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Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

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Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#481

Post by schrodinger »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #392
throwaway2037 wrote: post #372

At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice: > This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. I like that. It is direct and honest. I'm fine with people using LLMs for natural language related work, as long a…

It's still worse than useless : https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-transla...

I have sympathy for those affected but this article is disingenuous. I speak Spanish and have just gone to 3 or 4 Spanish news sites, and passed their articles through to ChatGPT to translate "faithfully and literally, maintaining everything including the original tone."

First it gave a "verbatim, literal English translation" and then asked me if I would like "a version that reads naturally in English (but still faithful to the tone and details), or do you want to keep this purely literal one?"

Honestly, the English translation was perfect. I know Spanish, I knew the topic of the article and had read about it in the NYTimes and other English sources, and I am a native English speaker. It's sad, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. LLMs can translate well, and the article saying otherwise is just not being intellectually honest.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#482

Post by maxlin »

yongjik wrote: post #13
benoau wrote: post #2

> However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost. Yikes. You'd think they would at least have one redundant copy of it all. > erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil servants > 30 gigabytes of storage per person That's 22,500 terabytes, about 50 Backblaze storage pods. Or even just mir…

It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB. It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month). They did have backup of the data ... in…

I have almost 10% of that in my closet RAID5'd with large part of it backing up constantly to Backblaze for 10$/month, running on 10 year old hardware, with basically only the hard drives having any value ... Used a case made of cardboard till I wanted to improve the cooling, and got a used Fractal Design case for 20€.

_Only_ the kind of combination of incompetence and bad politics here can lead to the kind of % of how much data has been lost here, given the policy was to only save stuff on that "G-drive" and avoid local copies. The "G-drive" they intentionally did not back up because they couldn't figure out a solution to at least store a backup across the street ...

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#483

Post by vineyardmike »

_heimdall wrote: post #432
throwaway2037 wrote: post #372

At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice: > This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. I like that. It is direct and honest. I'm fine with people using LLMs for natural language related work, as long a…

That footnote does make me question the bilingual reporter's skills in both languages though. If the reporter needs an LLM to help translate they could easily be missing subtle mistranslations. The final note that all AI-assisted translations are reviewed by the newsroom is also interesting. If they are going to take the time to review it and have enough experience in both languages to verify the translation, why use…

> It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor.

Two different editors.

But as others mentioned, this is helpful even for the same editor to do.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#484

Post by notpushkin »

roncesvalles wrote: post #436
zaran wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide an example of a commonly used cryptography system that is known to be vulnerable to nation state cracking? As for backdoors, they may exist if you rely on a third party but it's pretty hard to backdoor the relatively simple algorithms used in cryptography

It's not so much that there is a way to directly crack an encrypted file as much as there being backdoors in the entire HW and SW chain of you decrypting and accessing the encrypted file. Short of you copying an encrypted file from the server onto a local trusted Linux distro (with no Intel ME on the machine), airgapping yourself, entering the decryption passphrase from a piece of paper (written by hand, never printe…

Yeah, but also consider that maybe not every agency of South Korea needs this level of protection?

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#485

Post by alsetmusic »

Marsymars wrote: post #395
throwaway2037 wrote: post #372

At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice: > This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. I like that. It is direct and honest. I'm fine with people using LLMs for natural language related work, as long a…

This is how I’ve done translation for a number of years, even pre-LLM, between the languages I speak natively - machine translation is good enough that it’s faster for me to fix its problems than for me to do it from scratch. (Whether machine translation uses LLMs or not doesn’t seem especially relevant to the workflow.)

My partner is a pro-democracy fighter for her country of origin (she went to prison for it). She used to translate english articles of interest to her native language for all the fellow-exiles from her country. I showed her Google translate and it blew her mind how much work it did for her. All she had to do was review it and clean it up.

The AI hype train is bs, but there're real and concrete uses for it if you don't expect it to become a super-intelligence.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#486

Post by godelski »

covercash wrote: post #457
godelski wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should look at the previous president of SK. Maybe a few more too... they frequently land in jail... I'm not sure Yoon Suk Yeol had any shame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_of_Yoon_Suk_Yeol

I would also be fine with US politicians and corporate executives landing in jail. At this point, any consequences will be more than they currently face.

We are a country without kings. No one should be above the law. Those tasked with upholding the law should be held to higher standards. I'm not sure why these are even up for debate

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#487

Post by phantomathkg »

_heimdall wrote: post #432
throwaway2037 wrote: post #372

At the very bottom of the article, I see this notice: > This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. I like that. It is direct and honest. I'm fine with people using LLMs for natural language related work, as long a…

That footnote does make me question the bilingual reporter's skills in both languages though. If the reporter needs an LLM to help translate they could easily be missing subtle mistranslations. The final note that all AI-assisted translations are reviewed by the newsroom is also interesting. If they are going to take the time to review it and have enough experience in both languages to verify the translation, why use…

If using LLM can shorten the time reporter needs to rewrite the whole article again in the language the reporter is fluent but take effort to write, why not?

This will give the reporter more time to work on more articles, and we as a foreigner to Korea, getting more authentic Korean news that is reviewed by Korean and not be Google Translate.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#488

Post by zaphirplane »

croes wrote: post #439
vbezhenar wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much more likely and cheaper, that US marines will desant and capture your backup facility, than someone would break AES-128.

There are less public options to get the data without breaking encryption especially when the target uses MS software

Now I’m down the rabbit hole of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#489

Post by alsetmusic »

schrodinger wrote: post #481
BlueTemplar wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still worse than useless : https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-my-job-transla...

I have sympathy for those affected but this article is disingenuous. I speak Spanish and have just gone to 3 or 4 Spanish news sites, and passed their articles through to ChatGPT to translate "faithfully and literally, maintaining everything including the original tone." First it gave a "verbatim, literal English translation" and then asked me if I would like "a version that reads naturally in English (but still fait…

What isn't tested here, and what I can't test myself as a mono-linguist, is how well english is translated to other languages. I'm sure it's passable, but I absolutely expect it to be less sufficient because most of the people working on this live in the USA / speak english and work the most on that.

I want to know how it holds up translating Spanish to Farsi, for example.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#490

Post by hedora »

croes wrote: post #442
xoa wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using encryption, which is known to have backdoors and is vulnerable to nation state cracking? WTF are you talking about? There are absolutely zero backdoors of any kind known to be in any standard open source encryption systems, and symmetric cryptography 256-bits or more is not subject to cracking by anyone or anything, not even if general purpose quantum computers are doable and prove scalable. Shor's algorithm…

You don’t need a backdoor in the encryption if you can backdoor the devices as such. Crypto AG anyone?

In fairness, they backdoored the company, the crypto algorithms and the devices at Crypto AG.

Anyway, there are many more recent examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_Wars

Don’t get me started on the unnecessary complexity added to TLS.

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