Quite a Day on The Passive Voice
Here’s yet another update on The Passive Voice.
After an email attack, the server hosting the blog was rebooted, a process that required about three hours.
After the restart, the server ran for about two hours.
Then, due to some sort of miscommunication (not additional attacks), the server was rebooted a second time and was down for another three hours.
After the first reboot, PG thinks he may have lost a few comments. After the second reboot, evidently the server was restarted in roll-back mode, so PG lost a couple of posts, including the first apology for the server outage, and 1-2 hours worth of comments. He’s replaced the other post.
If you missed the first explanation, the server hosts other sites besides The Passive Voice and PG has no evidence the email attack was directed at this blog. The hosting company’s tech support desk says the server was locked up and they were unable to get in before the first reboot to determine the target of the attack.
PG’s hosting service says everything should be fine now. PG hopes so.
Again, please accept PG’s apologies for the site not being available for several hours today and also if any of your comments disappeared.
UPDATE: PG has checked into the Comments issue in more detail. Evidently all of today’s comments got zapped. Sorry. There were some good ones.
PG is trying to decide if his hosting provider has two strikes or three strikes.
Apology accepted, PG. These things happen. Hopefully, everything will go smoothly from here on.
I was watching the comments on several posts today, and on the newest contract post all the comments disappeared. I hope your server has the problems squared away now!
3 hour re-boot cycle? That would be the kind of time I would expect to restore the whole server from a backup. Must be some kind of E-mail attack if it left the original server a smoking ruin.
I’m pretty sure they did restore from backup for the second reboot.
That would explain the whole role back.. (duh moment for me there.)… I guess E-mail attack is the service provider term for “Server got P0wn3d” (rooted)
Well, that sucks. Explains why I couldn’t get on this afternoon. Glad to see you’re back, PG!
I demand a refund for the time I spent reloading your site trying to read a post from like 3 weeks ago because I am that far behind on my blog reading. Now I’ll just try to refresh my memory on the topic of the post.
Dang! Items of note lost were Carolyn Jewell’s excellent comments about the foreign rights issue, plus interesting discourse on the ‘nightmare’ clause… At least all your readers didn’t go poof.
Agreed, Anthea. Plus other excellent comments are also gone.
Yikes! I hope things calm down–hang in there, PG!
If a reboot takes three hours, your hosting provider is doing something wrong. The process should be automated, such that someone with the appropriate authority types a command, the server shuts down and restarts, and all the programs it’s supposed to run normally start running again. Being generous, that ought to take no more than ten minutes. If it takes three hours, either something is misconfigured or there are more manual steps that the person with appropriate authority has to perform (and can therefore get wrong, because they only do this about once a year).
And yes, “restart in rollback mode” or “restore from a backup” is weasel-speak for (at best) “we have no clue what we’re doing” and (at worst) “we got hacked and so can’t trust anything that’s on the server now”.
That’s what I suspected. See the later post on server status that sits above this one for more details.
Don’t see why you need to apologize. (Unless, of course, you sent an email attack to your own host because you were bored, you black hat you.)
Though I hope those people who commented on the earlier posts repost what they said. Some of those posts from today looked like they would spark some interesting comments/discussion.
I’m going to don my conspiracy hat: I think Big Publishing was out take you down.
Hey – join the dots. Amazon goes screwy. Smashwords goes offline for 2 days. Kobo gets knocked out for a whole morning. Then PG. Sounds like the Big 6 have hired a crack team of 12-year-old Indonesian hackers.
They’re out to get us! =o)
Man! What a hassle!
Yesterday was traumatic for me. I tried and tried to get my daily dose of PG, and couldn’t get in!
By evening, I was shaking and jonesing really bad. Do you have a support group for this kind of thing?
If there is a support group, I want to join.
PG, sorry about your ISP woes. FYI, my blog is hosted at bluehost.com, a company that was recommended by WordPress.org as a great WP host. I’ve found them to be highly efficient, and in the years I’ve been hosted there, have never received a geekspeak message, not even once. They have excellent customer support and low prices. It took a few hours and less than $200 to have a technician move my blog there originally. Something to think about.
Hi PG! Love your blog.
