Slashdot Mirror
Some Hotmail Accounts Wiped
tomhudson writes "PC Magazine reports that many Hotmail accounts have lost all their emails. Users' entire email histories have apparently been lost. 'Users can still log in sans issue. However, they arrive at empty inboxes: No custom folders, no messages in "Sent" or "Deleted," nothing. As one might expect, the abruptness (and unexpectedness) of the purge has left some of Hotmail's long-time users a bit in the dark.'"
I would have thought that any long term hotmail users must have been in the dark a long time ago, not to see the light of gmail. /googleFan.
We have it forced on us by my university, and as soon as it was possible, I set up everything to forward to my gmail account. Havent had to use the shoddy interface in a long time.
Maybe they finally tried to switch Hotmail over to Windows NT...
No sig today...
you get what you pay for. If email is valuable to you, back it up yourself, or get a service which provides an SLA (uptime, backup, etc). MS's Hotmail specifically says they're not responsible for loss of data. But, people use it because it's free, then want to bitch when there's a problem.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Besides, isn't it called something terrible these days like "Windows Live Hotmail"?
Well apparently with this new "upgrade" they're changing the name to Windows Dead Hotmail.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Who's going to trust Microsoft to have a part of it? Am I the only person, after the whole Danger debacle and now this, who would never consider trusting Microsoft with any important data? This kind of thing looks really, really bad.
Make love, not reality television.
Of course. sans = Storage Area NetworkS, which is obviously where the author thinks the problem lies.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You gets what you pays for. You're paying nothing except your privacy - which corporations demonstrably don't value highly - in exchange for a webmail service. One which explicitly declares in its terms and conditions that you have no expectation of data integrity.
And if you only ever use the web interface, there isn't even any chance that you've mirrored your mail to your local computer. Webmail relieves you of the responsibility of installing a mail client, backing up your data, etc.
Now everything is going "cloud", I can see a gap in the market for "family cloud" appliances - plonk them on your home network, trust a few similar units on the networks of family members, and get the benefits of redundant backups, mail service, etc, exchanging the cost of your privacy for a few hundred dollars.
Obviously it was a security breach, which is why they called the SANS institute to help figure it out.
John
Besides, isn't it called something terrible these days like "Windows Live Hotmail"? Once more showing That things connected to "Windows" is a data loss risk.
Windows Active Live Visual Hotmail .Net 7 Personal Edition
This makes their new marketing slogan for Windows Live all the more humorous! 'To The Cloud' indeed! More like POOF!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
I saw an article on that, some sort of sans paper. It was pretty rough.
rewriting history since 2109
Do you? The author used it in a perfectly acceptable manner. "Sans" means "without". So "Users can still log in sans issue." can be read as "Users can still log in without issue." That describes the situation perfectly. Users can log in just fine, but they can't view their messages.
I appreciate it when people criticize the authors or submitters for their stupidity or ignorance, but that's just not the case here. You are the one who is in the wrong, and we should criticize you.
"I use crowd based storage."
I tried that for my beer. It didn't work out.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You can easily backup your emails by setting up an account with another webmail provider and set that to download and save email from your original account. Of course that means you are giving two companies access to your information, but since you used web mail to begin with, I'm assuming that you are ok with that.
Just because the mails aren't visible doesn't NECESSARILY mean they are deleted. It could just be a replication issue amongst certain servers(you see this happen on slashdot from time to time, ie a story looks like it doesn't have any comments because there was an issue updating the server you are currently using). Eventual consistency is a powerful tool, but things like this can easily happen if a problem occurs.
Monstar L
About two years ago Yahoo changed some back end stuff to rid of the country based email system (I was .au) they had and to centralise everything. In the change many peoples accounts got wiped or they got locked out of their accounts. I got locked out of my account and couldn't remember what smart ass answer I had put in to the secret questions over a decade ago. Yahoo refuse to do anything if you can't get past the secret question and so now I have nothing to do with them.
