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Comment by velcrovan | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, the content in those parts of the article is just flat wrong. I’m a longtime Backblaze customer and fan of their hard drive stats. This is the first time I’ve read something from them that felt at all “off”, let alone as wrong and gross as this.

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I would take it as a pretty strong signal that their growth is slowing. Except that their Q4 was apparently good. The stock is suddenly down 15% in the last week, but I doubt they could or would react so quickly to that. It's still well above the 1mo and 6mo levels. IOW the recent uptick was a reaction to their Q4 but now it's regressing to their business as usual.

TLDR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> Object Lock serves as a digital vault, making data immutable for a specified period. It creates a virtual air gap...

"Virtual" and "air gap" is quite frankly an oxymoron. The two concepts are just at odds with one another. This article gives me misgivings about Backblaze as well.

It's poorly worded for sure. Perhaps the object lock servers:

* run on an immutable operating system,

* enforce strict (local) whitelist-based firewall rules,

* pull, not push, data from other servers,

* restrict remote administration to a physically isolated network,

* or disable remote administration entirely.

I feel like that's as close as you can get to the benefits of air gapped environments without the drawbacks of servers directly exposed to the network. Or, well, unless there happens to be a 0-day in the TCP/IP stack. It depends on the threat model I guess.

It's hard to know, but since it's virtual, we know with certainty that there's no guarantee of any sort of "air" between the object locked data. Much less the total severance of any kind of plugged in network that "air gapped" implies.

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