> … was just ignoring regulations that were built up over decades, only discovering the reasons for those regulations …

yeah it’s unreal to me how many people who imagine themselves intelligent are just now discovering the equivalent to why we make wheels round.

they never think to ask “why does regulation x exist?”

its absolutely crazypants.

Whoever claims "your deposits are FDIC insured" needs to be prosecuted as fraud and scam artists. “Your” the company’s deposits in the bank is FDIC insured. My deposit with you the company is not. When the bank goes belly up, your deposit is FDIC secured up to the account limit which is tiny in the scale of things. When your company goes belly up, my deposit is gone.

Why do you think the laws and regulations are unclear?

This seems to be following the completely standard and expected process.

Contractor goes belly up, so you go to court and a judge who confirms they were a custodian of your data and you are entitled to retreive it.

Same would be the case if I was leasing equipment to someone and they had it at a storage lot. If the middle party dies or goes bankrupt, I get a court order to claim it from their other possessions.

If you talk to a lawyer (or, worse, a legislator, many of whom are also lawyers and all of whom are surrounded by them), they will insist up and down that this is a pretty standard custodial arrangement dispute and that the system worked as intended. And I would, very begrudgingly agree with that.

The legal system is perfectly capable of recognizing stolen property no matter how many layers of abstraction you put it through. The problem is always in the fact that the dispute resolution process is too expensive[0] to be useful. If you are defrauded for $10,000; but the legal fees for your representation will exceed that; then that juice ain't worth the squeeze. See also: Bricks and Minifigs.

In the Nine PBS case the judge correctly recognized Iron Mountain as a constructive bailee of Nine PBS's property and created a framework to retrieve their data. The problem is that this took almost half a year of legal work to get to the obvious outcome to make Nine PBS whole.

In Synapse's case, the problem is slightly different, because Synapse is not a bank, they are a reseller of banking services. That's the whole idea behind "fintech[1]" - that we can sell banking services while dodging all the regulatory compliance designed specifically to stop these kinds of issues so long as a real bank is involved. Saying their deposits are FDIC insured is like saying you have auto insurance because you happen to be riding a taxi. Technically correct but misleading and fraudulent. FDIC insurance doesn't cascade into your customers' accounts, because if it did, you'd be a bank.

[0] There's a similar problem with Bitcoin, where only a certain number of transactions can ever be processed per hour and thus it bottlenecks any higher-layer process that intends to use the Bitcoin blockchain as a settlement or dispute resolution system.

[1] "Fintech" in particular is meaningless as all banks are tech companies. They were one of the first adopters of electronic computers, online transaction processing, and a whole load of other things that seem utterly quaint now.

EDIT: changed "years" to "almost half a year", I was too lazy to do another Google search

Sometimes these things can go better for companies like Iron Mountain when there's a court order/decision in place to cover them. Nine PBS, in order to access their own data, could end up accessing data belonging to other people and that may not be properly covered under existing contracts and policies. It's a risk for Iron Mountain if this happens. Having a court decision and court set procedures that essentially force them to participate and also establishes third party review of the data will give them some cover if one of those other clients of the now defunct OSS discovers that Nine PBS accessed or inadvertently retained their data.

A court is needed for cover since it is possible that sometimes else's data will be seen or even corrupted in the process. This way they can say they were doing what the court asked for. That is legal cover for everyone to do what they want. Also legal limits on what they can do.

That is how I interpret the article anyway

They couldn't really - I doubt Iron Mountain actually objected to giving the data, but in the end it probably wasn't in a position to know what data belonged to PBS and what belonged to other clients of OSS and you'd get very worried if a data storage company gave a companies data to someone else without authorisation.

It’s likely that Iron Mountain needed a court order in order to do this with legal cover.

It’s just a data warehouse and OSS likely had multiple clients data and backups. Iron Mountain can’t let one third party go searching through a defunct customers stuff that has a bunch of additional third parties property intermingled with it. Too many unknowns and potentially litigious third parties.

If Iron Mountain made a deal with PBS-affiliate, they'd be breaking the terms of the contract with their customer (the fact it is defunct is just an asterisk). If you were an Iron Mountain client and one of your customers made an end run around you to go directly to Iron Mountain because they refused to pay your bill, you'd be pissed at Iron Mountain.

By solving this as they have done, Iron Mountain can assure other clients they will not just let a third person circumvent their clients. They can now say they only did it by a court order even if they were more than willing to accept the asterisk and do it on principle. Everyone is happy. Everyone is whole.

The initial reporting implied it was some catastrophic data loss, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire. The truth, while concerning, is a lot more boring.

Also some articles and people on social media were unclear that it was just a single PBS station involved, rather than all PBS content. I saw comments that thought that all the archives for Sesame Street were lost.

Archival/secure storage is big business with big liability headaches if you make a bad decisiion.

A non-profit in a deeply unfair situation tugs at the heartstrings.

This audience thinks data center operators are Jedi.

They did, they contracted with a vendor to store and backup the data. If that is insufficient then just about every customer of AWS, Azure, GCP, OCP, and every other managed storage provider is guilty of the same sin.

I wonder the proportion of companies who store backups with a minimum of two separate vendors. Low?