Blue's WordPress Blog

So that data loss that happened on ezboard around 31 May 2005/1 June 2005. The one where ezboard managed to lose a year’s worth of messages (according to the stats. for our ezboard, something like 70,000 messages including a whole section devoted to one of our members, a paramedic who’d died from a brain haemorrhage). The one where those messages were dismissed as mere historic data by ezboard. The one where we discovered that the backups we were paying ezboard to make had somehow all been deleted too.

Well if you recall, ezboard offered a little reward for information leading to the arrest of this heinous hacker. And ezboard told us they’d brought in the FBI to apprehend the villain who’d been clever enough to hack into ezboard’s network, delete all the current data, hop across to another network and delete all the backups (note how they weren’t secure, off-site backups – Disaster Recovery, anyone?).

Well that hacker must have been very clever indeed or he’d have been apprehended by now wouldn’t he? What with the might of the FBI hunting him down and everything. Funny how I’ve seen nothing about any arrest or even any ongoing investigations. If I were a cynic, I might be tempted to think that there never was a hack at all and that it might just have been incompetence from ezboard that led to the data loss. And that claiming it was a hack would have diverted criticism away from Labatt and his small band of lackeys to some nebulous creature for people to blame.

I’m reminded by a comment I just posted on another Yuku/ezboard-watch message board that there are a couple of issues with the whole ezboard to Yuku profile imports and the claimed numbers of Yuku users.

Firstly, my old ezboard account has been exported to Yuku without my permission and without me asking for the account to be migrated. That’s not very friendly, is it? Especially as the wonderful account migration has messed up the profile so that I am apparently a 2006 year-old female. It doesn’t help that I can’t log in with that account – I’ve been banned from Yuku for “privacy violation” apparently (spot the irony in that…) – and even if I could, there’s no facility within Yuku to delete your account anyway. Presumably a reduction in user numbers wouldn’t help Yuku to look good for advertisers.

I do still have a working ezboard account and I migrated that one across to see if it would actually work (see my comments in my last post about this). I decided to hide all the profile details given that they were mainly wrong: as an example, your location has to include a US State even if you’re outside the US. How does that work then? Maybe this is just poor coding or maybe it looks like there are more US-based profiles than there actually are?

But one think strikes me about the forced account migration for my banned account: if I were to set up a user account and profile for Robert Labatt (ezboard, Inc.’s CEO) on another message board and not allow him to access or delete that account, I wonder how long it would be before my ISP began getting bombarded with hysterical legal threats from ezboard? Double standards? Surely not…