> Since the hack, officials restored their website and posted a message announcing they are rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. Even if the hacker claims they deleted backups, the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months in Romania.
So it seems not all has been lost. I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.
This happened in a 50k people town where my father is from in 1982 with a BIG flood that destroyed the town land registry documents (among a lot of the town). Since he's a lawyer, had first hand experience and I was always curious I asked many things about this a while back. Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people. You can never get to 100% recovery like that, but everyone knows who their neighbor is, at least in a town that is small like this.
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.
> Basically, what happened is that they rebuilt it from proof of ownership and testimonies of the people
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.
Fun fact, if you're unlucky enough to replace your Social Security card 10 times, they will no longer issue them to you anymore. It is a lifetime limit, and they fan it out to 3 per year.
Oddly enough, if you legally change your name, they will send you a new one regardless of the limit.
The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed. In fact, that is the first thing I was told by the ssa dot gov site, when I applied to receive a new card.
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!
> The circumstances in which you actually need to physically present your Social Security card are quite rare indeed.
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...
To get one, but not to renew it, so that's still pretty rare.
Here's a pretty good video about a somewhat similar challenge, that of proving your citizenship in ancient Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTt0qwncDXI .
I no longer have an SS card--which was in a wallet stolen years ago--or, perhaps, a birth certificate which I looked for recently but couldn't find. I do have a passport.
> SSNs are not a "national ID"
That's not what they are, but that's what they've defacto become. I hate it.
Is that still true?
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.
oh ok so just for money body and property related issues. phew.
> Except for certain industries where the government has a direct interest (banking, healthcare, real estate)
That's still a massive dependance on "ID" for SS...? Blockbuster tho.. phew it's been a while.
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'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.
Afterwards, you have to make an appointment to see them in person. Until then, you can order them online or via snailmail.
[flagged]
I tend towards being cautious with my information which has led to beauricracies doubting my existence.
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.
So for many years I only paid cash for everything, but I hit a point at which I wanted to start establishing credit. What I did was to open a secured credit card at my bank. They actually had me put it in a CD which was used to secure it. After I think 2 years of paying on time they removed the security requirement. I don’t know if that’s still a viable method but I used it in the early 2000s.
Yeah it's actually not that bad, because for example the BMV will likely upon request send you a duplicate driver's license to your address of record. Same for getting replacement credit cards. If you had utility services at that address in your name that's additional documentation. Also historical tax returns, bank accounts, etc.
"why's he asking for a new dl? "
"Oh volcano exploded, his home is under 5 ft of ash."
"Gotcha, mail him the copy"
Fun fact: If your house is under 5 ft of ash, it's not covered by volcano insurance. That only covers you if your home is destroyed by the actual eruption/explosion.
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."
This basically covers the financial model of the whole insurance industry;
Getting something like Volcano Insurance requires some specific foresight, I would be slapping myself on the back if my house was covered in volcanic ash right up to the point when I got on the phone to my insurance company to make a claim.Brb, gotta camp on top of the ash at the same lat/long coordinates to catch the mailman.
It depends on the country. The US has the ability to do the equivalent of deep "duck typing" with almost no documentation even if you've been off the grid in the developing world for a long time. This is a case where the intelligence apparatus works in your favor. They can know you are a US citizen with high probability absent obvious evidence of such.
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.
In my country (and I think by now most non-US developed countries do something similar) everybody has a CPR(CentralPersonRegistry) number that identifies you, you need it to do almost everything so you aren't likely to forget (its your birthday + 4 digits). You get it at birth or if you come to the country for more than 3 months, it legally mandatory and it's also legally required to inform the government if you change your address. Also, if you (ever) had a modern passport there is already a database with your fingerprints, face and iris scan in it.
At least you can restore it. Imagine all your devices are lost in a massive fire, is there a way to get back your apple account?
I have a 'bootstrap' system... I have recovery codes and a backup for critical things encrypted and stored in a public git repo I push to both gitlab and github. If I lose everything, I can use those recovery codes to access the things I need to recover my digital identity.
