This is why I don't trust my own videos/photos/documents/notes/etc. to "the cloud". How many examples like this have there been where peoples stuff just disappears one day with no way to bring it back? More than I can count.
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.
Exactly, the cloud should be used as a secondary backup, not a primary device. Using it as the latter is no better than you keeping everything in one place at your house.
I need to add cloud mirroring. What cloud service are you using?
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.
For offsite backups I use Arq with Amazon, but the remote storage provider largely doesn’t matter all that much. Data is encrypted. Choose based on price.
Arq goes to OneDrive too. Just remember to exclude the Arq files from files that are downloaded by default if you're running the client. I'd look at B2 as well, but for the few terabytes I'd use it for it's a bit expensive with the plummeting Australian Dollar.
"Just remember to exclude the Arq files from files that are downloaded by default if you're running the client."
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'm still on crashplan. I prepaid for 5 years, so I've been moved to the small business plan since my 5 years aren't up yet. At some point I'll probably need to look at moving my data somewhere else. Anyone have any recommendations on the cheapest place to backup 3TB of data?
Trust the cloud? Hell I won't even purchase music that isn't on CD or LP. If my access disappears for whatever reason (hacked, I've posted something politically distasteful on a linked service, whatever), even if I get it back, I could be a long time without my collection.
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.
People look at me like I'm crazy for not giving in to streaming services and insisting on maintaining a music library. It's hard for me to avoid concluding that these people simply don't really enjoy music.
I don't think it's that, really, that streaming users don't really enjoy music, it's just that streaming services simplify things, removing the need to handle physical media. Never underestimate the warm, convenient glow of laziness that streaming services enable.
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 only listen to albums with Spotify. I have over 100K listens on last.fm and 90% of it is with Spotify and listening to full albums. That doesn’t have anything to do with streaming. A lot of “casual” people are always going to go after singles mostly as soon as that’s available.
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.
> someone who really gave a damn got their hands dirty
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.
You mean a company whose management can tell the difference between working on something complex and not working at all? Sadly, very few exist, and those end up being bought by the evil kind.
You really need to find a new job. I don't know anyone who works for a company like you describe. Just ask questions like "How long have you worked here?" and "How do you handle tasks that run over their time estimates?" during interviews.
I did 8 months contracting for $large_uk_enterprise and it was exactly like that. I tolerated it for so long because the money was good and I thought I might be able to learn some useful lessons.
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.
I’ve never worked at companies where using Jira was synonymous with bug quantity over quality. There will always be buglets, bugs, Bugs, and then BUGS.
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.
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).
Sounds like another outrageous case of digital sharecropping, where the value of the service was primarily provided by the users and the community they formed, yet such value was not respected, and people's work--a cherished part of their lives--was casually thrown away.
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.
Maybe we can file a patent application for a business process that discovers product features by learning behaviors within an online community. Even if we have to narrow the claims to product features that alienate the community I think we would still be able to find investors.
Full disclosure >> posting this here to establish prior art
> they didn't want to pay for storing all of those recipe and cooking videos twice...videos are big and space is expensive...
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.
I think that's the point though - you never realize this kind of failure until it's too late. That's why you're better off biasing towards just paying for space and being careful with added complexity unless you really need it.
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.
True, but in this case they were storing what was the core value of the site and what the users were using the site for. It’d be different if they were just collecting all PII forever because they didn’t want to think about it.
The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time which is much more expensive. Telling your programmers to erase all comments and noncompilation important whitespace would be monumentally dumb for instance. It is far cheaper to keep every version of code back to 1997 than to have to reverse compile and reverse engineer to document once for instance.
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.
> The people who say that are the ones who pay for programmer time
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).
Well. Videos are orders of magnitude larger than many other common web content formats. And there are probably several codecs available on a CDN. It's reasonable to call that expensive and still claim that cloud computing is cheap overall. It is amazing to store gigs of photos for cents per month on AWS.
But I would guess bandwidth dwarfs storage costs here, so it does seem odd.
But that's another good point, if you're storing multiple encodings, storing a single backup is less than double the cost, because you only need to back-up one encoding.
Slow-to-retrieve backup services like S3 Glacier are usually much cheaper, too.
This is basic, though. If the stuff was stored in a Unix filesystem it would be the difference between a symlink (correct strategy) and a hard link (risky). Correctly implementing the hard link strategy (in the Unix analogy, this happens in the filesystem code itself) requires reference counting. Either you invest the time to implement that, or you should stick to symlinks.
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.
I respectfully disagree. It should be public record when a product or service fails to perform to the expectation of the customer. This is why we have outlets such as Yelp and Amazon reviews. There is no incentive to improve the product if they aren't put on blast.
“Public record” is not equivalent to “in the tech press”. If there was a central registery of IT operational errors, where data was carefully reported by all public and private companies, then your stance would be absolutely understandable. But in today’s press climate, the focus would be on dragging their name through the mud for clickbait, rather than on interviewing them about their plans to improve going forward and evaluating _those_ claims for technical and business veracity.
ps. Happily, I haven’t a clue who they are, not have I tried to look.
If an article was posted by $random_internet_person about a car that exploded with "some details changed", where necessary context is missing (e.g. what the car company did in the aftermath to ensure it doesn't happen again), then yes, we should withhold the name of the company until a fuller picture is available. It's not ethical to go about blaming and shaming unless you know for a fact what happened and the context surrounding the incident. And unless you're Rachel, you don't.
That's not what happens though -- people have shrieking tantrums that you aren't doing X for free, or enough, or high quality enough, or that an engineer made a mistake, etc etc etc... And if you ask why they trusted their incredibly precious things to a service for which they don't pay, you get yelled at more.
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.
Hmmm. Inclined to agree if you replace the company in this argument with a person.
