Posts by Arkhanist

Firm fat-fingered G Suite and deleted its data, so it escalated its support ticket to a lawsuit

Gsuite admin here. They do have recovery tools if user data in gmail or google drive etc gets accidental deleted - the user-accessible 'bin' being the simplest! But admins can recover that data from the last 30 days regardless, along with user accounts - presumably it's not actually gone from disk till after that. Beyond the 30 days though, they warn the data is likely gone for good.

To delete the entire gsuite account though, that's not a simple fat-finger error, that's a full on failure to read what's in front of you, and doing it anyway including clicking through the warnings. I've never actually done that particular step, but the admin interface is clear when what you're doing will cause permanent data loss, including disabling certain services, and has 'are you sure?' confirmations. I'm not surprised that deleting the whole shebang meant google couldn't just turn it back on and have all the data linked back with user accounts etc. there's a huge amount of different services linked together under the 'gsuite' brand, I'm sure the bits were still there somewhere, but it's a bit like deleting the partition table on a disk, or formatting your last AD server, and expecting the restore to be simple without your own backups.

As a long-time sysadmin, with great power comes great responsibility etc...

And yes, we back up important data via external backups. There's a bunch of cloud-to-cloud backup services, as well as API access to download things, and on the individual level 'google takeout' lets you back up literally everything - including a bunch of stuff you didn't even know google had, though a lot of the data analytics/advertising stuff is turned off for gsuite business/education customers.

LastPass? More like lost pass. Or where the fsck has it gone pass. Five-hour outage drives netizens bonkers

Lastpass stores and decrypts the password db locally. It uses the online sync only for backup of the db and syncing changes between different computers. It's not a cache, you can set it to never go online at all right from the start.

The online service can't decrypt the pw db at all either, it's stored as an encrypted blob which only your master pw unlocks. The web-based login on the lastpass website actually uses a javascript version of the client that downloads and decrypts the pw db on your local pc.

Where it will fall over when the cloud service is offline is using the web client (as opposed to the plugin), on a new machine, or syncing changes automatically, unsurprisingly. It's no different in principle than using a keepass db with dropbox or the like, just wrapped up a bit prettier, easier to use but admittedly a more obvious target.

The only reason I noticed it was down was when I added a new password to it on one PC, then it didn't automagically sync it to another.

Nuclear waste spill: How a pro-organic push sparked $240m blunder

I use the mineral-based litter myself, but a bag full of that stuff is seriously heavy - given it's basically ground up clay, not surprising. Plus there's a fair amount of dust when you have to empty and clean the whole tray (the clumps are still quite crumbly and leave contaminated bits behind, as well as bits that weld themselves to the tray when they absorb uhh, liquid). So if you're an old lady with a bad back and/or asthma, the organic stuff is a bit easier to deal with. I'm pretty sure old ladies with a lot of cats is a large enough market segment to be worth targeting, aside from the hippies.