Phone number and email access, if you can regain access to them.
It is definitely a good idea to plan in advance and set up a recovery contact: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102641
But email access is protected by MFA based on your destroyed device. Recovery codes are also stored in the same destroyed building.
I said “if” for email, which I at least have recovery codes stored with someone trusted.
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.
You can get back your phone number once you have a photo ID and buy a new phone. Then you should hope that your service providers aren't secure enough to have disabled SMS-based account recovery.
If you're married and Jewish, the wife's mother keeps the marriage document, so even if there is a house fire and all documents are lost, your mother in law usually lives in another house, so you can pick it up from there.
I’m married and Jewish. It would be pretty surprising to me if my wife’s mother had even seen our marriage paperwork let alone possessed it. This also isn’t a tradition I’ve ever heard of in my family.
Or did a joke about overbearing mother in laws just go right over my head.
Ask your mother in law. At least in Israel, during the ceremony, the Rabi gives the ktuba to the bride's mother for safe keeping.
Sort of the plot of Banana Joe.
Everytime I get stuck with some kind of circular bureaucracy I shout "it's Banana Joe all over again!" and no one understands.
Hadn't heard of that one before. It's a Bud Spencer film!
And now I also know that he has a law degree, has several registered patents, and was a certified airline pilot. Pretty impressive.
Do the people who sign sworn affidavits already have to have proven identities? If so, then they're unable to recover from a situation where they lost everyone's identity.
In Austria, there is the concept of "Amtsbekanntheit", meaning if the government officer knows you, that's also valid proof of identity.
You start with the queen. Everyone knows who she is.
Yes exactly, I'm the queen, and so's my wife.
While in jest, It does remind me of the time Dolly Parton entered a Dolly Parton look alike contest and lost.
In fairness, she isn’t a Dolly Parton look-alike.
There is little alternative.
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.
This is where "possession is 9/10ths of the law" comes from.
I actually think our discussion came from there! Or at least, there was a previous/later discussion about this exactly related to that.
It's one of those "programmer misconceptions" - we want to make reality fit our neat and tidy list of rules/laws/code; but it's the other way around most of the time.
There are also physical markers in the ground at the corners of most properties. So if you had to, you could send a surveyor out to recertify boundaries. That would get very expensive quickly, however.
This is not true anywhere I've lived, and I'm curious where it is true.
We have some in northeastern US. However they don't necessarily sit on plot boundaries; I get the impression that surveyors put them wherever it is most convenient for them to better triangulate the land. We found one in our front lawn somewhere near the road, it was a small concrete square that turned out to be a pillar sunk deep into the ground.
Here in Sweden it seems to be true. Both houses I owned had the markers. I had an issue where the online map disagreed with the markers and found out they made a nice film to explain how to resolve problems regarding lot borders: https://www.lantmateriet.se/sv/kartor/vara-karttjanster/Visa...
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.
Generally, those markers are placed by the person who did the previous survey. They’re not really official designations of anything. However, if you look around, you will find things called survey monuments. Sometimes they’re embedded in the sidewalk, or the middle of the road. Out in the boonies sometimes there’s a little concrete pedestal that has the marker on it. Anytime you look at a recorded deed you will see a legal description of the land and generally that description will start from one of those monuments.
It's usually a piece of steel rebar/round stock or pipe, maybe with a yellow plastic cap, or maybe not. Usually buried or not very visible, I'd guess the surveyors find them with a metal detector.
Most of the us has it like that. Some of the early states still do 'nw to the stump', a stump that rotted away before 1800... The newer states learned that lesson and land is to something more likely to last and hard to move. Metal stakes are most common. Though most people are not aware of the stake since there is no reason to look for it.
They are commonly found by lawn mowers after some erosion.
