So they rebuilt it first from first hand proof, then by testimonies, with a period of counter claims available IIRC. For sure there were some false claims, but given the magnitude of the disaster, this is the best solution within that context.
In a similar vein, I was once curious how you would prove your identity if ALL of your relevant documents (passport, driver's license, birth certificate etc) were lost in some kind of cataclysm e.g. a house fire pre-digital etc
Turns out there is actually a mechanism for this:
- get multiple people to sign sworn affidavits that you are who you say you are
- that begins the "paper trail" of evidence that allows you to start getting the rest of the document chain
- you rebuild from there.
If you're married, there is already a similar process for when a spouse takes the last name of the other spouse. The marriage certificate is the first step and then it goes from there for driver's license, passport, credit cards and so on.
Oddly enough, if you legally change your name, they will send you a new one regardless of the limit.
It is very unlikely that you will be asked, even by a prospective employer, for your actual card, because let's face it: it doesn't even have a photo, or anything but that unique number on it. Anyone trying to authenticate your number should be satisfied if you can give them the correct number.
And just for review: SSNs are not a "national ID" and you're typically not required to divulge it to private parties, and they can make up some other unique ID for you in their database. It's usually just a shortcut for them to do a background or credit check on you. And that's not something for which they would need your physical card.
That being said, I've replaced my card about 3 times now, and it was comparatively difficult this time around. The first time, I did it all through the mail (the process of building up from no ID to get birth certificate from out-of-state, to the SSA card, to the in-state driver license.) and the second time it arrived by mail, no hassle.
But this time around, even though I applied online, I was directed to make an appointment at the field office and physically walk in there, to prove my humanity. I had never been to an SSA Field Office in my life! The experience was very chill, and there were a dozen windows serving people, while about 4 of us waited in the lobby, and I was in-and-out half an hour early. The civil servant was a lady in good spirits who was a military veteran. Big props to them!
In my state, it's one of the allowed document types for proof of social security number, required to get a real ID drivers license.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/ma-real-id-documents-checklist/down...
I'm curious when this happened. The phrase "but this time around" makes it sound fairly recent. However, my wife had this very procedure required back in the 1990's.
She also had the same experience as you: Very friendly civil servants eager to help, and things were cleared up quickly once she understood the process.
That's not what they are, but that's what they've defacto become. I hate it.
Except for certain industries where the government has a direct interest (banking, healthcare, real estate), I don't think anyone has asked for my SSN in at least a decade. It's not like the old days when you'd fork over your SSN to rent videos at Blockbuster.
That's still a massive dependance on "ID" for SS...? Blockbuster tho.. phew it's been a while.
I got my first passport at a formative period of my life (international travel does that). I looked nothing like the photo within aa year. It served as a passport until it expired but only created skeptisism as a photo ID.
I don't know how to drive, so do not possess a driver's licence. I am in a 35+ year relationship, but unmarried.
The only purchase I have made on finance was a bed that I immediately paid off because the the only reason I did it was to establish a record. This was surprisingly difficult to do because they were reluctant to let me have the bed on finance because I had no credit record.
I finally had to renew my passport when I bought a house. It was the only way I could meet the id requirements.
Prior to that I was leveraging non-photo id that could only be acquired with photo-id. It seen that will be accepted in lieu in many instances and allows you to get more similar forms of non-photo ID. All you need to get started is to find a staff member fed up with the ridiculous rules enough to click the checkbox to say that they saw a photo ID. It helps that many of the staff in these positions are more aware of security theater than the general public.
Being a land owner means a lot of those days are peassed, I can't really prove I am the person who is recorded as owning the land, but mostly organisatipns are happy that I am claiming to be someone they know exists.
Linkedin has stopped asking. I'm not sure if that means they think I am a lost cause or that anyone not on their books by now doesn't actually exist.
Of course, if you fall into a crack that is beyond their reach you will almost certainly have a more difficult time. For a variety of historical reasons, there has been relatively little reliable documentation of American citizenship so the system adapted to that reality.
"Oh volcano exploded, his home is under 5 ft of ash."
"Gotcha, mail him the copy"
What you need is "pyroclastic event" insurance to cover you for ash and lahar.
/ It cost something like $15/year when I lived in Seattle.
// The macOS spell checker doesn't know "lahar."
- get insurance to cover you for X
- get hit by X
- realise you actually got hit by Y after reading the policy small print (or you really did get hit by X, but your policy only covers you for Y)
Or did a joke about overbearing mother in laws just go right over my head.
