Google uber alles

[libertango]

I was showing a co-worker Google's Mission Statement, which is one of the most breathtakingly simple and elegant I've ever seen:

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Makes you wonder if they'll ever buy out Project Gutenberg, scan in every public domain work available, put it online, and make our idiot Librarian of Congress Mr. Billington eat his words about digitizing books, eh?

But, me being me, I poked around a little more and found Google's official corporate history.

It's what's at the bottom of that page that I think says more about Google's culture than anything else. Remember, kids, this is an official corporate document, naked to the world:

"What's next from Google? Hard to say. We don't talk much about what lies ahead, because we believe one of our chief competitive advantages is surprise. Surprise and innovation. Our two chief competitive advantages are surprise, innovation and an almost fanatical devotion to our users. Well, you get the idea."

This goes way past Sergey and Larry's pledge to "Do no evil." This is the spirit of play in its best sense.

Bravo.

Comments

[tacit.livejournal.com]

It's too bad Google recently reversed its position on using Googler Groups to send spam ot Usenet newsgroups, and now permits spammers to post spam through Google Groups unchecked, without taking any action against them.

So much for "do no evil"...

Spam problems

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

My constitutional law prof used to say that the most difficult questions aren't between right and wrong -- those are easy -- but between two "rights".

The problem with spam is that there are two conflicting but valid concerns:

* People find spam annoying on a number of personal levels, and it puts strain on the infrastructure of the net.

* On the other hand, free and unfettered discourse is always a good thing, and one person's "spam" is another person's just plain e-mail. Where does one draw the line? Who guards the guardians?

I've actually been accused of "spamming" because I made a post with an employer's name at the bottom. The post had another to do with my employer of the time, but that .sig was considered too much of a commericial message and endorsement (I believe it was four words or fewer).

So the dilemma faced by *any* provider of internet services, let alone Google, is that any anti-spam measure will be decried by some as stifling free speech, while loosening filtering will be decried by others as encouraging spam.

*^*^*^*

All of that said, though... I just tried searching on a number of different terms, and on a number of different search engines (just to keep Google honest)... and I can't find any reference to your report. Do you have a citation? I am curious to read, if so.

Re: Spam problems

[tacit.livejournal.com]

Google never made a formal announcement. It's a quiet policy shift, and one that you'll only notice if you regularly report spam to the groups-abuse@google.com address.

In the past, spam reported to this address would result in the spammer's Google Groups account being terminated. Starting a couple months ago, Google changed their policy; they no longer terminate the accounts of spammers. Nowadays, if you send a message to groups-abuse@google.com, it does not even get read; all that happens is you receive an autoreply stating that Google does not monitor Usenet traffic or 'censor' any Usenet users.

People (usually spammers and their lawyers) often make spam out to be a free speech issue, but it's not; in fact, it's not related to free speech at all. For starters, commercial speech is not free; the Supreme Court has been clear on that point. (If it were, states could not do things like prohibit cigarette advertising on TV and the like.)

Also, much of what gets sent around in spam is already criminal or prohibited. For example, fraud, pyramid schemes, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, sale of controlled substances without FDA approval, and so on are all illegal. I have seen examples of all of these posted from Google Groups. This is not a free-speech issue; it's an issue of criminals committing illegal acts behind a cloak of anonymity provided by a Web-to-Usenet service which does not want to spend the money or resources to see that its services are not abused. People will talk about free speech and censorship, of course, but in the end, it's all about the money.

Re: Spam problems

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"Nowadays, if you send a message to groups-abuse@google.com, it does not even get read; all that happens is you receive an autoreply stating that Google does not monitor Usenet traffic or 'censor' any Usenet users."

I can't speak to Google's past policies, not having been aware of them. But your precis of what one receives when one writes to that address is heavily edited, to say the least.

Here's what I received, with your cuts emphasized:

"Thank you for your note. Google does not regularly monitor or censor postings sent to Google Groups, but we do try to prevent wide-scale spam and other forms of Usenet abuse. Please be assured that the information you sent to us is being collected and taken into account. While we understand how annoying off-topic posts can be, we aren't able to pursue most complaints we receive about them. We are using the information you provide to make large-scale improvements in preventing abuse. We appreciate your help in our efforts to increase the quality of Google Groups."

Both "regularly" and "most" imply, at least to me, that Google does delete posts and accounts when circumstances warrant. As to whether the reports are "unread" that's unclear. It certainly occurs to me that Google, of all people, has the ability to keep track of reports over time, and be able to check their veracity against a database of known spam. My Gmail account receives perhaps 1 spam a week.

But what bothers me the most isn't even that you're so willing to distort Google's position on this. It's that what you're advocating takes no consideration of false reports, and false positives. To hell with the spammers' freedom of speech -- that's not what I'm trying to protect. I'm trying to protect MY freedom of speech... And, from what you appear to be advocating, you're willing to have it rest in the hands of some hormonal 13-year-old script kiddie willing to make a single, unverified false report.

Let me be clear on this. Sometimes when I get into this kind of discussion, I'm told that false reports "never happen". Well, I've been the guy who answers the e-mail or reads the newsgroup for both a Major Hardware Manufacturer and, later, a Major Software Company, and I can tell you from experience -- false reports happen all the time.

If I were less than fully ethical, I might be tempted to make just such a false report to both lj_abuse and your ISP. Under what you appear to be proposing, your LJ account and your internet account would be terminated. Under what Google's stated policy is, such a report would be merely one point of data, to be aggregated until a pattern emerges, or tossed aside like the spurious outlier it would be.

I know which approach makes me more comfortable.

