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.
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.
.... 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.
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.
sudo rm -rf /
I prefer to delete all my files without sudo.
Am I bungee jumping yet?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
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!
Are we sure his name isn't Macro Marsala?
Your right. Bad publicity can be good "free publicity" in some cases but this guy basically said "look at me, I'm a moron". You can recover from accidents and other misfortunes but pretending to be an idiot is sort of a lot more difficult.
Start a VM and try it. It will do exactly nothing without --no-preserve-root.
On the other hand "rm -rf /*" will do.
not every system has a GNU rm.
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
I would have thought so too, did I not know any Italians. It's really quite plausible, whether or not it really happened.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.
Marco, is that you?
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.
I wondered if someone else had played a prank on him ... posting the story while he was off hiking in Amazon or somewhere where they don't have the interbooks so hew couldn't respond.
As it is, he made us think he was an imbecile, and now we think he's a liar. I don't see what good that does him.
// to do: joke about politics goes here
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
It took this?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.