Dennis Cooper fears censorship as Google erases blog without warning

Large discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12099757" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12099757</a><p>More discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12097063" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12097063</a><p>Another comment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12097707" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12097707</a><p>Yet another comment: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12089980" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12089980</a><p>Another submission: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12088543" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12088543</a><p>And another: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12100781" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12100781</a><p><i>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 &quot;fire and forget&quot; comments, you&#x27;ll need to visit all three submissions.&quot;</i>

Can&#x27;t help but repeat: See whatever you have in the public cloud as <i>a cache copy</i> of your information, a copy that can disappear at any moment, and you can&#x27;t do anything about it. Have a local master copy of <i>everything</i> you care about, properly backed up.

I can&#x27;t help but feel like the word Censorship is being severely diluted by using it in cases like these.

Is this a common thing? I can&#x27;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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;POSSE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;indieweb.org&#x2F;POSSE</a>). 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&#x27;t appear on the front page, even though it got over 80 points and nearly 20 comments in just 40 minutes.<p>Does that mean the comments here will sink without trace and forever be ignored?

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.

How long before other companies (like Medium) will start doing this?<p>That&#x27;s why I&#x27;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&#x27;s a hassle to set-up for the average person but the peace of mind might be worth it.

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

We have not enough tech education<p>&quot;impossible for culture to be produced.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s rather cheap to setup or let someone setup your own wordpress server on a hosted server, made redundant with backups.<p>So it&#x27;s worrying that artists think it&#x27;s Google hosting or nothing.

[moved to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12099757" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12099757</a> ]

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.<p>It worries me that Dennis Cooper has no respect for Google&#x27;s private property rights.