10 Comments
User's avatar
Running Burning Man's avatar

Great work. Keep the pressure on. Someone affected and pissed needs to think about litigation and send a preservation letter to all the parties - Yale, the three knuckleheads who did this, AND Mastadon itself. The latter will have backup tapes.

Eric Brown's avatar

No, Mastodon won't. Mastodon isn't a centralized service, like Twitter; it's decentralized, like email. The server admins might have backups, but if they're doing it in their spare time, they might not.

SCA's avatar

Damn, kid!

How many more vitamins can I take? I really want to be around when they write books about you.

Josh Scandlen's avatar

Is this a good thing or bad thing for the good guys? So much going on here for those, like myself, not in the know it’s hard to know.

Christopher Brunet's avatar

good in the sense that it's a tacit admission of guilt -- destruction of evidence during a lawsuit can results in sanctions including the presumption of guilt

bad in the sense that once it was destroyed, it will be impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Mastodon was a blackmail operation

Running Burning Man's avatar

Depends on Mastadon's backup system and schedule. It might still be available - assuming someone aggrieved sends a preservation letter out.

Eugine Nier's avatar

What backup system? Mastadon is a distributed protocol, it's up to each instance to run its own servers.

Running Burning Man's avatar

OK, you are way ahead of me. Someone backs up, perhaps the "instance" else they constantly risk failure. If I have that wrong, then I'll desist. Maybe I should already!

Eugine Nier's avatar

Generally it's the responsibility of whoever runs each instance manage his own backups.

Diana Murray's avatar

Yeah, maybe it would have been better to sue them first.