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.'"

Comments

Re:That's what I was going to say

[Totenglocke]

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.

Re:Simple...

[Andy Smith]

"MS's Hotmail specifically says they're not responsible for loss of data"

Whereas the likely truth is that they _are_ responsible for loss of data, but they don't _accept_ responsibility.

Data loss is just not an issue with The Cloud!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Do you have any idea?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not Microsoft's first fuck-up with Hotmail

[blind biker]

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.