Our entire economy is only a "click to share" away from exposure
December 14, 2020 9:26 AM Subscribe
This morning, several Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Docs, went down for about an hour. A good reminder that, as Vicki Boykis has put it, Google Drive is production: it’s wormed its way into the operational systems of companies where it now lives like a very dangerous Swiss army knife, used for anything and everything without thought given to the implications.
I feel this was my fault as, literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" after watching that IT Crowd scene this morning.
Sorry.
posted by Wordshore at 9:39 AM on December 14, 2020 [51 favorites]
Sorry.
posted by Wordshore at 9:39 AM on December 14, 2020 [51 favorites]
Would be interesting to compare and contrast the Microsoft outages of a few weeks ago, the recent AWS outage, and now Google. Each seems to have had its own set of impacts.
posted by gimonca at 9:44 AM on December 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by gimonca at 9:44 AM on December 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
With COVID and every kid now learning from home, Google Classroom is production as well. I was seriously bracing for impact when I woke up and saw that GCloud was having a bad morning.
It's beyond production...it's all my school and the kids have right now to keep working. I can understand why my district chose it - you can't beat the price, it's compatible with almost every laptop and PC out there, email integration and filtering is pretty solid, the other platforms aren't any better (looking at you, Canvas).
But holy fucking shit there's so much wrong with Classroom, and in the what - 9 months since we've started this business? - Google has done absolutely capital-Z ZERO to improve this platform. There isn't even a way to take tests or spot quizzes! Teachers are cobbling tests together with Google Forms and trying to integrate it into their grading systems that way. And this is the tip of the iceberg.
Sorry for the rant.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:47 AM on December 14, 2020 [41 favorites]
It's beyond production...it's all my school and the kids have right now to keep working. I can understand why my district chose it - you can't beat the price, it's compatible with almost every laptop and PC out there, email integration and filtering is pretty solid, the other platforms aren't any better (looking at you, Canvas).
But holy fucking shit there's so much wrong with Classroom, and in the what - 9 months since we've started this business? - Google has done absolutely capital-Z ZERO to improve this platform. There isn't even a way to take tests or spot quizzes! Teachers are cobbling tests together with Google Forms and trying to integrate it into their grading systems that way. And this is the tip of the iceberg.
Sorry for the rant.
posted by JoeZydeco at 9:47 AM on December 14, 2020 [41 favorites]
I feel this was my fault as, literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" after watching that IT Crowd scene this morning.What.
Sorry.
The.
Hell.
Wordshore.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 9:56 AM on December 14, 2020 [15 favorites]
Nothing here surprises me because long ago I read Neil Postman's 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. It's all about the unintended consequences of our use of technology.
posted by neuron at 10:04 AM on December 14, 2020 [15 favorites]
posted by neuron at 10:04 AM on December 14, 2020 [15 favorites]
I feel this was my fault as, literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" after watching that IT Crowd scene this morning.
I seem to recall that people searching for 'google' in the chrome url/search bar and then clicking on the top result is one of the more popular daily search patterns.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:06 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
I seem to recall that people searching for 'google' in the chrome url/search bar and then clicking on the top result is one of the more popular daily search patterns.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:06 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
“The implications” — Is Sundar Pichai aka Dennis Reynolds? Maybe getting on the Google boat was a terrible mistake.
posted by interogative mood at 10:07 AM on December 14, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by interogative mood at 10:07 AM on December 14, 2020 [6 favorites]
I feel this was my fault as, literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" after watching that IT Crowd scene this morning.
It's OK, it wasn't you, it was me. The little red light on the Internet started blinking and I had to switch it off and on again.
posted by flabdablet at 10:08 AM on December 14, 2020 [13 favorites]
It's OK, it wasn't you, it was me. The little red light on the Internet started blinking and I had to switch it off and on again.
posted by flabdablet at 10:08 AM on December 14, 2020 [13 favorites]
From the first linked article (emphasis mine):
However, despite the outage affecting numerous Google services, its core search product continued to function, and third-party ads were still showing in results .
Phew! It would’ve really been terrible not to see those ads.
posted by cheapskatebay at 10:08 AM on December 14, 2020 [12 favorites]
However, despite the outage affecting numerous Google services, its core search product continued to function, and third-party ads were still showing in results .
Phew! It would’ve really been terrible not to see those ads.
posted by cheapskatebay at 10:08 AM on December 14, 2020 [12 favorites]
But holy fucking shit there's so much wrong with Classroom, and in the what - 9 months since we've started this business?
Not to defend a competitor, but 9 months is in a minuscule amount of time to make major changes of something that huge without it certainly turning into a disaster. Also, anything that isn't search advertising makes Google practically negative money, so not surprising they aren't spinning up a Manhattan Project to fix everything up.
posted by sideshow at 10:12 AM on December 14, 2020 [11 favorites]
Not to defend a competitor, but 9 months is in a minuscule amount of time to make major changes of something that huge without it certainly turning into a disaster. Also, anything that isn't search advertising makes Google practically negative money, so not surprising they aren't spinning up a Manhattan Project to fix everything up.
posted by sideshow at 10:12 AM on December 14, 2020 [11 favorites]
I feel this was my fault as, literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" after watching that IT Crowd scene this morning.
It's OK, it wasn't you, it was me. The little red light on the Internet started blinking and I had to switch it off and on again.
Actually, it might have been me - I was raising my fist to the sky and railing at tech giant monopolies. Perhaps skyfather heard me?
posted by infini at 10:13 AM on December 14, 2020 [8 favorites]
A good reminder that, as Vicki Boykis has put it, Google Drive is production
[Interesting stuff! People are doing lots of dangerous things with Google, not gonna think about what I’ve seen, just going to try and do better. Scrolls through Substack…]
posted by Going To Maine at 10:30 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
[Interesting stuff! People are doing lots of dangerous things with Google, not gonna think about what I’ve seen, just going to try and do better. Scrolls through Substack…]
What I’m reading lately::(
Why are Taleb’s ideas so good (I personally have long been a fan) and yet it’s so easy to hate him? The Taleb starter pack.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:30 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
Also, anything that isn't search advertising makes Google practically negative money, so not surprising they aren't spinning up a Manhattan Project to fix everything up.
