Hacker News Reader

Comment by fuzzix | Hacker News Reader

Don't write about the owner's golf buddies either.

https://vpsexperience.wordpress.com/

An odd experience, I would say.

Regardless of the truthiness of this blogpost, their ToS actually includes this gem (repeated twice actually, due to poor editing):

3.13 Subscribers may not use the Services in a manner that would violate the lawful privacy rights of any person, ... or embarrass, which shall be determined in DigitalOcean’s sole and absolute discretion.

So... if someone gets embarrassed by what you put up, DO just decides to take it down.

https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms/

We try to provide the best cloud experience possible and part of that is following up on abuse complaints, otherwise we end up with blacklisted IPs and other issues that impact customer service.

There are occasional weird situations like this that come up and I would love to handle every support request directly but unfortunately that's not possible.

We've had to scale the support team to support over 100,000 customers and we didn't get the right customer support director on board till about 2 months ago.

We are constantly looking to improve our service in all areas and Zach is on top of it to ensure that all of our customer support staff get more training in how to better respond to customers.

However, the promise that I make is that if any situation ever arises in any way shape or form with DigitalOcean please contact me directly - moisey --- a-t --- digital0cean - and I will be on top of it as soon as possible.

I hope that helps in response to this issue.

Thanks, Moisey

Can you elaborate on "blacklisted IPs" for hosting content? For spam or compromised boxes, sure. For hosting a webpage that "embarrasses" someone?

At any rate, I have no way of knowing about this issue. It's just curious that DO would put embarrassment as a ToS violation. All sorts of stuff embarrasses all sorts of people. Might as well just put up "DO reserves the right to terminate your services, at any time, without reason."

celebrity photos are huge, huge business. sites pop up all the time trying to monetize papparazzi shots and hosting providers have to deal with all sorts of fallout from anyone with a vested interested in the intellectual property or famous name.

these people do not give a shit about the streisand effect. they are going after their money.

So in that case DO receives a DMCA takedown, they comply, and let the customer deal with it? Or you're saying they file malicious lawsuits against the hosting provider and courts happily allow these suits to proceed and don't award fees to a neutral hosting provider?

We forward any abuse complaints that we receive to the owner of the account and ask that they handle them.

We try not to interpret the law as that is not our specialty of course, we are simply saying that we would like that customers use the service for a non-malicious purpose. But we're more than happy to open up a dialogue about this and make amendments if necessary.

Thanks!

If an IP continuously receives abuse complaints it is blacklisted by various services which can then lead to mail undeliverability issues or other problems which is why we are very pro-active on any abuse complaints that we receive and forward them to customers.

In regards to embarrassment it's about the intention of the statement which is to not use the service for a malicious nature. But we're more than happy to open up a dialogue about this and see if there are any amendments to the terms that are a good idea.

We'll push on getting more of our public content into github so that customers can provide feedback and provide rewrites of the terms that they feel capture the sentiment but perhaps clarify those terms better.

Their lawyers have not yet taught them that decisions about content make one a content provider instead of a hosting provider, and all the wonderful protections in OCILLA/DMCA vanish into thin air.

I'm sure they will get that eventually. Maybe after they learn to scrub customer storage in every case (not just enough to sweep the issue under the rug) so that droplets aren't immediately compromised on termination.

In case that wasn't clear to you, DO puts their drive wear ahead of your data. There are still multiple endpoints in the API that will leak your data to other customers. They fix some cases of it every now and then, then revert without telling anyone once they see the impact on their SMART metrics. When sneak called them out they wrote an entirely fabricated blog post. That incident resulted in a published CVE in libcloud earlier this year but of course nobody gives a shit, throw more VC at them!

Would you like to elaborate? The only data-leak story I have heard about was that until recently, "scrub disk with 0s" was unchecked by default when a droplet was destroyed. Now that option is checked by default. What other concerns do you have?

I wish we wouldn't upvote stuff like this. The guy clearly bullied a random Google employee in a private chatroom into commenting on a subject that was totally irrelevant to his work, and then turned his comments into a biased character assassination post WITHOUT even telling the dude he was writing about him.

It sure seems like the author went into the chatroom looking for a story, and got the THINNEST of all possible stories ("Random Google Developer Has Opinions") and, in an effort to turn it into real news, colored it in the most negative way possible. It is profoundly terrible journalism, and the motives behind it are so ugly. This is not something that we should endorse on Hacker News.

The only story of relevance here is that Digital Ocean has a line in its TOS about not allowing "harassment or embarrassment", and they will enforce it if you do indeed harass a guy.

>The only story of relevance here is that Digital Ocean has a line in its TOS about not allowing "harassment or embarrassment", and they will enforce it if you do indeed harass a guy.

I think you are missing the real relevance here; that DO will use their own discretion to determine if your content is worthy of dissemination. You're right, it was terrible journalism, and a thin story. So what of it? Why should DO concern themselves with the content that isn't breaking any laws? What, precisely, is "embarrassment"? It was a no-name blogger posting a non-story.

>This is not something that we should endorse on Hacker News.

The fact that you say this explains a lot about why you have your opinion on DO and how things should work, and why I have mine. If this story is getting upvoted, it's getting upvoted. There is no "we", unless you're trying to curate opinion and create an echo chamber.

By accepting implicitly the facts presented by the article as facts, you are doing something called "privileging the hypothesis."

Say, for example, that there's an article about a "scientific study", claiming some strong conclusion (e.g. "pig hair cures diabetes.") The article goes on to say that the study has one data-point and no control-group (which is to say, basically, that it's an anecdote.)

