vdanen - Slashdot User

Comment Volunteering did it for me (Score 1) 128

by vdanen on Sunday August 10, 2008 @11:04AM (#24546079) Attached to: Open Source Helps New IT Grads Get Foot in the Door

No post-high-school education here, but spending insane amounts of time beta testing, packaging, proof-reading documentation and generally getting my hands very very dirty with one particular Linux distribution landed me a job as a packager/documenter with the distro, and last month I "celebrated" my 8 year anniversary working with the same company (now working on security).

The thing that got me in, besides obvious skill, was the volunteer work and passion I put into the company so the end result was they gave me a cheque for doing in an official capacity what I'd been doing unofficially for months.

The nice thing about that is that it gave me the time to increase my knowledge and skills and has gotten me a number of minor little projects under my belt in that time as well as two significant projects (both more or less defunct now, but that's besides the point since both projects had more value to me in terms of what I learned by doing them).

Submission + - Reasonable expectation of privacy from web hosting

Submitted by Shafted on Sunday July 27, 2008 @01:35AM

Shafted writes: I'm in a bit of dilemma and am wondering what fellow Slashdotters think regarding this subject. I've been hosting web sites for some clients for years and have been doing so on my own server up until about a year and a half ago when I got a reseller account with a company that will remain nameless. They are, however, a fairly large one and they did come highly recommended. Other than the usual slow tech support, occasional server overloading, and... well... typical support staff, it's been pretty good and has saved me from having to deal with problems like hardware and driving down to the colo at 4am to figure out a routing problem. All-in-all, it was pretty good. Until yesterday when I was asking for a relatively minor email-related fix and by the tech support staff's response, they had accessed my MySQL database directly and looked at the contents, presumably in order to tell me what I was doing wrong. Regardless of the fact that they missed the boat with regards to the support question, I found it surprising that they would access my database data without my consent. When asking them why they were accessing the database without my permission, they've pretty much ignored it, despite repeated requests asking why they think this is ok. I did get a response from one of the higher-ups who said it was ok, they were perfectly within their rights, and their privacy policy supports that. Problem is, I've read the privacy policy, terms of service, and acceptable use policy and nowhere does it make mention that they have the right to look at files/data, but it does indicate that I am the one who owns the data (presumably to cover copyright infringement). Another fellow indicated that he felt that, as site admin, he had the right to look at whatever he wanted on the site, whether it's his data or a customers (he, from what I can tell, is not an employee). So my question is this: Do I, as a customer who, according to the acceptable use policy, owns my data, have a reasonable expectation of privacy of the data for which I own, despite it being hosted on a third-party's server? Or do web hosting companies have the right to poke around at everyone's data as they see fit? I can understand looking at data to determine whether it violates the AUP or TOS, provided that it's justified (i.e. a scanner or audit indicates that something fishy is going on). But since I haven't violated the AUP or TOS, do they have this right? Is this something all web hosting companies do? If it isn't expressly stated, either that they do or do not have the right, does that automatically give them the right? I'm not from US so I'm not fishing for a law suit, but if I start looking somewhere else can I expect this same kind of behaviour? Is this an industry norm or did someone make a mistake and they're simply unwilling to admit to it? I'd really like to hear what some of you have to think, knowing that many of you probably have sites hosted by third-parties and some of you may work for web hosting companies. Since this is the first one I've ever dealt with, I'm unsure whether I should expect this anywhere else, and if so I may end up going back to self-hosting.

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