To be sure, edtech in almost all cases makes negative money. The ones who /do/ make money have are quite slimy: blackboard and proctoring software come to mind... and many of the others are open source projects with minimal supprt, developed by overworked professors. (happy to see counterexamples, though.)
posted by kaibutsu at 10:34 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
To be sure, edtech in almost all cases makes negative money. The ones who /do/ make money have are quite slimy: blackboard and proctoring software come to mind... and many of the others are open source projects with minimal supprt, developed by overworked professors. (happy to see counterexamples, though.)
posted by kaibutsu at 10:34 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
Being on the west coast, I'm happy this seems to have passed us by. Everything was normal for the kids when they started school here. I don't envy the teachers and parents that were in the midst of this.
posted by herda05 at 10:43 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by herda05 at 10:43 AM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
FWIW I work for a company that makes plenty of money with open source edtech (Moodle, Mahara, depending on your view of the situation Totara) -- the money comes from charging for hosting, integrations and customisation, and subscription fees for regular updates/support.
Tertiary education and enterprise L&D is where the money is though. Schools have no money, ever, for such things.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:52 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
Tertiary education and enterprise L&D is where the money is though. Schools have no money, ever, for such things.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:52 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
Also, anything that isn't search advertising makes Google practically negative money, so not surprising they aren't spinning up a Manhattan Project to fix everything up
That’s kind of the problem with relying on Google for anything, though, isn’t it?
posted by atoxyl at 10:59 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
That’s kind of the problem with relying on Google for anything, though, isn’t it?
posted by atoxyl at 10:59 AM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
Oh, also - the pull headline for this post is Our entire economy is only a “click to share” away from exposure. That’s arguably quite true, and concerning. But the issue of a massive Google outage taking out all of their services for ambiguous reasons seems to be a bit of an unrelated problem. The former is a problem of people putting sensitive data into tools that are designed to facilitate both data sharing and easy data manipulation, including through a number of unexpected APIs. The latter is a problem of it being apparently possible for (nearly?) every Google service to go down due to some small number of points of failure.
Both are big issues! But they are aren’t quite the same issue.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:09 AM on December 14, 2020 [7 favorites]
Both are big issues! But they are aren’t quite the same issue.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:09 AM on December 14, 2020 [7 favorites]
Google has done absolutely capital-Z ZERO to improve this platform.
They've introduced break-out rooms into Meet, which is not Classroom per se, but it's been a huge improvement for my wife who is a high school teacher and has been online since March.
Also this is not a great time to be adding a lot of new features to a service like Classroom tbh. As noted here, stability is a concern.
posted by GuyZero at 11:14 AM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
They've introduced break-out rooms into Meet, which is not Classroom per se, but it's been a huge improvement for my wife who is a high school teacher and has been online since March.
Also this is not a great time to be adding a lot of new features to a service like Classroom tbh. As noted here, stability is a concern.
posted by GuyZero at 11:14 AM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
I seem to recall that people searching for 'google' in the chrome url/search bar and then clicking on the top result is one of the more popular daily search patterns.
I see it daily.
posted by notsnot at 11:14 AM on December 14, 2020
I see it daily.
posted by notsnot at 11:14 AM on December 14, 2020
Also if you think this was bad, you can all try to remember what it was like back in the 90's when your local Exchange or AD installation went offline and how fun it was trying to get your single sysadmin out of bed to fix everything. Or how Outlook was half-broken all the time (possibly existentially).
Also, anything that isn't search advertising makes Google practically negative money, so not surprising they aren't spinning up a Manhattan Project to fix everything up.
Google's non-ads business is about $35B annually (based on annualizing their third-quarter results), so, no, not really. Google's non-ad business is approximately the 94th biggest company by revenue in the US.
That said, word on the street is that it was Google's identity/login system that went down which is why everything went offline, except for ads and other stuff that's not linked to a login token. Centralized identity systems are hard, yo.
posted by GuyZero at 11:20 AM on December 14, 2020 [13 favorites]
Also, anything that isn't search advertising makes Google practically negative money, so not surprising they aren't spinning up a Manhattan Project to fix everything up.
Google's non-ads business is about $35B annually (based on annualizing their third-quarter results), so, no, not really. Google's non-ad business is approximately the 94th biggest company by revenue in the US.
That said, word on the street is that it was Google's identity/login system that went down which is why everything went offline, except for ads and other stuff that's not linked to a login token. Centralized identity systems are hard, yo.
posted by GuyZero at 11:20 AM on December 14, 2020 [13 favorites]
I seem to recall that people searching for 'google' in the chrome url/search bar and then clicking on the top result is one of the more popular daily search patterns.
I do that too, because the search bar technology is terrible. They have started the @google thing in the search bar, but it's still..not that good, doesn't support copy/paste or mistakes/backspacing well.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:39 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
I do that too, because the search bar technology is terrible. They have started the @google thing in the search bar, but it's still..not that good, doesn't support copy/paste or mistakes/backspacing well.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:39 AM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
This is like that time that Bing was offline for ten days and no one noticed.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:46 AM on December 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by ricochet biscuit at 11:46 AM on December 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
... literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" ...
MalkovichMalkovichMalkovichMalkovich ...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:57 AM on December 14, 2020 [6 favorites]
MalkovichMalkovichMalkovichMalkovich ...
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:57 AM on December 14, 2020 [6 favorites]
That said, word on the street is that it was Google's identity/login system that went down which is why everything went offline
Did this have an effect on all those websites that have login with Google or Google Pay?
I wonder if this is why my phone thought it was -27C here this morning (actual temperature via Enviroment Canada +1)
posted by Mitheral at 11:57 AM on December 14, 2020
Did this have an effect on all those websites that have login with Google or Google Pay?
