Dennis Cooper fears censorship as Google erases blog without warning | Hacker News Reader

Dennis Cooper fears censorship as Google erases blog without warning

theguardian.com

92 pointsmerraksh26 comments

Open articleView on HN

Large discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063

Another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097707

Yet another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12089980

Another submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12088543

And another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12100781

Added in edit: As of 15:00 BST, 14:00 Zulu, all three major discussions (including this one) are still active and seeing contributions. If you want to know what people are saying, rather than just your own "fire and forget" comments, you'll need to visit all three submissions."

The last link (12100781) is to an unrelated article.

Can't help but repeat: See whatever you have in the public cloud as a cache copy of your information, a copy that can disappear at any moment, and you can't do anything about it. Have a local master copy of everything you care about, properly backed up.

I can't help but feel like the word Censorship is being severely diluted by using it in cases like these.

Nah, It's been meaningless for a while now.

Is this a common thing? I can't imagine writing a book stores entirely on blogspot. UI aside, most of the writers I know are at least somewhat cognizant of the need for backups.

This is why IndieWebCamp came up with POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (https://indieweb.org/POSSE). By all means, use Blogger, Facebook, G+, Flickr, Medium, Nautilus and any other outlets you care to, but remember that only you can be the caretaker of your own data.

Question for @dang (or other mods) - this is now marked as a dupe and so won't appear on the front page, even though it got over 80 points and nearly 20 comments in just 40 minutes.

Does that mean the comments here will sink without trace and forever be ignored?

Feature request: merge

I've been asking for a merge feature for years. This is now a great example of just how bad the situation can get.

Art is supposed to be challenging but if you think about it even porn hosts do censorship. We live under a privitized tyranny of terms and conditions with no due process.

That's not a fair statement, and isn't any different than it's ever been.

There's never been an obligation for other people to support and help distribute obscure and controversial "art".

In fact, it's easier to get it distributed today than ever before.

We only live under those terms and conditions if we voluntarily agree to them. :)

How long before other companies (like Medium) will start doing this?

That's why I'm advocating hosting your own blog. Github Pages basically provide free hosting for static pages, and you can use a blog generator like Pelican or Jekyll. Sure it's a hassle to set-up for the average person but the peace of mind might be worth it.

If you use github pages, you aren't hosting your own blog.... GitHub is.

Sure, but you are more likely to keep your local clone up to date and it is easier if the need comes up to migrate to any other static file host or jekyll build host that accepts a git repository push. Backing up and restoring most traditional CMS is much more onerous that git pull/push.

Right! And GP, jekyll can run on other hosts, not just Github.

So in effect Google lulled him into believing that they were okay with is work and it was secure.

Seems so yes, and apparently,

"His advice to other artists who work predominantly online is to maintain your own domain and back everything up."

He never received same advice from others in the last 14 years, bit odd..

Reads to me as a case of (the dutch saying), who burns his buttocks has* to sit on the blisters

We have not enough tech education

"impossible for culture to be produced."

It's rather cheap to setup or let someone setup your own wordpress server on a hosted server, made redundant with backups.

So it's worrying that artists think it's Google hosting or nothing.

[moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099757 ]

I think all this really does is remind everyone that they should review their current backup strategies

What the hell is he going to sue for? Google is a private company; they have the right to ban anyone for any reason.

It worries me that Dennis Cooper has no respect for Google's private property rights.

Private property rights are not an unlimited license to be a jerk - although libertarians do seem to think so.

The common good overrides that and if like Google you are going to stick to fingers up to the "man" over NSL's its very hypocritical.

As Seward said "there is a higher law than the Constitution"

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