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Category Archives: Cloud

cloud computing and why it’s a good or bad idea

I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud – why not just use buttons? Also planned obsolesence is a bitch

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I bought a Bosch 500 series because that’s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.

Bosch dishwasher open control panel

After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.

Bosch dishwasher Home Connect logo

Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.

Video

This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my latest YouTube video on Level 2 Jeff:

GE Dishwasher – Planned Obsolescence

So getting back first to that old GE dishwasher, it was, I don’t know, I think that planned obsolescence is something that applies to many consumer products today.

Companies know if they design something to last only 5 or 10 years, that means in 5 or 10 years someone’s going to have to buy a whole new one.

And on my GE Amana dishwasher, it started having weird power issues, like the controls would just not light up unless I reset the circuit breaker for a few minutes. That started happening more often, and this past Saturday it just wouldn’t come on no matter what, even after I tested and re-wired it all the way from the panel up to the dishwasher’s internal power connector.

So it was dead.

Next up, I looked at what it took to get a control board. Well… $299 for a control board that was ‘special order’ and might not even fix the problem? That’s a non-starter for my $600, 8-year-old dishwasher.

Even if I got it fixed, the front panel was starting to rust out at the hinge points (leaving some metal jaggies that my soon-to-be-crawling 6 month old could slice his fingers on), and other parts of the machine were showing signs of rust/potential future leaks…

[…]

The touch sensor, you kind of touch it and the firmware—like this new dishwasher actually takes time to boot up! I had to reset it like three times and my wife meanwhile was like laughing at me like look at this guy who does tech stuff and he can’t even figure out how to change the cycle on it.

That took about five minutes, sadly.

But eventually I pulled out the manual book because I was like… “this is actually confusing.”

It should be like: I touch the button and it changes to that mode! But that was not how it was working.

I wanted to run just a rinse cycle to make sure the water would go in, the water would pump out through the sump, and everything worked post-install.

But I couldn’t find a way to do a rinse cycle on the control panel.

So I looked in the manual and found this note:

Bosch dishwasher manual mention of Home Connect

It says options with an asterisk—including Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start, are “available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model.”

The 500 series model I bought isn’t premium enough to feature a 7-segment display like the $400-more-expensive 800 series, so these fancy modes are hidden behind an app and cloud service.

I was like, “Okay, I’ll look up this app and see if I can use it over Bluetooth or locally or whatever.”

Nope! To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to your Wi-Fi, which lets the dishwasher reach out on the internet to this Home Connect service.

You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle.

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

[…]

What should be done?

When I posted on social media about this, a lot of people told me to return it.

But I spent four hours installing this thing built into my kitchen.

I hooked it up to the water, it’s running through cycles… it is working. I’ll give them that. It does the normal stuff, but you know, there are some features that don’t work without the app.

At a minimum, I think what Bosch should do is make it so that the dishwasher can be accessed locally with no requirement for a cloud account. (Really, it’d be even better to have all the functions accessible on the control panel!)

Anyone building an IoT device, here is my consumer-first, e-waste-reduction maxim:

First local, then cloud.

Cloud should be an add-on.

It should be a convenience for people who don’t know how to do things like connect to their dishwasher with an app locally.

And it’s not that hard.

A little ESP32, a little $1 chip that you can put in there could do all this stuff locally with no cloud requirement at all.

I think that there might be some quants or people who want to make a lot of money building all these cloud services.

[…]

Source: I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud | Jeff Geerling

what the actual fuck. I don’t want to connect my dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, dryer, whatever to the cloud either.

Microsoft blames Outlook outage on another dodgy code change

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Users of Microsoft’s email service might be feeling a distinct sense of déjà vu after the web version of Outlook last night blocked access to Exchange Online mailboxes.

According to Microsoft, the problem was due to “a recent change made to a portion of Outlook on the web infrastructure, that may have resulted in impact.”

Reverting the change did the trick, and service was restored, but the question must be asked – does Microsoft test its changes before deploying to production?

The problems, according to DownDetector, began around 1730 UTC on March 19 and appeared to be worldwide. The company admitted to them via social media shortly after, saying: “We’re investigating reports of an issue affecting users’ ability to access Outlook on the web.”

