Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from a malice.
Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
71–80 of 100 posts
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#72The joys of IT. Back in the day, to wipe years of records you had to burn or shred tons of paper in multiple locations. Now you just crash one little system... Despite 20 years of Microsoft-induced crashes, clear best practices and yadda yadda, most organizations will still have a single backup system for any given data repository -- if they have one at all. And the answer when shit happens is "outsource! Go to the c…
> The joys of IT. Back in the day, to wipe years of records you had to burn or shred tons of paper in multiple locations. Now you just crash one little system. [...] most organizations will still have a single backup system for any given data repository -- if they have one at all. No, back in the day, you could still wipe years of records because most people only used a single filing cabinet with no duplication or of…
Back in the day, in 2300 BC, records caught in fires were preserved forever, while records not so lucky eventually returned to the earth. (Barring the odd formal peace treaty inscribed in metal.)
We know a lot more about conquered Mesopotamian kingdoms than we do about successful ones, because step one after taking over a city was apparently burning it down, or at least burning down the palace.
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, such ideas would create an atmosphere of fear and increase cover-ups, rather than solve problems. There needs to be a solution that acknowledges the inevitably of mistakes and still deals with the issue.
Exactly this. How many of us would be up in arms if developers were fired for making mistakes? You just need to look at all the stories around rm -rf...
Maybe thats exactly what should happen?
I mean, whole "security" antics where companies loose tens of millions of logins/credit cards numbers and it all ends with "southpark BP apology"
People fuck up epically and get a slap on a wrist with a promotion, I mean, come on
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#74There has been too much recently of government agencies losing data due to "crashes" or "inadvertent" deletions. For example the IRS, state department, and now the Air Force. A really easy way to fix this is to make a law so that if government data such as this gets lost, then the cabinet level person responsible for overseeing the agency immediately loses their cabinet level position and is barred from further work…
Making mistakes is an important part of learning and becoming experienced. I'm sure we've all done a bad "rm -f" from time and time, and each mistakes makes you more cautious in the future.
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#75If they were running a Windows server, they didn't care about their data.
Can you elaborate?
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only thing between your data and /dev/null in a cloud data center is a vacation and expired credit card.
Thank goodness storage is cheap. I've had a revolving door of credit/debit card numbers over the last few years thanks to identity theft, and the SaaS providers I use for personal stuff are really good about keeping my data around even after invalid credit-card auto-pay cycles fail. For more serious data, I have to imagine that SLAs generally define data retention periods even after exiting the agreement, right? (I l…
This is also a bit "above my pay grade", but i've heard bits and pieces about how our company has some kind of agreement setup that if there is a billing dispute that there is a minimum amount of time that must pass before they can shut us down.
Obviously it doesn't help if the company goes under, but it's not as simple as the parent commenters statement.
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#77There has been too much recently of government agencies losing data due to "crashes" or "inadvertent" deletions. For example the IRS, state department, and now the Air Force. A really easy way to fix this is to make a law so that if government data such as this gets lost, then the cabinet level person responsible for overseeing the agency immediately loses their cabinet level position and is barred from further work…
It's always an attractive idea to eliminate incompetence through threats. It's been tried lots of times throughout history, and has never succeeded (in fact, it usually makes things worse).
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This idea is too simplistic. Although I used to support it. I've changed my position from yours to 'retrained and demotion' position. Since people make mistakes, I think being 'barred from further work' is counter-productive and the government would lose out on many able and competent workers. Heck, this idea could also be exploited by lower-level workers due to not liking their higher-up bosses; i.e. a lower-level w…
If you have backup, a crash won't lose months of data. I'm ok to lose a so called "competent worker" if he/she hasn't been doing something as simple as off-site backup. It's local data corruption here. At worst you loose the data since the last backup. Now, in the army, they have redundancy procedures for everything, and you want to make us believe the one server used to keep them in check, not only had crash beyong…
You'd be surprised how tenuous backup situations are at most companies and organizations. Even if your company is doing full disaster recovery checks 24/7, one after the other, a "well-placed" failure/mistakes or small series of failures/mistakes can lead to data loss.
Many of the things that cause data loss are just simple mistakes caused by a failure to review changes carefully, even when you have multiple levels of review- I would dare to say especially when you have high confidence that someone else is reviewing your changes.
"Manual" data changes, e.g. executing SQL statements or scripts that execute SQL that aren't a part of your application, in my experience are the most common cause of data loss.
After manual data changes the second most common in my experience is not understanding what you are doing. For example, you might take a chance on an upgrade that fails because you have to meet a deadline.
Changes to application code are next. Typically when making changes to an application, a little more thought may be put into it than a one-off data migration or change, but if you are under time pressure, don't know what you are doing, or are assuming someone else will catch your mistakes, you could easily screw everything.
Following this- mistakes that cause hardware or software failure. I worked at one large organization where storage arrays with various power backups were just "turned off" by a contractor that didn't understand the impact of what he or she was doing.
Finally, you might have configuration issues or the hardware might just fail.
Really, there is no substitute for having your data backed up frequently, and in a way you know how to easily restore and have tested, by building another machine from the ground up to replace it and documenting and practicing that well. Very few do this frequently. And even if you do- what if all of your hardware were destroyed? Can you easily go out and buy something off the shelf with instructions you have in your head or stored safely around the world and rebuild everything?
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#79Really? Like there are no backups? Is this amateur hour?
This is a Lockheed snafu, so yes, it is amateur hour. Much of the data is backed up, and more of it will be retrievable from original sources. Maybe not all of it; I'll be very interested to see what gaps remain when they declare the issue resolved.
I would withhold judgement on Lockheed. It wouldn't surprise me if someone there raised the lack of a backup strategy as an problem with the govt. ... only to be ignored or told there wasn't enough budget for it.
Re: Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records
#80May the additional security requirement deter sensible backup procedure? Like you can't have copies of backup somewhere? Or backups have to be encrypted and the keys are in a USB drive somewhere, which had gone missing/bad and the encrypted data can't be recovered?