Adults backup their blogs

I once wrote that I didn't feel secure having so much of my life happening on Google-hosted services. But then, as we're all prone to do, I felt the pressure of more urgent matters to care about, and didn't take any significant steps toward fixing that particular problem. Maybe, then, I deserved the piece of corporate shit I found in my mailbox yesterday — a poorly machine-translated version of this e-mail so many other bloggers have been bombed with:

Important Update to Adult Content Policy on Blogger
You are receiving this message because you are the admin of a blog hosted on Blogger which is identified to have Adult content.
Please be advised that on June 30th 2013, we will be updating our Content Policy to strictly prohibit the monetization of Adult content on Blogger. After June 30th 2013, we will be enforcing this policy and will remove blogs which are adult in nature and are displaying advertisements to adult websites.
If your adult blog currently has advertisements which are adult in nature, you should remove them as soon as possible as to avoid any potential Terms of Service violation and/or content removals.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

"Identified" by whom? I mean, I could take "adult content" to be a compliment: yes, please, I'd really like to think what I'm writing about is not childish — but I know that isn't what they mean. They mean: "having to do with sex/sexuality/pornography, which we believe are all the same, and think is a bad thing". Except that, never mind I wholeheartedly disagree with them (since according to their terms-of-services I don't have the right to disagree), this is a blog about role-playing games, for fuck's sake! What's their issue with it, exactly? That it's got a catchy title? That I link to a few so-called "adult" sites in my blogroll (including sex-ed blogs, newsblogs, political activism blogs and art blogs which happen to include pictures of human genitalia, or breasts)? Or maybe it's my occasional use of curse-words?
Now, I don't run any ads, thus this change of policy shouldn't affect me, in theory. But they already misclassified my blog as a "sex" blog, right? Without even bothering to check. Thus, how likely is it that they correctly discriminate between "blogroll links" and "ads", always and without error? Yeah, not the most reliable ground to build my house on.
Out of solidarity with actual sex bloggers, though, I'm not going to make any preemptive change (be it to my blogroll or else). Instead, I backed up my blog and, well, should l'Orgasmo Cerebrale suddenly disappear from this Google-hosted corner of the Internet without further notice, you'll know why — but then it would soon pop up somewhere else.

If you have a blog hosted on Blogger, here are instructions for performing a backup — something which I now think wise to do regularly. ErosBlog also suggests a method to backup virtually any website using HTTrack Website Copier: I haven't tried it yet, but I will. Keeping backups in multiple formats will probably make it easier to set up my blog again on a different server, should I have to.

«I'd rather be a pig than a pro-censorship advocate.»

Why I'm not on Google+

Having a large number of friends — and not in the Facebook sense — I'm not surprised that I received several invitations to Google's new "social network", Google+. Instead of rushing headlong into it, though, I let those invitations rest for a while, while considering whether joining would actually do me any good.
I'm glad I was cautious. In almost no time, and with no effort on my part, I received enough off-putting, if unsurprising, news to decidedly make my mind.
Google+ terms of service and policy are as always geared towards the benefit and safety of Google, not my benefit and safety. They are explicitly sex-negative, even going so far as removing a specific exception for art nudes which was previously in place. They are chicken-hearted blanket statements meant to empower the company to arbitrarily disallow content on a case-by-case basis, which amounts to censorship. Cue the completely arbitrary ban of Anonymous. What does that remind me of? Oh, yeah…

Well, I'm not joining. I didn't resist joining Facebook for so long just to impulse-subscribe a service which is just the same, affected by just the same liabilities and involving just the same dangers. For the time being, I'll go on using the Status.net (specifically identi.ca) as my sole "social network" provider.
My connections — the real-life ones — are an asset to a company like Google, and what has Google done to merit me gifting them with my assets? My demands weren't that high either: just by doing nothing at all they'd have qualified as exceeding my expectations. But no, they censored content and people, instead.
I'm actually beginning to feel uncomfortable having my e-mail, blog and a couple in-development websites all hosted by Google: surrendering this much of myself to a company was a mistake. At the time, they looked like the safest of companies, but I was just young and naive: big business is big business, and in the end their friendly facade is crumbling and revealing the extent of the lie. I will go looking for alternatives. So, maybe I ought to thank Google+ for raising my awareness of the problem.