Quick PSA before we get to the actual update:
Over 700 people have subscribed to the Balloon Juice mailing list, but only about 450 of you have opened the previous messages, so as many as 250 of you are not seeing the messages, most likely because gmail (or other email programs) are moving these to “Promotions” – so you never see the updates in your inbox.
John sent out the update this evening at xx, so if you signed up and you are not seeing that message in your inbox, that is probably the reason.
If you tried looking through your folders via the left pane, found “Promotions” and tried dragging a message to your Inbox, the message *might* be copied to your Inbox/Primary tab, but you won’t get the “Would you like all messages from (username) be sent to your Inbox/Primary tab?”.
But, if you click on Inbox, you should have header tabs across the top. You should see Primary, Social, Promotions and Forums. Click the Promotions tab from there and drag the message from (username) to the Primary tab, and you *should* get the “Would you like all messages from (username) be sent to your Inbox/Primary tab?”
Some of these updates come from me and some come from John, so you may have to do that twice, once for each of us.
Okay, here’s today’s update.
Hello all!
I wish I had something positive or informative to add, but I in fact do not. I will let you know that sometime this afternoon I snapped and reached for the nuclear codes and have been going off on twitter all day. I doubt it will do anything, but I am officially ready to burn 365 Data Centers to the ground.
It starts here.
Dear @365datacenters
My website has been down for a week now because three of your data centers have been down since last Saturday. You claim there was a security breach, but there has been no reporting in the media of one. You claim you are working on a plan.
— John Cole (@Johngcole) May 22, 2022
At any rate, I am now starting to think that this was a ransomware attack and they are in the late stages of negotiation to get the data back. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The only way they could KNOW our data is still safe but still not be able to access it is if someone else hacked in, took control of their controls, and of course the data is safe because if they kill the baby they won’t get paid.
This is just speculation, but that is all I have. Other than that, no updates. I talked to the people at the help center and told them to stop lying to me, and they said they were going to pass this on to management, and I told them to start preparing for class action lawsuits. I also asked if Stephen Klenert is still their VP for customer solutions, and they confirmed that he is, so I told them I was thrilled to view his tiktok of him cleaning his patio yesterday.
I am ready for this place to burn down.
At any rate, I have no answers, am in a shite mood because this is twenty+ years of my life’s work and I have no control over what happens to it, and I can’t even eat my fucking feelings because I have no pasta or ice cream in the house.
Take care
Updated at 8:30 on Monday to add better instructions about “Promotions”. Thanks JWR.
And this tip from NotMax: As for Gmail, easy peasy (i.e., lazy) way to bypass hunting through individual categories is to click the “All Mail” option in the left-hand pane.
And check your spam folder.
Earlier today I added a list of all the site updates in the sidebar. I also added a link to some twitter feeds and a link to the tweet that John asked everyone to retweet in order to try to get the attention of the folks at 355.
After Cole sent the update to the list, we received another email from our site hosts. (Not 355.)
“365 is scheduling a call for tomorrow to share information with us.”
Me: Fingers crossed for actual news, an actual plan, and an actual timeframe.
WaterGirl and John: Thank you for the temp site and everything you are doing to restore the old site.
Cole: metaphorically, go medieval on 365’s ass.
Once you get all of your data back, this company deserves to go out of business permanently.
Perhaps you should start banging on 365’s soul less corporate overlords, Stonecourt Capital
Something I found out about Gmail’s “Promotions” tab (Win10 + Gmail), here’s what I saw/did:
If you tried looking through your folders via the left pane, found “Promotions” and tried dragging a message to your Inbox, the message *might* be copied to your Inbox/Primary tab, but you won’t get the “Would you like all messages from (username) be sent to your Inbox/Primary tab?”.
But, if you click on Inbox, you should have header tabs across the top. You should see Primary, Social, Promotions and Forums. Click the Promotions tab from there and drag the message from (username) to the Primary tab, and you *should* get the “Would you like all messages from (username) be sent to your Inbox/Primary tab?”
Anyway, this worked for me.
And thank you, Watergirl, for putting me on the right track!
Balloon-Juice, like Tunch, abides. The jackal force will stay with Cole. I been lurking lately, but will always log into the blog. Glad you got some jackal action so the party could go on. AL’s important covid updates, the garden posts, all the good stuff. is back.
Cole’s important work carries on, that is the important thing. Look forward to the great successes ahead, JGC. Thanks for your work.
Since this is an open thread, and I need to support jackal-action viewership with provocative commenter content, I have a question. Just saw a pic of the Rolling Stones. How is that not only is Keith Richard is still alive, but he looks years younger and healthier than Mick Jagger?
Thanks for the updates, I’ve been mostly lurking lately…
Enjoy this twitter of Guiliani losing his shit at a parade spectator…
https://twitter.com/jacobkornbluh/status/1528416293388537856?s=20&t=JniltZN7P2dvSnTt11vltA
Multitude of things (alone or in concert or cascade) from which the outage could stem. Personally would assign ransomware attack to the next to bottommost quintile of causation, seeing as only a segment of company’s operations have been impacted.