I wonder if this is why my phone thought it was -27C here this morning (actual temperature via Enviroment Canada +1)
posted by Mitheral at 11:57 AM on December 14, 2020
But holy fucking shit there's so much wrong with Classroom, and in the what - 9 months since we've started this business? - Google has done absolutely capital-Z ZERO to improve this platform. There isn't even a way to take tests or spot quizzes!
We had google classroom as an optional extra (we were primarily using gsuite for email and docs for the last few years) but all the teachers adopted it in early 2019 or so, and it proved pretty handy during the first lockdown. My wife's school is on 365 and Teams, and they and the other school I know using it hate it with the heat of 1000 suns. As an ex-sysadmin, it's a far bigger pain to manage than google, that's for sure (we have both, though 365 is mainly used to get home use copies of desktop Office)
I'm hardly an expert on classroom (I'm the IT support manager these days), but I know some that are, so I can ask them; are quiz assignments no good for doing quick tests?
Back on topic; it's the internet. All services have outages, and 45 minutes of a big one like google is frustrating, but I've seen a lot worse! Hell, I've had switches let out the magic smoke and take out chunks of our diddy network for longer than that. We have power outages for hours sometimes (rural area), and we've been doing electricity for what, 140 years in the UK?
Google make plenty of money on workspace (nee gsuite for enterprise), but they let schools have it for free, so when they go off and becoming productive adults they might just use google instead of microsoft office. Microsoft discounts the hell out of licences for schools for the same reason.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 12:00 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
We had google classroom as an optional extra (we were primarily using gsuite for email and docs for the last few years) but all the teachers adopted it in early 2019 or so, and it proved pretty handy during the first lockdown. My wife's school is on 365 and Teams, and they and the other school I know using it hate it with the heat of 1000 suns. As an ex-sysadmin, it's a far bigger pain to manage than google, that's for sure (we have both, though 365 is mainly used to get home use copies of desktop Office)
I'm hardly an expert on classroom (I'm the IT support manager these days), but I know some that are, so I can ask them; are quiz assignments no good for doing quick tests?
Back on topic; it's the internet. All services have outages, and 45 minutes of a big one like google is frustrating, but I've seen a lot worse! Hell, I've had switches let out the magic smoke and take out chunks of our diddy network for longer than that. We have power outages for hours sometimes (rural area), and we've been doing electricity for what, 140 years in the UK?
Google make plenty of money on workspace (nee gsuite for enterprise), but they let schools have it for free, so when they go off and becoming productive adults they might just use google instead of microsoft office. Microsoft discounts the hell out of licences for schools for the same reason.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 12:00 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
I'll curtail my impulse to argue this is just one more reason to "try to avoid using Google", as I know that's just a bias (informed) on my part. Instead I'll just echo Going to Maine's point and say I really expected this article to make a very different argument, one that I think is much more concerning. I don't think people have begun to think through the interconnectedness of apps and devices just yet, and what that means, much less how this relates to the Internet of Things, as well as proliferated social media platforms, who often have unclear privacy settings and unclear reasons/mechanisms for accessing data from your other apps or mobile devices.
Toss in ambiguity around legal rights concerning authorship in this particular soup of apps and settings and it gets even more difficult. Who owns a course designed in Google Classroom? Who owns it once it's shared? Who owns the content that is delivered when students submit assignments? Can Google sell that gdoc data anonymously to a system like turnitin to improve their machine learning and cheat detection?
You can extrapolate the same issue for SMBs who use google as a cost saving option for their own production, and who haven't bought the legal protection that might come from other ways of acquiring licenses. Then think through the weird mix of personal devices and other applications with massive data probing fingers involved.
Exposure is a good word for it. Anyway, would have loved that article.
posted by hank_14 at 12:05 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
Toss in ambiguity around legal rights concerning authorship in this particular soup of apps and settings and it gets even more difficult. Who owns a course designed in Google Classroom? Who owns it once it's shared? Who owns the content that is delivered when students submit assignments? Can Google sell that gdoc data anonymously to a system like turnitin to improve their machine learning and cheat detection?
You can extrapolate the same issue for SMBs who use google as a cost saving option for their own production, and who haven't bought the legal protection that might come from other ways of acquiring licenses. Then think through the weird mix of personal devices and other applications with massive data probing fingers involved.
Exposure is a good word for it. Anyway, would have loved that article.
posted by hank_14 at 12:05 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
With COVID and every kid now learning from home, Google Classroom is production as well. I was seriously bracing for impact when I woke up and saw that GCloud was having a bad morning.
One of the best things our school did at the beginning of the year was clarify expectations about computer problems/outages/access.
Basically, they sent an email that said "IT happens. You'll get booted out of a Zoom meeting and be unable to rejoin. Classroom won't load for you. Your neighbor's microwave will slow your wireless to a crawl.
Just try to work on something you already have, read a book, do a little extra homework and rejoin when you can."
I really think it helped relieve a lot of pressure on the kids (who haven't quite internalized that technology isn't always reliable) and on the teachers (who don't have to penalize the kids for not being computer wizards).
posted by madajb at 12:12 PM on December 14, 2020 [14 favorites]
One of the best things our school did at the beginning of the year was clarify expectations about computer problems/outages/access.
Basically, they sent an email that said "IT happens. You'll get booted out of a Zoom meeting and be unable to rejoin. Classroom won't load for you. Your neighbor's microwave will slow your wireless to a crawl.
Just try to work on something you already have, read a book, do a little extra homework and rejoin when you can."
I really think it helped relieve a lot of pressure on the kids (who haven't quite internalized that technology isn't always reliable) and on the teachers (who don't have to penalize the kids for not being computer wizards).
posted by madajb at 12:12 PM on December 14, 2020 [14 favorites]
I'll curtail my impulse to argue this is just one more reason to "try to avoid using Google", as I know that's just a bias (informed) on my part.
I can't imagine running a business that relies on Google products*.
Their support is notoriously bad, even when you pay them. Their penchant for A/B testing in live products, changing behaviour without any sort of notification. Forget it.
I haven't been in IT for more than 10 years, but almost all of my acquaintances still in the field have some sort of Google horror story.
