Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper records burn great and are harder to store in multiple locations
Faxes and photocopiers have existed for nearly a century
A photocopy isn't a primary record!
Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
151–160 of 440 posts
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't know exactly on it works in Romania, but proving you purchased a patch of land is a different question -- for that you have the deed. You then submit the deed to the land registry. So this situation could at most result in the seller being able to sell the land more than once or disputes over the priority of sales over liens and other competing acts subject to registration.
Here in Brazil lots of people deal land by word of mouth. The country is just too big and there isn't enough state present to make every transaction official, so people shake on it, draft an unofficial document and actually living and developing the land over a long period of time is what consistitutes ownership.
This is well documented in the the book "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto. When it was published I thought it would change the world, but apparently nobody cared. :-)
In his thesis, this is the reason capitalism cannot work well in Latin America and other nations around the world. He says that registered land ownership is the foundation of capitalism. This is how one can borrow money against your land and invest it to make more capital. Very common for example with farmers in N. America to borrow against their farm, for machines, seeds and fertilizer.
(I am not an economist)
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am pretty sure I was bitten by this bug, or a similar bug, on an IRA transfer form that I uploaded to a bank. On the scan that I uploaded, one digit in the account number was a clean "5", but the customer service person said it looked like a good clean "6". I presume their document management system was an outcropping of a system originally set up for dealing with faxes, and used that or a similar compression algor…
Thus - one could assume that all transfers stored by the bank- before the update would not hold up in court.
I don't know what you mean by "hold up in court". This seems to be an instance of software engineers making sweeping prognostications about legal matters.
"Hold up in court" as in was it duly executed and filed by a certain date, regardless of the time and extra management required for the bank's performance? Yes, why not.
"Hold up in court" against someone claiming it was an unauthorized transfer? Even without the bug, that can be contested in many straightforward ways!
But unless there is a specific legal claim that hinges on the bug being significant, it's pretty irrelevant "in court". I knew about this precisely because the transfer failed to go through due to redundancy - one digit in account numbers is generally a check digit, plus account titles and whatnot.
In general you can always challenge the validity of scanned documents, regardless of known software bugs or not! Just like you can always challenge that a paper document is a forgery. You need a specific argument and some evidence though!
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#154> 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.
Hah, scan-dal.
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#155Romanian friends have told me that this is really due to corruption. Specifically: - government gives IT/data contracts to cronies - cronies don't actually do any real security work to protect the data - things like this happen
It's always amusing how this is always attributed to the corruption.
It's even more funny on Reddit when you can see the person who is blaming cronies in his Romania but has posts of him doing some blue-collar work in the Midwest.
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#156An update from the land registry (the truthfulness of this remains to be seen depending on how fast this comes back online): ANCPI announced that it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud. The operation is being coordinated by the Special Telecommunications Service (STS) and is expected to be completed on Wednesday, July 22. After the migration, authorized institutions will inspect the app…
> it had begun migrating its applications to Romania’s Government Cloud This proclamation, coming from a governmental organization, makes me afraid they are doomed. Effectively they are saying they are fixing the mistake by repeating it. What they should do is admit fault. Freeze the system. Get independent expert help. Best wishes, recent Romanian land buyers and sellers Edit: thank you @cbg0 for giving us this upda…
They are getting expert help. I expect that the agency maintained their own local deployment on infra administered by its own employees. Now they are migrating to the central 'government(-maintained) cloud'.
At the same time they are working with authorities.
Not everything needs an external consultant.
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
So that 50% attack results in someone taking all the land? No thanks. It is a poor idea to use blockchain for government registries. If you want transparency, simply publish signed daily updates and that's enough. Just use simple DB with backups, and optionally, a printer printing changes on a paper.
Yeah, the overwhelming majority of the benefit of blockchain here is just gotten by making the data public and signed. Now you may argue "that is a blockchain, not every blockchain is associated with a shitcoin" but to be frank that ship has sailed, if you wanted to defend that you'd have had to do a lot more work over the past decade.
Which could easily be solved by just making data publicly accessible. Actually I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to download land registry say every month. Same actually goes for any stock ownership in companies over certain threshold.
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#158Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#159> 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…
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.
I interpreted this as a vagueness related to the reporting accuracy, not the existence of a backup.
Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database
#160> 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…
> I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided. You know, it's not like people would come and steal your land overnight because you can't provide proof of ownership.
Happens far more often than you would think in developing countries.