Google needs to understand that watching this nightmare scenario play out over and over again is actively destroying trust in their platform. When your email, authentication, documents, payroll, and CRM all flow through a single provider and that provider can lock you out overnight with no meaningful recourse, you’ve invited customers to place their entire digital presence into a house of cards. The fact that this same story surfaces almost daily should be a wake up call to existing and prospective customers. Every unresolved lockout is one more reason to start planning an exit. Google has led the effort to lower the bar so much that it’s commonplace and somehow acceptable to ghost paying customers who youve locked out or even worse bounce them through a gauntlet of AI chat bots with the illusion that you are even aware of the damage you’ve caused.
Yeah, loss of a google account in certain cases can destroy entire small businesses and there's no recourse. In the old world we had extremely deep bodies of case law around utilities and commercial leases and road access, insurance and all kinds of things to make business operation legally predictable, but for the digital equivalent it's still the wild west and everyone just throws up their hands like its unavoidable.
Imagine being homeless, and your Gmail account is your online identity for what little financial presence you have, and how in the world can you recover from its loss?
On the surface it seems like it would be a good idea for all these users who were suspended to do a mass arbitration like what happened to Uber to get them to start taking it seriously, this comes up like monthly people getting account pulled up from under them and impacting business. Maybe there a legal differences or something
https://www.mbelr.org/mass-arbitration-how-ubers-own-alterna...
I don’t disagree, but the reality is SaaS is the model that most companies depend on and these risks exist everywhere.
If your business is dependent on services you need to take a modicum of effort to protect yourself - the posts author was literally walking around with his entire business at risk from him dropping his phone or having it pickpocketed.
At the end of the day, the protagonist in this story is mad because Google won’t allow him to social engineer access to his company. He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add many) in the most fraud signally way possible.
> He deleted his sole token (Google makes it trivial to add many) in the most fraud signally way possible.
Are we reading the same blog post? He had his password, 2FA authenticator set up, and backup codes -- everything Google asks you to have to be on the "golden" auth path.
He only deleted his SMS authentication path (one thing I don't understand is how he was able to do this in the first place without being logged in), which is in any case the least secure method of 2FA. Also, It should be fairly obvious that SMS is not expected to work seamlessly while traveling, how is this not a scenario that's hit by millions of Google users worldwide?
We’re hearing one side of the story from a frustrated user recounting a borderline traumatic and stressful event.
The SMS only fallback is when other things have failed and they suspect that there’s been a takeover. Microsoft does something similar to tie it to some tangible thing. I’m not excusing Google. Their exception handling is poor at best. I’ve seen issues at customers where phones left in flight get flagged because of GPS disruptions due to Middle East conflicts, for example. (Phones flagged as having been in Syria or Russia can be kryptonite) One scenario was a VIP whose kid was in Europe with their other parent and the VIP’s tablet, signed into work email.
Other factors apply too - there may be multiple accounts tied to the number that are in different locales, for example. No idea what obnoxious rules Australia and UK add as well.
Point is, this type of shit happens and you should have a contingency.
> Point is, this type of shit happens and you should have a contingency.
Let's work through what the contingency could have been. Always make sure you buy international roaming everywhere you go? Always be able to switch your MX records (from a provider whose account isn't tied to a Google-controlled email)?
They seem to get increasingly less practical to be honest. People travel all over the world everyday, this shit shouldn't be hard for a company like Google that supposedly ingests mountains of data.
More to the point, I think email has become sort of a fundamental right given how much of your identity depends on it. Companies that control this sort of identity foundation need to be heavily regulated, and perhaps nationalized.
Ok, sure man. In the meantime before the Lenin of our age appears…
In this case, don’t run around with a business account with a single user with admin privileges. Segregate privilege. Don’t share a phone number with other accounts. Don’t use SSO as the key to your business.
If you run a business you need to manage risk. If a customs officer thought he looked funny and seized the phone, he’d be boned as well.
^ This. I get that We Are On The Internet And People Will Be Wrong Sometimes -- but I'm really confused by the amount of people insisting that a subscription is just a slosh bucket of token capacity to be used however they feel like using it; are these people who genuinely misunderstand how subscriptions work or what Anthropic's terms were, and genuinely weren't aware that 3rd-party harnesses violate them? The vibe I get is more "how dare you constrain me from doing whatever I want", angry rebellious teenager vibe, willful oversimplifications of the situation... it doesn't feel particularly honest or reality-seeking.
It's a very bad press article, that says a lot of wrong things that are not in the research article.
As I explained in a reply to a sibling comment, the spot on light on a wall can "move" faster than light. Or you can have the inverse setup of a wall that is illuminated everywhere but in a dark spot, and the dark spot can "move" faster than light.
You can imagine the second example like a movie where a dark UFO moves over a light sky. There is an illusion of movement, like in a movie. But the information is not moving FTL from a part of the screen to the other, the information is moving STL from the proyector to the screen.
They measure the point where A=0 on a surface. When the singularities are far away, they behave like particles and it makes sense. In this case the point A=0 "moves" FTL, but it's as fake as the UFO in the movie. Also in some cases it's easier to do the math considering fake objects that move FTL. (just google "phase vs group velocity"). This is a well known problem/trick that is taught in a standard course in the second year of a physics degree.
It looks like the research is interesting, but the groundbreaking "darkness can “travel” faster than light" angle in the article is just nonsense.
Can someone more knowledgeable explain this better please? I have questions:
- if you can measure the 'optical singularities' travelling FTL, then surely 'information' is travelling FTL?
- does it matter (i.e. violate relativity) if something is travelling faster than light speed in some medium as long as it doesn't travel faster than light in vacuum?