* Except maybe an ad-dependent business because you essentially can't avoid their dominant market position. But even that will come back to bite you, as Metafilter well knows.
posted by madajb at 12:19 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
I can't imagine running a business that relies on Google products*.
Their support is notoriously bad, even when you pay them. Their penchant for A/B testing in live products, changing behaviour without any sort of notification. Forget it.
I haven't been in IT for more than 10 years, but almost all of my acquaintances still in the field have some sort of Google horror story.
* Except maybe an ad-dependent business because you essentially can't avoid their dominant market position. But even that will come back to bite you, as Metafilter well knows.
posted by madajb at 12:19 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
Google's non-ads business is about $35B annually (based on annualizing their third-quarter results), so, no, not really
Their PR dept did a full court press to brag when they announced earnings that showed search ads were “only” 85% of their total 2019 revenue, because everyone shits on them for having only one line of business that keeps the lights on.
posted by sideshow at 12:53 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
Their PR dept did a full court press to brag when they announced earnings that showed search ads were “only” 85% of their total 2019 revenue, because everyone shits on them for having only one line of business that keeps the lights on.
posted by sideshow at 12:53 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
You can extrapolate the same issue for SMBs who use google as a cost saving option for their own production, and who haven't bought the legal protection that might come from other ways of acquiring licenses.
I'm not even sure that Google actually has the culture of providing legal protections or any kind of relationship that would involve accountability.
The SMB I'm part of wanted video storage/streaming as a service. We looked at a couple of options and YouTube stood out as (a) free and (b) great if you want your content to be discoverable. The API was a bit of a pain for our use case but we figured it out over two months and I naively speculated that at whatever point we started to approach our API quota we could figure out a way to pay Google for the service.
Haha no.
You can petition YouTube/Google to get your API quota bumped for free, and they may or may not give it to you based off of largely opaque internal process, but what you absolutely cannot do is get them to take your money in return for providing an agreed-on level of service. Hell, it's a herculean achievement to find someone to communicate with about the question, and they will almost certainly refer you to the free quota adjustment process.
Google does not want you as the client. They want you as user-product. They *may* allow you to be a metered user of products mediated automated interactions. They appear to be allergic to the idea of creating any kind of structure that would be responsive, though, and the idea of a relationship especially one involving accountability seems to be beyond the pale. This isn't exactly unknown in the business world, and it may be unfair to single Google out, but there's definitely a spectrum and Google is on a far side of it.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:03 PM on December 14, 2020 [8 favorites]
I'm not even sure that Google actually has the culture of providing legal protections or any kind of relationship that would involve accountability.
The SMB I'm part of wanted video storage/streaming as a service. We looked at a couple of options and YouTube stood out as (a) free and (b) great if you want your content to be discoverable. The API was a bit of a pain for our use case but we figured it out over two months and I naively speculated that at whatever point we started to approach our API quota we could figure out a way to pay Google for the service.
Haha no.
You can petition YouTube/Google to get your API quota bumped for free, and they may or may not give it to you based off of largely opaque internal process, but what you absolutely cannot do is get them to take your money in return for providing an agreed-on level of service. Hell, it's a herculean achievement to find someone to communicate with about the question, and they will almost certainly refer you to the free quota adjustment process.
Google does not want you as the client. They want you as user-product. They *may* allow you to be a metered user of products mediated automated interactions. They appear to be allergic to the idea of creating any kind of structure that would be responsive, though, and the idea of a relationship especially one involving accountability seems to be beyond the pale. This isn't exactly unknown in the business world, and it may be unfair to single Google out, but there's definitely a spectrum and Google is on a far side of it.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:03 PM on December 14, 2020 [8 favorites]
Google does not want you as the client. They want you as user-product.
Google has thousands of sales people, all reporting to a former head of Oracle sales, who will absolutely take your call and who will absolutely sell you quota for all kinds of services. Yes, weirdly, there are APIs that exist and are not for sale. But they have a whole page on selling video streaming services. There's a big "Contact Us" button on that page. Unlike YouTube, the price probably does not start at "free."
posted by GuyZero at 1:18 PM on December 14, 2020
Google has thousands of sales people, all reporting to a former head of Oracle sales, who will absolutely take your call and who will absolutely sell you quota for all kinds of services. Yes, weirdly, there are APIs that exist and are not for sale. But they have a whole page on selling video streaming services. There's a big "Contact Us" button on that page. Unlike YouTube, the price probably does not start at "free."
posted by GuyZero at 1:18 PM on December 14, 2020
Adwords wants you as the client. Which is why it's supported by actual humans.
posted by benzenedream at 1:19 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by benzenedream at 1:19 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
Yes, weirdly, there are APIs that exist and are not for sale. But they have a whole page on selling video streaming services. There's a big "Contact Us" button on that page. Unlike YouTube, the price probably does not start at "free."
I am utterly baffled, then, that the handful of people that we managed to contact inside YouTube and GCP between September 2018 and July 2020 were either as utterly unaware of that particular API as I was (until this moment finding out about it on a completely independent internet forum), or were uninterested in relaying that information to me. Because we were all but begging them to point us to a paid option.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:30 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
I am utterly baffled, then, that the handful of people that we managed to contact inside YouTube and GCP between September 2018 and July 2020 were either as utterly unaware of that particular API as I was (until this moment finding out about it on a completely independent internet forum), or were uninterested in relaying that information to me. Because we were all but begging them to point us to a paid option.
posted by wildblueyonder at 1:30 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
Because we were all but begging them to point us to a paid option.
Oh I'm not saying the company is organized. And I am pretty shocked that GCP people weren't able to say something meaningful. YouTube people knowing nothing about paying them is not a surprise. But Google acquired Anvato in '16 which seems like what you're trying to do, but to be honest I don't really know exactly what you're trying to do. Google getting confused selling to someone smaller than, say, FOX Sports, yeah, probably.
My experience of Google is that it currently has over 100,000 full-time employees and each of them know what about 5 others do for a living and beyond that it's a total mystery.
