As for YouTube it is and always have been available on the web for windows phone.
Microsoft in clear violation of Google's TOS used undocumented APIs and stripped ads from YouTube and now they have the audacity to say that they would have complied by the TOS if it suited them better.
Please take your anti-Google (probably Microsoft sponsored astroturf) elsewhere:
Except, Microsoft did not strip ads from the videos. They said yesterday that they will be happy to serve ads if Google lets them access. And please, let the legal departments decide if it is a clear violation or not. Do not take a decision on your own.
I think you are the one who is astro-turfing here, if i apply the finger pointing criteria to you too. It is better if you reply to the argument leaving your personal preferences neatly tucked in.
Microsoft is flagrantly violating YouTube's terms of service. Saying they would serve ads if YouTube had an API for it is like me using your obviously not public WiFi and saying I would pay for it if you let me.
What Google's been saying from 3 years while dragging it's feet is that Windows Phone does not have enough users to make an app for, but now their claim is that so many people are using the Microsoft Youtube App for Windows Phone that it's hurting the content creators. Huh? Why can't they monetize them by making an app and show twice as many ads in it just to spite WP users? No, they won't. They want to disadvantage Windows Phone compared to Android. Vimeo has had a Windows Phone app from a long time, and Google' can't afford to make one? And you believe them?
Why don't they come out with the real reason then, like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Skype, do about closing down things and eat up the bad press? Why beat around the bush and play delay tactics and hide behind facts? Oh, they want to protect their clean image of being "open" and "do no evil". This is a ploy by Microsoft to force Google to tell the public exactly why they refuse to make a Youtube app and even ban Microsoft from doing so.
How can Windows Phone have so few users that use YouTube that it's not worth monetizing and have so many users that use Microsoft's new app that it's hurting Google and content creator revenue? Why not agree to allow MS to show Google ads and make money since they don't have to spend the money to create the app but can take the profits?
I am happy that the customers are getting access to the most widely used video site. I will let the companies dunk it out as to what is unauthorized or what is not. MS responded to it already, and said they are will be happy to work towards betterment of mutual customers on a day where Larry page loathed negativity among companies. Or something to that effect.
They're abusing the patent system to extort money from Android device manufacturers and they have to gall to completely ignore requirements in a ToS.
I'm looking forward to the day when Microsoft is completely irrelevant. They should just shut down everything except for the research and Xbox departments now.
You know, saying that anyone who disagrees with your opinion is "probably Microsoft sponsored astroturf" just makes me picture you with a tin foil hat on your head.
Sometimes the truth is a lot simpler than you're thinking it is. You write a lot of posts that are pro-Google. Are you sponsored by Google?!?!?
'Are you sponsored by Google?' I think so. I've been accused of being an 'anti-google astroturfer' before. 'Gosh that's odd', I thought. Then I read the posts written by my accuser. Pro-google, down the line - echoing PR talking points. Normal people don't do this. I do think Google hires PR flacks to post here on HN.
Seems more likely he is just a regular Google employee who supports what they are doing, albeit a bit aggressively. There are many of them on HN. Not sure why either of you are assuming malice here.
And I don't work for Microsoft, never worked for them or any affiliates nor own their stock or ever owned it and the closest that I know I was ever to any MS employee was when I was interviewing in Seattle at Amazon for a C++/Linux position.
Now, can we get on with the discussion instead of trying to derail it by ad hominem attacks?
You don't think it's relevant? Microsoft is paying millions to run anti-Google attack ads and smear campaigns everywhere, it's not unthinkable that they would hire astroturf to roam sites like HN, so for the sake of the health of this community they ought to be pointed out.
Just because you are paranoid, does not give you the right to label anyone as paid for roaming a site and attacking your favourite company. This feels like the "either you are with us or them" mentality". Please, if you do not have the proof, do not go down this path. It is dangerous, and lets anyone label anyone as being a shill and paid commentator.
There's up and down voting for that, and probably HN's spam filtering matters too. Making comments expressly meant to derail the conversation isn't necessary or useful.
If Microsoft is paying recoiledsnake a billion dollars to make that post, does it change any of the facts in it? No? Then why whinge about possible or probably astroturfing instead of just addressing the facts in their post?
Unless you want HN to do a full background check on every poster here, it's hard to identify Google/Apple/Microsoft fans/haters/employees/shareholders. You have the option to remain silent, vote and move on if you're not interested in a post.
Same as every other “cloud provider”, yet somehow Google is the one subjected to these overwritten accounts and the almost mandatory pseudo law/policy musings that follow.
You might want to take a look at some policies from others in the industry to get a more accurate picture of this landscape.
These policies are constructed as such to mitigate litigation, which the author concedes. Regardless I'm glad this instance had a happy ending.
Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Facebook Mail and my personal mail server all stand in contradiction to your claim.
Stop making things up just because you want to complain about the Google. Nobody will fault you for a simple "Fuck Google, they're demonstrably evil and have access to way too much data now," which is what it seems to me you're driving toward.
Email is decentralized because Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and whatever server you can setup can talk together. You don't have to use Gmail to send an email to a Gmail user.
The only thing that's threatening email decentralization is the war on spam. It's becoming more and more difficult to send messages that don't go directly to spam boxes if you're not one of the big player.
Or simply people who didn't have the skills to be a peer?!
And what about closed gardens like social networks and services that wall our data behind proprietary walls? Google data liberation front is a step forward but its still not enough.
People with such great skills and knowledge of the stakes of IT like the HN audience shouldn't put the blame on common people right?!
I genuinely believe that technology and the open source community have reached a maturity that makes the development of simple and solid alternatives are possible, even for the least knowledgeable of us.
Take a look at what this startup is trying to achieve: https://www.cozycloud.cc/
It gives everyone an easy to administrate server, you can assign your own domain name, self host it or have it hosted elsewhere. The server is a plat-form on which you have total control and ownership of your data and can install and develop apps that serves YOUR needs. It still young but with the support of talented people that could become BIG!
One of the problems that's recentralized mail is spam.
Because of spam senders, especially spam originating from residential and dial-up IPs (well, mostly residential now), many large email providers use blacklists (literally: DUL -- dial-up lists) to block SMTP access from IPs within a known residential range. Many also work to whitelist specific lists of known legitimate email providers.
May enterprise IT organizations require explicit whitelisting of domains from which email is sent. I kid you not. And many of these organizations apparently have never heard of SPF/DKIM.
A third level of resource are reputation-based services. Cisco's Ironport / Senderbase is among one of the better of these (it indicates both good and bad reputations, as opposed to simple blacklisting or whitelisting, as well as volume variations from a given IP and "neighborhood" reputations of nearby IP addresses.
The result is that it can be painful to try getting your mail delivered through to large email service providers. I've had the most significant issues with Yahoo and Aol, though others are at times problematic. This affects both individuals trying to configure small residential servers and businesses / enterprises.
Ideally tools such as SPF and DKIM help, but at best these indicate that a given IP address is included in a policy framework or that header integrity is assured -- there's still no basis for assuming that a given email message is or isn't spam. Getting SPF and DKIM properly configured can also involve hoop-jumping, especially for non-technical users.
I don't think his comment was focused on John or Jane Q Public, but rather the general use of cloud services and the dangers of these types of events happening.
For instance, I host most of my business on AWS. We recently had a compromised server that delivered malware to some of our Web visitors resulting in Google completely blacklisting our site, and ultimately resulting in AWS sending us a threatening notification that we were violating their terms of service by serving malware and we could be terminated at any time.
Within an hour of finding out the root cause we cleaned up the malware issue, but we spent the next 24 hours trying to get Google to remove the blacklist and kept our fingers crossed that AWS wouldn't just terminate all our 17+ instances and ask questions later - effectively putting us out of business.
This has always been the way it works with hosting providers and even colocation facilities. You have an obligation to keep your infrastructure healthy, or the provider has an obligation to shut you down before they get a reputation for being malware/spam/badness-friendly and have to worry about their peering relationships and the like.
Well, the Amazon approach is much better than the Google approach. At least they sent a notice, while Google's policy is "shoot first, discuss later". Well actually the first part, I'm not sure if there is a second part.
Apple iCloud, MS Live, Amazon Kindle Libraries, Dropbox.
All of these widely used and are subject to loss of service, arbitrary account shutdown, data loss, and data theft. None of them are really trustworthy, particularly not as a primary data store, so I find it odd that the commenter rants about Google - the problem is trusting any corporation with control over your data.
The interests of a corporation and an individual are not likely to coincide in the long term. Google is not evil, they're just a corporation like any other.
Microsoft gets a lot of beating for changes to Windows, simply because of widespread use; an OS with 0.5% market share will not be messing with so many people. By being banned by Google you lose your email, youtube, adsense, adwords, docs...your financial life could be destroyed, even if the 'violation' is for an unrelated offense (example: posting copyrighted material on Youtube and getting adsense disabled)
Another difference, as an example, when the company I work for had some issues with the hosted mail from MS, my boss was able to get to a real, live person .. not left fluttering in the breeze as so often happens with google.
The handful of times I've had issues, I usually take to twitter, and it magically gets resolved within a day... I'm overly tethered to google at this point. via Andriod and Google Voice alone, it's been a difficult weekend with the issues GV seems to have had since Friday. I've recently cloned my dropbox to both google drive, and skydrive... which gives me a little security.
