Context (for nerds)

This happened yesterday. For those unaware, InfluxDB is some database offering no one cares about. Unfortunately that's not true because some people care about it People cared so much that InfluxData (the developing company), about a decade ago, jumped in the SaaS game and made their own cloud offering to host InfluxDB instances. For some reason, this was considered a good idea and people used their service.

Quite suddenly, some European region and some Asian region containing InfluxDB instances were shut off. Normally, deprecation of services are well advertised by a vendor. This isn't the case here and it's why I posted this: the CTO jumped in on HN to try to do some damage control. He is also a co-founder, according to his HN profile and by his own admittance. What does he have to say?

Hi, cofounder and CTO here. We notified everyone via email on February 23, April 6 and May 15th. We also offered to help migrate all users. I realize that it's not ideal that we've shut down this system, but we made our best efforts to notify affected users and give them options to move over to other regions. If you've been impacted by this, please email me personally and I will do my best to help out: paul at influxdata.com.

Drama

To summarize why this is r-slurred: Paul here notified his customers that they would permanently shut off products they pay for by sending only three emails. In enterprise, this is supremely r-slurred: emails are likely to be caught by a spam filter or never read.

HN agrees and gets angry:

This is insane.

...

This screams either gross incompetence or straight up negligence. This is such a solvable problem (as many here have already mentioned various solutions), but I'm honestly just flabbergasted that this is a problem that is even being discussed here right now.

As a DBaaS, the data of your customers should be your number one priority. If its not, y'all need to take a hard look at what the heck your value proposition is.

We weren't impact by this directly, but you can be sure that this is going to be one of the topics for discussion amongst my teams this week. Mostly how we can either move off InfluxDB Cloud or ensure that our DR plans are up to date for the rug being pulled out from under us from you guys in the future.

\

Paul, are you actually for real right now? Did you really just say "We deleted all your data, and its your fault. We did whisper into the wind three times, you should have heard it. No, there is no chance of recovery"?

\

Hi Paul, email is one-way communication and not guaranteed to be delivered. At a minimum you should have monitored who did and did not respond to the email with some kind of action and those that did not should have more effort expended to be able to reach them. Finally, you should have kept the data for a reasonable amount of time (say 90 days) post shut-down so users that did not get the notification could download it. What you've done is super rude and if I were still a customer in an unaffected region it would definitely be reason enough to leave because it's pointless to sit and wait to see how you'll deal with my data when the time comes. Better to preempt that and leave while I still have control.

For anyone who thought this was purely incompetence: no. They just wanted to save money :

We get an email address because we need to contact our customers. After that we make best efforts but if people can’t respond to vendors they pay money to, we’re really at a loss. I realize that shutting down a region isn’t good. It’s not what we would have preferred, but we had to do it for the business. And we made an honest effort to contact all customers to help move them.

Plenty more rage in the thread. Meanwhile, on their forums, a developer advocate defends his piggy's actions;

Hi all, I am ever so sorry the closure of these clusters has unexpectedly hit you. To confirm the information given by support. Communication was delivered in the following ways;

The UI was updated with a closure message for these regions.

The https://status.influxdata.com/ website also provides the notification.

We sent out emails on the following dates:

Feb 23, April 6, May 15.

We understand that a scream test would have been another form of communication that we overlooked. Some of the reasons for the closure of been outlined here: [some Slack link]

Conclusion

It's pretty rare to see cloudshit companies implode like this, and even more rare for representatives to directly engage in communities that would assuredly shit on them. Thus, this is funny.

Interesting. IBM doesn’t want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion.

And perhaps that is the real answer to the question of why: eliminate competitors. Fewer competitors means more revenue opportunity for IBM.

Who the frick knew in 2023 Oracle is the good guy for Linux.

I remember reading about something like this here but cant find it

Announcing The World’s First On-Chain Intelligence Exchange

Buy and sell information on the owner of any blockchain wallet address—anonymously, via smart contract. pic.twitter.com/4xr7dLvOjp

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) July 10, 2023

TL;DR:

Despite the name, cryptocurrencies are mostly not private (see Analysis section below). This means that anyone can see the (randomly generated) wallet addresses of users sending and receiving fake internet money, as well as the amounts being moved. Arkham is new start-up is aimed at linking wallet addresses to real people/companies by crowdsourcing intelligence and rewarding good doxxing.

