Slashdot Mirror
That Man Who 'Deleted His Entire Company' With a Line of Code? It Was a Hoax (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As many Slashdot readers speculated, the story about a man deleting his entire company with a line of code was a hoax. Marco Marsala, the owner of a Web hosting company claimed on a forum earlier this week that he deleted all the data on his company's server. Stack Overflow, which runs the forum, says that the post was a hoax, and pointed to an article on an Italian news outlet, which describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company. "It was just a joke," Marsala told the paper.
"Give us your data we'll delete it"
I suppose they really really believe, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
1500+ clients and no backup?
HOAX.
Maybe it's just me, but a 'marketing effort' that 'jokes' about deleting all your customer's data doesn't seem to me to be a really good joke or marketing.
Waiting for the inevitable: "Marco Marsala files for bankruptcy as company goes under."
describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company
He tries to get more business by saying he deleted all his customers' data ? What an idiot. And anyone who remains his customer after this is an even bigger idiot.
sudo rm -rf /
.... then he's a fool. After all, placing the idea of "this person is an idiot without proper backups" isn't exactly what I'd like potential customers to be thinking about my company.
describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" to promote Marsala's company
How does telling everyone that you are incompetent "promote" your business?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So he IS actually a stupid moron. I'm really ashamed of being Italian.
I would totally trust my business with this guy who jokes about deleting servers. I mean, it's obviously the right thing to do.
The way most companies do backups there's no point. If backups are a checkmark on the official risk management schedule, you're fucked when you need one. I've seen it. To PROPERLY manage backups means you need to dedicate extra man-hours to making sure they can be restored in a wide variety of circumstances. By actually restoring from backup on occasion. Can you restore after you lose a server and the backup software on it? Can you restore after you've had a virus undetected for a week? For a month? Are your incremental backups too unwieldy to work in real life? Does it actually take a full day to pull the reels and get the data back? Do you have offline copies? How sure are you that your encryption can be decrypted?
Doing backups properly is hard. The story would have had a ring of truth if it included backups that couldn't be restored because the encryption key was the wrong version.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Let's try and be positive here; this guy won't make that mistake. And lots of other people will have been encouraged to think about their backup scenarios, which will be a GOOD THING. Overall I think it's been positive, though less than elegantly so!
How many people really believed that he didn't have or had deliberately sabotaged the --no-preserve-root feature of rm?
I'm pretty sure a lot of people were calling hoax on this one right from the start, myself included.
What about the guy who deleted Slashd*%.nn$# l;
NO CARRIER
Are we sure his name isn't Macro Marsala?
...this right here.
The whole point of a viral stunt is to get exposure for a product or brand.
Out of all the news stories this generated (many copy and paste jobs by newspapers), did anyone catch his companies name? nope, not mentioned once.
Secondly, most of the news sites covering this funny "accident" won't bother reporting that it's fake, so the chances are most people just know the guys name and will run a mile from having anything to do with an incompetant host.
So he might as well have deleted his entire server and backups for all the good this stunt did for him.
Did you know there's a GIF of exactly that? It's not gross or anything, it's really great.
http://www.funnyjunk.com/Mcpoo/funny-gifs/5487720/
is those news mentioned to the jokers ?
If it's a hoax, he won and the internet "news" organizations once again prove their stupitity.
It it's real, well, I feel for his customers, but the guy deserves to be out of business.
After the guy gets a thousand emails saying "Your dumbass deserves it for wanton stupidity."
Honest.
Trust me with your data.
Wouldn't be the first time some fraud was trying to rustle up some free publicity. Remember Ken Starks and his issues with Karen of AISD who banned Linux from the classroom. Thing is AISD had no knowlege of the issue: Linux - Stop holding our kids back
Currently Starks is having issues with the 'Taylor Housing Authority', as in 2013 they refused permission for Starks to site a computer in one of their housing projects citing a lack of appliance inspection. Last Feb they contacted Starks requesting 125 for their residents: Be Careful of What You Wish For...No, Seriously
So many news sources mentioned this story. The alleged "journalists" couldn't be bothered to check sources. They just parroted everyone else.
This is off topic but one reason I became an independent is because of the huge amounts of bs passing as "journalism" these days. The right wing idiocy that Fox calls "news" was painfully obvious. So easy to get smug over it... until you start thinking is left wing media any different? And sadly the answer is no. The left media is just better at peddling their point of view (see leftist priest class at NY Times and soft Marxists at the Guardian). They frame their politics as "human rights" rather than just do what journalists are supposed to do. Objectively report facts. Sermons and edutainment not really journalism. The only way to get a good view of a story is to hit as many news sites... of different ideological points of view as possible. .
