

Disgruntled employee kills JournalSpace with data wipe - thomas
http://www.geek.com/articles/news/disgruntled-employee-kills-journalspace-with-data-wipe-2009015/

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cdr
If you read the original post, the supposed "disgruntled employee" worked for
lagomorphics, not JournalSpace, and there's no evidence said employee was
involved in the data loss, just conjecture by JournalSpace.

Flagged for being incorrect and not adding anything.

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jws
There don't seem to be new facts in this article, but it discards the
"catastrophic OS flaw" theory and selects the "disgruntled employee" theory
though it appears to conflate it with a historical disgruntled employee. It
seems this is possibly shoddy reporting rather than new information.

Back at journalspace, I notice that if you buy their domain names they will
throw in 6 months of free hosting on the same machines that destroyed their
business. How generous.

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timf
The original journalspace announcement was discussed here, btw:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=417762>

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acangiano
If true, the disgruntled employee belongs in jail.

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bprater
What I can't fathom is whether this person realized that there were any legal
ramifications to doing a data wipe?

Did he think they'd just ignore the fact that he just killed their business?

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acangiano
Criminals often have poor impulse control, and let their emotions govern their
actions without worrying very much about the consequences of their actions.
This is particularly accentuated in those criminals who are also affected by
psychopathy, for which the consequences of their actions towards other people
are irrelevant.

~~~
zkinion
How do you know the full story of it? A lot of startups in the valley now are
totally dicking their employees out of equity and doing "firing layoffs"
instead of really laying people off.

How do you know that journalspace wasn't being shady and screwing them in some
kind of contract or negotiation gambit?

I can think of quite a few startups these days that deserve a similar fate to
happen to them.

Journalspace sounds like one of an army of web 2.0 startups that aren't going
to survive the coming years anyways and go broke. Maybe the founders can now
focus on better projects. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

~~~
acangiano
> How do you know that journalspace wasn't being shady and screwing them in
> some kind of contract or negotiation gambit?

It's irrelevant. If you have a dispute with someone and you feel he is
treating you unfairly, it's your right to leave and/or sue him, not to burn
his house down. If you burn his house down you are a criminal, no matter what
he did to you.

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jrp
I don't understand -- they seem to have been hosted by someone else; did the
hosts not do backups or did the employee somehow delete those too?

Seems like at least two things went wrong.

~~~
gcheong
It looks like automated backups is an add-on service, not part of their base
hosting package.

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dcminter
As an aside, my hosting company accidentally deleted my backup share on their
off-site SAN. I was not amused.

First rule of backups: trust nobody!

~~~
grouchyOldGuy
There's an infinite variety of problems that can exist with backups. Back in
the early eighties I had to restore a file from a backup that was more than a
year old, but couldn't read the tape (even though it was the same drive that
created the backup). We called in our Field Engineer and he hooked an
oscilloscope up to the tape drive and adjusted it until we were finally able
to read the tape. It took most of a day.

~~~
gcheong
Backups almost seem to be a running joke. Whenever we've done a restore of a
db from backup the plan is basically "try to restore from the latest backup,
if that doesn't work, try the next latest one and so on until you find one
that works".

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fnazeeri
Remember that scene in The Matrix where Cypher kills Switch and Apoc by
unplugging them. "Not like this."

Wow. What a way to go.

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ktharavaad
and here is the link to the guys who fked them over:

<http://www.lagomorphics.com/>

Its funny that they listed Journalspace under their "notable clients" section.

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Tichy
Interesting problem: how can you get to having backups if the person whose
responsibility it would have been to take care of backups is the one who
screws you over.

I guess this calls for technical CEOs...

~~~
wmf
The two-man rule?

First one who snitches on his coworker gets a bonus?

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weegee
having no tape backup is a crime

~~~
sireat
I thought tape backup had died out (good riddance 40MB QIC tapes).

This article: <http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=267> from 2 years ago calculated
that tape becomes practical when you have more than 10TB to backup, I imagine
it is even worse now, that is you need to backup even more data before tape
becomes the economy option.

Maybe there is some recent advance in tape technology?

~~~
grouchyOldGuy
Tape is a long way from being dead. We have tape libraries directly attached
to our SAN and they backup 160 GB per tape. Because of data retention laws (we
are a government agency) we need to archive backups for years, which we do
off-site in a data vault. For SOHO use though, disk-to-disk backups generally
are cheaper and faster, but it's still important to store backups off-site.