Half an hour later, the company admitted it made a change that might be responsible. That change was reverted, and services started returning to normal.

This sort of incident is becoming depressingly commonplace. A lengthy outage occurred at the beginning of March which Microsoft also blamed on some dodgy code.

[…]

Source: Microsoft blames Outlook outage on another dodgy code change • The Register

‘Technical issue’ at Google deletes some customer maps timeline data

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The data was stored in Google Maps’ Timeline feature, which – for those of you who let Google track you around the world – preserves a record of locations you visit. That sounds creepy and perhaps creepier still once you realize Google makes it possible for photos to appear on the Timeline too, so that users can have a visual record of their travels.

Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing.

Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people.”

The email goes on to explain that most users that availed themselves of a feature that enables encrypted backups will be able to restore their Maps Timelines data.

Users who did not make those backups can’t restore their data. Those who did make backups need to manually restore their info using a procedure Google included in its email.

[…]

This isn’t the first time Google has messed up users’ historical data: In 2023 the company shortened its default data retention time for location info from 18 to three months, but some users missed the announcement and then complained as their data was purged.

[…]

Source: ‘Technical issue’ at Google deletes some customer data • The Register

Apple Music Is Down, you can’t listen to your music because cloud

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If you wanted to play some tunes on your iPhone this afternoon, but found nothing would play, it’s not just you: As of Tuesday afternoon ET, Apple Music is down.

Apple’s System Status website currently confirms Apple Music’s downtime. As of this piece, the site shows the following status for Apple Music:

Apple Music – Outage

Today, 2:26 PM – ongoing

Some users are affected

Users may be experiencing intermittent issues with this service.

All other Apple services, including the App Store, FaceTime, iMessage, and all iCloud services, are currently online.

Source: It’s Not Just You, Apple Music Is Down | Lifehacker

Still can’t access your Outlook mailbox? You aren’t alone

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Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves.

Part of the issue appears to be related to the initial wobble over the weekend. Some of the users affected by that outage were locked out of their accounts after repeated login failures, and Microsoft’s status center for Microsoft 365 continues to report that users might be unable to access their email using the native mail app on iOS devices.

As of today, issues persist, and Microsoft has promised another update by 2300 UTC. On the plus side, the current status has changed from “We’re analyzing available data and attempting to determine the underlying source for users’ problems” to “Our analysis of available data is ongoing as we attempt to determine the underlying source of users’ problems.”

[…]

Source: Still can’t access your Outlook mailbox? You aren’t alone • The Register

Microsoft Exchange Admin Center goes down for EU users

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Microsoft’s Exchange Administration Center (EAC) has fallen over and appears to be struggling to get up.

The issue affects users trying to access EAC to administer Exchange Online for their users. Users began expressing frustration about the service being down just before lunchtime in the UK. The issue appears widespread in Europe, with users from countries such as Germany, Poland, and Belgium reporting problems.

Canada and the US appear fine, hinting that the issue might be location-based. The Register asked Microsoft for more details, but the company has not responded.

The EAC manages mailboxes, administers groups, and migrates data, among other functions. A lot of its functionality is also accessible via PowerShell, which currently seems to be working fine. However, the company has not commented on the issue or when it will be resolved.

Microsoft is very keen for customers to migrate from on-premises versions of Exchange to the company’s cloud, although one observer on social media remarked: “The amount of downtime they are facing is getting to a point where you can’t even argue ‘Cloud has better availability.'”

Quite. The long-held assertion that the cloud is a cheaper, more reliable option than an on-premises rack of servers has been ringing increasingly hollow in recent times. Microsoft suffered an Outlook outage over the weekend, and some Microsoft 365 users experienced downtime on Monday.

[…]

Source: Microsoft Exchange Admin Center takes siesta for EU users • The Register

Payday from hell as several Brit banks report major outages

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The UK is full of unhappy workers that are unable to manage their payday cash amid online service outages at a host of major banks.

Downdetector indicates trouble at Lloyds Bank, Halifax, TSB, Nationwide, First Direct, Bank of Scotland, and Barclays, although the latter’s woes appear to have been resolved since the surge of complaints earlier today.

The same can’t be said for the others, however, which all continue to report glitches via their service status pages.

