Sunday, January 16, 2005

A belated report of near-death

You sometime read about people who want to look up a seldom visited distant relative or aquaintence only to find that the person in question has been dead for XX (fill in the blank) weeks, months or years. I think the record may be held in efficient welfare Sweden, where social workers found (in the 90s), a skeleton sitting at a 10-year old breakfast with a 1986 newspaper. Nobody noticed the poor geezer was gone, money went to his account automatically and the rent was paid (including electricity).
Well, the same has just happened with a lively and informative (for those who knew what was being talked about) Latvian language IT blog or quasi-blog, www.pods.lv. Seems that some envious folks disliked the editor (nick: coolynx). Apparently some teeny-hackers, trying to get at coolynx, whacked the whole server, taking out a number of hosted sites and more or less wrecking www.pods.lv to this very day.
As someone who did look at pods (in Latvian, and very technical, sometimes) just to feel the buzz of what was going on among the sysops and people in the business, I am ashamed to say that its near-destruction passed me by, as well as a couple of other people at my day job paper who used to monitor it. We never noticed! All this seems to have happened in November. Forgive us, who slept!
BTW: pods is back, a pale shadow of itself, as the whole site and its files were apparently totally erased. Don't know if it will ever come back to life. It had extensive files, archives on various esoterica (for us laypersons) on linux, tools, software tricks, etc, and long and passionate discussions of these in Latvian.

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