Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them • Hacker News Board

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#221

Post by dsabanin » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #218

dsabanin wrote: post #211

From time to time, I have a perisistent feeling that iCloud might be misplacing my files. It's just a feeling, but I realized that it's quite challenging to be sure it's not happening.

It’s not so hard. A few command line commands on a Mac. Store the md5 of each file, throw it into a JSON file. Load it all up in a dict. I do something similar every month. Gotta do something with those cores overnight :) It’s very brute force and inelegant, but also simple and quick enough.

One day, I'll do it. Honestly, I'm just afraid to find out the answer… :)

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#222

Post by ISL » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #7

I take nightly images of my computer's primary drive and replicate them offsite, with alerting if it fails and automated scheduled backup restore testing. It blows my mind to think that some random schmuck like me has better backup procedures than these multibillion dollar global corporations. Companies that don't invest in their IT end up paying for it tenfold down the track.

How fast is your internet connection? That sounds like a big lift for a full image every night.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#223

Post by tedk-42 » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:14 PM UTC

kohtatsu wrote: post #62

nabla9 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can be just calculated risk. Incredible damage for some users can be negligible damage to the company. In this case just 10TB of data was lost, so maybe thousands of users for the long term storage option. Losing customer data has potential for big reputation or brand damage, but surprisingly often the damage is relatively small. Putting in too much effort when potential damage to business is minimal may not be…

This comment reads as "This is normal; nothing to see here move along". Which is more of an indictment on the state of things than on the comment itself. If you can't protect people's shit, don't offer to hold onto it for money!

"If you can't protect people's shit, don't offer to hold onto it for money!"

If you can't sell a reliable car, don't make one?

Products fail sometimes and we in the tech-sphere get to laugh about it. No such thing as 100% failure proof. Customers that paid for the service would be angry but no doubt, they'd get their money back.

Yes they might have lost more, but that's the business sometimes.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#224

Post by xnyan » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

galoisgirl wrote: post #209

jiofih wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “calculated risk” doesn’t make it okay when the risk is all on the consumer losing their memories. This corporate view on business risk alone is unethical.

There is no such thing as lack of risk in this world. When a restaurant takes your reservation for Friday night, there's a 0.00001% (or so) risk that they will burn down on Thursday or that half the staff will get heart attacks or something. Should they not do reservations at all?

If they don't have a working smoke alarm, or are storing flammable materials over the burner, or don't have enough emergency exits then no, they should not do reservations at all.

It seems Canon did not have a backup, they had replication of data. If you are storing data for money, then this is a professionally negligent behavior. Not being able to prepare for everything is not an valid excuse to not prepare for what you reasonably can.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#225

Post by smoe » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:16 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #154

dividedbyzero wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, people can hold even very critical views of things without full-on 120% zealot-level boycott, especially if it's about the very system that produces next to every single thing necessary for life and survival, save oxygen maybe.

Capital markets produced the the goods and services that make this forum possible. If you hate capitalism, you hate basically everything that got you to this conversation. So why not stop feeding into it, in the few obvious ways you can? Because it's fake, you don't hate capitalism if you like Hacker News, even if you think you can. Hacker News is literally owned and operated by venture capital firm

There is a difference between being critical of something and hating it. And if you want to change a system, there are not many ways to do so without interacting with it.

Say you happen to be born into a communist regime but dislike communism. Getting out of it might not be feasible for any reason ranging from not being allowed to, not having the means, to not wanting to leave your community behind. No matter if you now want to completely tear down the predominant social-economical systems or just tweak them, either way you going to have to interact with them.

If you want to destroy capitalism, hacker news is probably not the most promising place to start. If your goal is to tweak it I actually think it is.

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#226

Post by ibeckermayer » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:17 PM UTC

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #206

This sounds to me like the classic “replication is not backups” situation where (at best) all of the user files were stored in RAID array someplace and that is what the malware ate. If there had been actual backups and effective backups then it should have been trivial to restore non-corrupted files. It also sounds like someone made the decision not to backup the raw images because they were “big” - that is actually…

What’s the difference between replication and backups? Is the distinction that backups must be stored on separate infrastructure, whereas replication might still be 1 or 2 points of failure?

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#227

Post by JoeAltmaier » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

tedk-42 wrote: post #223

kohtatsu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment reads as "This is normal; nothing to see here move along". Which is more of an indictment on the state of things than on the comment itself. If you can't protect people's shit, don't offer to hold onto it for money!

"If you can't protect people's shit, don't offer to hold onto it for money!" If you can't sell a reliable car, don't make one? Products fail sometimes and we in the tech-sphere get to laugh about it. No such thing as 100% failure proof. Customers that paid for the service would be angry but no doubt, they'd get their money back. Yes they might have lost more, but that's the business sometimes.

There's a price point out there for everybody, and the lower ones are not very secure I imagine.

What's missing is, some certification level that tells you how secure the data is. So you know what you're buying into?

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#228

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:19 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #180

XorNot wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent tends to matter with the law. Ford knew there was a problem, knew they could fix it, and elected not to because "it's a small number of deaths". You can replace things, not people. That retrospective analysis utterly misses the point: for the area they were responsible for, if the company knew they could do better and elected not to, then they got treated exactly as they should have.

>Intent tends to matter with the law. Ford knew there was a problem, knew they could fix it, and elected not to because "it's a small number of deaths". You can replace things, not people. Per the link posted by the GP the Pinto did not have any problems relative to other cars of the same type and era. Ford's "intent" (if you can call it that since they didn't know the future at the time) was to say "err, we don't re…

[deleted]

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#229

Post by jaclaz » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #177

jaclaz wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that actually happened, in the known Ford Pinto Memo "affair": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost–benefit_analys...

And a little further down the same page you linked.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Retrospective_safet... Turns out the Pinto was within the realm of normal for a car of that type and era and if you're building something normal it's hard to justify recalling it at great expense unless everyone else is recalling it to (in which case that would be normal).

Yep, but that is an analysis from a Legal viewpoint.

What - I believe - made the Pinto case memorable was not that in a given subset of accidents it was (or was not) slightly more dangerous, it is the fact that the matter was looked into by the manufacturers and that it was waved off on a mere cost/benefit basis (with a supposed cost for increased security per car of US$ 11).

Mind you this is all in all normal, any safety norm or related technical specifications is (or should be) based on the "reasonable costs for society to obtain a reasonable increase in safety".

Re: Canon's cloud platform has lost users' files and can't restore them

#230

Post by microcolonel » Tue, Aug 18, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

smoe wrote: post #225

microcolonel wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capital markets produced the the goods and services that make this forum possible. If you hate capitalism, you hate basically everything that got you to this conversation. So why not stop feeding into it, in the few obvious ways you can? Because it's fake, you don't hate capitalism if you like Hacker News, even if you think you can. Hacker News is literally owned and operated by venture capital firm

There is a difference between being critical of something and hating it. And if you want to change a system, there are not many ways to do so without interacting with it. Say you happen to be born into a communist regime but dislike communism. Getting out of it might not be feasible for any reason ranging from not being allowed to, not having the means, to not wanting to leave your community behind. No matter if you…

> There is a difference between being critical of something and hating it.

The original comment said “hate” not “is bad”; probably the source of a lot of the confusion in this thread lol.

> If you want to destroy capitalism, hacker news is probably not the most promising place to start. If your goal is to tweak it I actually think it is.

Idunno, even just calling it “bad” seems to imply that there are better things, which is not really a statement about “tweaking” anything. A statement in favour of tweaking capitalism would be something like “capitalism on its own can not reliably produce moral goods”.