I'm not aware of corner markers being the standard, at least in the central and western US. For rural and undeveloped land, oftentimes you can pay the surveyor extra to put up corner markers though, which is a good investment if you plan on fencing the property
This is true most places in the us. Have you looked? You often have to dig up the stake. It helps to have an idea of where it should be before you start digging.
Not saying that this is the only reason, but it is a big reason why we have a land survey of our property on hand on paper and stored online. If something ever happened to the registry, we could at least establish our claim to our land.
Don't you have a land title, which of course is more evidence than a survey which anyone can pay for and get?
The title proves ownership (kinda), but does not define the outline of the property itself.
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.
Recorded deed will more or less universally contain a legal description of the land. This does, in fact, defined the illegal outline of the parcel.
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.
Very place dependent and not so universal in my experience. Where I live the title/deed just has street address. A completely separate agency holds the plot map that links addresses to physical measurements.
Surveys, at least here and I assume everywhere, also contain parcel numbers, the neighbor's parcel numbers, and the legal owner of each parcel's name right on the survey. Along with the date of the survey. I live in a pretty rural area where 20 acres is a small lot, so having proof of where the property lines are tends to be just as important as the title.
Wouldn't work in a city like NYC where nobody knows their neighbours and a chunk of houses are empty and only owned by shady shell companies as investments...
Shady shell companies do an excellent job of proving ownership -- it's the only reason they exist! So if NYC is hit by an asteroid, you'll find backups of all the important papers neatly filed away in Delaware.
I always wonder how things would be reconciled if something similar happened to a bank. What would be the simplest way to ‘download’ one’s balance whilst proving that the downloaded files were signed by the bank?
I'm good with starting from 0 if the bank is (my mortgage is a lot bigger than my balance)
Sods law would be the only bank not affected would be those I owe money to
Your best chance would probably be mailed statements
Your balance is at a bank. If the bank is gone your balance at it doesn't matter.
Definitely only works in high trust societies. Heck, even in normal times in India there's a rampant land mafia of which many politicians are a part. Forged provenance, illegal squatting and forced seizure, extraction and evictions are the norm.
And this is why we need title insurance :(
In my country, titles are always issued in duplicate. The land registry gets one of these originals, and the landowner the other. Just about every landowner has their original on their person, or held by a bank if it's mortgaged.
So all is not lost if the registry goes up in flames.
Happened here about 30 years ago with a fire in a council planning office. All building plans and records were lost. It was enormously useful because there was no way to prove that that house addition there wasn't approved or in any plans. Fans of Yes Minister will know the appropriate quote from Sir Humphrey.
[flagged]
Remember the xerox-scandal years back, that invalidated officially scanned documents. You already life in a world where "scanned before" means you can legally challenge the validity of a document.
Is this the scandal to which you are referring?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202
Yes, that is what they're referring to. The technical details behind it are kind of cool. It's a "bug" of the JBIG2 compression algorithm. See 1, 2
[1] https://community.apryse.com/t/jbig2-compression-issue/1814
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBIG2#Character_substitution_e...
All I see is 1, 1
There‘s also a great conference talk [0] on this, with an english translation [1].
[0]: https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0
[1]: https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk
Yes, several national archives where affected on all settings. If a institution scanned and archived documents with these- these documents are - in theory challenge-able in court- within reason..
Hah, scan-dal.
I am pretty sure I was bitten by this bug, or a similar bug, on an IRA transfer form that I uploaded to a bank. On the scan that I uploaded, one digit in the account number was a clean "5", but the customer service person said it looked like a good clean "6". I presume their document management system was an outcropping of a system originally set up for dealing with faxes, and used that or a similar compression algorithm.
Thus - one could assume that all transfers stored by the bank- before the update would not hold up in court.
I don't know what you mean by "hold up in court". This seems to be an instance of software engineers making sweeping prognostications about legal matters.
"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 specific argument could be that the sum entered was falsified by the process digitalizing. And any checksum that would have caught that- would be computed after scanning.
One should assume the outcome of one's case in court is at least partially, if not heavily, influenced by one's political (influential-ness) standing.