For the past two years, I've been using my gmail address more, and my own domain email less, because the gmail ui has been more convenient... without igoogle/reader I don't think that's as much the case, but if I lost my email (logins for other sites) I'd be boned... I recently had to re-enable a domain on my mail server just to change an old account on a site I needed to recover. Not cool/fun.
It does not do that, I just double checked, even when the focus is on the "Send" button a dialog box pops with "Send (Ctrl-Enter)" and no sending happens. Maybe what you encountered was the work of a browser extension or a labs feature left enabled, or most likely you just tapped return at the wrong moment.
It may not have done it for you, but it did it for me, and others in this thread have confirmed that it did it for them.
For reference, I don't have any browser extensions installed, and I haven't used any labs features, so neither of those suggestions is correct either.
And forgive me for being blunt, but your reply seems to be similar to what happens when a problem is reported to some "support" services where they say "Works for me!" The clear underlying text is "So you're an idiot, and don't matter."
So thank you for your suggestions, but they're wrong. And it did do it for me, and I double-checked.
I think maybe you should take a step back and realize that the way you communicated your message initially isn't consistent with the defense you're making here. You didn't state your original issue as a bug, you called Google out as if this were some kind of feature:
"People, when you design an interface, don't put invisible, undiscoverable, irrecoverable actions in it."
This would only be a feature if it happened for everyone, and now you're using curt language with someone who is trying to help.
Troubleshooting is hard, and the communications involved are often polarizing. End users commonly feel defensive, and troubleshooters often fail to couch their language diplomatically.
The matter of reproducibility is the basic litmus test by which programmers classify issues as bugs versus environment issues. Bugs are problems in the software, and environment issues are problems in the user's specific configuration. Often times an issue is a combination of both. The willingness to engage in troubleshooting environment issues varies by developer, but if you're interested in receiving help, it's worth acknowledging that your problem falls somewhere on this continuum, which means you always bear some responsibility in remaining objective during the troubleshooting process. You seem convinced that this is some type of feature issue, rather than remaining open to other possibilities.
I think I might have an idea about what's happening in your case, but I'm reluctant to even posit the idea, because I fear you'll lash out as me as well.
I acknowledge that I was curt. I do, however, believe that I'm being consistent. It's news to me that it's perceived as not, so I'll take another look at it. Thank you.
And I didn't call it as a bug because it happened to me twice, it has happened to me on other platforms, and I assumed that a Google Mail interface would behave the way Google intended. I acknowledge that testing and debugging is hard, but I guess by default I had assumed Google would get it right. Your assertion is that they haven't got it right, and that this is a bug. Noted.
For reference, I work on software used in safety-critical situations, and so I know a little about getting user interfaces consistent, repeatable, and tested. I have the advantage that our system can control the hardware and environment, but I am aware of many of the issues. I'm just annoyed that hitting "TAB" caused me to send an incomplete message to an important customer, making me look stupid. I guess I'll have to treat Google's interfaces with the same paranoia as I use professionally when I write software. That's disappointing, but I guess unavoidable given their constraints.
And I'm sorry I've made you feel that you can't propose a suggestion as to what might have happened. That's really, really not intentional. But when I'm already having a bad morning, having someone say "No, that doesn't happen" when it clearly did is not a sure fire way of improving it.
So put it all down to the problems of writing software for uncontrollable environments causing different and sometimes undesirable behavior, coupled with the inability to read people accurately in a forum type of context, coupled in turn with a certain amount of stress over the whole thing.
And I apologize unreservedly for offence caused, and thank you for your comment.
Added in edit: I've upvoted you - I genuinely appreciate your comment.
All understandable points. I'll put out a couple of suggestions. Keep in mind that when troubleshooting, these are all guesses. They're not intended to imply that you don't have a problem. Also try to keep in mind that there may be some small detail you've overlooked that is causing the behavior you're observing. If you're dead set on insisting that the behavior happens the way you've described and there are no other possibilities, then you should stop reading here.
As troubleshooters, we often try to fill in the blanks with what we perceive as small pieces of missing information. This isn't an individual assault, but rather learned behavior. I'm damn good with a computer, but my #1 rule of troubleshooting is to assume that any "truth" about what I've observed can be invalidated through empiricism.
Enough hedging, let's see if we make any progress in troubleshooting the problem you experienced :) What we know so far:
* Pressing the TAB key results in an email being sent
* Other users report that pressing TAB doesn't send the email
We accept these as truths, but with two caveats: 1) they may be disproved or refined at any time (we aren't sentimentally attached to them, ego be damned), 2) there may be some additional information that is not yet obvious, so the list shouldn't be considered complete
What can we tease from this information?
