2-4 weeks feels so absurd that I reread the alert twice thinking maybe they meant something different. Database problem into discovery of failed backups, perhaps?
It'll be interesting to see the postmortem. I don't know much about their infrastructure.
The data's *always* been safe. /r/DataHoarders would never overlook this.
Nvidia will serve you a free, high-speed half-terabyte download right now[0]. It's one with a cutoff date of 2020—but given that GPT-3 was released mid-2020, that's probably the one you actually want, for ML research.
When the threat model is "a fire takes out the DC", sure. But "the servers are root-level compromised", whoops, that's worth rebuilding from scratch. No way to make sure whatever AI agent did the compromise didn't go and embed malware in some flash ROM.
You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions here. Who said anything about any server being compromised? Much less root-level compromised? And an AI agent being involved?
> You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions here.
There aren't that many scenarios which make a restoration time of weeks inevitable, even after taking into account the AO3 people are volunteers - given the large intersection between nerds and fanfiction or a loooot of furries working in IT, I'd assume you'll find the most competent people working on it, so I doubt the cause is incompetence.
They say the data is safe, which implies an offsite backup with a different architecture (or a managed provider). They said in the past they had a secondary site which they could switch over to if needed, which implies that the issue is not related to hardware or datacenter problems (e.g. your usual backhoe related issue or a physical destruction of the datacenter).
And that leaves only two options: a) a former staff member went fully rogue and everything needs to be rebuilt because everything might be backdoored, but there is no indication of that, or b) they got compromised really hard by one of the multitude of the vulnerabilities that cropped up the last days and chose to rebuild from scratch for a similar reason.
(And as far as I know AO3, like FFN, is limited to text and stuff like cover art, so the dataset should be small and easy enough to restore from a backup)
Was it mentioned somewhere that they got compromised? And that it's not for example a hardware failure? I imagine lead times for getting brand new hardware would be in the 2–4 week range these days.
2-4 weeks feels so absurd that I reread the alert twice thinking maybe they meant something different. Database problem into discovery of failed backups, perhaps?
It'll be interesting to see the postmortem. I don't know much about their infrastructure.
Wonder if it's related to the Gitlab crisis (the regexp vulnerability in Ruby that hit them first). Ao3 seems to be a Ruby on Rails app.
Per reddit [1] the data is safe.
Apparently they run bare metal that they own [2] so I'd assume their servers got compromised hard and they'll need to buy entirely new servers.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1xir586/comment/19rubn...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1xir586/comment/19ruc1...
The data's *always* been safe. /r/DataHoarders would never overlook this.
Nvidia will serve you a free, high-speed half-terabyte download right now[0]. It's one with a cutoff date of 2020—but given that GPT-3 was released mid-2020, that's probably the one you actually want, for ML research.
[0] https://huggingface.co/datasets/ray0rf1re/AO3-2020
There are later dumps, but they aren't quite public
> In necessity, we could even switch to the second server with very little downtime
So much for that...
When the threat model is "a fire takes out the DC", sure. But "the servers are root-level compromised", whoops, that's worth rebuilding from scratch. No way to make sure whatever AI agent did the compromise didn't go and embed malware in some flash ROM.
You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions here. Who said anything about any server being compromised? Much less root-level compromised? And an AI agent being involved?
> You seem to be jumping to a lot of conclusions here.
There aren't that many scenarios which make a restoration time of weeks inevitable, even after taking into account the AO3 people are volunteers - given the large intersection between nerds and fanfiction or a loooot of furries working in IT, I'd assume you'll find the most competent people working on it, so I doubt the cause is incompetence.
They say the data is safe, which implies an offsite backup with a different architecture (or a managed provider). They said in the past they had a secondary site which they could switch over to if needed, which implies that the issue is not related to hardware or datacenter problems (e.g. your usual backhoe related issue or a physical destruction of the datacenter).
And that leaves only two options: a) a former staff member went fully rogue and everything needs to be rebuilt because everything might be backdoored, but there is no indication of that, or b) they got compromised really hard by one of the multitude of the vulnerabilities that cropped up the last days and chose to rebuild from scratch for a similar reason.
(And as far as I know AO3, like FFN, is limited to text and stuff like cover art, so the dataset should be small and easy enough to restore from a backup)
Was it mentioned somewhere that they got compromised? And that it's not for example a hardware failure? I imagine lead times for getting brand new hardware would be in the 2–4 week range these days.
> And that it's not for example a hardware failure?
They say they have a second site, the chance of hardware failure taking out both sites at the exact same time is near zero.
Imagine if there was an API to rent servers within minutes or someday even seconds.
[delayed]
"Hey, why are activity rates up 2000%?" —Tumblr executive