That Man Who 'Deleted His Entire Company' With a Line of Code? It Was a Hoax (pcworld.com) 93
An anonymous reader writes: As many Slashdot readers speculated, the story about a man deleting his entire company with a line of code was a hoax. Marco Marsala, the owner of a Web hosting company claimed on a forum earlier this week that he deleted all the data on his company's server. Stack Overflow, which runs the forum, says that the post was a hoax, and pointed to an article on an Italian news outlet, which describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company. "It was just a joke," Marsala told the paper.
Interesting tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
"Give us your data we'll delete it"
I suppose they really really believe, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I suppose they really really believe, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Well, if it works for Donald Trump...
Re: (Score:2)
In Trump's case it's less bad publicity than incessant media smear campaigns. That aren't working. You can almost see the fear in the eyes of the pundit class as Trump continues to win despite their best efforts, proving that their ability to define reality is wearing thin, that their role of king makers is coming to an end.
Re: (Score:2)
The pundit class has always been wrong. Their continued existence is based on the knowledge that people have short memories. The reason is that they make predictions based on their personal biases without letting nuisances like objective reality get in the way.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean selectively editing videos and misquoting? Yeah, we have all seen it, and it is pretty blatant.
Re:Interesting tactic (Score:5, Funny)
He's Italian. It would be more like "That's some nice data you got there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it..."
Re: Interesting tactic (Score:1, Funny)
There are only 4 kinds of Italians: mafiosi, fascists, communists and dead. And they're all lazy.
Re: Interesting tactic (Score:1)
Re: Interesting tactic (Score:1)
Sure it is... To the bottom.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you wave one arm around and shout a lot?
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STFU...
Whoooosh!
Monty Python [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:3)
Previously, on slashdot [slashdot.org]:
The NYTimes has an 8-page exposé on how an online business is thriving because of giant amounts of negative reviews. It seems that if you directly google the company you have no problem discerning the true nature; but if you instead only google the brand names it sells, the company is at the top of the rankings. Turns out that all the negative advertisement he generates from reputable sites gives him countless links that inflate his pagerank.
I mean, there's also a reason he is revealing it was a hoax. The 'it was a hoax' articles will do damage control while also doubling his exposure. I presume they'll come up first in searches, being newer. Would this be a as great as getting your name out there in a positive light in the first place? No. But everyone else is trying to do the same thing, and it's expensive. This was effective and free. Not everyone will appreciate the joke and some potential customers will be lost.
Re: (Score:2)
I would have thought so too, did I not know any Italians. It's really quite plausible, whether or not it really happened.
Re:Stupid is as stupid does (Score:5, Insightful)
Your right. Bad publicity can be good "free publicity" in some cases but this guy basically said "look at me, I'm a moron". You can recover from accidents and other misfortunes but pretending to be an idiot is sort of a lot more difficult.
Re: Stupid is as stupid does (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I wondered if someone else had played a prank on him ... posting the story while he was off hiking in Amazon or somewhere where they don't have the interbooks so hew couldn't respond.
As it is, he made us think he was an imbecile, and now we think he's a liar. I don't see what good that does him.
// to do: joke about politics goes here
Idiot (Score:5, Insightful)
describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" (in Italian) to promote Marsala's company
He tries to get more business by saying he deleted all his customers' data ? What an idiot. And anyone who remains his customer after this is an even bigger idiot.
Re:Idiot (Score:5, Funny)
And anyone who remains his customer after this is an even bigger idiot.
Perhaps he can become a government contractor...
Re: (Score:3)
Why was this modded "funny"; it's insightful!
Re:Idiot (Score:5, Funny)
Plz help!
I've accidentally routed all the toilets at work into the hamburger machine. I will be in trouble if anyone finds out how much poop is in the hamburgers.
Ha ha! It was just my marketing idea. Plz buy my hamburgers.
Why is no one buying my hamburgers?
Re: Idiot (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Tell me, you're a tiny hosting provider in Italy. Suddenly, this one little story gets posted and makes it around the world, even in mainstream media.
You cannot buy that sort of promotion - it's marketing worth is probably in the billions of dollars, and instead of being a tiny hosting provider in Italy no one's heard of, now everyone knows your
Re: (Score:2)
sudo rm -rf /
I prefer to delete all my files without sudo.
Am I bungee jumping yet?
Re: (Score:3)
Start a VM and try it. It will do exactly nothing without --no-preserve-root.
On the other hand "rm -rf /*" will do.
If it was a marketing effort .... (Score:2)
.... then he's a fool. After all, placing the idea of "this person is an idiot without proper backups" isn't exactly what I'd like potential customers to be thinking about my company.
