[HN Gopher] A million ways to die on the web
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A million ways to die on the web
Author : hexage1814
Score : 212 points
Date : 2024-01-18 09:02 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.archiveteam.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.archiveteam.org)
| hyperluz wrote:
| My yahoo e-mail account was Yahoo-ed (one day, I logged in on it
| to find Yahho deleted all my e-mails (some of then important and
| others of sentimental value), due to account inactivity for a new
| arbitrary number of days not previously informed.
| Erratic6576 wrote:
| my geocities account was destroyed, putting an end to my career
| as webmaster. I grew a resentment towards that website
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Incidentally my angel fire site is still up for some insane
| reason
| ssss11 wrote:
| Omg I haven't heard the name Angel fire in YEARS
| dandrew5 wrote:
| Same! Coincidentally, I recently backed up my Angelfire
| site from the late '90s. A lot of the original links were
| missing but thankfully they provide a `sitemap.xml` and I
| used HTTrack to make a local copy.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I fear this for my gmail. I now use mbsync (lieer[0]) to have
| my emails synced locally on my homeserver, and then browse it
| with notmuch[1]. It's an incredibly freeing experience to have
| all your email on your own machine.
|
| 0: https://github.com/gauteh/lieer
|
| 1: https://notmuch.readthedocs.io/en/latest/man1/notmuch.html
| girishso wrote:
| For the exact same reason I started using MacOS Mail app with
| gmail, but I am realising now that it doesn't download "all"
| the emails unfortunately. Lieer looks like a good option,
| thank you.
| tetris11 wrote:
| It's a great tool, it's just agonizingly slow sometimes
| because Google likes to throttle the connection when you
| make big changes. The initial download especially is slow,
| but the small changes thereafter are pretty fast.
| throwaway167 wrote:
| + Politically regulated out.
|
| The political environment the site operates in turns hostile to
| website content or method of publishing. The operators face costs
| of compliance, loss of scope, or personal risk in continuing.
|
| See: The UK Online Safety Bill [1] [2] and especially [3]
| "Ofcom's >1,500 page consultation on the Online Safety Act 2023,
| and why small companies don't have a chance"
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23922397/uk-online-
| safet...
|
| [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/uk-government-knows-
| ho...
|
| [3] https://decoded.legal/blog/2023/11/ofcoms-%3E1500-page-
| consu...
| livrem wrote:
| They forgot one: Natural disaster deleted all the data and there
| was no backup.
|
| I was a paying subscriber to a great little site called magweb
| ~20 years ago. They scanned old and new (military) history and
| (war) game magazines and posted HTML versions, with permission of
| original publishers. It was really nice and explicitly allowed
| users to print or save copies of articles. No DRM. Perfect
| example of how a site for reading magazines online should work.
| Everything just basic HTML that even worked great to read in
| phone browsers 20 years ago.
|
| Then Hurricane Katrina hit and the server that was apparently
| running out of the owner's basement somewhere in that area was
| flooded, with no working backups. I still have not found any
| traces of most of the 40000+ articles, other than the few I had
| saved, that used to be on that site. Since it was paywalled only
| a tiny part of the site is available on the wayback machine.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050529083811/http://www.magweb...
|
| (No, I can't imagine running a business and scanning magazines
| for 9+ years and not make sure to have backups of everything.)
| Hamuko wrote:
| There was also the OVHcloud data centre fire in 2021, although
| it's debatable if it'd fall under the same "natural disaster"
| category.
|
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ovhcloud-ordered-...
| achairapart wrote:
| I know at least one startup that closed its doors because
| they lost both production and backup data on that OVH data
| center.
| Snow_Falls wrote:
| And that's why 3-2-1 specifies to have one _offsite_ backup
| dspillett wrote:
| Preferably with a completely different provider, in case
| something takes out there entire network somehow (or they
| go out of business).
|
| But make sure you check where the other provider is
| hosted: I read it one user (individual, not a startup or
| other company) who had backups of stuff on a shared host
| with a second shared host. It turned out that they were
| both running on servers in that one OVH DC and they were
| cheap hosts with no better backup/dr plan themselves...
| pixl97 wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/908/
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| I'm gonna Craigslist all your stuff!