[dead]
I'd bet money the offline copy is far from up-to-date, given the state of the network. It still has potential to be mayhem
If its at least somewhat recent hopefully those affected still have paperwork for any property ownership transfers. Finding proof of property you bought decades ago would be a huge pain.
The problem is that everything will potentially be under dispute, since anyone can claim they purchased a patch of land whose registry was missed in the restoration
Don't know exactly on it works in Romania, but proving you purchased a patch of land is a different question -- for that you have the deed. You then submit the deed to the land registry. So this situation could at most result in the seller being able to sell the land more than once or disputes over the priority of sales over liens and other competing acts subject to registration.
The United States is rare. Most countries (seemingly including Romania[1]) have adopted either a cadastral/Torrens title system in which the land registry is definitive legal evidence of who owns a particular piece of land. If you purchased a piece of land and that wasn't recorded in the registry, you are SOL because registration is what conveys title.
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...
> If you purchased a piece of land and that wasn't recorded in the registry, you are SOL because registration is what conveys title.
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.
Here in Brazil lots of people deal land by word of mouth. The country is just too big and there isn't enough state present to make every transaction official, so people shake on it, draft an unofficial document and actually living and developing the land over a long period of time is what consistitutes ownership.
It doesn't take much. A neighbor and I just had to deal with a bunch of property line confusions in the US where a property subdivision 25 years ago wasn't handled correctly. None of us really cared but it would matter in the event of an eventual sale and it cost thousands of dollars in surveyor and legal fees.
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.
The public public land record in Croatia is notorious for being outdated and poorly maintained. Basically, the last time it was properly maintained was during Austria-Hungary a century ago, or at least that's the popular opinion. Right now we have the cadastre and the land registry and they do not always align. And for your example of unofficial agreements, the land my father and his brothers inherited is still in my grandfather's name, he died over 20 years ago, now my parents are aging, and there is just a verbal agreement on how the property is divided.
This is well documented in the the book "The Mystery of Capital" by Hernando de Soto. When it was published I thought it would change the world, but apparently nobody cared. :-)
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)
The reason capitalism cannot work well is that it assumes endless resources and infinite growth, not because people don't like electronic transfers. Capitalism is failing in all countries and those that are not are already transitioning to some form or another or post consumerism.
Sure at the "end game" stage you are correct. But on the way to that stage it does what it does really well, meaning it makes lots more capital.
De Soto is talking about why it "cannot" get started in a place without government controlled land registry.
Very interesting.
There appears to be a push to control open source software, in the guise of protecting children via age control.
With OSS, anybody can tweak the code on his device to pass the control, so the idea would be to only allow certified software. Which is expensive, and out of reach of most open source projects. Enter big, reliable companies that can afford the ticket for the certification of horrendous piles of slop.
see this recent HN post about it, I find it resonates, so to speak, with what you explain :
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960155
> 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.
Sorry to break it to you but we are past end game since possibly the dot-com bubble.
"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.
If De Soto is correct, and I am not qualified to judge, based on your statement about land ownership in Brazil, then capitalism was not fully developed to where it could have been. Get the book. It's an interesting read.
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.
That’s how it works in the US too. We don’t record documents with the county recorder to make them official, we do so to provide notice to third parties who might purchase the land.
You’re going to need more than just a claim to prove that, and anyone who did purchase land likely has some evidence in support, even if it’s testimony from others.
e.g. if you made a big buy there ought to be records of a bank transfer, mortgage, etc.
"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"
Lots of land deals aren't dealt in money transfer either. It's sometimes cash, livestock transfer, other realstate or durable goods like cars or machinery.
Only if you bought between the backup date and today
(And obviously has some doc to prove it)
It depends. In my country the online land register data is just a copy of the physical land owning certificate. The physical certificates (1 for the owner, 1 for the local government, and at least 1 more for some document keeping agency) are the source of truth.