As for Gmail, easy peasy (i.e., lazy) way to bypass hunting through individual categories is to click the “All Mail” option in the left-hand pane.
Found a short reddit thread, 5 days old, about a ransomware attack at 365 data centers:
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/urybn4/365_data_centers_ransomware_attack/
I lurk far more than I post, but this is driving me mad, let alone what it must be doing to John & Watergirl. 🙄 Adam’s updates on Ukraine are must reading. I trust his judgement more than my own, because he knows what he’s on about. I’m just an armchair historian, if that. Albeit the number of so-called experts commenting on the War In Ukraine who seem to have no knowledge of the long, complicated, & bloody history between Ukraine & Russia is just jaw dropping, & even a little frightening.
Then there’s Betty Cracker & her marvellous way with words. This is also where I “met” asiangrrlMN. What all this babble means is, I really, really miss Balloon Juice, its front pagers & it’s Jackals, & I really hope this will be fixed soon.
See what comes of leaving Thurston alone in the room with the computer?
// // // //
@NotMax haha I think this is more likely from Steve. He’s still pissed off from the ‘grooming’ aka hooman torture.
Using 3rd party hosting of data used to come up back when I was running our corporate computer networks from executives looking to save a few bucks. We’d always remind them that you lose control of your data when you do that.
@NotMax:
WhOops! Forgot about that “All Mail” option. Thank you! Long time Windows user here, and after years of using Outlook Express, (incredibly easy to use and modify), Gmail gives me the occasional headache.
And… good article at The Guardian about the Jan 6 committee’s upcoming live hearings.
“… According to the draft schedule, the June public hearings will explore Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, starting and ending with prime time hearings at 8pm on the 9th and the 23rd. In between, the panel will hold 10am hearings on the 13th, 15th, 16th and 21st.
The select committee appears to be planning for the hearings to be extensive affairs. The prime time hearings are currently scheduled to last between 1.5 and 2 hours and the morning hearings between 2 and 2.5 hours.
[…]
While the exact content and timings of the hearings are still subject to change, the sources said, the panel intends to lay out how the efforts to reverse Trump’s defeat crystallized over a critical 65-day period from the time he falsely declared he won the 2020 election until 6 January. …”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/23/capitol-attack-panel-public-hearings-trump
Ty for the updates WG
Do we know how our friends in MI who organize people impacted by the ‘justice’ system are doing?
Chances are we’ll find out there’s no Media coverage because the rest of 365’s hosted sites have been back up and running since last weekend and we’re down because, well, over 8 million references to ‘BJ’, lashings of ‘Santorum’, plenty of ‘skull fucking kittens’ and ‘fucking that chicken’. Plus the first thing everyone did when the site went down was run off to a temporary hideout promising ‘jackal action’.
The only question is who they sent the alarm to first, PETA or the FBI.
@Tony Jay
You forgot the ‘naked mopping’ I wish I could.
On another note, our new PM in Australia stopped off this morning to be sworn in by the Governor-General before flying out to meet with the other (s)QUAD leaders in Tokyo. This is a meeting between the Australian, US, Indian and Japanese leaders. I like how we can have an election on Saturday and the new government takes over immediately.
Our neighbors had a house fire about 6 months ago. He’s a English Prof and she is a wonderful writer with a PhD who struggles to get a position close enough so she can take care of their kids. Anyway the fire started in her office and she lost thousands of books, letters that are irreplaceable, manuscripts and other tools of the trade. “Devastating” is a badly overused word but it applies to their plight. The house is insured and they found a rental close by (I’ll see her, her son and their goofy dog in a minute) and they are soldering on. Much of what she lost will never be found but they are going to be ok. So will BJ.
@NotMax:
“Personally would assign ransomware attack to the next to bottommost quintile of causation, seeing as only a segment of company’s operations have been impacted.”
I haven’t seen anything specifying what segment of 365Data’s operations have been affected. It could well be all of them. Their own goddamn website (https://365datacenters.com) is down!
@Raven: Yeah, like Soylent Green, BJ is people, and balloon-juice.com will attract us, no matter the host.
I know Cole referenced 20 years of his life’s work, but that’s a community, not data.
@raven:
Sorry to hear about your neighbors. Hope they are able to recover quickly. Is there a GoFundMe or something?
@ JL : Deal with the devil?
And some people think on-line voting is the way to go?
@different-church-lady
Boaty McBoatface ’24!
🙂
@Tony Jay – I know you (and Amir) wanted a different outcome, but I hope you were at least moved by Zinchenko draping the Ukrainian flag around the PL trophy.
Look… we didn’t think we’d need ransomware insurance…. mostly because I wanted that new Benz.
Other options:
Somebody was derping a delete for months, or even years, with no valid DR tests.
Though it reads to me like they have cash flow problems and are looking to dump it off on another VC group.
