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Are We Ready For a True Data Disaster?
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions how long we can go before a truly catastrophic data disaster strikes. 'The lure of potential profits in the information economy, combined with the apparent ease with which data can be gathered and a lack of regulation, creates a climate of recklessness in which a "data spill" of the scale of the Deepwater Horizon incident seems not just likely, but inevitable.' Witness Google mistakenly emailing potentially sensitive business data to customers of its Local Business Center service, or the 1.5 million Facebook accounts and passwords recently offered up on an underground hacking forum. 'These incidents seem relatively minor, but as companies gather ever more individually identifiable data and cross-reference these databases in new and more innovative ways, the potential for a major catastrophe grows.'"
The question is, will we go for a top kill on the data leak, or will we first attempt more risky solutions which profit the data miners? What kind of concrete do you use to seal a data leak? And what's the conversion factor between the scale of an oil spill and the scale of a data spill? In other words, how do we get from m^2 to BAU (Bad Analogy Units), so we can compare them?
So I'm thinking about powerful solar flares wiping out all magnetic storage on the day side of the earth. Trillions of dollars in lost research data, crippled communications, you know, a catastrophe. Turns out this asshole is talking about compromised facebook pages.
Get a grip, drama queen.