Quite likely the opposite: a few weeks ago a ransomware attack halted ~100 hospitals' management systems in Romania, and the cybercrime defense unit just disconnected all hospitals and had the local admins rebuild from backups and paper trails. So I'm quite sure that all public administration IT admins have been running drills and probably have up-to-date backups.
About 15% of the UK's land parcels are not in any land registry database, because recording there only became compulsory in 1990, so if an event like a sale/morgtage didn't happen to a property since then, it might not be registered. Regardless of the land registry, the ownership can still easily be proven.
I'm skeptical that they not missing at least a week's or so worth of land title registry transactions, if the only thing they have left is offline, because offline backups are not made after every single transaction.
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.
> offline backups are not made after every single transaction.
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.
In such case notaries (or whoever reports transaction) can resubmit them.
Also, you still have paper documents, kept by parties to transaction, right?
When I worked at a stressful place I was worried not only of our version control getting damaged but also someone deciding they had had enough and doing damage on their way out.
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.
I wonder why the say "appears to have had," is that an assumption or was it stated somewhere? Without an offline backup, it would indeed be a very serious problem, more than it already is.
My reading is: "The agency would surely be panicking more than this if they didn't have an offline backup".
"Offline backup", as in "thousands of shelves full of dusty binders spread across offices all over the country"?
Yup. Everyone’s job safe for the next few years!
"And to think that we just finished digitizing all those paper files five years ago! Oh well, back to square one..."
I think the "offline" part is what is that "appears" to be, clearly they have backups somewhere, but maybe the attacker just missed to wipe some other "online" location.
I interpreted this as a vagueness related to the reporting accuracy, not the existence of a backup.
I was just in Hungary and they attempted to return land seized by the communist government by basically asking around.
People would get their buddy to agree the land was theirs so not a perfect system, but some families were made more whole.
> the agency appears to have had an offline copy, otherwise things would have gotten really messy over the coming months
The last thing any government will want to deal with is massive irretrievable data loss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_FrQnQv0Vw
now they get to do a greenfield implementation too!
/joking, i'm sure this is not a happy time for whoever is trying to rebuild everything
i think it is a very happy time charging whatever per hour you want
Has not digital data always been a secondary source of information, instead of a primary source of information? Paper records cannot be thrown away. And new records are probably recorded digital only but a copy is sent to the parties in the transaction
At least in my EU country, no the digital record is the primary.
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).
In the UK deeds no longer really exist and do not take precedence over the land registry.
Property that isn't registered can remain unregistered but must be registered before it is sold.
Paper records burn great and are harder to store in multiple locations
They're also often stored in basements, which is the first to flood.
Faxes and photocopiers have existed for nearly a century
A photocopy isn't a primary record!
OK but the primary record itself is not the primary record when challenged in court; subject to a change order; redefined by legislation or handled in many other ways. There is money involved.
Any country big enough was moving digital first/digital only for years. And with a paper records there is always a question if this one is the last one and contains a valid data or it's from years ago and since then everything was changed multiple times.
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.
> I was worried about the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership but it seems that may be avoided.
You know, it's not like people would come and steal your land overnight because you can't provide proof of ownership.
Squatters, boundary disputes and rent defaults happen all the time.
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
People can come and cut down trees, use the land for their cattle, raise crops or just start building something. If you don't challenge it and they get away with it for a while, they could even gain use of the land legally.
Happens far more often than you would think in developing countries.
Property lines disputes happen every single day in America, too. It's a universal thing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg15ev0347o
"Under normal circumstances, property law in England and Wales dictates the original owner cannot claim their property back even if the title change was made fraudulently."
That's... a curious thing to have in the body of laws. What's its purpose and who does it serve?
The US system is more the oddity, its the legacy England system from pre-19th century. England and Wales adopted and modified an Australian system, and its adopted a fair bit across the commonwealth. In other developed countries a lot are very much registry-is-correct. I think France is the main one which is "deeds based"
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.
