The comments in the blog talk about arrogance and how someone else would have done what RMS did if he didn't exist. They also complain that him being a "nutjob" has actually done harm to freedom. This line of thinking is dead wrong. It takes someone precisely like RMS to stand for his ideal and dedicate his life to what he believes. I, personally, feel a great debt to the man.

Things should be back to normal now. Trevor just moved www.ycombinator.com to Slicehost, and I just told HN to refer to static stuff there instead of serving it locally.

Interesting how easy it is to move your whole web site. Good customer service is important when users can switch so easily.

Crazy to think about the consequences of a mistake like this. This was sent by a friend to an email list I'm on:

"Well, consider this community hospital fubared.

IT dudes running around pulling out their hair. If it wasn't affecting patient care it would be a humorous scene-but I can't check xray's, or labs or anything. Took out a horrendously bloody gallbladder this morning, and I can't tell (labwise) if she's still bleeding...not good."

What I am finding really absurd about this whole thing is, the photocopier companies knew about this (obviously), and a number actually had services/software available to wipe the drives - but failed utterly in actually telling anyone who might care about them.

My gf works at a hospital and there are many panties in a twist about this right now. She contacted one of their major photocopier providers and asked about what happened to the ones they had on lease that were returned in the last few years. "Oh, they were sold, or scrapped, or given away... couldn't really tell you for certain though." So the obvious question: "Did you wipe the drives first?" "A: No, that wasn't included in our contract with you." - because nobody knew about this 'feature' when the contracts were written!

Massive fail both security wise and from the sales side on missing easy upselling. Very likely any hospital or police dept would gladly have paid for these services had they know it was necessary.