| https://xkcd.com/1150/
| benxh wrote:
| I personally was affected by this fire, although I've always
| kept 3 month backups of production data, encrypted, on-site,
| just in case of emergencies like this. Haven't touched their
| services for anything production related ever since
| gary_0 wrote:
| Similarly: Terrorist attack. After 9/11 I remember that some
| websites for WTC-based companies went offline, presumably
| because they were hosted on computers in the building.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| There's also giving up in protest of a lawsuit, one of the oldest
| causes:
|
| >Altern.org is a free web hosting service created in 1992 by
| Valentin Lacambre and disappeared in 2000. From its origins to
| the closure, Valentin Lacambre, a pioneer of Free Internet in
| France, had to permanently close the free hosting service in
| early July 2000 following numerous lawsuits. This closure was due
| to the laws of the time, which placed the delicate obligation on
| hosts to act as judge, censor, and, by default, guilty, as it was
| deemed difficult and contrary to his principles to control the
| 21,893 sites that existed on Altern.org at the time of closure.
|
| http://yavista.com/98/1f/981fa5fe.html
|
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altern
|
| (Valentin Lacambre went on to be a co-founder of Gandi.net.)
| diggan wrote:
| > (Valentin Lacambre went on to be a co-founder of Gandi.net.)
|
| Gandi.net which recently (last year) was purchased by some
| other corporate entity and subsequently raised all the prices +
| made previously free features paid. I only mention this as I
| discovered this week that my Gandi bill suddenly got a lot
| bigger.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| Yeah I'm in the process of migrating away because of it.
| Sigh. Gandi had a good run.
| diggan wrote:
| Same here :/ Saw the writing on the wall when the previous
| purchase/sale happened to some investment company or
| whatever it was, but thought I could hold off my migration
| for a while longer...
| profsummergig wrote:
| Tigerdirect comes to mind.
| inopinatus wrote:
| There is a tale - perhaps apocryphal - handed down between
| generations of AWS staff, of a customer that was all-in on spot
| instances, until one day the price and availability of their
| preferred instances took an unfortunate turn, which is to say,
| all their stuff went away, including most dramatically the
| customer data that was on the instance storages, and including
| the replicas that had been mistakenly presumed a backstop against
| instance loss, and sadly - but not surprisingly - this was pretty
| much terminal for their startup.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| That's like a gamma ray burst hitting the planet and just
| vaporizing it. So unlucky. But obviously fate had other ideas.
| sidibe wrote:
| Not really with spot instances it was just waiting to happen
| on a day with more demand than usual. That is 100% expected
| sethammons wrote:
| More like a balancing rock statue in an area that can have
| earthquakes
| HPsquared wrote:
| Common mode failure.
| BossingAround wrote:
| How..? Was there no local code on any of the dev machines? No
| git? I'm asking because for example if Github is vaporized
| today, my product would lose roughly a day or two's worth of
| work, since we have like 30 computers having a repository copy.
|
| Of course redeploying every single thing would not be seamless
| because of course, there might be some configuration stored in
| services, or something similar, but I'd say that ~90% of our
| automation is stored in Git.
| Jasp3r wrote:
| They lost customer data, not source code. You shouldn't have
| a local copy of all user data on your machine.
| appplication wrote:
| But my customers enjoy the personal touch of me manually
| editing their SSN in my local MS Access database.
| taneq wrote:
| I mean, after all, if you don't have your own copy of the
| MS Access database then when your team scales beyond
| about 5 people that database is going to get harder to
| access. So really everyone should have a copy of all
| important PII. :P
| pixl97 wrote:
| If something is on the cloud does 3-2-1 backup stop
| applying?
| hawski wrote:
| I would also like to know the answer. Would it be a good
| idea for the company to keep _encrypted_ backups on their
| machines/HDDs? Not a laptop somewhere, but something just
| a bit more involved.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| i think for company-critical databases, the best you can
| do without invoking a terrible headache for your security
| officer is going multi-cloud: one big tech cloud, and one
| smaller firm that is completely disconnected from the
| other one
|
| maybe they could even use a relatively inexpensive
| colo/baremetal provider to simply mirror the bigtech
| deployment on a smaller scale (would need to be quite
| flexible/vendor-agnostic to make that work...)
