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Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

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Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#51
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why the say "appears to have had," is that an assumption or was it stated somewhere? Without an offline backup, it would indeed be a very serious problem, more than it already is.

My reading is: "The agency would surely be panicking more than this if they didn't have an offline backup".

"Offline backup", as in "thousands of shelves full of dusty binders spread across offices all over the country"?

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#52
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fires? floods? documents getting lost/misplaced/stolen/destroyed?

Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.

There have been plenty of instances of paper-based land registries being wiped out. It's just usually a very local problem because paper lends itself more to decentralized storage

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#53
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you will own nothing and be happy"..no thank you!

I always thought the “you will own nothing” expression referred to a Gini coefficient of 1, not 0. The intent of abolishing private property would presumably be the latter.

Depends on if you're scaremongering about Capitalists or Commies.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#54
post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

Remember the xerox-scandal years back, that invalidated officially scanned documents. You already life in a world where "scanned before" means you can legally challenge the validity of a document.

Is this the scandal to which you are referring?

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restored from very old backups and paper documents.

"Very old" could mean that they were not up to date. What did they do when the backups didn't match the actual situation at the time of the breach?

Property is not fluid and doesn't change hands very often. Sure, in a large enough market lots of activity happens every day, but any given property is only involved in a transaction once a decade. You can have very old backups and still capture the state of the market to 99%+. Any recent activity will have brokers, buyers, and sellers, who all have current copies of their activity.

Also, this sort of event should result in some hackers being found and jailed for life as well as their families being bankrupted permanently. Or, if they are being protected by their government, this should be considered an act of war and an appropriate military response should be delivered.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to be rather sturdy in my experience. Would we even be able to read an electronic record after 100 or 200 years of storage? Old piece of paper is quite accessible.

There have been plenty of instances of paper-based land registries being wiped out. It's just usually a very local problem because paper lends itself more to decentralized storage

Yes, so quite limited in scope. We have no experience with storing and keeping accessible electronic records for hundreds of years, though, but we know already that accessing old storage media and formats isn't necessarily easy.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#57
post #5

> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania. So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable…

[deleted]

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#58
post #14

Was hoping it was a political act in favor of land reform or against owning property.

"you will own nothing and be happy"..no thank you!

Fair enough. But you do realize that all ownership is a made-up shared fiction that most people believe as real.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#60
post #46
post #32

[flagged]

I would be less comfortable with my land registry tied to a blockchain, as soon as I lose it (who is much more likely to) it's impossible to get my land back. What's wrong with paper records backup up a digital record and audit trail. This all seems like a solution for a non-problem to me.

A blockchain isn't stopping you from doing any of those things, if anything it's facilitating different backup models by different parties. A paper record is so much more susceptible to various kinds of risks, adversarial and otherwise. I recommend to look past the hype or hate at the technology. A blockchain is the logical extreme of where you end up when you think about how to sync backups, and you recognize that it comes with certain mathematical limitations on how much disruption you can handle.
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