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Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

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Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#31

Post by s1artibartfast »

dylan604 wrote: post #7
s1artibartfast wrote: post #4

Im curious why this topic has been popping up in the news. It seems like a bog standard contractor/subcontractor obligation case.

If Iron Mountain made a deal with PBS-affiliate, they'd be breaking the terms of the contract with their customer (the fact it is defunct is just an asterisk). If you were an Iron Mountain client and one of your customers made an end run around you to go directly to Iron Mountain because they refused to pay your bill, you'd be pissed at Iron Mountain. By solving this as they have done, Iron Mountain can assure other…

Thats my impression too. Iron mountain is doing exactly what I would want if I had data with them.

If you are wharehousing data, you dont just let your customer's customer come in, look around, and take whatever they want. Even if they have a sob story.

You ask for a court order with specifics.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#32

Post by mikeryan »

boscillator wrote: post #3

The ruling seems fair and reasonable, and I'm surprised they couldn't come to the same conclusion without a court.

It’s likely that Iron Mountain needed a court order in order to do this with legal cover.

It’s just a data warehouse and OSS likely had multiple clients data and backups. Iron Mountain can’t let one third party go searching through a defunct customers stuff that has a bunch of additional third parties property intermingled with it. Too many unknowns and potentially litigious third parties.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#33

Post by toofy »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #16

I think stories like these highlight the need for clearer (not necessarily more) regulations around contractor/subcontractor/client relationships and what happens when one of them goes tits up. There were rampant issues in the fintech world that exploded when Synapse, a banking as a service provider, went bankrupt and their ledger didn't match what partner banks had in their accounts. End users were told "your deposi…

> … was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations …

yeah it’s unreal to me how many people who imagine themselves intelligent are just now discovering the equivalent to why we make wheels round.

they never think to ask “why does regulation x exist?”

its absolutely crazypants.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#34

Post by s1artibartfast »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #16

I think stories like these highlight the need for clearer (not necessarily more) regulations around contractor/subcontractor/client relationships and what happens when one of them goes tits up. There were rampant issues in the fintech world that exploded when Synapse, a banking as a service provider, went bankrupt and their ledger didn't match what partner banks had in their accounts. End users were told "your deposi…

Why do you think the laws and regulations are unclear?

This seems to be following the completely standard and expected process.

Contractor goes belly up, so you go to court and a judge who confirms they were a custodian of your data and you are entitled to retreive it.

Same would be the case if I was leasing equipment to someone and they had it at a storage lot. If the middle party dies or goes bankrupt, I get a court order to claim it from their other possessions.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#35

Post by mywittyname »

toofy wrote: post #33
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #16

I think stories like these highlight the need for clearer (not necessarily more) regulations around contractor/subcontractor/client relationships and what happens when one of them goes tits up. There were rampant issues in the fintech world that exploded when Synapse, a banking as a service provider, went bankrupt and their ledger didn't match what partner banks had in their accounts. End users were told "your deposi…

> … was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations … yeah it’s unreal to me how many people who imagine themselves intelligent are just now discovering the equivalent to why we make wheels round. they never think to ask “why does regulation x exist?” its absolutely crazypants.

> they never think to ask “why does regulation x exist?”

They do, but they think the answer is always some riff on, "government overreach because bureaucrats need to justify their jobs."

That attitude has been firmly ingrained into (at least) a generation of people.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#36

Post by Jtsummers »

kmeisthax wrote: post #30
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #16

I think stories like these highlight the need for clearer (not necessarily more) regulations around contractor/subcontractor/client relationships and what happens when one of them goes tits up. There were rampant issues in the fintech world that exploded when Synapse, a banking as a service provider, went bankrupt and their ledger didn't match what partner banks had in their accounts. End users were told "your deposi…

If you talk to a lawyer (or, worse, a legislator, many of whom are also lawyers and all of whom are surrounded by them), they will insist up and down that this is a pretty standard custodial arrangement dispute and that the system worked as intended. And I would, very begrudgingly agree with that. The legal system is perfectly capable of recognizing stolen property no matter how many layers of abstraction you put it…

> The problem is that this took years of legal work to get to the obvious outcome to make Nine PBS whole.