I assume you ended up at AWS?
posted by GuyZero at 1:39 PM on December 14, 2020
Oh I'm not saying the company is organized. And I am pretty shocked that GCP people weren't able to say something meaningful. YouTube people knowing nothing about paying them is not a surprise. But Google acquired Anvato in '16 which seems like what you're trying to do, but to be honest I don't really know exactly what you're trying to do. Google getting confused selling to someone smaller than, say, FOX Sports, yeah, probably.
My experience of Google is that it currently has over 100,000 full-time employees and each of them know what about 5 others do for a living and beyond that it's a total mystery.
I assume you ended up at AWS?
posted by GuyZero at 1:39 PM on December 14, 2020
Google drive is production
I don’t understand this usage. What does it mean to “be production”?
posted by Pre-Taped Call In Show at 1:53 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
I don’t understand this usage. What does it mean to “be production”?
posted by Pre-Taped Call In Show at 1:53 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
It means they have SLAs. That is, they have well defined outage limits and tracking and customer policies if they don't meet those. Because of that they assuredly have the tools to prevent outages from (generally) going above those limits and the staffing needed to use them.
That said, shit happens, and production services don't always meet those limits and then you expect the company to Not Make That Mistake Again (or any similar mistakes) if they want to keep their customers.
posted by aspo at 1:59 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
That said, shit happens, and production services don't always meet those limits and then you expect the company to Not Make That Mistake Again (or any similar mistakes) if they want to keep their customers.
posted by aspo at 1:59 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
"Production" means it's business-critical, has to be managed properly, failure plans in place, etc. It's not just a dev environment that you can turn off and on again. The implication is that Google Drive has become that sort of critical component but it's just crept up and businesses don't manage it properly or have a plan for it going down.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 2:00 PM on December 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 2:00 PM on December 14, 2020 [10 favorites]
Most production systems define their availability in 9s. 3 nines means your service is 99.9% reliable which allows for a little over 8 1/2 hours of downtime a year. (It's not quite that simple because what do you do if you are doing for 10% of your users? Does that count as 10% of downtime, probably not).
Depending on the service 3 9s is pretty bad, because almost every application is using multiple services, and errors compound multiplicitavely. 3 1/2 nines is probably the minimum what you'd expect for a complex system (so up 99.95% of the time) while critical components would be 4, 5 or even 6 nines. At numbers like that you don't get global downtime, what you get is "occasionally a request fails and you have to retry" or possibly "occasionally a small number of our customers have very limited downtime" because at 5 nines you are talking 5 minutes of global downtime a year. So you are going to need massive redundancy and automated error handling to meet those goals.
posted by aspo at 2:09 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
Depending on the service 3 9s is pretty bad, because almost every application is using multiple services, and errors compound multiplicitavely. 3 1/2 nines is probably the minimum what you'd expect for a complex system (so up 99.95% of the time) while critical components would be 4, 5 or even 6 nines. At numbers like that you don't get global downtime, what you get is "occasionally a request fails and you have to retry" or possibly "occasionally a small number of our customers have very limited downtime" because at 5 nines you are talking 5 minutes of global downtime a year. So you are going to need massive redundancy and automated error handling to meet those goals.
posted by aspo at 2:09 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
(SLA means Service Level Agreement)
posted by at by at 2:09 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by at by at 2:09 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
How do Box and/or Dropbox and/or iCloud handle their own criticality?
posted by Going To Maine at 2:11 PM on December 14, 2020
posted by Going To Maine at 2:11 PM on December 14, 2020
How do Box and/or Dropbox and/or iCloud handle their own criticality?
For Box & Dropbox you pay them money, they give you a phone number. Mostly their external SLAs are around how long they'll take to respond to your support queries. They don't make any public statements about guaranteed uptime and I'd be surprised if they make private guarantees of uptime either.
posted by GuyZero at 2:16 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
For Box & Dropbox you pay them money, they give you a phone number. Mostly their external SLAs are around how long they'll take to respond to your support queries. They don't make any public statements about guaranteed uptime and I'd be surprised if they make private guarantees of uptime either.
posted by GuyZero at 2:16 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
I don’t understand this usage. What does it mean to “be production”?
It's jargon for mission-critical. It means that people like me, who have used Google Drive in the past for things that needed to be available 24/7, are depending on Google to be up all the time.
But because it's in many cases a free/uncontrolled service, if it goes down, there's no contract or anyone you can penalize for the down time. Let's say I'm a 26 year old first time Social Media Manager.
I've stored all my social media assets in Google Drive, and I am working for a company under contract to get a post up for Unilever at 6:30 am today, and I go to get a video. I stored the video in Drive because I am going to post from the comfort of my bed, and my work-related storage is something you can only access on site at my workplace and it's a pandemic but no one remembered that social media files are large and my email box was full so I had to put this video file somewhere. But now - I can't get the file.
Because I can't log in. So my Becel video does not go up at the time it's supposed to, and now Imperial Margarine's post on National Margarine Day goes viral instead. And the Becel VP is looking right at 6:30 because he wants to show his wife his great idea.
Maybe Unilever says my company is in violation of its contract. And my company loses a $20,000 deal with Unilever because I couldn't post a Becel video in time.
Now...my company probably knows that its website has to be up with Becel Margarine ads all the time, as well as its internal storage, and if that website were to go down it would blast notifications and people would respond or Amazon Web Services would fix it, or they would have to pay the $20,000 penalty.
But I, cheerful and helpful social media manager, have chosen to use Google Drive, and my manager even has access to it and we all think it's great.
But this time it didn't work and no one can call Google and say "give us $20,000 worth of services to make up for this contract you lost us." (No SLA.)
That's what I think TFA is saying but I couldn't read it because I have in the past been so much a part of this problem, especially at any point in one of my company's histories where they would not pay for tools I needed in time because we were always sort of one step ahead of the infrastructure. There but for the grace of God...etc.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:23 PM on December 14, 2020 [19 favorites]
It's jargon for mission-critical. It means that people like me, who have used Google Drive in the past for things that needed to be available 24/7, are depending on Google to be up all the time.