Across the board, the outages seem to be related to web and mobile banking, with the root cause unclear.

[…]

Unlike the other banks whose customers can’t access their online banking platforms, those who use Nationwide can still access their accounts and move money around seamlessly, provided the money is going into other Nationwide accounts under their control.

All affected customers are still able to use their debit and credit cards at ATMs and in shops.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s finance regulator, published a post-CrowdStrike report in October, saying it noticed an upward trend of third-party related outages hitting UK banks since the beginning of 2023.

[…]

Today’s outage comes weeks after Barclays suffered a weekend-long service wobble, that reportedly left at least one customer homeless as a result.

Source: Payday from hell as several Brit banks report major outages • The Register

After Snowden and now Trump, Europe  Finally begins to worry about US-controlled clouds

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In a recent blog post titled “It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds,” Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur, software developer, and part-time technical advisor to the Dutch Electoral Council, articulated such concerns.

“We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire large-scale US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds,” wrote Hubert.

Hubert didn’t offer data to support that statement, but European Commission stats shows that close to half of European enterprises rely on cloud services, a market led by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM – all US-based companies.

While concern about cloud data sovereignty became fashionable back in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed secrets revealing the scope of US signals intelligence gathering and fled to Russia, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency in light of the Trump administration’s sudden policy shifts.

In the tech sphere those moves include removing members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that safeguards data under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, alleged flouting of federal data rules to advance policy goals. Europeans therefore have good reason to wonder how much they can trust data privacy assurances from US cloud providers amid their shows of obsequious deference to the new regime.

And there’s also a practical impetus for the unrest: organizations that use Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 have to decide whether they want to move to Microsoft’s cloud come October 14, 2025, when support officially ends. Microsoft is encouraging customers to move to Microsoft 365 which is tied to the cloud. But that looks riskier now than it did under less contentious transatlantic relations.

The Register spoke with Hubert about his concerns and the situation in which Europe now finds itself.

[…]

Source: Europe begins to worry about US-controlled clouds • The Register

It was truly unbelievable that EU was using US cloud in the first place for many reasons ranging from technical to cost to privacy but they just keep blundering on.

Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers’ cloud products

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Microsoft has notified customers that it’s missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions.

According to a notification sent to affected customers, Microsoft said that “a bug in one of Microsoft’s internal monitoring agents resulted in a malfunction in some of the agents when uploading log data to our internal logging platform” between September 2 and September 19.

The notification said that the logging outage was not caused by a security incident, and “only affected the collection of log events.”

Business Insider first reported the loss of log data earlier in October. Details of the notification have not been widely reported. As noted by security researcher Kevin Beaumont, the notifications that Microsoft sent to affected companies are likely accessible only to a handful of users with tenant admin rights.

[…]

The affected products include Microsoft Entra, Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, and Purview, according to the Business Insider report.

[…]

The logging outage comes a year after Microsoft came under fire from federal investigators for withholding security logs from certain U.S. federal government departments that host their emails on the company’s hardened, government-only cloud; investigators said having access to those logs could have identified a series of China-backed intrusions far sooner.

The China-backed intruders, referred to as Storm-0558, broke into Microsoft’s network and stole a digital skeleton key that allowed the hackers unfettered access to U.S. government emails stored in Microsoft’s cloud

[…]

Following the China-backed hacks, Microsoft said it would start providing logs to its lower-paid cloud accounts from September 2023.

Source: Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers’ cloud products | TechCrunch

Cloud problems scale so very very well. Everyone has a problem if your cloud provider has one.

Microsoft applies fix for new Outlook desktop crashes

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Microsoft’s Outlook app is crashing for European users due to memory problems, Redmond has warned, and evidence suggests the problems are spreading to the US.

“We’re investigating an issue in which users in Europe may be experiencing crashing, not receiving emails or observing high memory usage when using the Outlook client,” Redmond warned.

“We’re analyzing data from customers experiencing crashes and high memory usage when using the New Outlook desktop app. We’re reviewing service telemetry and reproducing the issue internally to develop a mitigation plan.”

So far, there is no word on Microsoft’s plan, but social media reports suggest the US East Coast at least is suffering similar problems. Downdetector indicates the issue appears to be spreading.