To still even consider the study's conclusion as possibly true is to privilege the hypothesis. You didn't have any facts before. You don't have any facts after. And yet, your default has switched from "assume pig hair has no special properties whatsoever" to "assume pig hair maybe has something with a vaguely-medicinal use in it." You've updated on zero information.

Just as much as publicizing such a "study", it's irresponsible to put such journalism--sophistry, really--in front of other people, where it could possibly infect their defaults. Not everyone catches these things. Most people only read the first paragraph or two of things, and come away with impressions. These impressions, especially in the case of really bad journalism, can be directly opposed to the impressions they should have taken.

If we are a community here, then we should want to help one-another avoid bad journalism, and more importantly, avoid becoming swayed by whatever the bad journalism purports to report. We don't all need to think the same thing--but supporting a story just on the basis that other people support it, leads to pig hair being "signal-boosted" into notoriety.

Of I post a BS blog post about how DO is way more secure and reliable and cost-effective than AWS, and how AWS is a ripoff scam, will DO take it down to stop be from embarasskng Jeff Bezos?

Or are they exercising editorial discretion?

Again, I wasn't speaking at all on the issue at hand, because the issue isn't at hand. The article sucked too bad to let the issue be at hand.

All I was talking about is the meta-issue you brought up, of what HN as a community should or shouldn't "give air-time."

There's a previous HN discussion[1]. My take personally was that the guy was a complete dick, and not worth defending.

Even if you take the stance that his ability to speak freely should be defended (which I agree with) I suspect his behaviour here indicates there could be more to the story. Plus he sounds like the kind of customer I wouldn't want to have.

Businesses should be free to choose who they serve (subject to some restrictions around bias against classes of people).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016735

I kind of doubt this is about the golf angle so much as the creepy obsession the writer seems to have with this guy. Calling out some random Google employee and publishing his chat logs along with derogatory comments while seemingly looking to get him in trouble with his employer is harassment. I'm not sure why "Digital Ocean enforces its terms of service" is considered scandalous.

(Full disclosure: My only relationship with Digital Ocean is having been offered a free month of hosting with them once. Never used it.)

>I kind of doubt this is about the golf angle so much as the creepy obsession the writer seems to have with this guy.

Can you explain what you mean here? The blog owner appeared to be offended by the Googler's stance that he was taking in a public chatroom about Google policies so he blogged about it. How is that a creepy obsession?

People say things I don't like all the time. That doesn't mean I try to screencap off-the-cuff personal conversations, find their domain holdings, look up their home address through WHOIS and then create a blog to name and shame them. That is way beyond the pale.

That is an odd story, any idea who the author is? I find it hard to lend any sort of credence to an anonymous blog posting. Or did I miss some giant "this is who I am" link somewhere?

Yeah that sticks out. Author should have the courage to not be anonymous, especially for something silly like this. For all we know it could be a disgruntled Linode employee faking this or something. :)

But if true, I'm moving everything away to a more professional hosting provider. You don't just shut down a hosting account because of a single anonymous complaint. That's just a silly thing to waste your time with.

Things like this want me to give up programming and take up farming.

why not do both? I program, and have a small self sustaining micro farm. Just placed my order for 28 spring chickens, and 3 turkey's which will provide most of the meat for my family throughout the winter. I will supliment with fish and meat that I catch or hunt down.

I also have a vegitable garden which we can most of our food from or preserve in other ways. :)

If I want a chicken that tastes just as good as the ones I raise I have to shell out $20+ for a 6lb whole chicken.. Crazy.. I get it for about $1/lb.

I envy you. :)

No need for envy, get some land and go to work! It's wonderful. Getting ready to tap our Vermont Sugar Maples for a bit of spring maple sugar production... Nothing like old time, home made, boiled over a open fire, Vermont Maple Syrup!

Are you blogging about it? I have often thought of doing this but not really sure about the aspects of it.

Ive been thinking about it..

+1 - that's the way to live your life.

I have a massive vegetable garden but not enough to survive off completely as we're in a London suburb so we concentrate on growing the expensive stuff (and potatoes because once we planted them they just keep coming up every year).

Can't do chickens here - too many foxes.

I feel like you can say anything on HN and there will be someone who is doing it and can evangelize it. Let's try an experiment:

"I wonder if anyone has ever tried to run a startup out of a cave..."

Can someone verify this story? It sounds pretty convincing with screenshots and all. If it's true I'm taking my business else where.

Seems very odd that both a "Googler" and a VPS provider would be naive enough to think that telling someone to delete a blog post "OR ELSE" would result in anything but the pasting of the content everywhere under the sun outside of google/DO's control to spread the word on how evil they were.

I guess it could happen, but wow.. its like trying to get Beyonce derp face or whatever meme removed from the internet

It seems odd to me that DO never bothered to make any kind of statement to counter this guy's claims (at least not that I've seen), especially considering how well-known this story has become. That tells me that DO is either guilty or doesn't care enough about their reputation to even so much as publish a statement to help ease customers' (and potential customers) fears/worries. That's enough for me to stay away from them.

Just because someone have not commented on something does not mean they are guilty. They might not know about it. Some people live in the real world, with a large latency to news, e-mail or social media outlets. Yeah, I know, it is strange.

The post made the front page on HN a couple of months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7016735. DO staff seem to spend quite a bit of time responding to threads on HN in general, so that would be surprising.

How are they buddies? That's not evident and there's no trace of "golf" mentioned anywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com