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Last week, a reporter for MPR covered a story involving the state of Minnesota warning its’ agencies not to use a contractor’s service it had been using due to security problems:

This week, Minnesota Public Radio was able to access state employee data on Lookout Services’ Web site without using a password or encryption software. Employee names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and hire dates were visible on the Web site for every state agency using the service.

This week, the state and MPR are being countersued for breach of contract, stealing trade secrets and “hacking.”

It’s bullshit, of course.
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Wikileaks has released a half-million pager messages from the hour before, during, and after the September 11th terrorist attacks, which were intercepted over the air by whomever was monitoring pager frequencies for unencrypted messages:

Text pagers are usualy [sic] carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

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Things get juicier and juicier, via AppleInsider, who apparently keeps up with Microsoft news (emphasis mine):

An act of sabotage “would explain why neither party is releasing any more details: for legal reasons dealing with the ongoing investigation to find the culprit(s),” one of the sources said. Due to the way Sidekick clients interact with the service, any normal failure should have resulted in only a brief outage until a replacement server could be brought up.

The very long outage of core functionality, followed by an incapacity to recover any data, both point to the possibility that “someone with access to the servers at the data center must have inserted a time bomb to wipe out not just all of the data, but also all of the backup tapes, and finally, I suspect, reformatting the server hard drives so that the service itself could not be restarted with a simple reboot (and to erase any traces of the time bomb itself).”

The tipster goes on to state that on the Microsoft side, they were clueless about Danger-related technologies. As such, the signs all point to a Danger (ex-)employee committing sabotage.

Well, this makes it more interesting. When it comes to a choice of Whimper vs Bang, I’d prefer to go with the Bang. I don’t want to have lost my data service access or all my contacts because someone tripped over a power cord, I want some massive drama along with it. I want the place to have burned down while suffering a Godzilla attack, that kind of thing.

Further details on the Sidekick data loss, via Engadget:

Alleged details on the events leading up to Danger’s doomsday scenario are starting to come out of the woodwork, and it all paints a truly embarrassing picture: Microsoft, possibly trying to compensate for lost and / or laid-off Danger employees, outsources an upgrade of its Sidekick SAN to Hitachi, which — for reasons unknown — fails to make a backup before starting. Long story short, the upgrade runs into complications, data is lost, and without a backup to revert to, untold thousands of Sidekick users get shafted in an epic way rarely seen in an age of well-defined, well-understood IT strategies.

T-Mobile has refunded one months’ worth of data service charges to contract Sidekick users, which I didn’t get because I didn’t have a contract with my Sidekick. They will also be sending $100 “customer appreciation cards” to certain Sidekick customers, which can be used on T-Mobile products and services (including bills) only. There is no clear-cut criteria in place for who can expect to receive a gift card.

I have been without access to my phone’s address book and other data functions since last Friday. Such outages aren’t unheard of, but have never lasted longer than a day in the past. In the meantime, I finally got a new contract with Android-powered phone and rumors circulated that service would be back soon. I waited for my contacts to become available so I could transfer them to my new phone, and then I could ditch the Sidekick and let the prepaid account fade away.

Today, T-Mobile finally admitted that all of our data is gone:

Regrettably, based on Microsoft/Danger’s latest recovery assessment of their systems, we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

(The way it works is that while your information is on your phone, it’s not really stored there, it’s in the cloud. You sign-in to your account and the phone downloads your contacts. You can replace your phone without having to worry about contacts because they are stored in the cloud. However, if something happens to the cloud, you’re screwed.)

Too bad there’s probably something in fine print somewhere that prevents anyone from being sued over this.

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