“It’s been spreading across the country like the common cold now, and I can’t seem to figure out what is causing it,” reported one user. “There have been no changes to the environment and no updates to the Windows desktops that are having this issue.”

Microsoft’s engineers are working on the issue and trying to find out what the problem is. It’s not a good look for a software giant’s main email system.

[…]

Source: Microsoft applies fix for Outlook crashes • The Register

The new Outlook app is absolutely a downgrade in every way from the old one.

Major IT outage hits Microsoft Azure and Office365 users worldwide leading to cancelled flights, stock exchange outages and more chaos. What a great idea cloud is for critical infrastructure!

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Companies and banks worldwide have been reportedly hit by a mass IT outage, leading to grounded flights.

A major IT outage has reportedly hit banks, media outlets, and airlines on Friday, causing chaos at airport check-in and cancelled flights.

The outage is believed to be caused by an outage of Microsoft’s Azure and Office365 services.

Airlines such as Qantas in Australia and at least two low-cost carriers in the US – Frontier and Sun Country Airlines – have been forced to ground flights.

In Europe, users of Ryanair’s app and website also complained and not being able to check in on Friday morning, with a surge of reports noted on the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Source: Major IT outage hits Microsoft users worldwide leading to cancelled flights and chaos | Euronews

Slack Will Begin Deleting Older Content From Free Workspaces

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Slack announced a significant change to its platform, saying it will “begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis.”

Slack’s prior policy involved keeping messages and files for the lifetime of a free workspace, although accessing that full history required switching to a paid account. Under the new policy, Slack reserves the right to delete content from free workspaces after one year.

Slack will no longer keep messages and files for the lifetime of your free workspace. Starting August 26, 2024, Customer Data — such as messages and file history — older than one year may be deleted on a rolling basis from workspaces on the free plan, following the terms described in the Main Services Agreement and Trust and Compliance Documentation.

If you choose to remain on a free workspace, you’ll have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid plan. If you decide to upgrade, we’ll store messages and files based on your chosen retention period, with an option to keep all history.

Users interested in keeping their full history of content should upgrade to a paid workspace before August 26, 2024. Once deletion occurs, messages and files cannot be recovered.

Source: Slack Will Begin Deleting Older Content From Free Workspaces

This is a problem with cloud services – you do not own or manage the data or the rules with which it is kept.

Microsoft admits no guarantee that UK policing data will stay in the UK and at all private – are you looking, EU member states?!

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According to correspondence released by the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) under freedom of information (FOI) rules, Microsoft is unable to guarantee that data uploaded to a key Police Scotland IT system – the Digital Evidence Sharing Capability (DESC) – will remain in the UK as required by law.

While the correspondence has not been released in full, the disclosure reveals that data hosted in Microsoft’s hyperscale public cloud infrastructure is regularly transferred and processed overseas; that the data processing agreement in place for the DESC did not cover UK-specific data protection requirements; and that while the company has the ability to make technical changes to ensure data protection compliance, it is only making these changes for DESC partners and not other policing bodies because “no one else had asked”.

The correspondence also contains acknowledgements from Microsoft that international data transfers are inherent to its public cloud architecture. As a result, the issues identified with the Scottish Police will equally apply to all UK government users, many of whom face similar regulatory limitations on the offshoring of data.

[…]

Nicky Stewart, a former ICT chief at the UK government’s Cabinet Office, said most people with knowledge of how hyperscale public cloud works have known about these data sovereignty issues for years.

“It’s clearly going to be a concern to any police force that’s using Microsoft, but it’s wider than that,” she said, adding that while Part 3 of the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018 clearly stipulates that law enforcement data needs to be kept in the UK, other kinds of public sector data must also be kept sovereign under the new G-Cloud 14 framework, which has introduced a UK-only data hosting requirement.

[…]

Microsoft’s commitment to not access customer data without permission is further complicated by the terms of service, which make that promise strictly conditional by giving the company the ability to access data without permission if they either have to fulfil a legal burden, such as responding to government requests for data, or to maintain the service.

[…]

He added that given Microsoft’s disclosures to the SPA, “it must now be obvious that M365 and Azure Cloud services do not meet the two key requirements” to be a legal processor or sub-processor of law enforcement data under the DPA 18.