The PCWorld post contains this sentence:
"The most surprising thing might be that so many people believed him, including those on a forum for technology experts."
Yes, we believed it, because it's all too plausible. We've been there. We've done that. We've cleaned up the mess.
Just wow. I did not see that coming. It's like that time I told mom that the NSA wasn't listening to everyone's E-Mail and then later on the NSA turned out to be listening to everyone's E-Mail. Or that time I told mom there was no vast global economic conspiracy to keep the poor down, and then that Panama Papers story broke. And then this time I was talking to her and she was all like "There's no way that guy deleted his servers like that! You'd have to be functionally retarded!" and I was all like "No, No, you underestimate the incompetence of your average IT worker! I totally believe this is true! So I guess I'll just call it quits and hang up the ol' prognosticator's... er... whatever the hell it is that prognosticators wear. Hat? I'm going to go with hat.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Not from the DB who ran the hoax, but all of the hero types on Slashdot claiming all kinds of ad hominem against people who questioned whether it was a hoax. I could care less about the guy who ran the hoax, he is just one of them losers who wants attention (even if it's bad).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
One of my best friends in my 20s was an italian immigrant who came to the US at age 24. His *constant* warning to everyone was:
If you can't eat it, fuck it, wear it or drive and it is not shoes, do not buy it from italians. Also, everyone was a great shoemaker. As an [electrician, plumber, mechanic, programmer, boss] Steve is a great shoemaker. The absolute best.
Captcha: classy........
Jackass will be lucky if his systems are not hacked now.
He got lucky, fixed it, and acted like it was a joke. Remember don't suspect !malice when it could be stupidity...
Doing backups properly is hard. The story would have had a ring of truth if it included backups that couldn't be restored because the encryption key was the wrong version.
Actually, doing backups properly is easy. For any number of servers less than 50, backups and restores are pretty easy.
Doing backups for thousands of servers is where it gets hard.
Doing backups for Windows is hard too. I've never seen any Windows backup tool put the system back exactly as it was.
Doing backups and restores for Unix systems isn't hard. Linux makes this ridiculously easy. LVM, snapshot, mount the snapshot readonly, backup. umount the snapshot, delete it, be happy. If the backups are file-based, versioning makes this a 1-5 minute effort. It really is that easy.
30 days of versioned backups is 1.10x the size of the original. For some systems, 120 days of versioned backups are 1.20x the original. Just depends on how much daily change data there is.
Need it encrypted? Use an encrypted file system. Most Unix backup solutions will transfer through ssh, automatically.
If you are pushing critical backups to "the cloud" -
a) I think you are stupid.
b) I think you are an idiot.
c) Encrypt BEFORE sending.
d) Don't believe anything that provider claims. Marketing seldom has anything to do with reality.
e) If you don't completely test the restore, forget it. You only have "hope", not a plan. Where I work, we have a plan. Most systems can be restored to the point they were 45 days ago in less than 45 minutes. Some to 120 days ago in 45 min and all where they were last night in 45 min. The only reason it takes longer is when the data copy back physically takes longer.
Oh ... and we use VMs for almost everything, so moving a system from physical server to another physical server isn't hard.
We only have 30 servers, so our methods might not scale for places like I used to work, with 40K servers, but the ideas and a good system do go far. At that place, every project was required to build their own backup, recovery and DR solutions based on the RTO/RPO requirements. If funding for the DR solution wasn't available, the system was scaled back until it was. The only time I know that an outage lasted longer than allowed was after a system was put into production, but the DR design had not been fully implemented (it was already purchased). They were down 8 hrs, all day. 22K workers couldn't do anything. They finished the DR solution very quickly after that. That single system had more servers in it than my current company has total servers (counting VMs too!).
Did I mention - 100% F/LOSS software used here?
It's been a quiet day
he stretched it too far when he asked what to do if he switched if and of in dd...
When people are not really paying attention, they -really do- have short memories. And people pay less attention to things now that they used to.
It works just often enough to make the Marketing managers think it is generally true. But don't bet on short memories, especially in our business. 8-)
I'm right there with you. I once told an intelligence officer that bulk communication surveillance was impossible because Bruce Schneier said so. I envy that officer's poker face.