zlacker

> The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.

Two things occur to me about this story, exposed in this quote, that I often think when seeing stories of this nature:

1. Many businesses that rely on computers don't have a disaster recovery plan, and thus, can't spin up again for a while, sometimes at all.

2. Good security (i.e. enough to frustrate aggressive criminal gangs, like the police) is often not in place, for a number of understandable reasons, but they also tend to include less understandable ones (as in (1)).

People like our good selves, the readers of HN, might think about how we can offer our services a bit more widely to help some of the smaller fish out there stand up to bullying and attacks.

>>brigan+(OP)
This actually gave me an idea for a service, thanks for the call to action-

>>brigan+(OP)
Wouldn't the Disaster Recovery/backup equipment also be confiscated by the police?

>>amoshi+i2
The 1 in 3-2-1 would ensure you have a copy offsite as well.

https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/technology/3-2-1-backup-rul...

>>shawnc+F2
How far offsite? Like, across the street? In another town? Out of state?

Does a small-town newspaper expect to be raided by law enforcement and build a disaster recovery plan around that, or a tornado?

They don't call it "The Long Arm of the Law" for no reason.

>>NoZebr+E3
Well, if your attack vector is local law enforcement, then in a different jurisdiction would be a good start. Working your way further and further toward whatever makes it most annoying for them to get to.

>>NoZebr+E3
One would have to think about it and investigate. Say, they might confiscate your laptop with thunderbird and your mail archive but they probably wont delete your webmail account or forbid you from using it. At least I imagine if the point is to gather information it doesn't include deleting it or taking control of it? If they really want to delete your things I imagine one could create an append only webservice.

Preserving some things (without hiding anything) is better than nothing.

>>brigan+(OP)
Good idea IMO.

I'm wondering about the (not necessarily financial) ROI. I don't know many small businesses that could afford it and I think the the load on the tech volunteers would be too large.

Happy to be proved wrong, though.

>>batch1+x1
Note that if you advertise a service like this you will almost certainly face charges of obstructing justice. I'm not qualified to say if you could defend against them but your legal bills would be potentially infinite.

>>Araina+H11
A small business disaster recovery service? I don't think so-

>>NoZebr+E3
I recommend to parties I work with that are at risk from these sorts of events to keep their BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) data corpus at risk in European datacenters owned by European companies. Can be as simple as rsyncs or blob storage backups, or active infra always running, depending on budget and organizational needs and maturity.