Re: (Score:1)
You might remember the story, but you likely won't remember the name of the company or person. However you now have a bunch of high-ranking sites that mention the name of the company, so the ranking for the company itself will now be higher. It's banking on the forgettability of the story versus the benefit of increased rank.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, it'll be highly ranked, surrounded by articles commenting on their colossal fuckup. Good luck getting the same number of view & ranling on the follow-up media revealing it was a hoax. All he's done is successfully smear the company's name for years to come.
Good Grief... (Score:5, Insightful)
describes this whole fiasco as a "marketing effort" to promote Marsala's company
How does telling everyone that you are incompetent "promote" your business?
He's made the mistake - never again (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Overall I think it's been positive...
Sorry, no...
Re: (Score:2)
Let's try and be positive here
We ARE being positive here. You're talking about a business where not only did one person make a mistake, but he made another mistake while (or claimed to) while performing data recovery, proved a company only had one single backup, and proved there were no systems in place to prevent such mistakes from affecting many.
Mistakes are tolerable. You make a mistake, you lean, you move on. You demonstrate a clear and repetitive string of repeated failures along with absolutely no systems in place to catch such fa
LOL (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Typical Tea Bagging right wing nut bar, you have to bring your obsessive politics into everything.
Where is our apology? (Score:2)
Not from the DB who ran the hoax, but all of the hero types on Slashdot claiming all kinds of ad hominem against people who questioned whether it was a hoax. I could care less about the guy who ran the hoax, he is just one of them losers who wants attention (even if it's bad).
Re: (Score:2)
It took this?
Backups are a hoax (Score:4, Insightful)
Doing backups properly is hard. The story would have had a ring of truth if it included backups that couldn't be restored because the encryption key was the wrong version.
Re: (Score:3)
I like to say "backups are easy, disaster recovery is hard." Old school, tapes go offsite weekly. Contemporary, all backups are synced to the "cloud." There is no true backups solution that leaves everything available to the running systems, remote mounting or not. From what I can tell, he was really talking about disaster recovery replication, which isn't what I would call backups anyway.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Former backup/recovery sysadmin here.
There are two things a company needs to define before they should start looking at solutions: the RPO (Recovery Point Objective), and the RTO (Recovery Time Objective). Recovery Point Objective basically means, "How much data can you afford to lose in the event of a disaster? A second or less? An hour? A week? A month?" Recovery Time Objective basically means, "How long do you have to get that data back onto an operational system? How long can you afford for your system
Don't be stupid (Score:1)
Doing backups properly is hard. The story would have had a ring of truth if it included backups that couldn't be restored because the encryption key was the wrong version.
Actually, doing backups properly is easy. For any number of servers less than 50, backups and restores are pretty easy.
Doing backups for thousands of servers is where it gets hard.
Doing backups for Windows is hard too. I've never seen any Windows backup tool put the system back exactly as it was.
Doing backups and restores for Unix systems isn't hard. Linux makes this ridiculously easy. LVM, snapshot, mount the snapshot readonly, backup. umount the snapshot, delete it, be happy. If the backups are file-b
Re: (Score:1)
Having non-production and production environments is a good way to manage this. Have a process to strip/anonymize any "sensitive" information and build the non-production/test system from the backups. If it builds, then not only do you have a production-like system to test on, but you've just taken strong steps towards confirming the backups are good.
Re: (Score:2)
not every system has a GNU rm.
Hoax? (Score:1)
NO CARRIER
Was there a typo in the article? (Score:1)
Entire story was a Hoax .. (Score:1)
Currently Starks is having issues with the 'Taylor Housing Authority', as in 2013 they refused permission for Starks to site a computer in one of their housing projects citing a lack of appliance inspection. Last Feb they contacted Starks requesting 125 fo
The PCWorld author, however, is naive (Score:2)
The PCWorld post contains this sentence:
"The most surprising thing might be that so many people believed him, including those on a forum for technology experts."
Yes, we believed it, because it's all too plausible. We've been there. We've done that. We've cleaned up the mess.
Wow. (Score:1)
Has your mother considered government service? (Score:1)
I'm right there with you. I once told an intelligence officer that bulk communication surveillance was impossible because Bruce Schneier said so. I envy that officer's poker face.
Or maybe it wasn't a hoax (Score:2, Insightful)
He got lucky, fixed it, and acted like it was a joke. Remember don't suspect !malice when it could be stupidity...
Re: (Score:1)
He got lucky, fixed it, and acted like it was a joke. Remember don't suspect !malice when it could be stupidity...
This is actually the most likely answer... 8-}
Paying attention... (Score:1)
When people are not really paying attention, they -really do- have short memories. And people pay less attention to things now that they used to.
It works just often enough to make the Marketing managers think it is generally true. But don't bet on short memories, especially in our business. 8-)