| ianburrell wrote:
| It would make sense to keep backup on hard drive stored
| in safe in office. Doing it weekly would be reasonable
| but would have to accept that going to lose a week's
| worth of data.
|
| The main problem is that would outgrow single hard drive
| so would need NAS. Also, the transfer speed could be an
| issue as database gets bigger. Even if don't store all
| customer data, it does make sense to store all the
| configuration, keys, and secrets.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Yes. Having a copy you can "touch" is important. At the
| absolute minimum you should have it on another cloud
| service.
| tehlike wrote:
| You can still do off-site backup to another cloud.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Only if you're willing to stake your company's digital
| existence on the reliability of another company's cloud
| service.
|
| If anything, it increases the need for 3-2-1 backups: the
| original copy of all of your files are on somebody else's
| computer that you have no control over. Hopefully they're
| keeping it backed up, and hopefully they don't go belly
| up and pull the plug all of a sudden. So you can use a
| primary backup in another cloud service from another
| company that hopefully won't kill their product at the
| same time as the other one (again, you have very little
| knowledge or control of the way they run their data
| center). Ultimately, it's a good idea to have a copy of
| your data that you have control over, maybe in a big
| drive (or set of drives, tapes, etc) in the safe, rotated
| daily/weekly/however long your company can cope with
| losing in a major SHTF situation.
|
| Excessive? Maybe. For what it's worth my shop is locally
| hosted with both local and cloud backups. I have never
| regretted having at least one backup of anything and it's
| saved my bacon (or my coworkers', boss', etc.) a number
| of times. I've been fortunate to never need to rely on a
| secondary backup, but I sure wouldn't bet the company on
| it.
| BossingAround wrote:
| Ah that makes more sense, I can't read. I thought that the
| project stopped working all together, hence the startup was
| finished. I didn't realize it meant that they simply lost
| enough customers to go under.
| halostatue wrote:
| A company's source code is mostly valueless. A company's
| customer data is priceless.
|
| As Fred Brooks said in Mythical Man-Month: Show me your
| flowcharts and conceal your tables, and I shall continue
| to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually
| need your flowcharts; they'll be obvious.
| pilotneko wrote:
| Crazy, but even AWS resources are not unlimited. In 2023, I
| experienced multiple days where g4dn instances were not
| available in us-east-1 (in any AZ).
| jethro_tell wrote:
| Heh, they still live in the real world where they have to
| order or build servers put them in a rack, configure them to
| be added to the pool.
|
| At their scale lots of their stuff is custom and needs to be
| ordered at least 18 months in advance.
|
| The fact that they can do capacity planning 2/3 years in
| advance and have very limited misses in a way that people are
| astonished that they have capacity misses is a testament to
| how good they ate at it.
| glitchcrab wrote:
| I think a lot of people who have never really used anything
| other than a major cloud provider don't really understand
| what goes on behind the scenes. I was a sysadmin at a
| hosting provider and even though we were magnitudes smaller
| than AWS, we still saw a lot of the same issues, just on a
| smaller scale.
| darkwater wrote:
| But hey, think of the money they saved before that!
| Thorrez wrote:
| The third largest bitcoin exchange made a change to their RAM
| settings in EC2. This shut down the machines, wiping out the
| hard drive and RAM. Their wallet was stored there. They lost
| everything.
|
| https://siliconangle.com/2011/08/01/third-largest-bitcoin-ex...
| lnrd wrote:
| Third largest bitcoin exchange...in 2011.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Well the bitcoin supply is limited, so it's quite a big
| loss.
| stavros wrote:
| For them! Due to the way the economy works, destroying
| money is actually a donation to everyone else who has
| money (deflation).
| mjburgess wrote:
| Still hard to imagine this wasnt ever just laughed out
| the room immediately
| paulddraper wrote:
| ...with 17,000 BTC.
|
| (Valued at 220k USD then, or 700M USD today)
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| So funny reading comments from that era to the articles about
| this incident. Some say they were lucky because they are
| using Mt. Gox! Another observation - bitcoin at that time was
| by many perceived as and had reputation of in-game purchases.
