Disappearing videos and disappointed grandmothers
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
From what I understand, one day, the creator decided that the site wasn't making him any money and shut it all down. I foolishly didn't back anything up and all my prose was gone. Granted, my teenage writing wasn't about to win any awards or woo any publishers. But some of the stuff I wrote was meaningful reflections on experiences at the time, meticulously edited and reviewed, and I still wish I would have been able to read them now.
What really irks me is that all he had to do was give me one day and I would have been able to save all my stuff. I have very little sympathy for any company that does anything like what Rachel describes here.
Though, saying I don't trust my files to the cloud is not the same as saying I don't use the cloud. I keep two copies of all of my files in 2 physical location. However, both of those physical location are within 10 miles of each other, so I also mirror everything to the cloud. That is, I always have 3 copies of all of my files, 2 in physical location and 1 in the cloud.
I know so many people that have all of their important videos and photos in one location (their phone, the cloud, a hard drive in a drawer, etc.) I can't imagine how they sleep at night knowing everything could go poof at any time. I've tried explaining this to some of them, but they think I'm paranoid.
Not their house. Their neighbour's house. How long ago did this xkcd came out? https://xkcd.com/1150/
I was about to give Backblaze Personal a try, but stopped because I don't like how they handle encryption. If I'm understanding their site correctly, restoring requires giving them your key. I'd prefer something where decrypting for restoration is client side.
I'm currently contemplating Backblaze B2 or Amazon Glacier using Arq or Duplicati[1] or something like that. (Or maybe using something I write myself which can better adapt to my specific needs).
Also eyeing OneDrive, since I have 1 TB of that from my Office 365 subscription, and am only using a whopping 300 MB of it.
Hmmm...could I make a large disk image and store the .dmg file on OneDrive, and then mount that image and use it as a Time Machine volume, thereby getting a cloud Time Machine backup?
[1] or duplicity or duplicacy...I'm not sure which of the three similarly named backup programs I'm thinking of!
Edit: looks like the answer to that last question is no. Time Machine does not seem to allow using a mounted image as a Time Machine volume.
Now how do you use that key to restore without feeding it into the website?
Funny you mention that. I'd been trying to figure out why my disks were running out of space. Turns out my Amazon Drive desktop client was syncing the encrypted Arq files back to my laptop, then those were being fed back into the Arq backup set. You can imagine how quickly that spins out of control space-requirements-wise.
I have however accepted that as a possibility (no matter how unlikely) with Steam as I don't really go back to play old games, but I expect the music I purchase to accessible to me for decades without question.
I do think that there can be something lost when listening to an assortment of single tracks as opposed to cohesive albums. Getting a new album and letting it play all the way through definitely feels like a different experience to me than putting on a playlist of assorted tracks.
With the prevalence of streaming music I wonder if more and more artists are abandoning the creation of cohesive albums?
There's also the issue that, I think, that compressed audio files are particularly susceptible to bit-rot (perhaps compressed files of all kinds?). If you don't have a physical copy to re-rip from then you could well be boned.
I do think though since so many people don’t listen to albums anymore some shift will probably happen over time. Though it seems like nothing has changed too much yet and it has been a few years.
Here is an article with NSFW examples: https://deadspin.com/this-is-probably-how-the-cubs-ended-up-...
Although this person is the hero of the story, I feel obligated to point out that in today's JIRA-driven "what have you done for me lately" close-the-stories what's-your-velocity we're-about-to-downsize-so-you'd-better-prove-you're-valuable culture of "efficiency", the person who did this either had a LOT of job security (as in, compromising photos of the CEO in a public bathhouse job security) or did this on their own time while spending their "working hours" closing tickets and attending conference calls.
Okay, maybe not a sane company, given the story, but there are plenty of places without the toxic culture you describe above.
I got told off more than once for showing initiative and pushing something forward that wasn't on the approved list for the sprint even though I had time and there wasn't anything left to pick up.
