, and gain a better understanding of what the system can actually do.

Hey all. I invested and de-invested $4000 in ethereum in May; and have been kicking myself recently. I was planning to throw all of my available cash at ethereum again and wait, but this article has got me a little spooked. Any way to address the security concerns and potentials of another altcoin overtaking it? What are the general predictions for what ETH 2.0 will do to the existing units of ethereum?

Thanks all. I’m a big noob when it comes to all this.

many unfortunate talking points from 2017 that mischaracterize what Ethereum is today and is capable of in the future.

the broader community is crafting a response together here! check it out.

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CR plan doesn't say anything about how would be handled claims not related to the exchange? Will they be covered 100% like fiat creditors related to exchange or prorate? That important because Coinlab has allowed (but disputed) claim for $500M and trustee need to set asiide (reserve) either ~23% of that amount if distribution is prorate (like btc creditors) or 100% like fiat creditors. Beside that claim Coinlab has $17B claim what is currently not allowed under assessment (trustee for now doesn't need reserve funds for this claim, only if court rule its allowed but disputed claim).

Had a buddy pay for a fiverr gig today with bitcoin and it took so long that the gig got canceled because they didn't receive the BTC payment in a timely manner. Hmm...

Snapshots:

1. Kim Nilsson of WizSec on the Coinla... - archive.org, archive.today*

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I've got big respect for Kim Nilsson and his WizSec reports on Gox, but surely he's well out here.

Creditors who don’t opt for the early payout will stay on until the end and split the remaining assets normally, which is projected to be slightly higher (22–23%) if CoinLab’s claim is successfully struck down.

Where is this 22-23% coming from? I think this is confusing BTC assets/BTC claims for YEN assets/total claims. With the appreciation of BTC, yen assets are way higher now. BTC would have to crash to like 12k USD or something stupid for us to be in this situation.

Sorry for spamming this same thing everywhere. It seems like I am shadowbanned on this subreddit alone, no one can see my opening posts, so I'd rather try and share the message. I've reached to mods since I believe this to be some accident. Just few months ago my post was the pinned one here.

What's important here is that the trustee managed to reach a settlement with CoinLab. The whole Early Payment -bullshit with Fortress and CoinLab is now confirmed by CoinLab itself.

Since nothing is being pushed on us, I really think this is best for us as creditors, allowing the case to get forward instead of getting stuck with CoinLab.

What's the most revealing today was also that CoinLab mentioned that the trustee has 23% (!!) of BTC held vs the approved BTC claims.

For each Bitcoin that was locked up in the bankruptcy that has a claim on it, the estate has only 0.23 coin to give out, according to a CoinLab spokesman.

From: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/coinlab-reaches-deal-mt-gox-184624542.html

That’s a serious bump from the 15-18% what people have mostly discussed about.

Sure, some might/will be sold still due to default ”Final Payment” option being a cash. That shouldn’t impact the ratio as it’s pro rata, but BTC value might slide obviously lower if thousands/tens of thousands of BTC will be sold - even on a bit longer period of time.

Realistically, I think we'll hear from the court in H1/2021. As the trustee is assigned to the work by the court and trustee even mentions he's part of the whole process even now with court, I believe it's going to be approved.

I would say stuff is going to happen faster than /u/thondera pointed out here (except the 2069 Mars Base!), but other than that the list itself looks good to me. I'd even claim there's a chance everything is settled (Final Payment paid in BTC/BCH) by the end of 2021 too; 2022 by the latest.

Yes, this is a good article. Sorry if my previous comments got a bit out of hand but this is an emotional rollercoaster for all of us.

This is really bad advice. This makes it look like the early payout is 90% of value when really it's absolutely horrendous unless Bitcoin crashes to next to nothing. 21% of the BTC value when civil rehabilitation started is worth 4.8% of a Bitcoin now, currently best guess from ozcoin is 14.9% payout for BTC claims. It's literally a third of the expected value.

Thanks for posting this.

How can you not get much more if you wait until final payout? There is 15% coins left at market price today and early payout gives 21% of 90% of old obsolete market price. Seems there should be a definite positive upside on waiting with the extra risk of something happening along the way. But of course Fortress wants that extra cash and process to end as much as we. Maybe Fortress is good actually. If you don't take the early payout that is. Taking the early payment is essentially selling to Fortress because they take the upside later. They expect an upside otherwise they wouldn't negotiate this. I think author of this article is wrong when he says there will be little upside in waiting. Waiting it will be however.

Except, the rehabilitation process should go rather quickly from here.

All of the creditors have submitted claims and the claim process has closed. Therefore, if the plan is deemed reasonable by the court, it will proceed quickly. Everyone that filed a claim will receive their Bitcoin and the unclaimed portion/disputed portion may drag on.

Out of the 140,000 BTC a maximum of 90% will be distributed likely within months. Not knowing the number of claims, or those electing to wait out the dispute process for the remaining 10%, you could only guess at least a minimum of 50% will be released in the first phase.

With the rehabilitation plan draft submitted and the Coinlab agreement, there's very little left to stall the process.

Thanks! I was really worried about this.

Well finally someone wrote something of value.

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