“These are: one, to conduct all processing and support activities 100% from inside the UK; and two, to only make an international transfer if they are specifically instructed to make the particular transfer by the controller,” he said.

“Microsoft have confirmed that they do not and cannot commit to requirement one for their M365 services, or indeed for most of the services they operate and support in Azure. They have also said that they cannot ‘operationalise’ individual requests as required of them under section 59(7) of the act, thus failing to meet requirement two.

“There can be no clearer evidence than Microsoft’s own clarifications that they cannot meet the legal requirements for a processor or sub-processor of law enforcement data.”

Stewart said: “If it’s not possible to understand the simple question, ‘do you know where your data is all the time?’, then you probably shouldn’t be putting your data in that platform.”

[…]

Source: Microsoft admits no guarantee of sovereignty for UK policing data | Computer Weekly

With the EU and also some EU domain name registrars (looking at you, SIDN) working with these crazy cloud providers, it should have been blindingly obvious that putting data in a US cloud provider would open it up for US spying and a complete lack of data ownership. However idiots will be idiots.

Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account with 620k customers due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’

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More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.

The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund’s 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google’s cloud service as the issue.

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”.

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

“Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the pair said.

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”

While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.

UniSuper was able to eventually restore services because the fund had backups in place with another provider.

“These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” the pair said.

[…]

Source: Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ | Superannuation | The Guardian

Sony Shuts Down LittleBigPlanet 3 Servers, destroying Fan Creations – don’t trust the cloud

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Sony has indefinitely decommissioned the PlayStation 4 servers for puzzle platformer LittleBigPlanet 3, the company announced in an update to one of its support pages. The permanent shutdown comes just months after the servers were temporarily taken offline due to ongoing issues. Fans now fear potentially hundreds of thousands of player creations not saved locally will be lost for good.

“Due to ongoing technical issues which resulted in the LittleBigPlanet 3 servers for PlayStation 4 being taken offline temporarily in January 2024, the decision has been made to keep the servers offline indefinitely,” Sony wrote in the update, first spotted by Delisted Games. “All online services including access to other players’ creations for LittleBigPlanet 3 are no longer available.”

The 2014 sequel starring Sackboy and other crafted creatures was beloved for the creativity and flexibility it afforded players to create their own platforming levels. The game’s offline features will remain available, as will user-generated content stored locally. Players won’t be able to share them, though, or access any data that was stored on Sony’s servers, which likely made up the majority of user-generated content for the game.

While the servers for the PS3 version of the game were originally shut down in 2021 due to ongoing DDOS attacks, the PS4 servers remained open up until January of 2024 when malicious mods threatened the game’s security. “We are temporarily taking the LittleBigPlanet servers offline whilst we investigate a number of issues that have been reported to us,” the game’s Twitter account announced at the time. “If you have been impacted by these issues, please be rest assured that we are aware of them and are working to resolve them for all affected.”

Some players were worried the closure might become permanent. It now seems they were right.

“Nearly 16 years worth of user generated content, millions of levels, some with millions of plays and hearts,” wrote one long-time player, Weeni-Tortellini, on Reddit in January. “Absolutely iconic levels locked away forever with no way to experience them again. To me, the servers shutting down is a hefty chunk bitten out of LittleBigPlanet’s history. I personally have many levels I made as a kid. Digital relics of what made me as creative as i am today, and The only access to these levels i have is thru the servers. I would be devastated if I could never experience them again.”

The permanent shutdown comes as online services across many other older games are retired as well. Nintendo took online multiplayer for Wii U and 3DS games offline earlier this month, impacting games like Splatoon and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Ubisoft came under fire last week for not just shutting off servers for always-online racing game The Crew, but revoking PC players’ licenses to the game itself as well.

“This is naturally a very sad day for all of us involved with LittleBigPlanet and I have no doubt that many feel the same,” tweeted community manager Steven Isbell. “I’m still here to listen to you all though and will take time over the coming weeks to reach out to the community and listen to anyone that wants to talk.”

Source: Sony Shuts Down LittleBigPlanet 3 Servers, Nuking Fan Creations

European Commission broke data protection law with Microsoft Office 365 – duh

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The European Commission has been reprimanded for infringing data protection regulations when using Microsoft 365.