Not years. This whole "saga" has been going on for 5 months, and the suit against Iron Mountain was only filed on 28 July, so it just took weeks to come to this current arrangement.

EDIT: Toned down the comment. Leaving the rest, though, since I can't delete it with the reply below.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#37

Post by kmeisthax »

Jtsummers wrote: post #36
kmeisthax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you talk to a lawyer (or, worse, a legislator, many of whom are also lawyers and all of whom are surrounded by them), they will insist up and down that this is a pretty standard custodial arrangement dispute and that the system worked as intended. And I would, very begrudgingly agree with that. The legal system is perfectly capable of recognizing stolen property no matter how many layers of abstraction you put it…

> The problem is that this took years of legal work to get to the obvious outcome to make Nine PBS whole. Not years. This whole "saga" has been going on for 5 months, and the suit against Iron Mountain was only filed on 28 July, so it just took weeks to come to this current arrangement. EDIT: Toned down the comment. Leaving the rest, though, since I can't delete it with the reply below.

I changed it.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#38

Post by plorg »

trebligdivad wrote: post #24
boscillator wrote: post #3

The ruling seems fair and reasonable, and I'm surprised they couldn't come to the same conclusion without a court.

They couldn't really - I doubt Iron Mountain actually objected to giving the data, but in the end it probably wasn't in a position to know what data belonged to PBS and what belonged to other clients of OSS and you'd get very worried if a data storage company gave a companies data to someone else without authorisation.

An Iron Mountain employee is quoted in this article saying basically that.

Re: Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data

#39

Post by walrus01 »

I previously commented on this when a different, earlier news article and it wasn't clear at the time if the storage company was a colocation customer, or a dedicated server customer of Iron Mountain:

=============================================

(from 4 days ago)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293326

The news article is really not clear about whether this was, relative to the company "OSS":

a) OSS is a colocation customer with its own hardware colocating it inside an Iron Mountain datacenter. In which OSS owned the bare metal and paid iron mountain for rack space and power.

or

b) OSS is a dedicated hardware customer of Iron Mountain running a service on bare metal owned by Iron Mountain, and has gone defunct, leaving behind a bunch of servers/storage arrays that would in normal circumstances get wiped/reprovisioned.

From the point of view of a customer of OSS (PBS), that's two extremely different things.

If it's scenario A, I don't see how PBS has any claim against Iron Mountain. Your typical datacenter colo host for bare metal hardware owned by a customer has no involvement whatsoever in the condition or operation of the data, operating system, filesystems, RAID arrays, ZFS, etc of how the customer has set up their environment. Nor any ability to do anything with it. A colocation host that hasn't been paid for its rack space and power will typically have clauses in its colo contracts allowing for seizure and sale of abandoned hardware after a certain period of time.

====================================

New commentary:

The new news article seems to shed a bit more light on it, it sounds like it's scenario B, in which OSS never owned the hardware (they just set up the operating system/software config on it), and was renting it from Iron Mountain. In this scenario it's much more realistic to expect to be able to get some data back. And as the new news article says, PBS is paying all of the overdue bills in order to be able to do so.

Ordinarily a dedicated server provider that is renting rackmount bare metal hardware to people has a very automated and fast re-provisioning process, if you don't pay your bill, the terms of the contract let them wipe the servers within a fairly short amount of time and reallocat them to new customers.

Now if it had been scenario A, I think that there would have been very little opportunity for judicial remedy in an order requiring Iron Mountain to do anything, because Iron Mountain would have had no control over what a failing/bankrupt/dead colocation customer did with the data on their servers. PBS might have had a claim against the principals of the OSS company, but then you get into the "blood from a stone" problem of trying to enforce a judgment against people who have no assets or ability to pay.

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