Samuel's nonchalant reply to this is highly disturbing to me. I'm a Newsblur customer and as far as I can tell, my feed data is in the hands of some hacker and he doesn't care at all. I am much less concerned about the service being restored, which seems to be all that he's worried about, and more about knowing who has my data.
On top of that, I used to use his "forward newsletters to Newsblur" feature for a long time. I've long stopped using it and deleted all the feeds with newsletters, partly because it never worked very well, but mostly because I more or less had an inkling that something like this would happen and it's just not worth it, too many email newsletters leak personal data all over the place. However, I have no clue if those were really deleted or if they stuck around in MongoDB.
Clarification what exactly the ransom is (did he just dump it locally and encrypt it? or did the hacker download it and is threatening to leak it?) would be very welcome.
> On top of that, I used to use his "forward newsletters to Newsblur" feature for a long time. I've long stopped using it and deleted all the feeds with newsletters, partly because it never worked very well,
Newsblur mangled the formatting of a very large amount of newsletters I forwarded. The grouping per sender was great, but not really worth it if many newsletters end up unreadable.
Considering Newsblur's solution relied on setting up (sender/subject) filters on your email provider, I just kept doing that, but instead of forwarding to Newsblur, I now direct them all to a separate folder.
Lost the grouping per sender, but I honestly didn't explore an alternative too much. Even if Newsblur didn't mess with the newsletters' HTML and displayed them as GMail does, it was just too much of liability to blindly forward emails to a third party service like that: many companies do obnoxious things like send transactional emails from the same address as their newsletters, or blur the line between what is bulk and targeted mail, and I'd rather not have things like emails with flight information and other random tidbits of personal data floating around in someone's MongoDB.
On top of that, I used to use his "forward newsletters to Newsblur" feature for a long time. I've long stopped using it and deleted all the feeds with newsletters, partly because it never worked very well, but mostly because I more or less had an inkling that something like this would happen and it's just not worth it, too many email newsletters leak personal data all over the place. However, I have no clue if those were really deleted or if they stuck around in MongoDB.
Clarification what exactly the ransom is (did he just dump it locally and encrypt it? or did the hacker download it and is threatening to leak it?) would be very welcome.