But because it's in many cases a free/uncontrolled service, if it goes down, there's no contract or anyone you can penalize for the down time. Let's say I'm a 26 year old first time Social Media Manager.
I've stored all my social media assets in Google Drive, and I am working for a company under contract to get a post up for Unilever at 6:30 am today, and I go to get a video. I stored the video in Drive because I am going to post from the comfort of my bed, and my work-related storage is something you can only access on site at my workplace and it's a pandemic but no one remembered that social media files are large and my email box was full so I had to put this video file somewhere. But now - I can't get the file.
Because I can't log in. So my Becel video does not go up at the time it's supposed to, and now Imperial Margarine's post on National Margarine Day goes viral instead. And the Becel VP is looking right at 6:30 because he wants to show his wife his great idea.
Maybe Unilever says my company is in violation of its contract. And my company loses a $20,000 deal with Unilever because I couldn't post a Becel video in time.
Now...my company probably knows that its website has to be up with Becel Margarine ads all the time, as well as its internal storage, and if that website were to go down it would blast notifications and people would respond or Amazon Web Services would fix it, or they would have to pay the $20,000 penalty.
But I, cheerful and helpful social media manager, have chosen to use Google Drive, and my manager even has access to it and we all think it's great.
But this time it didn't work and no one can call Google and say "give us $20,000 worth of services to make up for this contract you lost us." (No SLA.)
That's what I think TFA is saying but I couldn't read it because I have in the past been so much a part of this problem, especially at any point in one of my company's histories where they would not pay for tools I needed in time because we were always sort of one step ahead of the infrastructure. There but for the grace of God...etc.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:23 PM on December 14, 2020 [19 favorites]
I don't work at either of those companies, but I suspect that if you pay them enough money it comes with some sort of refunds if they are down long enough.
That said, box and dropbox are not really the same kinds of services as financial services or the like. (For instance, how often do you think you use your credit card and it doesn't work because the credit card system itself is at fault? I suspect it's almost never.)
posted by aspo at 2:24 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
That said, box and dropbox are not really the same kinds of services as financial services or the like. (For instance, how often do you think you use your credit card and it doesn't work because the credit card system itself is at fault? I suspect it's almost never.)
posted by aspo at 2:24 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
With COVID and every kid now learning from home, Google Classroom is production as well. I was seriously bracing for impact when I woke up and saw that GCloud was having a bad morning.
My kid came to me complaining of this. After failing to get through to anyone at either the school or the district office, I told them, "This is what Learn-From-Home SNOW DAYS look like in 2020, enjoy."
And then Google Classroom came back up, and the snow day was cancelled :(
posted by mikelieman at 2:27 PM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
My kid came to me complaining of this. After failing to get through to anyone at either the school or the district office, I told them, "This is what Learn-From-Home SNOW DAYS look like in 2020, enjoy."
And then Google Classroom came back up, and the snow day was cancelled :(
posted by mikelieman at 2:27 PM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
warriorqueen: I doubt anyone is going to pay for contracts lost like that. At best you are probably going to get something like "you pay x/month for this service, during the past month we missed availability by y% so we are going to reduce your bill by some function of y."
posted by aspo at 2:28 PM on December 14, 2020
posted by aspo at 2:28 PM on December 14, 2020
No, I know, but it is a difference between the social media manager getting fired or not.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:31 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by warriorqueen at 2:31 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
Workspace, the paid version of key google services - including Drive - does have SLAs. 3 nines in a given month for each core service, and they do offer service credit if they breach that. $20,000 worth, no, it's 3 days credit for between 99% and 99.9% - but I'm fairly sure Amazon doesn't offer that either. For S3, their rough equivalent of drive, AWS S3 SLA is 3 nines in a calendar month, with a max of 10% service credit for above 99%; or 3 days for a 30 day month.
It may well be different if you're a big business that can negotiate your own contracts, of course.
Free consumer version of google drive? Uh, no.
Who owns a course designed in Google Classroom? Who owns it once it's shared? Who owns the content that is delivered when students submit assignments? Can Google sell that gdoc data anonymously to a system like turnitin to improve their machine learning and cheat detection?
The school does, and in the EU at least, selling it on would be a breach of GDPR as well as their own privacy contracts that we have a copy of. Also, no ads in the paid services.
I get that people think that Google is entirely cavalier about their consumer products, and only uses them for data acquisition for advertising, and kills them whenever some new product manager wants to make his mark, and I absolutely agree with that 100% (the google graveyard is a sobering one). I wouldn't put my important data in a brand new google service as a consumer these days if you paid me.
But they are treating their core business services somewhat as a business product these days, like gmail and drive (when you pay for them) with change control of when new features roll out, and as a sysadmin who's worked with google, amazon and microsoft for years I've found their business arm a hell of lot more helpful than Microsoft's ever have been. Every query I've ever addressed through their direct support arm for gsuite for education has been answered and resolved in literally minutes. Microsoft? I still have bug reports that haven't even been acknowledged, let alone fixed, and we actually pay them quite a lot of money every year.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:50 PM on December 14, 2020 [7 favorites]
It may well be different if you're a big business that can negotiate your own contracts, of course.
Free consumer version of google drive? Uh, no.
Who owns a course designed in Google Classroom? Who owns it once it's shared? Who owns the content that is delivered when students submit assignments? Can Google sell that gdoc data anonymously to a system like turnitin to improve their machine learning and cheat detection?
The school does, and in the EU at least, selling it on would be a breach of GDPR as well as their own privacy contracts that we have a copy of. Also, no ads in the paid services.
I get that people think that Google is entirely cavalier about their consumer products, and only uses them for data acquisition for advertising, and kills them whenever some new product manager wants to make his mark, and I absolutely agree with that 100% (the google graveyard is a sobering one). I wouldn't put my important data in a brand new google service as a consumer these days if you paid me.