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.
Yeah, generally agree with all this. I don’t think we need to shame them, as the gp initially mentions. But I personally have an interest in understanding the exact issue, seeing the response, etc. I.e. I believe there’s value in knowing the company, the actual incident, and so on.
> Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so.
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.
It does, but I don't see how an entity such as a corporation can be "shamed." A corporation is not capable of feeling shame. The individuals who work there can, but no one is asking for any individual to be named. I suppose it could said those who work there might be indirectly shamed by association, but that's a stretch.
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.
Even it were a person, people have a right 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.
If I post on Twitter that my car blew up with a car wreck photo from some random website that I’ve photoshopped slightly to block Tineye, the Internet will set itself aflame trying to figure out what kind of car it is, create a press firestorm around the issue, and tank the company’s stock.
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.
I agree with your point in general, but in this case all we have to go on is Rachel's account of what happened, which was posted to illustrate a particular point and is probably missing important context. I'm not saying the company isn't deserving of a public shaming, I'm just saying we don't know if it is deserving of a public shaming because all we have to go on is one person's humorous/scary anecdote with "some details changed". Posting the company's name at this point seems premature.
I agree, you can't complain that every communication is locked and scripted and then try to hurt someone who has tried to be as candid as possible. It's just pushing towards a more and more unauthentic world.
>Ask yourself why you consider it right to shame them by name, when OP did not consider it right to do so. [...] ,
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".
You can't "dox" a company by calling them out for lying and incompetence. Rachel simply does not want to get sued. This isn't some virtuous moral high ground you're standing on, stop pretending otherwise.
I agree with you in general, but the other problem with the
post that you're responding to is that it's likely to elicit guesses... and guesses in the guise of knowledge... some of which may be wrong.
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.
While I vehemently disagree with what the a user above you said about "doxxing" companies being wrong (it's not doxxing, it's whistleblowing), I also don't think we should guess. If someone KNOWS what company it is, I do believe it's in the interest of the uses and society to know this, as a warning, but guessing just potentially hurts innocent companies that have nothing to do with this.
>Even inside the company, the internal tech support is essentially gaslighting the employees who report this problem, by saying things like "it never existed"
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.
Some companies are caught in a cycle where they're not charging enough to their customers, much less enough for tech support, and as a result their policy seems to be to frustrate you as much as possible by denying everything if you contact them with problems, while refunding you store credit if you persist. Please send photos - you send photos - "we don't see anything wrong." A refund doesn't actually solve the issue!
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.
Another even more egregious example -- around 10 or so years ago, I was a big proponent of the writing website Urbis. It was a site where you could submit a piece of writing and get feedback from other users. You can still see its activity on the Wayback Machine. It was an interesting site still without equal as far as I can tell.
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.
This was 2008, only a few years after Facebook had come out and well before the "People are the product" conversation that would come to dominate the discourse around monetization. Free services like Gmail and Livejournal had set a precedent for my naivete in expecting a decent product to be available for free. I've certainly learned my lesson from that experience.
Probably the most unique thing about Urbis was their system for generating reviews which I thought was pretty interesting -- reviews on your work were locked by default. In order to unlock a review, you had to write a review of equal word count on someone else's work. I thought this was pretty successful method for incentivizing active participation on the site, something I haven't seen replicated anywhere else. Although I more or less grew out of writing recreationally, so I wouldn't even know if there were a successful modern alternative to Urbis.
This reminds me of the issue that came up recently with Twitter (I think?) re-using image IDs that were very old. A lot of professional sports teams ended up with very odd/cryptic posts.
Add to this youTube's annoying habit of leaving placeholders for deleted videos in my playlists but not telling me what it is that got removed, thus preventing me from ever finding it again. I fail to see what purpose is served by deleting the metadata as well as the possibly-copyright-infringing content.
Yes! If it at least said "xyz was removed due to a copyright claim by abc", but no, instead there are just blank spaces in the playlist. I leave them there on hope of this feature someday being added.
YouTube is inconsistent about how it reports the video name. IIRC I noticed that on Roku, it will show the name in a playlist or if you try to play the video.
If nothing else deleting/hiding the metadata makes it less likely that someone outside of youtube will figure out a way to accurately determine how many times a given piece of content has been uploaded to youtube. Instead they hide it all and pretend like it never happened.
I discovered this recently: If the uploader themselves deletes the video then it will also be removed from your youtube history, as well as your Google account's history @ myactivity.google.com
On my playlist with music that's not yet in the public domain, I've added in the description of the playlist the full list of the name of the songs. So that each time a video got removed, I only have to check the list and find another copy on YT. Still it only works because I rarely add any new videos to the playlist.
I spotted Facebook does this on more than several occasions. "Videos are big and space is expensive and we are cheap". Not only videos, but images would also spontaneously go for some users.
This is reminiscent of the Reply All podcast's episode about a photo storage service that had major problems. If i recall correctly, some photos in that story were actually recovered, but it took a while.
...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.
I make it a point to Dropbox critical files(non-media) & do monthly backups of my phone & Mac to 2 physical drives. I'd love for something which does this daily of specific folders on my phone & Mac & makes sure there are no duplicates etc. And then on a monthly basis archive them to 2 or more different cloud storage vendors.
Clouds pace costs money - most users data is actually redundant. Hamsteed cat pictures and the likes of them. So why not save space by having a original and all those users just having a hash. Of course, if theire stuff... Is not theirs.. And theirs alone.. The users shall never know.. The omerta compels you.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadThough, 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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Oracle
Here is an article with NSFW examples: https://deadspin.com/this-is-probably-how-the-cubs-ended-up-...
I am a great believer in regulation through being sued to smithereens
...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-...
(1) Yes, that is plural.