Hyperbolic headlines to follow.
I think the music industry could have told them where this would lead.
Suing everyone who downloaded anything regarding health records for enormous amounts of money because “records is records”?
“The stats filled 27 DVDs”
What does that even mean? Single layer? Double layer? Double sided? It’s about a specific as saying “the stats filled 27 discs.” Well, OK, what kind?
On a side note, I don’t like how they try to scare people with the size of the data. That’s 128GB, literally the size of the sd card in my (admittedly pro-level) camera. Or about the size of a hard drive in a low end laptop. It shouldn’t take weeks to upload - 3 weeks is 0.5Mb/sec; even DSL uploads in the UK is 2.5Mb - 5 days. It would take the typical cable customer 1.2 days to upload. Use google’s 1Gb fiber and it’ll take 18 minutes.
Or how about just giving us the number of bytes it consumed? Is “130GB” not a scary enough number?
(or 430GB if you go for dual side dual layer discs)
Citing the number of discs is just bullshit OMG THAT’S SO MUCH reporting.
I am just going to take a wild guess and say that it was actually on 27 discs. That is the way the US gov’t delivers data too. It’s more about the tedious job it was than the amount of data.
Reporters don’t go far enough, in my opinion. The real question is how many floppy discs are we talking about and if laid end-to-end, how far would they reach?
I want to know if the punchcards would stack to the moon.
It’s unknown, but we have reporters working on it. What we have uncovered so far is that if we took a scroll of papyrus and used hieroglyphics it would wrap around the equator six and a half times!
What the article doesn’t say is if any laws were broken or if any data was compromised. When dealing with real time statistical analysis of massive dataset (like regional or national health records), the use of cloud services offers a huge advantage at generating real time analytics and results.
I think a lot of people hear “Google” and think “oh no, its going to show up on the search engine” but there’s a lot of other services that they (and other big data companies like Amazon) provide that are not in any way connected to the public search engine.
For example, Google does maintain a HIPAA compliant service (assuming the proper BAAs are in place) for a number of the paid Google Apps. https://support.google.com/a/answer/3407054?hl=en Granted, this is UK and not USA, but its not especially far fetched to hope that sufficient safeguards were in place here as well. I’m not saying this data was or was not stored correctly and safely, but the automatic assumption that data stored on Google (or other cloud services) is immediately compromised is an incorrect one, and has been for quite a while.
did ATOS have a hand in the data breach?
Wait,wait… did they do this just to save money by not having an in-house secure database server? Did they save enough for the fine?
I really hope not.
8.45 kilometers. It would take Usain Bolt 42 minutes to run that amount of data!!
27 Rai stones with data written in sharpie.
I’m pretty sure the recognized standard is “Libraries of Congress”.
It occurs to me that an in-house secure database server with the right configuration (or wrong configuration, depending on how you look at it) could also “allow for full data-set sharing with one click”.
199,971 miles - not quite to the moon 
(225,623 miles)
Not in Britain.
The recognised standard for universal measurement here is the Wales.