The rebuke came from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) and is the culmination of an investigation that kicked off in May 2021, following the Schrems II judgement.

According to the EDPS, the EC infringed several data protection regulations, including rules around transferring personal data outside the EU / European Economic Area (EEA.)

According to the organization, “In particular, the Commission has failed to provide appropriate safeguards to ensure that personal data transferred outside the EU/EEA are afforded an essentially equivalent level of protection as guaranteed in the EU/EEA.

“Furthermore, in its contract with Microsoft, the Commission did not sufficiently specify what types of personal data are to be collected and for which explicit and specified purposes when using Microsoft 365.”

While the concerns are more about EU institutions and transparency, they should also serve as notice to any company doing business in the EU / EEA to take a very close look at how it has configured Microsoft 365 regarding the EU Data Protection Regulations.

[…]

Source: European Commission broke data protection law with Microsoft • The Register

Who knew? An American Company running an American cloud product on American Servers and the EU was putting it’s data on it. Who would have thought that might end up in America?!

Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet

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More than one-quarter of scholarly articles are not being properly archived and preserved, a study of more than seven million digital publications suggests. The findings, published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication on 24 January1, indicate that systems to preserve papers online have failed to keep pace with the growth of research output.

“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

[…]

The sample of DOIs included in the study was made up of a random selection of up to 1,000 registered to each member organization. Twenty-eight per cent of these works — more than two million articles — did not appear in a major digital archive, despite having an active DOI. Only 58% of the DOIs referenced works that had been stored in at least one archive. The other 14% were excluded from the study because they were published too recently, were not journal articles or did not have an identifiable source.

Preservation challenge

Eve notes that the study has limitations: namely that it tracked only articles with DOIs, and that it did not search every digital repository for articles (he did not check whether items with a DOI were stored in institutional repositories, for example).

[…]

“Everybody thinks of the immediate gains they might get from having a paper out somewhere, but we really should be thinking about the long-term sustainability of the research ecosystem,” Eve says. “After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00616-5

Source: Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet

Satellites Step Up After Red Sea Internet Cables Get Severed

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[…] Earlier this week, four out of 15 communication cables were cut, disrupting network traffic that flows through the Red Sea. The damaged cables affected 25% of traffic between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, according to Hong Kong telecoms company HGC Global Communications. The cause of the damage is still unknown, and the company is working on a fix, which it referred to as an “exceptionally rare occurrence.” Although HGC did not reveal the cause behind the damaged cables, a U.S. National Security Council spokesperson blamed it on the anchor of a cargo ship that was sunk by the Houthi group in Yemen. The Houthis, however, issued a statement denying its involvement.

Regardless of the cause, satellite companies have stepped up by beaming connectivity from space to reroute some of that impacted traffic. Satellite operators such as Intelsat are providing back up connectivity to fill in the gaps for the severed cables, SpaceNews reported.

Intelsat has a fleet of 52 communication satellites in orbit, providing broadband internet and offering airline passengers inflight connectivity. Other companies, like Eutelsat OneWeb, SES, and, more famously, SpaceX are also in the business of beaming connectivity from Earth orbit.

The recent incident, although rare, does offer a glimpse into what a hybrid connectivity solution would look like, providing internet from both underwater cables, as well as orbital satellites. Subsea customers, or those getting internet from both ends, can restore their connectivity within 15 minutes should there be an issue with a terrestrial provider, Rhys Morgan, regional vice president for Intelsat, told SpaceNews.

[…]

Source: Satellites Step Up After Red Sea Internet Cables Get Severed

Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes

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Last week, co-founder David Crosby said that “so far” the company had identified 14 people who were able to briefly see into a stranger’s property because they were shown an image from someone else’s Wyze camera. Now we’re being told that number of affected customers has ballooned to 13,000.

The revelation came from an email sent to customers entitled “An Important Security Message from Wyze,” in which the company copped to the breach and apologized, while also attempting to lay some of the blame on its web hosting provider AWS.

“The outage originated from our partner AWS and took down Wyze devices for several hours early Friday morning. If you tried to view live cameras or Events during that time, you likely weren’t able to. We’re very sorry for the frustration and confusion this caused.