If anything, if Google's policy really has changed, then it sounds to me like they got burnt too many times by pulling the trigger too quickly. And Google is now big enough it has a responsibility to refrain from such reckless enthusiasm, however well intentioned.

Re: Spam problems

[tacit.livejournal.com]

Contrast Google's new, improved autoresponder boilerplate with the response one used to get when reporting abuse to Google:

Thank you for your report. the account you reported has been terminated.

If you actually look at Google's boilerplate message now, what does it mean?

"Google does not regularly monitor or censor postings sent to Google Groups, but we do try to prevent wide-scale spam and other forms of Usenet abuse." Google does not do anything about spammers who post to one group at a time. We only impose limits to stop the Alan Ralskys of the world; for example, we don't let you post to 15,000 newsgroups at the same time.

"Please be assured that the information you sent to us is being collected and taken into account." Please be assured that no human being has read your report, but it's gone into a statistical accounting program and been counted before being routed to /dev/null. We like to be able to tell our shareholders how many abuse complaints we get per year.

"While we understand how annoying off-topic posts can be, we aren't able to pursue most complaints we receive about them." We want to deflect criticism by not discussing spam or criminal activity, and instead pretend that people complain to us because messages are 'off-topic.'

"We are using the information you provide to make large-scale improvements in preventing abuse." We do not terminate spammers; all we do is make changes to our software if enough people complain.

You say, "Both "regularly" and "most" imply, at least to me, that Google does delete posts and accounts when circumstances warrant." Yes, that's exactly the conclusions you're supposed to draw; Google can pretend to be tough on spam and still do nothing. I know that they do NOT, in fact, delete posts and accounts any more. How? Because in the past, spammers who posted clearly and egregiously criminal spam (for warez software or pyramid schemes, for example) would be cancelled within about 48 hours, and an email would be sent to the people complaining; nowadays, the same "penis pill" and "$$$make$$ $$money$$$ $$$fast$$$!!!!!" spammers continue posting from Google for weeks (or in one case I'm familiar wih, months) with total impunity. I do not recall seeing one single post cancelled or one single account terminated since Google started sending that boilerplate in response to spam.

"But what bothers me the most isn't even that you're so willing to distort Google's position on this. It's that what you're advocating takes no consideration of false reports, and false positives."

Now I'm lost. How do you figure that?

I'm not advocating that anyone, Google or otherwise, termiate anyone on one unverified complaint. What I am advocating is this: Google receives a complaint. The complaint contains full Usenet headers. Google examines the post, verifies that the headers are genuine and match a real Usenet post, which originated from Google Groups. (This is trivial; it takes only a few seconds.) Google then reads the post. If it's clearly commercial in nature, Google takes action.

Re: Spam problems part II

[tacit.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about posts where a person who's a contributor to comp.sys.mac.systems says "Hey, I'm selling my old iMac, anyone interested?" While that may be a 'commercial post,' it's not clear that such a post violates any newsgroup charter. No, 'm talking about messages that read "Make $60,000!!! Just send $5 to each name on this list, then take the top name off, put your name on, and use Google Groups to send out at least 1500 copies of this same message! In weeks you'll be a millionaire!" These posts now appear regularly from Google Groups accounts; Google used to can those responsible, and now it does not.

"If I were less than fully ethical, I might be tempted to make just such a false report to both lj_abuse and your ISP. Under what you appear to be proposing, your LJ account and your internet account would be terminated."

How? To make a Google Groups complaint, you have to send the full Usenet headers and newsgroup message you are complaining about. Could you produce valid headers? No. Could a 13-year-old script kiddie? No. Google's abuse people would look up the message, it would not exist, that would be the end of the matter.

You see, what I'm suggesting actually requires intervention by a human being--a human being who is an employee of Google. Google has discovered what every other ISP has discovered: an abuse employee costs money to hire, generates no revenue, and actually decreases the total amount of revenue coming in, by disconnecting customers. That is why companies like Hopone Internet, with thousands of employees and five data centers in five different cities, employs only ONE abuse person, who is under strict orders from management never to terminate any paying customer unless the monetary cost of not terminating him is higher. (I know this because I've spoken to him on the phone, and listened to him refuse to shut down a warez spammer, and continue to support the warez spammer until I made such a big stink about it on news.admin.net-abuse.email that people started blacklisting Hopone--all this in spite of the fact that this abuse person actually said, and then repeated in a newsgroup post, that he and Hopone management were fully aware that the spammer was committing criminal acts.) This is why companies like Google are willing to talk about "not being evil" and write autoresponder bots that talk about spam, but are not actually willing to, you know, stop spammers.

Google didn't get burned; they just realized that enforcing their own acceptable use policy was costing them money, that's all.

There's been conversation about this on the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email (and I believe on news.admin.net-abuse.usenet as well), which I invite you to take a look at; you can find the conversations archived at, of course, Google Groups.

One curious thing, though--while Google Groups no longer cancels spam posts nor terminates the accounts of the spammers (the famous "How I got a 9-inch penis...read my story!" spammer has been posting the same exact spam through Google Groups since at least November of 2003 without a break and without Google taking any action), Google does not archive Usenet spam postings in their newsgroup archive. They seem to be fine with letting the spammers do their thing, but they don't want to eat their own dog food!

Re: Spam problems part II

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

"To make a Google Groups complaint, you have to send the full Usenet headers and newsgroup message you are complaining about. Could you produce valid headers? No. Could a 13-year-old script kiddie? No."

Actually, yes and yes. I can think of a fairly simple method to do so, and have seen it used in the field. You have far more faith than I in the integrity of the data.

As may be... It's clear our opinions are each shaped by different experiences. There's not much I can do about that.

Thank you for expressing your thoughts as well as you have.