But they are treating their core business services somewhat as a business product these days, like gmail and drive (when you pay for them) with change control of when new features roll out, and as a sysadmin who's worked with google, amazon and microsoft for years I've found their business arm a hell of lot more helpful than Microsoft's ever have been. Every query I've ever addressed through their direct support arm for gsuite for education has been answered and resolved in literally minutes. Microsoft? I still have bug reports that haven't even been acknowledged, let alone fixed, and we actually pay them quite a lot of money every year.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 2:50 PM on December 14, 2020 [7 favorites]
I feel this was my fault as, literally seconds before Google crashed, I searched on it for "Google" after watching that IT Crowd scene this morning.
It's OK, it wasn't you, it was me. The little red light on the Internet started blinking and I had to switch it off and on again.
Actually, it might have been me - I was raising my fist to the sky and railing at tech giant monopolies. Perhaps skyfather heard me?
I think it’s been said before that Metafilter is the Canada of the Internet. We would win the gold medal in apology olympics.
posted by mundo at 2:59 PM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
It's OK, it wasn't you, it was me. The little red light on the Internet started blinking and I had to switch it off and on again.
Actually, it might have been me - I was raising my fist to the sky and railing at tech giant monopolies. Perhaps skyfather heard me?
I think it’s been said before that Metafilter is the Canada of the Internet. We would win the gold medal in apology olympics.
posted by mundo at 2:59 PM on December 14, 2020 [4 favorites]
For S3, their rough equivalent of drive, AWS S3 SLA is 3 nines in a calendar month, with a max of 10% service credit for above 99%; or 3 days for a 30 day month.
S3’s direct competition at Google isn’t Drive at all, it’s Google Cloud Storage.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:42 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
S3’s direct competition at Google isn’t Drive at all, it’s Google Cloud Storage.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:42 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
So I've been a long-time and fairly satisfied Google "Enterprise" customer.
Overall, there's a ton of difference between "Google" and "Google Enterprise" w/r/t SLAs etc. The latter is a tiny slice of Google Inc, but it has a fair number of large-scale customers who aren't going anywhere, and they provide support for those customers, and it's not bad support since you're paying for that support. They provide support centers around the world, so you can open a ticket 24/7/365 and there will always be someone to receive and respond to it. I typically would get tickets closed within a two- to four-hour period. Plenty of large customers use Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite Enterprise aka Google Apps for Business etc) and it's not going away any time soon as a product suite. Google Cloud is also in there, and that's used by tons of big companies - not as many as AWS or Azure, but quite a few. So that's good!
But they do move fast when it comes to product changes, and Gmail for example today is not the same as Gmail a few years ago. This is a blessing and a curse, depending on how you think new features should be introduced and whether customers should be able to hold off on those with different product release lines and such. Google Workplace does have at least two release lines, but they eventually move even the slow release forward whether they like it or not.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a lot slower in product movement - but is becoming a lot faster than it used to be. And they have a lot of their own problems, insane licensing hell for all but the largest enterprises being the top of the list: do I want "Business Premium" or "Business Standard" or "Enterprise E1" or "Enterprise E3"? Would it be cheaper for me to get Business Premium for most of my users along with Azure AD Premium 1 instead of getting Enterprise E3? What about Intune? Do I need that or can I get away with the default functionality of MDM? Etc, etc, etc.
And interestingly (to me anyway) is that each is becoming a bit more like the other, like we have an Overton window of sorts for desktop application suites. Google now offers a lot more licenses: they've gone from two to about a dozen (!) and each one provides different features. Microsoft is introducing new product features every week but most people don't even see them.
Anyway, at the end of all this: I don't really see how Microsoft 365 is really any different. Both products support the use of third-party backup components, and it's up to administrators whether to use them or not. Plenty of businesses do back up Google Drive, just like plenty back up SharePoint Online and OneDrive, but in either case if the primary services fail you can't just point to your backup and keep working without interruption. So, yes, Google Drive is "production" just like SharePoint Online is "production" and if either one goes down it's just not a fun time. I don't really hear people complaining about Microsoft 365 even when this stuff happens, I guess because people kind of expect that to happen periodically.
posted by me & my monkey at 3:54 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
Overall, there's a ton of difference between "Google" and "Google Enterprise" w/r/t SLAs etc. The latter is a tiny slice of Google Inc, but it has a fair number of large-scale customers who aren't going anywhere, and they provide support for those customers, and it's not bad support since you're paying for that support. They provide support centers around the world, so you can open a ticket 24/7/365 and there will always be someone to receive and respond to it. I typically would get tickets closed within a two- to four-hour period. Plenty of large customers use Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite Enterprise aka Google Apps for Business etc) and it's not going away any time soon as a product suite. Google Cloud is also in there, and that's used by tons of big companies - not as many as AWS or Azure, but quite a few. So that's good!
But they do move fast when it comes to product changes, and Gmail for example today is not the same as Gmail a few years ago. This is a blessing and a curse, depending on how you think new features should be introduced and whether customers should be able to hold off on those with different product release lines and such. Google Workplace does have at least two release lines, but they eventually move even the slow release forward whether they like it or not.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a lot slower in product movement - but is becoming a lot faster than it used to be. And they have a lot of their own problems, insane licensing hell for all but the largest enterprises being the top of the list: do I want "Business Premium" or "Business Standard" or "Enterprise E1" or "Enterprise E3"? Would it be cheaper for me to get Business Premium for most of my users along with Azure AD Premium 1 instead of getting Enterprise E3? What about Intune? Do I need that or can I get away with the default functionality of MDM? Etc, etc, etc.
And interestingly (to me anyway) is that each is becoming a bit more like the other, like we have an Overton window of sorts for desktop application suites. Google now offers a lot more licenses: they've gone from two to about a dozen (!) and each one provides different features. Microsoft is introducing new product features every week but most people don't even see them.
Anyway, at the end of all this: I don't really see how Microsoft 365 is really any different. Both products support the use of third-party backup components, and it's up to administrators whether to use them or not. Plenty of businesses do back up Google Drive, just like plenty back up SharePoint Online and OneDrive, but in either case if the primary services fail you can't just point to your backup and keep working without interruption. So, yes, Google Drive is "production" just like SharePoint Online is "production" and if either one goes down it's just not a fun time. I don't really hear people complaining about Microsoft 365 even when this stuff happens, I guess because people kind of expect that to happen periodically.
posted by me & my monkey at 3:54 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
This morning was parent-teacher conferences, so the kids all did distance learning while their parents settled in for a series of Google Meets.