Long time reader, first time poster:
Some of the comments from
http://www.thepassivevoice.com/02/2012/how-to-read-a-book-contract-nightmares-and-daydreams-in-warranty-clauses/
7 Comments to “How to Read a Book Contract – Nightmares and Daydreams in Warranty Clauses”
1.
Beth OrsoffFebruary 22, 2012 at 10:27 am
PG,
I too am an author and an attorney. I recently went round and round with a publisher (who shall remain nameless) over their one-sided reps, warranties, and indemnity provisions. I made a little headway, but not much.
When I’m not writing, I work as an entertainment attorney. Big Studios are even bigger targets for lawsuits than Big Publishers. Yet, they routinely accommodate their talent in the areas of reps, warranties, and indemnities. The two most common “gives” are: (1) to delete “or alleged breach” so the talent is only on the hook for actual breaches instead of merely alleged breaches; and (2) to qualify the talent’s reps and warranties re libel, defamation, etc. with the words similar to “to the best of the talent’s knowledge, including that which they should know in the exercise of reasonable prudence.” Those two don’t solve all the problems, but they go along way to taking the talent off the hook. If the talent knowingly lied they are still liable (although a Big Studio will rarely if ever look to talent for reimbursement/indemnity), but otherwise they are pretty much off the hook.
I’ve negotiated with a couple of publishers on my own behalf and have seen the publishing agreements from any others. I have yet to see these two changes in a publishing agreement. When I point out to the Big Publisher that these two changes are routinely made in contracts with every major studio and production company, the response is some form of “we don’t care.”
As you point out, the reality is authors themselves rarely get sued and even when publishers do get sued, they won’t necessarily look to the author for reimbursement, even if they have the right to. If an author wants to sign a contract with a publisher, they have to hope for the best.
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Passive GuyFebruary 22, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Thanks for the entertainment law perspective, Beth.
I’ve gotten “to the best of Author’s knowledge” into a couple of warranties, but in most cases, publishers seem to treat the close with totemic reverence.
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2.
Anthea LawsonFebruary 22, 2012 at 11:09 am
Regarding that clause — actually, my attorney husband insisted the publisher strike that before publishing our two co-authored historical romances. It was a nice victory.
Now if we had only known what *else* to insist on, particularly in the reversion of rights clause…
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3.
Erin IvyFebruary 22, 2012 at 11:14 am
Excellent post! Very informative. The same type of clause exists in free-lance writing contracts I have signed. It made me squirm, but of course I was told that all contracts are like that…I mostly depended on the likelihood of it not holding up in court. Where I drew the line was that because of that clause I refused to take any jobs that included writing science lab manuals. But after reading this, I won’t ever sign that clause again!
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4.
JR TomlinFebruary 22, 2012 at 11:50 am
Informative post that emphasizes two things for me. 1) I thank GOD I am not a lawyer and 2) I thank GOD there are lawyers I can pay to figure this stuff out for me. No there is a 3) Never let an agent try to figure this stuff out for you…
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5.
Michael KingswoodFebruary 22, 2012 at 3:45 pm
Erm…. PG, I love you, but…
Dude, you are not seriously saying that the barbarous, illegal, immoral, and contemptible actions of the zealots for that religion could in any way be the fault of an author, or that any court, attorney, or reasonable person in any civilized portion of the world would agree with placing the blame on said author…are you?
Seriously dude, I think the Rushdie example was more than a LITTLE bit of a stretch.
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Passive GuyFebruary 22, 2012 at 3:56 pm
My principal point with Rushdie and the clause was that Rushdie’s book did, in fact, violate the laws of some countries, which is a potential trigger for liability.
In the most commonly-used formulations of the clause, there is no limitation to violating the laws of Western or European nations. It’s violating any law or any right anywhere in the world.
Thank you very, very much, L.
YOINKERS.
There’s been big bad hacks going on in teh unternutz for a month now. I’ve been sumo-slammed twice now on ALL of my sites, so it wouldn’t surprise me if your hosting provided is covering up that they were hacked.
Then again, they might just be incompetent boofheads that take 3 hours to reboot a server (which takes about… did mine just now).
Having been a sys admin and still living in Hardcore Geekland, I think they probably forgot start a service or simply don’t reboot things that often.
Tell ‘em they better straighten up or you’ll not only take away their Mountain Dew and Fritos, but you’ll tell their mum to make ‘em clean their rooms.
LOL, Judd.