Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Destroys Avsim.com, Along With Its Backups
el americano writes "Flight Simulator community website Avsim has experienced a total data loss after both of their online servers were hacked. The site's founder, Tom Allensworth, explained why 13 years of community developed terrains, skins, and mods will not be restored from backups: 'Some have asked whether or not we had back ups. Yes, we dutifully backed up our servers every day. Unfortunately, we backed up the servers between our two servers. The hacker took out both servers, destroying our ability to use one or the other back up to remedy the situation.'"
Owned.
You now will be escorted off-site.
Maybe future historians will consider this a dark age, whose intellectual production was lost.
Please don't say our treasured facebook, twitter, slashdot posts, wikipedia revision wars and v1agra spam may not be preserved for posterity.
I'm not yet convinced that information that today exists only on the internet is really meant for eternity :)
I'm assuming he wasn't backed up, either.
How about we start shooting people who can't recognize jokes. Sheesh.
Wait, we have to care? I thought we were supposed to point and laugh...
Blank until
Anyone who hacks a flight-sim sight has no life and really needs to get laid.
Coming from a slashdotter that is pretty rough.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
But then who's going to take out the Gibson?
Only goatse is eternal. The rest is being used to seed a randomness generator somewhere.
Futurist Traditionalism
Actually, he got regular backups at the Dollhouse. I'm not sure how he'll respond to being in Eliza Dushku's body...
I kept them in my other pocket.
A public viewing will be available at:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080116064652/http://www.avsim.com/
No date has been set for the funeral.
I hear it's murder. ;)
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Thirteen years is a lot of data.
Bah--it's not that bad. They actually have crude backups of all their terrain data. They just have to figure out how to restore from 'IRL' format.
There's no place like
How about we start shooting people who can't recognize jokes. Sheesh.
Then who would mod for slashdot?
Just callin' it like I see it.
So, when rats attack your cellar, you pick the most intelligent and ask for advice?
Or just kill them by anything at hand.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
So, when rats attack your cellar, you pick the most intelligent and ask for advice?
Yes, he said don't worry about it and go back to posting on Slashdot.
Because after all, we know that words only have one meaning, so if someone uses the word "hacker" one way, it must mean the same thing as when everyone uses the word hacker.
I think everybody in the Linux and MS-DOS-prompt community knows what a hacker is. However, I will supply you with a formal definition:
According to Eric S. Raymond, a confirmed higher deity and the mastermind behind the geek unification conspiracy, hackers are a group of neo-pagan, anarchist, smelly, arrogant, gun nuts and highly intelligent bastards who wish to establish an intellectual junta, which will be known as The Irate Rand-worshiping Anarchist THC-growing E-lliance, or IRATE.
- Ref: http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Hacker
Wikipedia revision wars will be a GOLDMINE for future archeologist.
Think about just how much they reveal about a certain topic.
Such as the difference of opinion about the color variations of the carrot !
What, you mean like this guy? You probably wouldn't even have the browser you're using right now if it weren't for that particular, uh. hacker.
And ironically, JWZ has a pretty good simple guide on backups: http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html
Why would you put that on your resume?
lightening hits your building or arson or theft
I thought lightening came under theft
which is totally what she said
Oh, we can make a good car analogy out of this: Having a backup car in case your primary car crashes is a great idea (if you can afford it). Except that instead of keeping their backup car locked in the garage, these people attached their backup car to their primary car with a tow bar and dragged it around everywhere they went. When the primary car crashed, the backup ran into it a fraction of a second later. Now they're sad that their backup car is dead too and are somehow suprised they don't have anything to drive.
You only have 4GB of irreplaceable data?
Just my family photos/videos archive broke the 2TB boundary this year, and that doesn't include the 1TB of archive media from my personal projects (images, old versions of personal websites, video montages, etc).
I think having a normally off, seldom used mirror of my 3TB of data the best backup solution I can muster.
You only have 3TB of irreplaceable data? I'm currently up to 5PB, though half of that is my pr0n collection.
Oh, wow, you are the reason I hate geeks. You haven't actually contributed anything whatsoever of value, but you are nitpicking irrelevant details out of some misguided sense of *something* I can't put my finger on.
1(a). If you want random data on Linux, /dev/random is the correct solution and /dev/urandom is not. There are many ways of quickly generating entropy, and unless you're willing to write the paper that proves the latter is acceptable for your particular case, you should always choose the former.
1(b). To repeat myself, because you did: "urandom is more than enough" - is it? Could you make an argument that urandom is as good as random? Do not use "well, /dev/zero is good enough" because that was your second bullet point, and such would render your first redundant. When one is choosing a random sequence for security, why would a pseudorandom sequence ever be good enough?
2. Your next argument is that "there are no reports", which suggests you haven't even read earlier in the thread. It is certainly possible for civilians to read overwritten data on low density media. Assuming you have a modern hard drive, we're reduced to a theoretical maybe, in the same way it's theoretically maybe possible that someone will wander into my house in the middle of nowhere and steal stuff - but I still keep the front door locked. You don't wait for an exploit before choosing the more secure option, idiot.
3. If, as you have asserted, /dev/urandom "costs mostly the same" as /dev/zero, how on earth do you manage to conclude that it is wrong to choose /dev/urandom? You might as well toss a coin. Are you just trying to find ways to put down the grandparent? Did he sleep with your mother or something? (If anything, a random initialisation is more likely to break a bad filesystem driver, and so is more valuable.)
4. Would you honestly choose the less portable 'cat' over the more portable 'dd', just to make some side jibe about how leet Lunix is? Do you also realise that 'dd' has more options for optimising your operation, so is a better command to start off with? Actually, why the fuck are you even assuming Linux? Some GNUphiles are worse than Microsoft at embracing and extending to the point that everything GNU is just slightly incompatible with everything traditional Unix.
N.B. The GP did not say "well, it's clear that it's impossible to read overwritten data" - he indicates that it is unlikely and provided the fastest, simplest method of both removing unlinked data and reducing the chance of reading overwritten data. Now
- /dev/zero will require me only to guess whether a 0 was previously 1; /dev/random will require me to guess whether a 1 was previously 0, and a 0 was previously 1, with the extra effect of random nearby writes to further distort the magnetism;
-
thus /dev/zero is a needless potential weakness with absolutely no benefit.
Please go back to school and change your field. People like you are always the squeaky wheel in the workplace, with your mindless one-upping on minutiae getting in the way of any creative personality.
To any sysadmins and DBAs...
Make sure you have offsite backups
Any person in the IT community who was alive to remember the events of 9/11 should have learned a valuable IT lesson from that event.
Repeat after me. I will not store my "offsite" backups in the other tower.
Who really needs their services knows howe to contact them and knows that if he has to ask the price, then it's too expensive for his needs.
The A-Team does data recoveries now?
That's a really bad analogy.
You must be new here.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That's not an archive, pal, that's evidence.
You wanna destroy that stuff, the sooner the better.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It was in that one episode of CSI:NY...
Note to self: never, ever ask you about your hobbies.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Sheesh, so many questions. Why worry about that junk? We'll just let the flight simulation software deal with that.....oh wait...
That's why I have an offsite backup mom locked in a bunker in the next town. Ya know, just in case my primary mom gets teh surprise basementsecks. Because I really care.