Category: The Internet

I signed up for elance a few years ago when I was looking for work and thought of doing a little consulting. I never really saw any decent paying work on their site and really kinda forgot about them until I received this e-mail today.

Dear xxxx,

We recently learned that certain Elance user information was accessed without authorization, including potentially yours. The data accessed was contact information — specifically name, email address, telephone number, city location and Elance login information (passwords were protected with encryption). This incident did NOT involve any credit card, bank account, social security or tax ID numbers.

We have remedied the cause of the breach and are working with appropriate authorities. We have also implemented additional security measures and have strengthened password requirements to protect all of our users.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience or disruption this may cause.

If you have any unanswered questions and for ongoing information about this matter, please visit this page in our Trust & Safety center: http://www.elance.com/p/trust/account_security.html

For information on re-setting your password, visit: http://help.elance.com/forums/30969/entries/47262

Thank you for your understanding,

Michael Culver
Vice President
Elance

I commend them for going public with this rather embarrassing story, a lot of companies hide these events. However, I’m annoyed that all these companies that retain this kind of data really only care about security after this kind of thing happens.

On Sept 29th 2003 hurricane Juan struck the atlantic provinces of Canada. At the time I was living in PEI and telecommuting to Montreal for sysadmin work at an e-commerce company. By the time the storm struck Charlottetown it had been downgraded to a tropical storm but still packed a serious punch. I spent a couple hours out exploring and taking pictures having never witnessed such an event before. By the time I got back to my apartment at 2am the power was out so I went to bed.

When I awoke in the morning the power was still out, not an ideal situation for a telecommuter. Of course, not 10 minutes after getting up I got a call complaining about problems with the website. No power = no high speed internet so I fired up the laptop and connected to a dialup account.

This worked for about an hour until my crappy Tecra 8200 battery started to give out. At this point I had diagnosed the problem but another hour or two was needed to get the site fully operational again. At this point I knew I needed to find some power. I remembered that I had an old 250 watt 12V DC to AC inverter. Instead of working in the car I opted to take the battery in the house.

At this point I had my laptop charging off my Subaru’s battery. I began to wonder if my high speed provider had a generator at the head end. I plugged my cable modem in and presto, high speed. I started to get cocky and even plugged in my old 13 inch color TV and satellite receiver! It all worked perfectly but after 10 minutes of TV I opted to just run the laptop and cable modem to have more run time.

To gauge my run time I put my multimeter on the battery to keep an eye on the voltage. Every 5-6 hours I would have to take the battery out to the car and go for a 30-40 minute drive to charge it up. It was totally inefficient and ridiculous but it worked.