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Peter Gabriel's Web Server Stolen
miller60 writes "Web servers hosting musician Peter Gabriel's web site have gone missing from their data center. "Our servers were stolen from our ISP's data centre on Sunday night — Monday morning," reads a notice at PeterGabriel.com. The incident is the latest in a series of high-profile equipment thefts in the past year, including armed robberies in data centers in Chicago and London. How secure is your data center?"
Wow. It never even occurred to me that people would execute traditional bank-style heists of data servers.
It's a handiwork of music pirates!
Peter Gabriel isn't the first musician to be a victim of equipment theft. Earlier in the millennium BT and Hybrid suffered major setbacks in the making of long-awaited new albums when their computers were stolen. I remember being royally pissed when Hybrid's Morning Sci-Fi , already generating a lot of buzz based on the band's material at concerts, was delayed years just because some dumbass saw shiny electronics in a studio and walked off with them.
Did they break in with a sledgehammer?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
If at first you don't succeed... buy a gun and go there in person.
A monkey, when asked for comment, was reportedly "shocked".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
The repercussions of this show what kind of destruction something like this can bring
Gabriel stole it from himself. He's jealous of Rick Astley's recent fame. He wants an internet Peter-roll using "Sledgehammer"...
A similar method of attack, layer 1 hijacking has been around at least 10 years now.
But that server was stolen, too. Unfortunately, the servercam on that one pointed to another server... which was also stolen. That one didn't have a camera, however.
There was a talk at ACM CCS a couple of years ago by a guy who specialized in physical security. He runs a company which works as site security testers. He told of being hired to check how secure a client's computers were in a "secure" data-center. The servers were in a floor-to-ceiling cage with a padlock and security cameras. All they had to do was to fake some passes to get into the data center and then either go under the floor or over the ceiling. In this data center, as in most, there was about a 2-foot crawlspace below the floor and another one above the ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling cages don't mean much if you can just go around them, and that's how many "secure" data-centers are set up. Likewise, the security cameras are only useful if someone is watching them, and in the places he tested, no one was. Since he was only testing, he didn't actually steal the machines, but he did put stickers on them to prove that he'd been there.
So, how secure is your data center: probably not very.
That is stolen music.
Now you can tell the difference.
Our data centre is behind three locked doors and on the middle floor. I love telling people when I remote into a server "yeah, I'm rebooting a box 16 miles away, behind locked doors and guards..."
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
with these new containerized data centers you don't have to worry about hackers (crackers, whatever); you have to worry about somebody with one of these.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Mr. Gabriel was reportedly quite Steamed about the theft.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
I have a friend whose co-located server went down. The Linux partition was screwed, and it needed a reinstall something fierce. I couldn't reach him (he was on vacation), so I drove down to the provider to grab the box. They did not so much as ask for my name; they just let me in, said, "go on in the machine room and grab it." This perturbed me a bit (because the machine clearly had a label that said "Property of [not me]. Do not touch."), but I went in, took it, brought it home, and fixed it up. When I brought it back (with a new install of SuSe and the then newly-released 2.6 stable), the techs remarked that the owner's roommate showed up to see what was wrong with the server. Having been told that an unnamed individual was allowed to make off with the server, he threatened to call the police. The service provider's response to him was, (and I quote), "fuck off."
No he didn't.
No one deserves to be the victim of a thief.
That kind of thinking was spawned from insurance companies.
If they had a 99.999 uptime contract, then they have every right to bitch.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
To quote a favourite band of mine:
"But this feels so unnatural
Peter Gabriel too"
naah sig schmig
The company I work for has all of its servers in a secure colo. The place offers secured cabinets, secured cages with racks, and even does walled off areas of the datacenter floor with a secured door for high paying customers like Google. The facility is manned 24/7 with cameras all over outside and in. The rear of the facility is fenced and gated.
If you're on the roster for your company with floor access this is the process you have to go through to even get to your server:
-If it's at night, you have to use your RFID badge to get in the front door
-Check in with security and sign out for your key if the door is not a combo lock
-Security needs to buzz you through the first door
-RFID badge and finger print through two or three doors
-Iris scan in the man-trap to get to the datacenter floor
-Combo or the checked-out key to get in to the cabinet or cage
On regular intervals they check the people on the floor to make sure that you're suppose to be there.
I'm not saying this place is a fortified facility that can handle a team of insurgents. However, I'd feel that my equipment is safe from the theft I've been hearing about at some datacenters. For a cabinet with a 1Mbps commit data rate with an actual 10Mbps internet connection and IPs, it's about the same cost of having a T1 to the office.
For those that want to know who we use, it's Quality Tech.
Dammit, CowboyNeal! I told you to steal Rick Astley's web server!
In this Land of Confusion, only one man could be so evil to steal Peter Gabriel's hard drive: Phil Collins. Peter could probably fell it coming in the air tonight. (Oh! Lord!) But Seriously, (gotcha!) we'll see his true colors shining when the cops catch Phil throwing it all away. No son of mine would get away with that!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
They're not particularly adept at customer service when things go wrong, but I don't know any organisation that sells mobile phones that is.
Stop right here. The rest of this discussion is a mobius strip of really bad jokes using titles of the few Peter Gabriel hits as gags. There are literally more than 50 Shock the Monkey jokes in here.
Don't say you weren't warned before continuing on in this discussion. Run while you can!
blah blah blah
Peter Gabriel's web presence isn't just about his ( great ) music.
His Witness project, co-ordinating on-the-spot hand held video recordings of human rights violations, is imaginably a far more serious target.
http://www.witness.org/
from their site:
WITNESS was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation as a project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). In 1988, Peter was part of Amnesty Internationalâ(TM)s Human Rights Now! Tour. He was struck by the stories he heard from survivors of human rights abuses and the lack of attention these stories received. Peter had brought along one of the first camcorder models and realized the potential of video as a tool against abuse; he noted that perpetrators of abuses were often brought to justice when photographic or video evidence of abuses existedPeter Gabriel is always looking for secure ways to stream video content from troubled spots to his servers that they may be archived and shared.
If this project was effected by this theft that is far more of a crime than what is being discussed here. even phil collins.