Yes, mobbing fans, I know, I could have jumped in on a story that already had people working on it. This is what management there said to me as well.
Nevertheless I'm rather old fashioned so I have two comments to make:
1) Too many cooks... etc.
2) Adding more people to a project/story that's not going to deliver on time will only make it later. (Here I'm obviously paraphrasing Fred Brooks.) And if it's going to deliver on time then why add more people instead of enabling those people to work on something else that's useful?
In the end I gave notice without any plan about what to do next but had three opportunities lined up before I'd worked my notice period and have been much happier since.
On the flip side, every once in a while in the fish-shell GitHub repo we get an idiot that files an issue titled “is this even maintained?” because there is a non-zero number of opened issues (or I file a bug on GH and the the repo owner closes it immediately as “will revisit later” so the issue count doesn’t go up).
It’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem.
You have to force people to own every ticket or they will just rot.
I promise I'm sober
My more noble and magnanimous side would wish that unnamed service's owners and developers success in the face of such an awful mistake, while my harsher side feels like failure would serve them right for not respecting their users and not valuing things that should be valued.
Full disclosure >> posting this here to establish prior art
And yet... from people who never pay the bills for anything, all I ever hear is 'space is cheap, computing is cheap, blah blah blah'. It's all 'cheap' until you have to pay for it.
It isn't free, but it's certainly cheaper than killing your entire company.
Being cheap about this is just likely to lead to more bugs and cost in debugging later anyway. There are tradeoffs and exceptions, but there's a reason the saying exists.
This is why businesses that deal with information need staff who are able to reason about the lifecycle of information.
Not making a reference count and respecting it killed the company using one store of duplicate data, if anything, prolonged the company.
If you are getting anything out of it net greater than it and there isn't a better use for it keeping it is worth it.
TYPICALLY the ones I hear that from are developers who aren't in charge of money/budget, and usually don't ever think about the cost of anything. The 'shiny/new' syndrome, coupled with little oversight, leads to nasty $ surprises later on.
And yep, "programmer time is more expensive" all night long. But at some point, other expenses are coming out of someone's budget someplace. Just because it's less than some other line item doesn't mean those costs can't add up to more than was expected (or needed, or budgeted for).
But I would guess bandwidth dwarfs storage costs here, so it does seem odd.
Slow-to-retrieve backup services like S3 Glacier are usually much cheaper, too.
It's mind-boggling that this happens but having experienced it myself, it sucks. Attempting to address an issue that sure seems to be due to another team's system is already difficult, so when they respond "it's not us" you're not only left holding the bag but questioning yourself for doubting that system.
Obviously, sympathy is limited for a free service, but I've encountered this with a paid service. And a few weeks later they announced broad based price increases, which made for a clearly implied backstory. Not enough money for labor costs.
This post goes out of its way to avoid naming the site in question.
If you know the answer to the above question, think carefully before providing that name here or anywhere. Ask yourself how invoking their name specifically contributes value to this story. Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so.
If you can’t think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you’ve got is “we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid”, this post already does so and without doxxing them.
If you truly feel that it’s necessary, proceed, but I think honoring the author’s clear intention to avoid naming them is the appropriate decision here as well.
ps. Happily, I haven’t a clue who they are, not have I tried to look.
eg "You said free, and now you're telling me I can't store 20TB of videos on your service! Un-fucking-believable". Cue all the statements (from free customers) that they'll never pay :rolleyes:
See also the threads on here when a company has increased prices.
Very disinclined in actuality, since this is a company providing a service to people who have handed over custody of their personal data (It sounds like very high-value data! Cooking videos aren't easy to make!) under the assumption that they will get something out of the deal, i.e., the videos would be hosted and they would be warned if they were going to be deleted (or at least apologized to if they were deleted by accident and not lied to).
>>> If you can’t think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you’ve got is “we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid”, this post already does so and without doxxing them.
