FW: sad news - latest "Memorial" press release

[Boris Dagaev]

Paul B. Gallagher wrote:
> it's impossible to judge how much data was lost and how (ir)responsible
the owners were.

Paul, there was no call in my message to jump or even come close to such far
reaching judgmental ends. Because this is a list for people concerned (not
exclusively, but) with language, I thought it appropriate to express my
comparatively mild surprise at how the phrases about the destruction of the
database and the ensued paralysis had affected me, how they had, as it were,
protruded in your translation whereas I somehow had glossed over them in the
original Russian. I came to realize that over the years I had learned to
read between the lines, gleaning from out there where the truth is true
circumstances of political hardship and ignoring hand-wringing but
essentially empty complaints, writing them off as examples of our typical
Russian "bezalabernost'"...

... and so I was in this contemplative, meditative, lenient mood when your
and Olga's rejoinders arrived...

As it is said in the other Memorial article Robert posted a link to: "[T]he
country has changed." Well, that much is certain. Unfortunately, Memorial
evidently has not. One simply cannot go out anymore with press releases like
this. Practical and pragmatic questions would immediately be asked: did they
take care of the fundamental concerns of their business? did they protect
their most essential informational assets? did they reasonably anticipate
and mitigate predictable risks? etc. Their personal contributions to the
cause notwithstanding, did the officials (Roginsky, Flige, and others) make
every reasonable effort to prevent highly valuable materials from falling
into the hands of the very people whose murderous forefathers dispatched the
innocent to the realm of the dead?

So, having read all your valid points, I called a couple friends of mine who
are in the IT business and explained (as much as I could) the nature of the
database (more than 20 years of historic research, scans, images, etc.) and
what  Memorial  does, and enumerated the factors that you thought may have
come into play ("employee laziness"... "bandwidth"... "security"...
"databases not being static"... "malfunction"...), and they all said:
"Baloney! For the database this important, they should have hired the right
people, paid for enough bandwidth, encrypted the database, established
scheduled backups, and stored them in multiple places, in a foreign bank's
vault, if necessary. In this day and age, not that hard, not that expensive.
At worst, they should've lost no more than a week of incremental backups."

And I am sure you can easily understand, if not agree, why it is almost
impossible for practical people like me to take some of Memorial's claims
about the government's evil deeds seriously. That is because we are not
susceptible to the kind of fanciful rhetoric that shamelessly (and in one
paragraph) conjures up the ghost of Solzhenitsyn and a phantasmal scenario
of the Holocaust Museum being destroyed in Washington in reply to an
innocent musing about a plain matter of whether a database had  been backed
up properly. And contrary to how Olga twists my words, I did _not_ call
"this destruction of a vital testimony a "tear-jerker""; I called such
pointless rhetorical statements tear-jerkers. A no-nonsense answer to my
thought would have been: "We got in touch with Roginsky (or Flige, or
whoever), and yes, the database had been backed up, but some vital
activities cannot go on as before, because it is obviously harder to work
with remote materials even in the age of the Internet." Something along
those lines (as opposed to all the horrors you and Olga managed to summon)
would have completely sufficed to quench my moderately inflamed curiosity.

>From this perspective, I have to conclude that the press release, however
true it may be in other respects, is deeply flawed, because it makes even
us, people who are obviously sympathetic with the plight, discuss possible
Memorial's wrongdoings, not the government's only. I am _not_ saying
Memorial  has actually done something wrong (for all we know,  Memorial  may
have secretly stashed the database in a remote Nepali village), but I _am_
saying that the press release Robert asked us to circulate does project an
image of the "avos'" getting the better of  Memorial .

Or maybe they just need a more skilled copywriter with modern (so to speak,
"upgraded") sensibilities...
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 4:30 AM, Paul B. Gallagher <
paulbg at pbg-translations.com> wrote:

> Boris Dagaev wrote:
>
> I am sympathetic with the cause and readily admit that I don't know
>> enough details, but can't help thinking: this particular statement
>> about government induced paralysis sounds a bit like a purposeful
>> tearjerker. Didn't they make a copy of the database on a server
>> abroad? Or am I being too simplistic?
>>
>
> Perhaps so, perhaps not. There are several factors that could have come
> into play (and I may have overlooked others besides these):
>
> 1) Employee laziness, lack of foresight, confusion, poor training or
> computer illiteracy, etc. Unless backups are easy (ideally, automated), they
> will not happen.
>
> 2) Bandwidth: A large file, even if compressed, takes a long time to
> transmit, and not all ISP's will be happy carrying hundreds of megabytes
> without imposing additional charges. For example, mine limits me to about
> 200 MB per day except between 2 AM and 7 AM, when I can go crazy and
> download about 150-200 MB/hr.
>
> 3) Security concerns: Do you want your most valuable property in someone
> else's hands? This includes the carrier; walls may have ears.
>
> 4) Databases are not static things. The backup will be a snapshot of the
> database as of the date and time it was made, so a week-old backup will not
> include this week's data. This means you must make regular backups, not just
> one. If you make incremental backups, there must be a way to assemble them
> into a usable whole.
>
> 5) Malfunction: Backup hardware and software can malfunction, and depending
> on the design, the user may be more or less aware of that fact.
>
> Without understanding how each of these factors affected the situation,
> it's impossible to judge how much data was lost and how (ir)responsible the
> owners were.
>
>
> --
> War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
> --
> Paul B. Gallagher
> pbg translations, inc.
> "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals"
> http://pbg-translations.com
>
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