The breach, however, occurred as Wyze was attempting to bring its cameras back online. Customers were reporting seeing mysterious images and video footage in their own Events tab. Wyze disabled access to the tab and launched its own investigation.

As it did before, Wyze is chalking up the incident to “a third-party caching client library” that was recently integrated into its system.

This client library received unprecedented load conditions caused by devices coming back online all at once. As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID and user ID mapping and connected some data to incorrect accounts.

But it was too late to prevent an estimated 13,000 people from getting an unauthorized peek at thumbnails from a stranger’s homes. Wyze says that 1,504 people tapped to enlarge the thumbnail, and that a few of them caught a video that they were able to view. It also claims that all impacted users have been notified of the security breach, and that over 99 percent of all of its customers weren’t affected.

[…]

Source: Wyze says camera breach let 13,000 customers briefly see into other people’s homes – The Verge

Which it’s better to store stuff on your own NAS hardware instead of some vendor’s cloud.

Apple Pay, Apple Card and Wallet were down for some users this morning – again

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Apple’s financial services, including Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Card and Wallet, experienced service disruptions for some users between 6:15 AM and 6:49 AM Eastern this morning, according to the company’s System Status page. As AppleInsider notes, it’s unclear how widespread the issues were, but the company has experienced intermittent Apple Pay issues earlier this year.

[…]

Source: Apple Pay, Apple Card and Wallet were down for some users this morning

Google calls Drive data loss “fixed,” locks forum threads saying otherwise

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Google is dealing with its second “lost data” fiasco in the past few months. This time, it’s Google Drive, which has been mysteriously losing files for some people. Google acknowledged the issue on November 27, and a week later, it posted what it called a fix.

It doesn’t feel like Google is describing this issue correctly; the company still calls it a “syncing issue” with the Drive desktop app versions 84.0.0.0 through 84.0.4.0. Syncing problems would only mean files don’t make it to or from the cloud, and that doesn’t explain why people are completely losing files. In the most popular issue thread on the Google Drive Community forums, several users describe spreadsheets and documents going missing, which all would have been created and saved in the web interface, not the desktop app, and it’s hard to see how the desktop app could affect that. Many users peg “May 2023” as the time documents stopped saving. Some say they’ve never used the desktop app.

[…]

Google’s recovery instructions outline a few ways to attempt to “recover your files.” One is via a new secret UI in the Google Drive desktop app version 85.0.13.0 or higher. If you hold shift while clicking on the Drive system tray/menu bar icon, you’ll get a special debug UI with an option to “Recover from backups.” Google says, “Once recovery is complete, you’ll see a new folder on your desktop with the unsynced files named Google Drive Recovery.” Google doesn’t explain what this does or how it works.

Option No. 2 is surprising: use of the command line to recover files. The new Drive binary comes with flags for ‘–recover_from_account_backups’ and ‘–recover_from_app_data_path’, which tells us a bit about what is going on. When Google first acknowledged the issue, it warned users not to delete or move Drive’s app data folder. These flags from the recovery process make it sound like Google hopes your missing files will be in the Drive cache somewhere. Google also suggests trying Windows Backup or macOS Time Machine to find your files.

Google locked the issue thread on the Drive Community Forums at 170 replies before it was clear the problem was solved. It’s also marking any additional threads as “duplicates” and locking them.

[…]

Of the few replies before Google locked the thread, most suggested that Google’s fix did not work. One user calls the fix “complete BS,” adding, “The “solution” doesn’t work for most people.” Another says, “Google Drive DELETED my files so they are not available for recovery. This “fix” is not a fix!” There are lots of other reports of the fix not working, and not many that say they got their files back. The idea that Drive would have months-old copies of files in the app data folder is hard to believe.

[…]

Source: Google calls Drive data loss “fixed,” locks forum threads saying otherwise | Ars Technica

Months of Google Drive files disappearing randomly

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Google Drive users are reporting files mysteriously disappearing from the service, with some netizens on the goliath’s support forums claiming six or more months of work have unceremoniously vanished.

The issue has been rumbling for a few days, with one user logging into Google Drive and finding things as they were in May 2023.

According to the poster, almost everything saved since then has gone, and attempts at recovery failed.

Others chimed in with similar experiences, and one claimed that six months of business data had gone AWOL.