Hmm, how about "we should hold them up as an example for users to avoid".
Doxxing doesn't exist for corporations, it only exists for individual people. The proper term of art here is whistleblowing or journalism. And the reason the author avoided mentioning the company name is probably to cover someone's ass who signed an NDA.
To prevent people from getting ripped off.
Doxxing is the wrong metaphor here because it implies someone being put in a vulnerable position because of their private activity. It isn't "doxxing" to name the restaurant in town which persistently fails health department inspections, or the contractor who can't install shingles competently. Why? Because that's business, and business is in the public sphere. Providing bad reviews prevents those bad actors from harming other members of the public.
The framing of your reply hinges on an unstated assertion:
“It is always ‘right’ to name and shame a corporation.”
I contradict that assertion in my plea, which results instead in this assumption:
“Consider the ethics of the situation before naming and shaming a corporation.”
Having laid out that, I will next address the literal question asked: “doxxed”, as you correctly identified when forming your reply, is used here as a shorthand for “digging up information about an entity that was intentionally withheld from you, with intent to shun and/or shame that entity once you discover who they are”. The definition you are using more restrictively says “person” rather than “entity”, which is certainly understandable.
I hope this helps you comprehend my position better.
Therefore I don't see how there's any issue in naming a corporation for their role in a situation that affected customers/users in an adverse way. Particularly since no users are bring identified either.
In short, no real people are being doxxed and while a corporation might have some legal entitlements (none which apply here), it has no expectation of privacy.
Let's stop treating corporations as if they were somehow people. If Rachel doesn't want to share the company that's fine, I'm sure she has her reasons, but that doesn't mean it's unethical for us to know.
If a car blew up because of a faulty gas tank, is it “respectful” to not name the car company?
If a vet killed your poodle because of negligence, is it “repectful” to not name the vet?
Free markets depend on the free flow of information. “Protecting” a company that did something wrong isn’t “respectful,” it’s unethical. Knowing a company (or a person) that messed up when delivering a product or service to the public is important.
Trusting one person enough to go find which company they’re trying not to name only proves that you were able to find which company they were trying to keep you from naming.
It doesn’t in any way provide veracity to their story, but if they’ve shorted that company’s stock, it’ll certainly provide them a profit.
The issue here is that you don’t “know” anything if you _only_ dig up the company, because you don’t know anything more truthful than you did before someone told you a possibly-untrue thing.
Unfortunately, people are prone to hearing “I found a likely suspect company” and respond with “therefore the story is true, burn them to the ground”.
Feeding them a name to riot around by naming a probable suspect _without any proof_ does nothing to improve the story, and materially harms suspect companies, their founders, and their employees. I don’t mind if you share a company name when you’ve proven they did this, but if you can’t prove it, don’t just post a random company name on the Internet and say “I think it’s them”. That’s inciting a riot without cause, and why I encouraged otherwise here.
The other possibility that you didn't seem to consider is that the author (Rachel Kroll) is withholding the website's name to protect herself and not the company. If she only heard about the company's video deletion via second hand information, she'd understandably be hesitant to name the company in her blog. The person telling her the story may have not gotten the facts exactly right.
>and without doxxing them.
If a user can factually state that <RealName> cooking website deleted videos, that's not "doxxing" the company. That's a very peculiar word to use and it doesn't apply to this situation. If someone factually states that the MS Windows 10 upgrade deletes users' files, that's not "doxxing Microsoft".
Discussion like this that try to "name names" can result in people making assumptions about others (be they people or companies) that could very well be unjustified.
...Okay, I did a little looking, and the followup to this episode was about a month later[2], and actually some pictures were able to be recovered after another company bought out the first and tried to save the photos. In any case, it's an interesting case study of an incident that shares someof the same themes.
1: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/71-the-picture-taker#e...
2: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/77-the-grand-tapestry-...
I am a great believer in regulation through being sued to smithereens
(1) Yes, that is plural.