I’ve been in second and third tier hosting sites. They run on the ragged edge resource wise.
…
@Gin & Tonic – Nope. No consolation. You can’t dry off the sportswashing with a yellow and blue towel. The blood still remains.
LFC’s owners made their money the old-fashioned and ethical way, microscopic computer algorithm driven arbitrage, and producing The Cosby Show and Rosanne
@AJ wrote:
“Do we know how our friends in MI who organize people impacted by the ‘justice’ system are doing?”
Yes! The thermometer is in the sidebar of our little home away from home, but it hasn’t gotten much action.
Their name is Voting Access for All Coalition (VAAC).
We are having a zoom with them tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7:30 ET. Even if you don’t normally come to the zooms with the folks we are raising money for, I think this one is going to be really special.
I believe all of the folks who are in the really great 1-minute VAAC video (now in the sidebar) will be there.
@Mo Salad – It’s not a “towel.”
@Gin & Tonic. – No. It’s a metaphor. And I will still claim that it is a desecration as much, if not more, than using the word towel, when placed on a trophy won in a Man City or Newcastle kit.
Happy for Zinchenko, fuck the rest of the lot.
@liza
I sent your reddit link about ransomware at 365-now-355, and he said he will ask them about that directly in their call today.
Thanks for sharing the link!
Comments have drifted, as usual, but I wanted to say thanks to John for going nuclear. My husband saw a Cheryl Rofer retweet on LGM yesterday. It’s getting around . . As I expect everyone already knows.
Anyway, thanks so much, John.
I went on the Stonecourt website and looked at their leadership team. There was a Rick Davis which I figured is a pretty common name and no way would it be the same Rick Davis Steve Schmidt was talking about in his Meghan McCain rant last week. Its the one and same Rick Davis.
Submit it to slashdot.org
Yep. Mine went into Spam, so I had to update accordingly.
When I went to the 365 DataCenter site, it also seems to be down — you get this message:
“We’re currently performing service affecting maintenance on our website. For support or to contact 365 Data Centers, please contact us via 866-365-6246 or via email at service@365datacenters.com.”
As for LinkedIn — their account is pretty quiet, with the most recent post advertising for an accounts payable manager. Maybe they are anticipating some issues there.
And regarding that — remember that Verizon reduces charges for its various services for any time that they are not available because of system errors (not thunder storms, but internal failures).
Regarding Rick Davis — It’s common for these kinds of venture capital funds to have “trophy” investors. It can also be a red flag that their business model might be too dependent on connections as opposed to sound evaluation of business opportunities.
@Gin & Tonic
I confess that I turned the TV off when the third Citeh goal went in so I didn’t (and still haven’t) see any of the afternath. We were always going to win our game, but we needed Villa to simply NOT ship three goals in 5 minutes, and since they couldn’t manage that simple task…
Never mind though. It’s small stakes compared to what Zinchenko and his countrymen are going through, but my mind is firmly on Paris and revenge for the Ramos Travesty.
@Tony Jay
I check the 365 website and our site host’s website every day. Believe me, they are both still down.
@MaiNaem mobile
For real? Rick Davis???
Looking forward to the day when you pry the data from those creeps, and move it to another cloud service.
At that time, it will be worthwhile to take one lesson from this shitshow as the following: at least once per week, have an automatic process on the hosting service copy a recent backup of both the WordPress database and site over to a completely different cloud service (like AWS, or Google), and drop it in a totally different (private) instance of WordPress to verify that neither is corrupted. Some automatic validation testing might be good, like spot-checks for a few hundred known comments/posts via MD5 hash checks, for example.
This would be the “in case of nuclear war” archive, so it would be worth some extra care to validate the data. My guess is that there’s a bit of Jackal IT talent that could help out with design and scripting, and I’d certainly pitch in too (although I’d take a back seat to a real IT pro).
Just wanted to say thanks for the updates and a very big Thank You for the temp site! I was starting to go through withdrawal, and it wasn’t pretty. . . .
@Watergirl – in the advent that it really is something we can’t recover from, do we have backups that we can restore? Seems to me – we should just off this damn thing and move elsewhere.
@watergirl yes for real-The Rick Davis https://www.stonecourtlp.com/rick-davis.
There’s another guy who’s also part of the McCain Institute. IiRC 3 people are HWBush/McCain people. It would be interesting to know who their other customers are and I don’t mean it in any kind of conspiracy way. Just curiosity.
My company had a catastrophic loss of service for nearly a week, in September, 2021 — no loss of data, but serious compromise of service capability. After that event, we moved cloud storage to two different providers, one being the back up.
First comment on new system to say – I enjoy angry John, but I’m just sad about the circumstances. I miss the full retinue of commenters and front pagers though!
I have learned the hard way back up, back up, back up, should be the mantra of anyone with a computer, preferably to hard media, as well as the cloud. Now, for a site the size of BJ,, that’s impossible, but there must be some steps that can be taken.