There is little information regarding what has happened; some users reported that synchronization had simply stopped working, so the cloud storage was out of date. Others could get some of their information back by fiddling with cached files, although the limited advice on offer for the affected was to leave things well alone until engineers come up with a solution.

A message purporting to be from Google support also advised not to make changes to the root/data folder while engineers investigate the issue.

[…]

a reminder that just because files are being stored in the cloud, there is no guarantee that they are safe. European cloud hosting provider OVH suffered a disastrous fire in 2021 that left some customers scrambling for backups and disaster recovery plans.

[…]

ust because the files have been uploaded one day does not necessarily mean they will still be there – or recoverable – the next.

[…]

MatthewSt reports that he has a fix; obviously this is something worked out by a user rather than official advice, so caution is advised.

Source: The mystery of the disappearing Google Drive files • The Register

Rivian update bricks infotainment – corp comms quickly and publicly on Reddit

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Hi All,

We made an error with the 2023.42 OTA update – a fat finger where the wrong build with the wrong security certificates was sent out. We cancelled the campaign and we will restart it with the proper software that went through the different campaigns of beta testing.

Service will be contacting impacted customers and will go through the resolution options. That may require physical repair in some cases.

This is on us – we messed up. Thanks for your support and your patience as we go through this.

* Update 1 (11/13, 10:45 PM PT): The issue impacts the infotainment system. In most cases, the rest of the vehicle systems are still operational. A vehicle reset or sleep cycle will not solve the issue. We are validating the best options to address the issue for the impacted vehicles. Our customer support team is prioritizing support for our customers related to this issue. Thank you.

*Update 2 (11/14, 11:30 AM PT): Hi all, As I mentioned yesterday, we identified an issue in our recent software update 2023.42.0 that impacted the infotainment system on a number of R1T and R1S vehicles. In most cases, the rest of the vehicle systems and the mobile app will remain functional. If you’re an impacted owner, you should have received an email and a text communication. We understand that this is frustrating and we are really sorry for this inconvenience. The team continues to actively work on the best possible solution to fix the impacted vehicles, and we will keep the community updated. In the meantime, our Service team is prioritizing this issue and you can reach out to them at 1-855-748-4265.

*Update 3 (11/14, 7 PM PT): We just emailed the impacted owners with next steps. The team managed to build a solution, and we will start rolling it out tomorrow.

*Update 4 (11/15 11:30 AM PT): the team has been able to build a solution that fixes the issue remotely. Roll out starting today. Thanks to the community for the support.

Source: 2023.42 OTA Update Issue : Rivian

As far as I am concerned well done – everyone was kept informed and a tough problem to fix was rolled out fairly quickly. Mistakes happen everywhere, so it’s more important that they are fixed and that people are informed.

It does, however, highlight the security issues of automatic updates.

Microsoft admits ‘power issue’ downed Azure in West Europe

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Microsoft techies are trying to recover storage nodes for a “small” number of customers following a “power issue” on October 20 that triggered Azure service disruptions and ruined breakfast for those wanting to use hosted virtual machines or SQL DB.

The degradation began at 0731 UTC on Friday when Microsoft spotted the unspecified power problem, which affected infrastructure in one Availability Zone in the West Europe region. As such, businesses using VMs, Storage, App Service, or Cosmos and SQL DB suffered interruptions.

So what caused this unplanned downtime session? Microsoft says in an incident report on its Azure status history page: “Due to an upstream utility disturbance, we moved to generator power for a section of one datacenter at approximately 0731 UTC. A subset of those generators supporting that section failed to take over as expected during the switch over from utility power, resulting in the impact.”

Engineers managed to restore power again at around 0800 UTC and the impacted infrastructure began to clamber back online again. When the networking and storage plumbing recovered, compute scale units were brought into service, and for the “vast majority” the Azure services were accessible again from 0915 UTC.

Yet not everyone was up and running smoothly, Microsoft admitted.

“A small amount of storage nodes needs to be recovered manually, leading to delays in recovery for some services and customers. We are working to recover these nodes and will continue to communicate to these impacted customers directly via the Service Health blade in the Azure Portal.”

Source: Microsoft admits ‘power issue’ downed Azure in West Europe • The Register