> if you can measure the 'optical singularities' travelling FTL, then surely 'information' is travelling FTL?
Information is not traveling FTL.
The canonical example is when you have a lighthouse in the middle of a huge circular wall. The light spot may move faster than light when you see it on the wall, but the info moves from the center to the wall, not along the wall.
When the singularities are far away, you can treat them like a single entity, and track the anti-peak and measure it's speed and they will move like 1/100 of the speed of light in this case.
When the singularities are very close together the anti-peak may move at a faster speed (FTL IIUC), but it's just an illusion for tracking the peak. The information moves slower than light.
> does it matter (i.e. violate relativity) if something is travelling faster than light speed in some medium as long as it doesn't travel faster than light in vacuum?
Not an answer, but I'm modeling it as a way to pull stability out of non stable region of space for a soliton field. The gradient the void causes allows the soliton to find a useful basin.
I honestly do see Trump just declaring he lost. "These Iranians put up a good fight and we weren't prepared." or something to that effect. He's been known to acknowledge defeat, like his complete 180 when Mamdani won.
Can we set up a bet on Polymarket or something? I'll take that action any day. He would have to phrase such an acknowledgement as an apology, and a Trump doesn't do that. Ever.
He didn't directly acknowledge defeat with Mamdani, at least not that I heard. It was more a case of populist game recognizing populist game.
Unfortunately the links beyond the first page of comments don't work, but if the visible comments are anything to go by, wow. Trump dun goofed. You get the sense that he's finally reached his Waterloo. No one is even trying to defend him.
Question for regular WSJ readers: do their comments normally read this way, or is this new?
WSJ is for rich conservatives where FoxNews is for poor conservatives (both are owned by Murdoch). But they have skin in the game (business/finance/they own stocks) so their criticism of Trump can be pretty brutal if it hurts their bottom line.
This piece includes original reporting sourced from maritime intelligence firms, financial forensics by Kharon, and an anonymous source with knowledge of Iran's oil accounting. What specifically do you think they got wrong? Happy to look at a better source if you have one.
What they got wrong is the title. The premise is bad, to start.
Iran could have leveraged these defensive tactics to make "a mint" from oil exports at any time. The war, for the state that it is in, is not where they are making the money. They have lost money as a consequence of the war and made money from tightening export controls to the point there are physical barriers. The forensic accounting is incidental and well understood from other nations (eg Russia, NK, etc).
The concluding paragraph that might tie these rather boring descriptions of economic machination together, is barely coherent. Read it carefully.
> The extreme redundancy introduces such complexity that the money is getting harder to trace even for Iran’s central bank—and easier for the country’s oil barons to skim. But it keeps the oil machine going. Short of all-out strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure—to which Iran would respond by bombing that of other Gulf states—it will not be throttled.
Both sentences are baseless indictments, at best. First aimed at oil producers who are "skimming", which they are not. The second run-on is gaslighting Iran as a state, as hell-bent on bombing unnamed neighbors in "the gulf" which seems purposefully chosen as ambiguous.
Is stating facts about the minutia of circumventing sanctions, then demonizing the actors, considered journalism? I don't think so.
> What they got wrong is the title. The premise is bad, to start.
Admittedly, the title is somewhat misleading. It doesn't take into account the massive costs Iran is absorbing in destroyed infrastructure, steel production offline, millions displaced, economy in freefall.
> Iran could have leveraged these defensive tactics to make "a mint" from oil exports at any time. The war, for the state that it is in, is not where they are making the money. They have lost money as a consequence of the war and made money from tightening export controls to the point there are physical barriers. The forensic accounting is incidental and well understood from other nations (eg Russia, NK, etc).
This is incorrect. The Strait of Hormuz blockade is a wartime measure. Iran couldn't have blockaded Hormuz in peacetime without triggering the kind of military response it's now already absorbing. The war is what made the blockade possible as a strategy. Iran had nothing left to lose by escalating. The pre war discount was $18–24/barrel. It's now $7–12. That improvement is directly war driven.
> Both sentences are baseless indictments, at best. First aimed at oil producers who are "skimming", which they are not.
The Economist isn't making a moral indictment as much as it's describing a consequence of routing payments through thousands of shell accounts across multiple jurisdictions.
> The second run-on is gaslighting Iran as a state, as hell-bent on bombing unnamed neighbors in "the gulf" which seems purposefully chosen as ambiguous.
Iran has explicitly threatened retaliatory strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure. This isn't speculation or gaslighting, it's stated Iranian deterrence. The article is describing the strategic calculus that makes all out infrastructure strikes unlikely.
> is stating facts then demonizing actors journalism?
You are recharacterizing conclusions drawn from reported facts as demonization, which lets you dismiss any reporting that reaches an unflattering conclusion about any actor.
Which specific factual claim in the article do you think is wrong?
> The Strait of Hormuz blockade is a wartime measure. Iran couldn't have blockaded Hormuz in peacetime without triggering the kind of military response it's now already absorbing.
So they could have, for the reasons you have pointed out. It's not "because of the war" but it is a consequence for someone to do something they could have done and "triggered the kind of military response it's now already absorbing." - you and I have a very different idea of what reality is.
> The Economist isn't making a moral indictment as much as it's describing a consequence of routing payments through thousands of shell accounts across multiple jurisdictions.
Please don't do that. None of the last paragraph is about consequence of routing payments.
I have pointed out how the facts are a facade for demonization. I stand by it.
In Epic's defense, this story has been updated. It looks like Tim Sweeney has stepped up and committed to solving the insurance dilemma for the family.
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-voorhees-law-slower-car.html