It is definitely a good idea to plan in advance and set up a recovery contact: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102641
And that link is to recovery contacts, not codes. If you’re willing to trust one person you can get back into your Apple account after a disaster.
Everytime I get stuck with some kind of circular bureaucracy I shout "it's Banana Joe all over again!" and no one understands.
And now I also know that he has a law degree, has several registered patents, and was a certified airline pilot. Pretty impressive.
A great-great grandfather of mine was mayor of a town through which the front passed twice during WWI. All that survived were basements. Your father's account more or less describes the process by which the land was reparceled.
They even show how they did historically which is super interesting!
Unfortunately changing the borders is super expensive and time consuming though so I didn’t do anything.
If the you need to know if the fence is on your property or the neighbor’s, a title or deed won’t help you find that line.
So if the official survey is lost and you need to know where the land you own is, you will need a survey.
A survey is little more than marching out into the field and putting at the location where you believe the boundaries to be based on your review of the legal description.
Of course that’s not the end of the discussion as to boundaries for reasons like adverse possession or busted titles but on his own a surveyor is going to tell you basically nothing.
So all is not lost if the registry goes up in flames.
[1] https://community.apryse.com/t/jbig2-compression-issue/1814
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Character_substitution_e...
"Hold up in court" as in was it duly executed and filed by a certain date, regardless of the time and extra management required for the bank's performance? Yes, why not.
"Hold up in court" against someone claiming it was an unauthorized transfer? Even without the bug, that can be contested in many straightforward ways!
But unless there is a specific legal claim that hinges on the bug being significant, it's pretty irrelevant "in court". I knew about this precisely because the transfer failed to go through due to redundancy - one digit in account numbers is generally a check digit, plus account titles and whatnot.
In general you can always challenge the validity of scanned documents, regardless of known software bugs or not! Just like you can always challenge that a paper document is a forgery. You need a specific argument and some evidence though!
The United States on the other hand has a massive title insurance industry, which wouldn't exist if this system was implemented. So you can make random handshake agreements all you'd like and sue over it.
[1] https://www.elra.eu/the-principles-underlying-the-land-regis...
Sort of. The registration is what provides opposability against third parties. But between buyer and seller, the transfer of ownership happens by the contract itself. You'll have a harder time against creditors of the seller placing liens on the property, or other people claiming to be owners (e.g. if they bought the foreclosed property); how hard a time depends on the country.
And there may be still be encumbrances/claims to the property that are not subjection to registration like adverse possession or rental agreements that can be asserted against the buyer and for which the buyer's only option is to sue to the seller.
ADDED: We also had a bunch of easements and cooperative maintenance agreements that were only partially documented in the deed and mostly done via a handshake. So we got that all squared away in the expensive binder from the lawyer.
In his thesis, this is the reason capitalism cannot work well in Latin America and other nations around the world. He says that registered land ownership is the foundation of capitalism. This is how one can borrow money against your land and invest it to make more capital. Very common for example with farmers in N. America to borrow against their farm, for machines, seeds and fertilizer.
(I am not an economist)
De Soto is talking about why it "cannot" get started in a place without government controlled land registry.
De Soto describes the exact opposite situation. Latin America inherited Napoleonic property law, which only recognized property ownership when formally registered, which required quite alot of red tape. It was impossible to transfer ownership without registration. Moreover, any defect in prior registration meant the lawful owner might be the heirs of someone generations ago. Most property "owned" by the peasantry usually had defective and incurable title, having changed hands in informal private agreements, which meant banks wouldn't accept it to secure a loan. This meant only the aristocracy could leverage the financial system, because they were accustomed to following all the formalities. What piece of real property someone thought they owned, even if occupied for generations, was often in the eyes of the law owned by some aristocratic family or the state.
He contrasted that system with the American common law system, where title could be legally transfered entirely privately. Disputes are handled by courts which look to the timing and substance of transfers. Moreover, adverse possession meant that after a number of years (well within one person's lifespan) nobody could come along and claim title because of a defective transfer (even if in principle they had a better claim originally), securing title in whomever held it, even if it had been transferred without even following the much looser requirements under the common law. A bank would issue a loan so long as you could prove you held an unchallenged title for a sufficient number of years. ("Title" was whatever piece of paper handed you by the previous possessors; no government stamp or recordation required.)
Registration systems in the US are a recent occurrence, and they overlay the traditional common law rules.
A gross generalization, but Napoleonic civil law systems emphasize formal transactions centrally administered by the state, while the common law emphasizes looking to the substance of private transactions, and usually only when a dispute arises (otherwise you just presume they're valid). Broadly speaking, De Soto argued the latter tended to favor the common man, because it was much less rigid.