Announcement thread:

Selected replies:

https://x.com/0xSalazar/status/1678352720883752965

https://x.com/BoredElonMusk/status/1678432535339208706

https://x.com/m4gicpotato/status/1678386996790566915

https://x.com/AxuETH/status/1678445406064111617

Analysis:

Buy Monero.

PS5 supports 20gbs through its thunderbolt. And internal there is 4tb limit so Sony deliberately made those limits to sell ps5 pro

Will test if regular ps4 games plays on it faster than regular 2,5 external ssd and hdd.

Nitter devs smugposting in the replies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665406

Also on /g/: https://archived.moe/g/thread/94589956/trans-game-developer-gets-let-go-from

Screenshot of messages from my manager that I received via Slack while she outed me during a group meeting with my teammates.

She must really well if her co-workers couldn't tell she was trans.

The Head of Human Resources asking me "I don't understand, a fear of being outed to the public? Aren't you already out?", and I have to explain to them that being transgender is not the same as everybody knows that you are trans.

Have a sense of humor people

Yes it's poast, which is filled with of the unfunny kind, but here's a working nitter instance for those who don't want to log in or sign up for twitter

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-07-07/9th-circuit-revives-case-alleging-california-tech-titan-aided-torture-by-china

Archive

E-H discussion

Tildes

Lemmytards

redditalternatives

/r/instantkarma /r/mademesmile

Edit: lw discussion

Edit 2: Initial announcement. They were hacked again after it

Edit 3: GitHub discussion of the XSS attack

Edit 4: Final announcement about the hack

Note: It would be best not to visit the instance for the time being until the issue is resolved.

At some point in the last 24-48 hours (approx. July 7-8, 2023) the instance vlemmy.net went down without a clear explanation, and at certain times redirected to a parked domain.

This comes after a notice from vlemmy admin pyarra announcing it was forced to de-federate with another instance due to content that is considered CSAM under Irish law (link to legal definition) syncing with vlemmy, hosted in Ireland. The original post link disappeared with the server but https://lemmy.world/post/1148656. There is no official confirmation whether there is any connection between this event and its disappearance.

https://feddit.nl/post/458654 has a screenshot of the redirected domain name.

An investigation by a user on [email protected] is underway... their findings were as follows:

• [Information from 1AM EST Jul 9th] vlemmy is still “up” and intermittently accessible. It is running "slow as hell"

• Stripe, Librepay, and Github accounts are all closed. Closure date unknown

• Reddit account still exists and has been messaged

• No mentions of the instance in Element.io chats but still searching

• They have almost certainly NOT lost their domain. Who.is historical records show no ownership or nameserver changes.

• The user updated the post stating "I’m working through about 40 different potential leads right now"

• The user is requesting help from the community finding an image from the kerbalspaceprogram community on vlemmy potentially left in someone's browser cache.

There’s always been doom posting about “social media killed the internet”, more so with all the social media being r-slurred lately - but keep in mind you can just not engage.

Normies will always use normie media and that’s okay, not in a soy way, most people are just happy with goyslop media.

If you want to find unique experiences there will always be places like rDrama, Fedi, Gemini, extremist Telegram etc.

This really makes us sound deranged. Things like the DC req for chudrama, the N-word pass for black history month, or the betting on racial identity of spree shooters is not going to appeal to the Silicon Valley Crowd.

Context: Multichain's CEO has been AWOL since May, leaving the rest of the team without access for server maintenance. There were early rumours that he was arrested by the Chinese government, but there's been no confirmation of that.

Yesterday, several of their contracts were drained to unknown addresses, with a total value of over $126m.

This is not the first time they've had trouble - they were hacked in 2022, but for a measly $3m.

https://x.com/MultichainOrg/status/1677180114227056641

https://x.com/MultichainOrg/status/1677096839731097600

Various people crying about their magic internet money:

https://x.com/VCosta7989126/status/1677131886248841217 (most of the replies to this are people trying to scam him when he has no money now lol)

https://x.com/Tombr8r/status/1677143238929711105

https://x.com/SmartlyC/status/1677158351384494083

looking through my recruiting notes... no such thing has ever happened

lol would you have committed the fart to the written record had it happened?

yes