| profsummergig wrote:
| Were they paying for said spot instances? If so, that's mostly
| on AWS, not the client. (Unless AWS explicitly says in its TOU
| that instances can be taken away instantly due to
| "availability" issues. Which IMHO would be a suicidal policy
| for AWS to have.)
| dilyevsky wrote:
| It is not suicidal and it is in fact what it says. You get
| 120s notice and there's no capacity sla even for on-demand or
| so called "reserved instances". You need to setup https://doc
| s.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-capa... to get a
| guarantee and they will obviously bill you for it even if
| you're not using it.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Having all your customers' data on instances local drives
| (sounds like they didn't use EBS) with no backups sounds pretty
| dumb, spot instances or not. Those weren't serious people.
| omnibrain wrote:
| I hosted my first personal website and my Star Treck (sic!)
| fansite on Tripod. At some point in time they also had a data
| loss and one of both (along with a lot of other sites) was gone.
|
| This is not mentioned here
| https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Tripod because I think the
| event precedes Archive Teams formation.
| 101008 wrote:
| Tripod and Lycos were great for kids who were learning HTML and
| wanted to have their own website. I remember the annoying
| popups and then banner frames, and how I tried to copy and
| paste a lot of JS to remove them (so unfair for them, they were
| providing a free service!)
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" Associated data"_ is a point I would not have immediately
| thought of. As data becomes more and more connected and services
| consolidated this becomes more important to consider.
| zoobab wrote:
| Loosing memory is an issue, the question is how to maintain the
| archive?
| k__ wrote:
| There are a few solutions:
|
| https://www.arweave.org/
|
| https://www.lighthouse.storage/
|
| To me, they seem like the most useful stuff coming out of the
| blockchain industry.
| hexage1814 wrote:
| Tough true? By preserving it yourself.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Have ArchiveTeam save it to archive.org and donate to keep the
| service alive.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Wait giphy was bought by meta? What a shame! And they don't sell
| it off, as they're supposed to? How doesn't it surprise me. A lot
| of the web feels like being destroyed by FANG. And Andreesen goes
| on claiming that the market prevents monopolies ...
| blatherard wrote:
| Meta bought Giphy in 2020, then the UK CMA ruled that it was
| anti-competitive, so Meta sold Giphy to Shutterstock last year.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| You're right! I read (in the original article?) that it
| wasn't completed yet, but it was:
|
| > The acquisition was completed on June 23, 2023.
| rvnx wrote:
| VCs in one hand have successful companies (that generally
| IPOs), and losers on the other hand.
|
| They can use their influence on the people who having voting
| rights, to actually push the hot-potato to public investors.
|
| That's one big reason why you public companies purchasing
| somewhat useless companies, or acquihiring them at insane
| valuation.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| It's a shame that none of substitutes for DNS seem to have gained
| any traction so far.
|
| Renting names that serve as resource identifiers, locators and
| trademarks all at the same time is just not a good idea.
| dirkc wrote:
| I'd add "maintenance burden". I have a few old properties I'm
| responsible for that used to be web apps, one is archived as
| static HTML, the other one still exists as an outdated web app.
| Every other week I receive a request to delete user data. At some
| point it might make sense to pull the plug on everything :(
| pabs3 wrote:
| Please do let ArchiveTeam know before you pull the plug so at
| least the public data can be saved.
| thih9 wrote:
| Digged - via website redesign:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Redesign
| rvba wrote:
| Interesting that the article does not show digg, which killed
| itself.
|
| On a side note, the current form of digg is interesting, yet
| somehow poorly done. Go there, sort by year: get only things
| from 2024, since no way to get 2023 or a rolling year. Not to
| mention being able to choose all or certain time periods
| probably_wrong wrote:
| The current Digg is doing its best to destroy the goodwill
| they collected with the slightly-less-current Digg.
|
| I started going there regularly about a year and a half ago,
| mostly because they would feature articles that I wouldn't
| find in my other typical websites. But in the last six months
| they have been optimizing to death, cutting anything that's
| not an instant success and publishing variant after variant
| of anything that's mildly successful (yay, another article on
| Twitter memes!). Clickbait titles are there too, along with a
| new-ish comment section that's 90% spam.
