Clouds Illusions

A heartbreaking story, just for the utter pointlessness of it, via ABA Journal.


A new lawsuit alleges a fired employee hacked into his former company’s networked computers and deliberately destroyed an entire season of a syndicated children’s TV show.

 According to the suit, Jewson was fired from Cyberlynk, an Internet service provider, for an undisclosed reason in February 2009. The suit asserts that on March 26, one month after his firing, Jewson went on a data-wiping rampage.


The show’s creator, WeR1 World Network, names both Jewson and CyberLynk, in the lawsuit. The suit says that CyberLynk, which was assigned to store two years worth of work, should have done more to protect its data. Fragments from 14 episodes of Zodiac Island, a children’s series that airs on TV stations across the U.S., were lost, and reproducing or reassembling the deleted data from the series is impossible.


The money lost can be recaptured, perhaps, but people worked hard to make those shows happen, and now they will never be seen.

But lawyers use the Clouds to store files, documents, the product of our labors and the work upon which our clients’ hopes rest.  And nothing could ever go wrong, provided you are diligent in making sure that there are multiple servers, backup electric, firewalls, fire extinguishers.  All the sorts of things that could protect our files from damage, destroying years of work and perhaps someone’s life in the process.

Except a disgruntled ex-employee who knows how to get inside the system and wipe out data because he’s pissed at the company.  Not your company.  Not mine.  The company who owns the cloud.  Yes, the object of his anger will suffer, but so will others.  The employee won’t care.  People who are angry and want to lash out don’t stop to wonder about the innocent third parties who will suffer.  The employee probably had an iPad, but that didn’t save your data from being wiped clean.

No matter how much care is taken, there is no way one can stop an unhappy, crazy, person who you’ve never met from doing terrible harm.  There will be recriminations afterward about what you could have done to protect the data, but it is just a matter of shifting blame.  The sad truth is nothing is perfectly safe. 

It’s just a matter of different risks, issues that are outside your control, giving rise to problems that were never on our radar.  Is the risk of some cloud computing company’s angry employee worse than the risk of fire or flood, or any of the other risks of paper files kept in our offices or at temperature controlled warehouses?

This isn’t to suggest that the cloud is unsafe, or at least any more unsafe than your own office, where this could happen as well as a host of other things that could damage or destroy files.  It’s just a reminder that stercus accidit.  Even in the clouds.

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5 thoughts on “Clouds Illusions”

  1. Jdog

    “And it’s clouds’ illusions I recall,
    I really should have made local backups,
    after all.”

    Gimmie my Grammie.

  4. Peter Duveen

    “This isn’t to suggest that the cloud is unsafe, or at least any more unsafe than your own office, where this could happen as well as a host of other things that could damage or destroy files.”

    So what is unsafe? I would look more closely at the employer-employee relationship, which seems to be prone to such events as this destruction of data. In fact, there is the phrase “going postal” that has been used to describe at least one manifestation of this flaw. Perhaps a shift to using contract workers would reduce the incidence of such events. Contractors are in business for themselves, and don’t have all the built-up expectations that the employer-employee relationship generates.

  5. Jdog

    What’s unsafe is obvious: putting all your data eggs in one basket, that you don’t control. Much, much better to make sure you’ve got duplicates — and diffs — elsewhere, so you can reconstruct what you need, if data gets lost or damaged, either by accident or malice.

    CVS is the killer app for that, and the geek points to make that work are acquirable and/or rentable.

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