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Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

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Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#311

Post by locao »

alexpotato wrote: post #230
franciscop wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like…

> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this: - get multiple people to sign sworn a…

Sort of the plot of Banana Joe.

Everytime I get stuck with some kind of circular bureaucracy I shout "it's Banana Joe all over again!" and no one understands.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#312

Post by AndroTux »

RandomLensman wrote: post #231
AndroTux wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you need to know how to read to read paper copies. Same thing, essentially. Anyone speaking hieroglyphics fluently? Point is, if you take care of your archive and make sure it remains accessible, it doesn't really matter whether it's digital or analog.

Not at all the same thing - what equipment do you need to read hieroglyphs on top of understanding the language (which goes for digital, too)? If you have the paper and understand the language, that's it. We already can see that accessing old digital data isn't necessarily easy if it wasn't always kept on/converted to current media and formats (will we keep that up for millenia)? And both storage can be broken, needi…

For the third time: IF you take care of the data, it’s fine in both cases. If you neglect your beloved book for 70 years and store it under a bridge, it’s going to be completely useless as well. The key part is the taking care of your medium.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#313

Post by dghlsakjg »

amiheines wrote: post #237
alexpotato wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this: - get multiple people to sign sworn a…

If you're married and Jewish, the wife's mother keeps the marriage document, so even if there is a house fire and all documents are lost, your mother in law usually lives in another house, so you can pick it up from there.

I’m married and Jewish. It would be pretty surprising to me if my wife’s mother had even seen our marriage paperwork let alone possessed it. This also isn’t a tradition I’ve ever heard of in my family.

Or did a joke about overbearing mother in laws just go right over my head.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#314

Post by ilamont »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #273
giancarlostoro wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, if you're unlucky enough to replace your Social Security card 10 times, they will no longer issue them to you anymore. It is a lifetime limit, and they fan it out to 3 per year. Oddly enough, if you legally change your name, they will send you a new one regardless of the limit.

The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed. In fact, that is the first thing I was told by the ssa dot gov site, when I applied to receive a new card. It is very unlikely that you will be asked, even by a prospective employer, for your actual card, because let's face it: it doesn't even have a photo, or anything but that unique number on it. Anyo…

> The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed.

In my state, it's one of the allowed document types for proof of social security number, required to get a real ID drivers license.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/ma-real-id-documents-checklist/down...

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#315

Post by dghlsakjg »

greycol wrote: post #293
olau wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start with the queen. Everyone knows who she is.

While in jest, It does remind me of the time Dolly Parton entered a Dolly Parton look alike contest and lost.

In fairness, she isn’t a Dolly Parton look-alike.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#316

Post by dghlsakjg »

markdown wrote: post #305
SteveGerencser wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying that this is the only reason, but it is a big reason why we have a land survey of our property on hand on paper and stored online. If something ever happened to the registry, we could at least establish our claim to our land.

Don't you have a land title, which of course is more evidence than a survey which anyone can pay for and get?

The title proves ownership (kinda), but does not define the outline of the property itself.

If the you need to know if the fence is on your property or the neighbor’s, a title or deed won’t help you find that line.

So if the official survey is lost and you need to know where the land you own is, you will need a survey.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#317

Post by dghlsakjg »

markdown wrote: post #306
gowld wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, real estate purchases come with "title insurance", because there is no official, guaranteed, land registry database.

wtf

That’s a simplified explanation. Title insurance covers a number of situations, fraudulent transfer of title is only one of them and is more likely to be something like “A wife sold her dead spouse’s house, but it turns out that there was a dispute about the will and now someone else is claiming that the house actually wasn’t hers to sell”

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#318

Post by b112 »

MiloLeo wrote: post #290
b112 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology can make lives safer. However, software is never secure, cannot be made secure, this is empirically proven to be a 100% valid position. In as software is not secure, and can not be made secure, using it for important records storage makes zero sense, unless you a) have full backups offline in physical, non-digital, read only medium or b) just don't do it online, at all. And my point is, it's not worth the…

But physical records also cannot be made secure. And the convenience is gigantic. I think that it is worth it, as clearly does much of the world.

Read the scope I discussed. Physical records can be made exceptionally secure. They can be secure on location (archival location, with guards). They also aren't reachable by every human being on the planet who wants to infiltrate.

Think about it. To destroy the public archives, of which there is typically more than one, you must travel to said location, breach it with weapons and other means, and destroy it. Or, you can sit in your parent's basement in your pajama's, and hack and destroy.

There is not even remotely the same risk profile.

And if you think something is "good" because 'the world thinks it is good', then I have to ask you why you're validating something via popularity. You know what else was popular? Fossil fuels. Smoking. Using uranium in makeup for women. Something being accepted, and being fun or convenient, doesn't make it correct, sensible, or right.

So please describe the horrible and incredible "gigantic convenience". Because I lived before the internet, and now after, and yes it is convenient.

But it certainly isn't a 'gigantic' one, nor is it sensible compared to the insane attack surface and risk.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#319

Post by margalabargala »

homakov wrote: post #300
margalabargala wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have decentralization without blockchain. A defining feature of blockchain is that each node depends on the precise ordering of prior nodes which is a huge liability if you have network disruptions, etc, in a bureaucracy. A git repo with cryptographically signed commits solves all the same problems without the headache.

You can't do any real money/real estate transactions without canonical order (chain of events). that's why git analogy is not applicable here. You'd need "main" branch to be canonically finalized for each and every participant.

What? Sure you can. All you need is confidence in the current owner. You don't need the whole history. Can you imagine the poor store clerk trying to say "sorry sir I can't accept that $20 bill unless you can name every prior owner in order".

Not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse here but this isn't an issue with the cadence of real estate transactions. Real estate ledgers do not need to support HFT.

Re: Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database

#320

Post by dghlsakjg »

b112 wrote: post #107
skinfaxi wrote: 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…

The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change. It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that. Except? It's a lot harder to hack a…

I agree that digitalization is not a panacea, but things did not work anywhere close to perfectly fine when everything was on paper. There are just as many ways for analog/physical processes to go wrong.

A sophisticated genius hacker in a different country can’t touch your paper records, but an absolute moron with a bic lighter can destroy records just as effectively. Hell, an irresponsible clerk can do an incredible amount of damage just by misfiling things.

Duplication literally doubles costs in the physical world, and has the downside of being very hard to keep in sync. A bank keeping paper ledgers would be absolutely fucked if they had to switch to a backup ledger that was more than a few hours old.

On net, I believe that digitalized documents are a net improvement.

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