De Soto also pointed out that US Federal Land Grants also did a decent job at distributing land among the people, unlike Latin America where mostly only the aristocracy held land under a good title.
"Cannot work well" and "cannot get started" are two different things. The whole of Latin America apart from Cuba is capitalist, for better or worse, regardless of how bad those countries keep their books.
And yes I can see that we are at the end of an era. This may be more the end of the U.S. empire than the elimination of capitalism, but for sure a new 'ism" is going to be required soon. What that is will be interesting to see. It would be nice to see someone with imagination come along instead the bipolar options we are handed today.
"i paid for 30 acres here at $xx rate, and here is the mortgage docs from the bank dated March 19th that I signed, plus their valuation of the property and what went into it"
(And obviously has some doc to prove it)
If the hacker was targeting the erasure of a particular recent transaction, they may well have succeeded. And by deleting numerous others, they have plausible deniability in the subsequent dispute over the property. If you just wipe a record that is related to you, and the manipulation is discovered (which it will be, one way or another), you are part of a narrow circle of suspects.
All you need is an append only tape or even a printer.
Interestingly in the Bangladesh Central Bank hack they used a printer to print out any transactions, but the intruders disabled it or it was just malfunctioning because it's a printer.
But I doubt the Romanians actually had such a system.
Also, you still have paper documents, kept by parties to transaction, right?
I had a copy of our code on media in my desk labeled “promotion” and updated it every month. In retrospect someone going through my desk would have assumed blackmail material and been disappointed to find only code.
People would get their buddy to agree the land was theirs so not a perfect system, but some families were made more whole.
The last thing any government will want to deal with is massive irretrievable data loss.
/joking, i'm sure this is not a happy time for whoever is trying to rebuild everything
When you buy property you get a deed for the land, but the details of a property can change after that. The deed also doesn't contain ownership, it just says what is on the land. It's common for land to have multiple owners (1/32 is not unheard of) due to inheritance.
I'm building a house, the land deed just has the land plot as we bought it, until the house is 100% finished (and registered) we will not get an updated deed, although the digital system has newer data (you need to register the construction progress).
Property that isn't registered can remain unregistered but must be registered before it is sold.
Just recently I've seen a 30 y.o. deed on some commercial property. Despite it was valid and predated the digital era, it had almost nothing common with the things on the ground.
You know, it's not like people would come and steal your land overnight because you can't provide proof of ownership.
Plus having most of your net worth locked up in something no sane person would consider buying off you because you can't prove you own it is ... suboptimal
That's... a curious thing to have in the body of laws. What's its purpose and who does it serve?
The advantages are you can see who owns the land, there's no argument in 20 years time when someone puts a competing claim.
There's an entire industry in the US dedicated to working around the problems that buyers have https://www.alta.org/
If you buy land, then build a house, then someone comes along from 1932 saying "actually that land is mine", you are screwed.
The digital copy is just that; a digital copy.
The hacker would have to destroy the database and all backups, and also burn down the building holding the registry.
Even if the digital records were completely lost, they still have the paper ones.
> being unable to prove land ownership
People know who owns what, there are also paper contracts of ownership which are more authoritative than the digital records.
accidental communism
It's literally not a requirement to have it all online. And the cost of developers, plus coding + security updates + platform costs, really just means you replace a few assistants which would process requests by hand, with all that.
Except? It's a lot harder to hack a person to delete all the files in the office, from 10k km away, than via a computer.
So many things simply don't need to be online. So many things simply are better archived by other means. So many things are safer, more secure, and the backup processes (microfiche, etc) are well understood and just work.
And of course everything didn't work perfectly, it did however work "perfectly fine", which means "very well" or "good enough". Meanwhile, adding in network connectivity to anything vital these days is just insanely dumb.
No software is secure, and will never ever be secure. Ever. Anyone who thinks that software can be made secure, is 100% wrong, period. My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages.
And as a third option we can have efficient digital systems that aren't plugged into the Internet. (Presumably the Internet could have a copy that's regularly updated.)
I've seen 'competent' backup solutions which had backup rotations that expired older content. And I've read post-incident responses where hackers slowly corrupted older records. And (via reading corporate wikis and docs), determined how long they had to wait, for backups to become tainted.
But I agree. True competent backup methods, including periodic backup restoration tests and other methods, can ensure a degree of protection. Still, one can end up with months of "bad backups" due to a hacker interceding in the process or corrupting records slowly, thus invalidating more recent backup sets post-hack. While this didn't happen with Equifax, the hackers were in there for 8 months slowly exfiling information.