1) Can you get the behavior to occur predictably? If you open a new compose window and press TAB, does the email send every time?
2) What is the normally expected behavior of TAB? In most web browsers, the TAB key is used to move focus from one form element to another. In Windows, the "focus" can move to buttons as well. In OS X, the focus navigation using TAB is constrained to text fields and lists by default, but can be configured to "All Controls" through the Keyboard preference pane.
3) What processes are available to intentionally send an email? That I am aware of, you can: click the send key, use the keyboard shortcut ctrl+return or cmd+enter (Windows/OS X). Use TAB to move focus to the "Send" button and press the spacebar/return/enter.
4) What small pieces of information might be missing? We've already ruled out browser extensions, so that's a good start. Try to think of any other software that uses global keyboard shortcuts or performs automation.
My pet theory (guess) would be that you're pressing TAB expecting that the TAB character is inserted in to the text field, but this is actually causing focus to move to the "Send" button. From there, a press of the spacebar, return, or enter key is sending the email. This is very easy to do when typing. If you can't regularly reproduce the behavior by a simple press of the TAB key, I'd say this gives this theory a higher probability of correctness. If you can reproduce the behavior by simply pressing TAB, then you can discard this theory.
Let me know if you have any thoughts on these items.
I accept that you were only trying to help - thank you for that. Please accept my response as feedback, and I hope you find it - after this subsequent expansion - helpful in some way.
My response could be thought of as a data point, that what you intended to say is not how the message was received. You may have intended to say: "Hmm, it worked for me, I wonder what's different about your setup." What I heard was: "You're wrong, it doesn't do that, I've tested it, so you're obviously doing something stupid."
Why is this sort of post even on HN, not to mention the front page? and why is this thread dominated by idiotic language about "evil" and "kings" and incoherent babbling about politics and democratic representation?! and suddenly everyone is a law scholar.
I blame Matt Cutts' occasional appearances for the subsequent flocking of SEO sorts here. This post doesn't belong on HN, certainly not on the front page.
> I blame Matt Cutts' occasional appearances for the subsequent flocking of SEO sorts here. This post doesn't belong on HN, certainly not on the front page.
Your anger is misplaced. The blame is solely on Google for not having an adequate customer service department.
When Google has arbitrary decided that your business is in violation of some of its rules, you end up falling into a Kafkaesque nightmare of form responses and then you stop getting even those. The only way to get a response from Google in these cases is to LITERALLY get a popular post on Reddit or Hacker News. That's why small businesses post about this stuff here. Don't blame them.
Blame Google for not providing a decent customer service center because they want to shave a tiny bit of expenses.
Given how important being able to advertise can be for some startups, it seems that inconsistent enforcement of AdWords restrictions would be very interesting to most readers here.
I partly agree about the customer service issue. However, they have really been stepping up as of late (if you are an AdWords customer that is). However the striking thing for me is the "voiced" doublestandard. Cutts is pretty consistent on the Organic side of things, but I don't think I have seen the same from their AdWords department. Which is a shame as it does need to be policed.
* Technical issues that affect the livelihoods of almost every person on here are important. The fact that this has so many upvotes is indicative of that.
* Unfortunately, because Google is on the surface a very friendly company, many technical people place Google on a pedestal and actually believe their slogan about doing no evil. It's just a slogan, and yes, Google does do a lot of evil.
* I suspect that you've never experienced the frustration of having your entire business on the line and not even being able to get a human response from Google. If you've ever been in that situation, I think you'd be able to understand how frustrating Google actually is.
Yes I'm not a huge fan of Google, what is your point? They are a for profit corporation, so I'm not sure why I'm obliged to like them.
There has been a lot of Google news the last week, and loads of submissions on HN, so I've made quite a few posts on them. That is hardly comparable to having an account for a year or more but only ever posting in stories about a single corporation to defend that corporation.
I don't know why you linked my submissions, only 4 out of the last 30 of them, going back ~560 days were about Google or Google products.
I don't think anyone is saying that you're obligated to like them. The problem they have is probably with your tone, which suggests that Google is obligated to literally never, ever shut down any product they experiment with.
Both of the api are still available. Translate is the same as before but you must pay for it, google web search has been replaced by google custom search and you must pay for it.
No - I have absolutely nothing to be careful of. I'm not a secret front for an anti-Google marketing campaign. I'm just a dude who values the OpenWeb, and I believe that Google's actions w.r.t. Reader have damaged RSS. I don't like it, and I don't trust Google's motives.
Now - who are you, and who made you the speech police? Why are you advocating on behalf of Google, and why are you bringing ad-homenim attacks against me and others who question Google's products and business practices?
hyp-o-crite: one who accuse others of astroturfing while concealing his/her own identity behind an anonymous userid.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/new-interface-for-g...