|
| It's been a sobering lesson on what happens when you put
| growth above everything.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| On another side note: I have been running an interesting link
| recommendation feed for many years now, and evidently in
| ~2018 someone curating links for Digg found my feed and
| started relying on it heavily to populate Digg's front page.
| It went on for months. Some days as much as half of the links
| I posted would subsequently show up on Digg, including links
| to unusual and old content (which was a strong signal that
| the overlap was no mere coincidence).
|
| In 2019 Digg posted a job listing for a links curator, and I
| cheekily applied, noting that I'm already doing the job
| anyway, so they might as well pay me for it. They didn't take
| me up on it, but like magic, the poaching went away.
| rvba wrote:
| How do you even make such a list nowadays? In the past tou
| could take stuff from forums, but now forums are dead.
| Facebook is trash so apart from known sources (is Rss
| dead?)organicly finding new stuff sounds harsh. Apart from
| maybe coppying from reddit / digg / wykop / some spanish
| reddit equivalent...
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| A few years ago I made a tool that fetches content from a
| big list of primary sources (via RSS or HTML), and pushes
| each link it finds through filters (keyword blacklist,
| duplicate check, etc). I made a UI that lets me accept or
| reject links Tinder style, and when I have a scrap of
| time to fill, I assess a few links.
|
| I also have a small group of well-read friends who make
| an effort to send me stuff, that helps a lot too.
| hamolton wrote:
| Probably would categorize this under "teh futurez!1!" in the
| original article
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Suppose not full kill, but moderation
|
| Habbo Hotel: It was marked that sexual predators were using the
| service to groom and instead of tackling the issue, they applied
| a worldwide mute. You could walk but not talk.
|
| Habbo still exists, but almost killed the whole fanbase.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo#Moderation
|
| And that, you required Shockwave.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There's also "Sea Change," where a Web site that was one way,
| changes to become another way.
|
| An example is BBSpot.com. It's still up and going, but very
| different from many years ago.
|
| I miss SatireWire. I think it's dead now (ERROR ESTABLISHING A
| DATABASE CONNECTION).
| flyinghamster wrote:
| That happened to mp3.com as well - it was once a Bandcamp-like
| site, until it was acquired by CBS Interactive after a
| disastrous music locker service got it nuked from orbit by the
| RIAA. It's now, for all practical purposes, a parked domain.
|
| I still have a CD-ROM from them (back then, everybody and his
| brother published a CD-ROM).
| daniel31x13 wrote:
| This is one of the main reasons I created Linkwarden - an open-
| source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and
| preserve webpages:
|
| GitHub: https://github.com/linkwarden/linkwarden
|
| Website: https://linkwarden.app
| qingcharles wrote:
| I'm frustrated by the fact there are zero archives out there of
| TwitterX, Instagram or Facebook. Even big brands have shuttered
| their accounts and now none of their content exists anywhere any
| longer.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Browsing into my 'Dead Bookmarks' folder, most of the links were
| either websites without enough funding to keep the servers
| online, acquired startups, or streaming services that were killed
| off by the giants' lawyers. Bash.org is the latest to experience
| the drag and drop of death.
| archerx wrote:
| Oh no! I just lost CG Society and now bash.org is dead? I feel
| like all the places teenage me used to hang out are all dying
| out slowly and its sad because those days we believed
| everything on the internet is forever.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| The stuff you want to delete from the internet (embarrassing
| photos, bad takes from a decade ago) are forever, but the
| ones you want to keep (great hangouts, cool personal
| webpages) are fleeting.
| declaredapple wrote:
| This is the difference between security vs archival
| perspectives.
|
| For security you should assume someone recorded it
| indefinitely.
|
| For archival you should assume nobody recorded it including
| the original creator.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I wish I could've put it so well myself!
| NanoYohaneTSU wrote:
| Look inside A Million Ways To Die. There isn't a Million Ways To
| Die.
| profsummergig wrote:
| > teh futurez!1!
|
| It's a sad list. Even Google, after it acquired YouTube, forced
| me to change my YouTube login to a gmail account.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| This should be renamed "ten ways to die on the web"
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