Or, you know, not.
They called and texted like it was a snow day, but everything was back juuuuust in the nick of time. My kids were pissed, and the teachers merely observed, "Welcome to the tech problems your kids see every day." *wince*
posted by wenestvedt at 3:55 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
Or, you know, not.
They called and texted like it was a snow day, but everything was back juuuuust in the nick of time. My kids were pissed, and the teachers merely observed, "Welcome to the tech problems your kids see every day." *wince*
posted by wenestvedt at 3:55 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
(It turns out that Amazon Drive exists! Who knew? Not me but, realistically, probably a lot of people. That, I think, would be your direct match to Google Drive, such as it is.)
posted by Going To Maine at 4:03 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 4:03 PM on December 14, 2020 [3 favorites]
But Google acquired Anvato in '16 which seems like what you're trying to do, but to be honest I don't really know exactly what you're trying to do. Google getting confused selling to someone smaller than, say, FOX Sports, yeah, probably... My experience of Google is that it currently has over 100,000 full-time employees and each of them know what about 5 others do for a living and beyond that it's a total mystery.
That rings true enough, and I will walk back my previous criticism that Google is not interested in you as a customer, given that they may well indeed be interested in you as a customer if you can be invoiced for amounts comparable to FOX Sports. :b
I assume you ended up at AWS?
No, we were in panic mode while maxing out our daily YouTube quota and having site features fail, so while we were trying to get attention at YouTube & Google I was also pursuing the quickest thing I could think to do: throw together some code that takes user provided video, runs it through ffmpeg to chug out H264 and a poster image, and sticks them on a static media server.
It worked pretty well at our decidedly modest scale. If we're lucky I'll need to pay attention to scaling questions at some point and maybe then we'll use AWS Elastic Transcoder, or possibly a service like JWPlayer or Mux or somebody else. Or maybe we'll even figure out how to use the GCP service you linked to. :)
posted by wildblueyonder at 5:19 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
That rings true enough, and I will walk back my previous criticism that Google is not interested in you as a customer, given that they may well indeed be interested in you as a customer if you can be invoiced for amounts comparable to FOX Sports. :b
I assume you ended up at AWS?
No, we were in panic mode while maxing out our daily YouTube quota and having site features fail, so while we were trying to get attention at YouTube & Google I was also pursuing the quickest thing I could think to do: throw together some code that takes user provided video, runs it through ffmpeg to chug out H264 and a poster image, and sticks them on a static media server.
It worked pretty well at our decidedly modest scale. If we're lucky I'll need to pay attention to scaling questions at some point and maybe then we'll use AWS Elastic Transcoder, or possibly a service like JWPlayer or Mux or somebody else. Or maybe we'll even figure out how to use the GCP service you linked to. :)
posted by wildblueyonder at 5:19 PM on December 14, 2020 [5 favorites]
S3’s direct competition at Google isn’t Drive at all, it’s Google Cloud Storage.
I was trying to think of an AWS service that would have an SLA akin to Google Drive for Workspace customers, for the purpose of pre-staging a large video file before posting to social media in the post above by warriorqueen. Best I could think of was S3 to show they have very similar SLAs (I've probably used S3 more than any other Amazon service, it's quite handy) though obviously the access methods are quite different. Both can be used via API though, and you can make S3 kinda Drive-like with an external GUI, but I'm open to a better example! Picking a half dozen AWS Services at random, they all have effectively the same 3 9s SLAs and credit as Google Workspace though, so it's a bit of a moot point.
I actually thought Amazon Drive was shut down along with Amazon Music's 'host your stuff' service, so I've learned something new today! Consumer only though, so no SLA equivalence for what I was trying to say.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:55 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
I was trying to think of an AWS service that would have an SLA akin to Google Drive for Workspace customers, for the purpose of pre-staging a large video file before posting to social media in the post above by warriorqueen. Best I could think of was S3 to show they have very similar SLAs (I've probably used S3 more than any other Amazon service, it's quite handy) though obviously the access methods are quite different. Both can be used via API though, and you can make S3 kinda Drive-like with an external GUI, but I'm open to a better example! Picking a half dozen AWS Services at random, they all have effectively the same 3 9s SLAs and credit as Google Workspace though, so it's a bit of a moot point.
I actually thought Amazon Drive was shut down along with Amazon Music's 'host your stuff' service, so I've learned something new today! Consumer only though, so no SLA equivalence for what I was trying to say.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:55 PM on December 14, 2020 [1 favorite]
possibly a service like JWPlayer or Mux or somebody else.
Yeah, I suspect that if JWPlayer solves your problem then no one is likely to do much in GCP-land except sell you storage, which you hardly need to talk to someone for. IMO you are about halfway to running Hulu if you've set all that up so far. Kudos.
posted by GuyZero at 7:31 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
Yeah, I suspect that if JWPlayer solves your problem then no one is likely to do much in GCP-land except sell you storage, which you hardly need to talk to someone for. IMO you are about halfway to running Hulu if you've set all that up so far. Kudos.
posted by GuyZero at 7:31 PM on December 14, 2020 [2 favorites]
I don't think people have begun to think through the interconnectedness of apps and devices just yet, and what that means, much less how this relates to the Internet of Things, as well as proliferated social media platforms, who often have unclear privacy settings and unclear reasons/mechanisms for accessing data from your other apps or mobile devices
We in the neo-Luddite community have not only been thinking this stuff through since well before Facebook was a thing, we've been shrieking warnings about it from the rooftops. Does anybody listen? Fuck no. We're just "fearful of change", apparently.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on December 14, 2020 [9 favorites]
We in the neo-Luddite community have not only been thinking this stuff through since well before Facebook was a thing, we've been shrieking warnings about it from the rooftops. Does anybody listen? Fuck no. We're just "fearful of change", apparently.
posted by flabdablet at 10:47 PM on December 14, 2020 [9 favorites]
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