P.S. Secret questions are the worst "security" feature ever. Either they are far too obvious and easy for casual acquaintances and Internet detectives to break (ala Sarah Palin) or you never remember the stupid shit you put in them many years in the past.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Personally, I like Mailstore Home when I'm using Windows. It's convenient, backs up only unique emails and allows for convenient archive. With the ability to search for and restore individual emails as well.
How many "nines" did Microsoft promise with their supposed reliability?
Zero for non-paid accounts. There is no SLA for free accounts, same as with gmail.
Anyway, this was not a technology failure, but the result of a Hotmail's inactivity policy. Which is clearly described on their site.
When MS acquired Hotmail, they tried to move from BSD to Windows/IIS, and failed (back then, anyway) miserably. Then they poured shitloads of commercials and bling into the UI of Hotmail. Finally, they intorduced a rather draconian policy, whereby if you didn't access your account in 30 days, you were locked out. Since I hated the commercials and the bling, I had a hiatus in Hotmail use, and got locked out. I also could NOT re-create the same account name, even if nobody was using it. Anyhow, I was locked out until that day when an exploit ("hack") was discovered, with which anyone could access anyone else's account, without supplying a password. Does anyone remember those happy days? So, I "hacked" into my own account. And yes, the account was there, with all the e-mails. Why the lock-out policy? I dunno, one of the many brainfarts generating from MS.
I remember opening my colleague's account and calling him over, just to show him it was possible. That was the last day he ever used Hotmail.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I did with someone who was going to get an e-mail address for the first time. They were unable to send e-mails until that was filled out.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
To the cloud! ...oh wait a sec.
I did with someone who was going to get an e-mail address for the first time. They were unable to send e-mails until that was filled out.
They must of fixed it - how lucky for you.
Another disposable account - less than 2 minutes - no sigh of demand for a 'phone number.
Bad google, bad.
It is really funny. Not so long ago there was a IAmA (interview) in Reddit with some of the Hotmail engineers.
One of the main things people didn't like is that Hotmail deletes all your data if you do not login in some time (3 months IIRC). Well, after being confronted with that, the engineers answered "well, we incresaed the time from X to 3 months" or something like that...
That was exactly the reason I left hotmail (when Gmail became available). I had *everything* from the first days of the net there (I created my HM account in August, 1997) but the bastards deleted it all.
Hotmail sucks so bad
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Until one day in '04, when I logged in after having taken a bit of a break from the online world. It was the first time I'd logged in to my Hotmail in a month, so I expected there to be quite a lot of mail. There were plenty of new messages, but all of my old email was gone!!!!
I freaked out for a while, then read through the "terms of service" or whatever they were calling it at the time. Seems they had silently implemented a policy whereby they delete ALL of your email if you fail to log in for 30 days. Ten years worth of email GONE!!
I suppose they were trying to provide incentives for people to log in to their Hotmail more regularly, but it all it motivated me to do was to open a Gmail account immediately.
Sure, it was a free service with no guarantees. Perhaps I should have been making backups of my precious emails. Thing is, this was not something they did by mistake. This was a policy that they willfully implemented. They chose to punish their subscribers. I don't get it.
Microsoft sucks.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
Why didn't Hotmail back everything up to the cloud?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
To the cloud! ...oh wait a sec.
As MS got absolutely nothing to offer on Cloud (once you filter PR mess), perhaps they try to make people lose trust to cloud services? ;)
As it is, it's always full of spam for porn and online pharmacies.
You know, I'm still waiting for someone to combine the two.
... do it yourself.
A vanity domain name, a VPS hosting an ubuntu instance running postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, roundcube, denyhosts and duplicity backup to some rsync.net space.
Yes it costs money, but I control the whitelists, the filtering, the retention and the backups. It's a small price to pay. I wouldn't expect my grandmother to set up something similar, but I can host extra mailboxes if need be. It's not that hard to do if you've been running linux for a couple of years. Set it up and forward a copy of your email from your current provider for a few months until you feel comfortable with your set up.
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
Pfeh, I wish it was still that easy to delete your account - I tried to delete my Hotmail/live account this morning, but apparently I do not have the correct combinations of runes and chicken bones required.
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"