So you can have a load of backups with questionable integrity.
Really, what I'm comparing here is indelible backups vs not. It could be holographic, write only storage for all I care. It's just that "paper" backups, which move to microfiche, have a century long history of how to deal with it. How to ensure they're good. How to keep duplicates, resolve security, and all that.
Meanwhile, most people dealing with the software side simple think "Oh, we can make this situation secure. We can make software secure."
This thought process is entirely wrong. Software is never secure. If you use software + a database or other store for data, it's not secure. And so, placing it online is just plain stupid.
Of course, you speak to other options. No external network connection, for example. And this is all well and good! And it significantly reduces the attack vector.
But of course, and lots of high security environments do this, you then have to ban staff from bringing in all phones, computers, and other devices. I read a post-action report where people's phones were hacked, and basically acted as a 2G modem (at the time) into wifi on an isolated network of a nuclear power plant. And due to the thought process of "We're 100% air gapped, who cares!", the hack was apparently an easy one.
But really, the difference is... how many people can attack your citadel.
The internet means billions. No network connection means hundreds.
It's just that simple. And I think you agree, mostly.
Suddenly your entire argument shifted in my head and I fully agree.
Might be something there I can learn about myself then :D
A sophisticated genius hacker in a different country can’t touch your paper records, but an absolute moron with a bic lighter can destroy records just as effectively. Hell, an irresponsible clerk can do an incredible amount of damage just by misfiling things.
Duplication literally doubles costs in the physical world, and has the downside of being very hard to keep in sync. A bank keeping paper ledgers would be absolutely fucked if they had to switch to a backup ledger that was more than a few hours old.
On net, I believe that digitalized documents are a net improvement.
Put some desktop-size tape robots in several government building closets, and task someone with switching tapes weekly, and you can achieve more reliability than multiple huge paper archives.
The real danger is that we’ll be so careless we’ll discard other enduring ways of doing things before we smarten up to their particular benefits.
My hope is that disciplined people still have an intuition for this, even among the digitally steeped. Sysadmin/ops types tend to a culture of diversifying backup location and even media type. Maybe that can reach back to human legible hard copy.
If we start thinking along the lines of technology has risk and we shouldn't use it, we should go back all the way to the discovery of fire as we all know fire can cause a lot of damage if in the wrong hands.
In as software is not secure, and can not be made secure, using it for important records storage makes zero sense, unless you a) have full backups offline in physical, non-digital, read only medium or b) just don't do it online, at all.
And my point is, it's not worth the convenience.
Think about it. To destroy the public archives, of which there is typically more than one, you must travel to said location, breach it with weapons and other means, and destroy it. Or, you can sit in your parent's basement in your pajama's, and hack and destroy.
There is not even remotely the same risk profile.
And if you think something is "good" because 'the world thinks it is good', then I have to ask you why you're validating something via popularity. You know what else was popular? Fossil fuels. Smoking. Using uranium in makeup for women. Something being accepted, and being fun or convenient, doesn't make it correct, sensible, or right.
So please describe the horrible and incredible "gigantic convenience". Because I lived before the internet, and now after, and yes it is convenient.
But it certainly isn't a 'gigantic' one, nor is it sensible compared to the insane attack surface and risk.
When I was responsible for backups we kept the tape cartridges in a fire safe in a different building. We took a full backup weekly and moved the tape from the robot to the firesafe as soon as the backup was complete. Only the daily incremental backups stayed in the robot for more than a day.
> spinning up a new shard takes a quarter
Both can be true
You would need to understand first how they gained access and verify that they can’t do the same again. That in itself could take days if not weeks. Then of course they might have found new vulnerabilities while they were in, so you would need to worry about that too.
Yes, even hundreds of them sometimes.
The most time consuming part of recovering from an attack is validating everything. It takes more than a few hours to validate the infra that stays put isn’t compromised, the IaC code itself isn’t compromised, deploy the infra, bring a copy of the offline backup of your data (your IaC can’t drive to another site and bring the backups, then make a copy, unless tou are really sure you removed any trace of compromise), validate that the backup is sound, then restore it.
In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.
> In some cases the infrastructure part is the least time consuming. Some platforms are straight forward enough that even manual deployment is fast. But after a hack you can’t trust anything so you need to do the slow validation that takes longer than your projected “hours”.
Your IaC is supposed to be on those offline backups too, and should be able to do everything from clean hardware.
The most time consuming part is to identify what caused the compromise. After that, you can put everything back online and then at the same time start to analyse who did it/what they did and so on. If the root cause for the breach is identified, you also know the time most likely and can trust the offline IaC backup.