hey pal, i'm not going to go around righting every one of you people who thinks they know what they are talking about. but since i'm here anyway, even though i already said this, i don't know a goddam thing about google adsense or adwords. period. i wouldn't know how to make money from scamming google even i wanted to.
also let me be clear that i don't think this is going viral because i wrote a poetic letter that tugged at the heartstrings of twitter. if you think that my story is going viral for any other reason besides google's completely crap user support you need to re-examine your approach to dealing with people.
and if you need anymore proof of that please be aware that i signed up for twitter on wens night. and i do not know a single person, not one single person either physically or virtually, that has republished my letter. this should speak volumes as to how frustrated people are with google and any company that has policies like this. go to twitter, search for @thomasmonopoly and change "top tweets" to "all" tweets and see how your users are responding. because this has absolutely nothing to do with me.
Actually, I'd argue that this is going viral because you spammed the entire internet with your twitter post. Surely someone would bite eventually. Just a hunch, though.
It went viral because all you do is talk and talk and talk and talk, and people love hearing about other people with problems. A "look at that poor sap, I'm better than him," kind of thing.
But anyway, we would appreciate it if you didn't start spamming HN with this story. We know the details. We know you're upset. We don't really care.
If you must comment, one comment per threading level, please. Don't reply to the same comment more than once. And, keep it short. There must be something better to do with your life than tell everyone that Google disabled your account due to ToS violations.
Speak for yourself. I fully appreciate this guy being the one carrying the torch for all of us, who have or will be in the future, wronged by Google or any other big corporation where we have no recourse. Hopefully something positive will come of this.
What came of it was that he's violated Google's ToS, as confirmed by a number of employees. It would be nice if he was innocent, but he's not, so the story is meaningless.
No, the point is that its irrelevant that he violated ToS. Google should not unilaterally wipe a user's data without providing a chance to retrieve it. I'm sure the ToS lets Google delete an account for no reason whatsoever. That doesn't mean it isn't evil to delete a user's data.
and based on what other people have said about you i do belive you are an honest person. and if i really have violated the terms of service in some way, what in gods name could i have done that was so small for me to have not noticed it yet so large as to warrant shutting down my entire account and blacklisting me???
i just noticed matt's comments at the top. and i'm going to respond without getting angry and without using profanity. but matt, if you know what it is that google thinks i did, and after all of this, you are still not telling me, i am dumbfounded. if that is true then you really need to consider your terms of service and your public relations department. i'm getting about 5 messages a minute about this on twitter.
hi. someone on twitter sent me a link to this. is this about my situation? because if it is let me say to "boneslf" if he is the correct person, i don't know a goddam thing about computers let alone the "tiny bit of programming knowledge and keyword knowledge to make money" scamming google products. let me be clear about that.
and also "jellicle" makes my point exactly and so do a few others on here.
also, i've sent an update to the few contacts i have made at google, but they haven't responded. i found out two days ago that this week the fbi raided an apt in my building connected with anonymous and hauled away computers. like i said, and like i told google yesterday, i don't know enough about computers to know whether or not it's plausible that this could have something to do with my issue, or if they would hack into my google account for some reason, but i do know that my router had "dns poisoning" last week and that's when the internet started acting up. it might be crazy for me to suspect that the fbi case has anything to do with this, but i would know if google would talk to me.
also, in my opinion, nothing would warrant what they have done. unless i was knowingly violating some term of service. which i don't think anyone at this point could possibly think that i was. i never even sent out group email or had any of my picasa folders public.
It definitely seems from the way that google is handling this (playing everything close to the vest, not letting you know anything) that it DOES have something to do with the FBI raid. In the US, this kind of cockiness and disregard for standard procedures of law and decency is often paired with Homeland Security shit. It doesn't seem very far fetched to say that google might have been told by the gov't that you are without a doubt some sort of terrorist or pro-wikileaks hacker so that the gov't can look at your information (without any kind of warrant, of course).
first of all i am absolutely pro-wikileaks. that shouldn't even be a statement i have to make. that's like saying "why yes, i am pro-truth." those people are the definition of patriots and they're not even from my country.
secondly, i can't imagine google would be dumb enough to actually think that even if someone did use my account for something like that. i would hope that the most powerful corporation would notice the change in behavior if someone was one day uploading pictures of hiking to my picasa account and emailing my sister and the next day hacking into the cia. i should hope that they would suspect they weren't the same person.
also, why is the text on this website so small? rhetorical question.
I have a small amount of experience with this kind of stuff (gov't assualts on Internet activists through property seizure, collusion with the private sector, etc) from reading Glenn Greenwald and some others and here's my take: the gov't has been cracking down on people suspected of DDoSing the credit card companies a few months back in the name of anonymous and wikileaks; I read a thread somewhere about the FBI raiding a house with guns drawn to go after the OP's 13 year-old son, who the mother said was absolutely innocent of using LOIC to do this at all.
I think you, and possibly your neighbor, might have become victims of this kind of shoddy, falsified intelligence work. Back when the "war on terror" was really hotted up after 9/11, there were tons of stories of Muslims being erroneously charged with terrorism, like the time with the "Detroit Sleeper Cell" that turned out to be just some impoverished Detroit Muslims; the FBI took wild liberties interpreting a disturbed man's doodles to be some sort of terrorist plot. Well, now the intel agencies are a little more restricted in their ability to harass and intimidate innocent Muslims (well, as long as they're within our borders). But as we've seen with the story about the 13 year-old, these agencies are still quite willing to harass and intimidate online activists, accusing them of being "hacktivists" and seizing their property. And we've also seen that companies such as google are quite "in bed" with the gov't whenever they ask them for the data in the name of "the war on terror."
TL;DR I suspect that google disabled your account at the behest of the gov't who are in turn serving credit card companies mad about being DDoSed by Anon who was mad at them for stealing money from wikileaks, who the credit card companies say violated THEIR terms of service.
The question remains, despite the link to Betsy Perry's G+ post which has been repeatedly posted in this thread in order to discredit you, is which term of service you violated in the use of your gmail account? Google refuses to answer this, which is what makes me most confident that some homeland security BS is involved here.
It's interesting that I am being accused of "samefagging" just because I seem to be on another person's side and am making somewhat wild assertions about what might have happened. I'm not an HN user typically because I'm ignorant of most of the stuff you guys find interesting, I found this thread linked from reddit and when I saw that ThomasAlexander's building had allegedly been raided by the FBI going after Anon, I knew I had to comment. I assure you, the last thing I want is for his story about the FBI raid to be untrue, it would mean the hour or so I've spent thinking and commenting on it was totally wasted.
LOL, another accusation. I looked at RangerSix's reddit profile, and I can confirm that he's definitely not me. Have you considered that my reddit name is the same as this one?
ahahaha. ok. yeah. there are tons of us all pretending that we don't have the same profile. even saying that is confusing.
and the thing about anonymous in my building is very true, look it up. bushwick bk. ny post. i don't know the specifics. but i did have breakfast two days ago with someone who knew the tenants and let's just say i don't want to know and he didn't want to tell me what was going on.