After the tsunami that hit Thailand and wiped out many fishing villages on the Pacific coast, the people were evacuated but as soon as they returned, they found the local mafia occupying the land, and as they had no need and there was no land registry, they were forced to rebuy their land.
In the US, real estate purchases come with "title insurance", because there is no official, guaranteed, land registry database.
That depends on the state, some do have a registry.
wtf
That’s a simplified explanation. Title insurance covers a number of situations, fraudulent transfer of title is only one of them and is more likely to be something like “A wife sold her dead spouse’s house, but it turns out that there was a dispute about the will and now someone else is claiming that the house actually wasn’t hers to sell”
That wouldn't be possible in my country because she would not have any right to sell the house until it was transferred to her. This transfer would happen during the probate process. The probate process is where all issues regarding the will/estate and disputes are settled. Once probate is complete, ownership is set in stone and the widow would have every right to sell her house.
A land title is written on paper or cardboard, with signatures and stamps on it.
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.
That's not how things work in most countries in Europe: the land registry is the authoritative source, and there are no bearer titles any more.
Romania is not very digitalized, and it still has a lot of paper bureaucracy.
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.
Reconstructing that archive from the records would be close to impossible. The documents they issue and banks/notaries and others have have 30 day expires. In theory most of these documents are issued on sale / mortgages / loans against these type of assets. Both notaries and banks have their own record system - I don't think there's a common system they all use, for notaries I'm not sure if they keep electronic records of these papers .. the system that was hacked was supposed to be it.
> the societal implications of being unable to prove land ownership
accidental communism
The sad part is, the whole world worked perfectly fine without anything online, ever, prior to 20 years ago. Even 10 years ago for slow-moving change.
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.
There are many examples of important paper records (property, birth/death, etc) being lost in fires or floods, so it's not the case that "everything worked perfectly fine" in those days either.
All those examples are not different from not having backups of digital data too. Making copies when you microfiche, having duplicate stores, it's all exceptionally easy and a solved problem.
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.
Your overall assessment of advantages and disadvantages seems like you're comparing paper with backups to software without backups, though. No competent system can have all the records destroyed remotely. And we know how to backup digital systems even better than we know how to backup paper ones.
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.)
That's not precisely true, depending upon the definition of 'competent'.
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.
I was ready to argue until I got to the end "My point is that the advantages aren't worth the disadvantages."
Suddenly your entire argument shifted in my head and I fully agree.
Might be something there I can learn about myself then :D
I agree that digitalization is not a panacea, but things did not work anywhere close to perfectly fine when everything was on paper. There are just as many ways for analog/physical processes to go wrong.
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.
Yeah, while online copies are a risk, you can make offline digital copies of important data for a thousandth the price of paper copies.
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.
Yeah, we’re early culturewise in the digitization experiment and high on optimism about the benefits, but not very far into reckoning with the downsides and incentives skew a bit towards carelessness.
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.
Everything comes with a risk, and people usually take it with a decent understanding of how to mitigate it mostly.
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.
Technology can make lives safer. However, software is never secure, cannot be made secure, this is empirically proven to be a 100% valid position.
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.
But physical records also cannot be made secure. And the convenience is gigantic. I think that it is worth it, as clearly does much of the world.
Read the scope I discussed. Physical records can be made exceptionally secure. They can be secure on location (archival location, with guards). They also aren't reachable by every human being on the planet who wants to infiltrate.
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.
One more reason to to define the whole infrastructure in code and have offline backups. Recovering could be measured in hours.
A backup that isn't offline is not really a backup as it far too easy to destroy it even by accident/carelessness/lack of understanding.
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.
> has entire infra in code
> spinning up a new shard takes a quarter
Both can be true
That sounds good, but wouldn’t you worry that the same hackers will let themselves in via the same route again?
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.
Only if you routinely test it, and if that kind of access to the offline backup is low friction enough to be doing that monthly, it might not be enough of a redundancy.
> Recovering could be measured in hours.
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”.
> 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”.
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.
[flagged]
[dead]