[LINK] SMH: '4800 Aussie sites evaporate after hack'

Roger Clarke Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
Wed Jun 22 16:25:04 AEST 2011


At 16:02 +1000 22/6/11, steve jenkin wrote:
>There was a court case in OZ many years ago where a vendor got sued for
>faults in COTS software (wordprocessor).
>The litigant got consequential damages, IIRC.
>Can anyone on list with decent legal knowledge confirm this recollection
>of mine?

The one I remember was Lotus 1-2-3 (although there have been a few).

Lotus had a strange, counter-intuitive default calculation sequence.

If you selected one of the other calculation sequence options, you 
could never get back to the default.  In effect, Lotus were saying 
'well, why would you want to use *that* sequence??'.

An engineering contractor preparing a tender used the default, i.e. 
assumed it would have a sensible setting.  As a result, some of the 
changes he made weren't reflected in the final figure that he quoted, 
and he lost a lot of money when his (funnily enough, very low) quote 
won the job.

He got the judgement and quite a lot of money.

Or so my memory goes.

Phil Argy?  Any memories of such things?

________________________________________


>Do "the 4800" have a "negligence" claim against Distribute IT?
>Either individually or as a class action?
>
>There are the "implied warranty" conditions of the TPA (now CCA)
>administered by the ACCC.
>
>Do these apply to all transactions, or only non-business?
>
>
>=========================
>>From the ACCC site:
>
>"Services sold before 1 January 2011 must have been carried out with due
>skill and care." (s66?)
>
>and
>
>"Consumer guarantees on services
>"Care and skill
>"Service providers must carry out all services using an acceptable level
>of skill and/or technical knowledge. Service providers must also take
>reasonable steps to avoid loss or damage when providing the services."
>
>
>Roger Clarke wrote on 22/06/11 9:59 AM:
>>  [The key elements of this story are extraordinary:
>>  (1)  "[after an attack on the servers]... four of the company's
>>  servers were "unrecoverable"".  (Okay, as they say, 'shit happens')
>>  (2)  " ... not only was the production data erased during the attack,
>>  but also key backups, snapshots and other information that would
>>  allow us to reconstruct these servers from the remaining data"
>>
>>  It's remarkable enough that a service-provider doesn't have the
>>  capability to re-construct the software environment on which its
>>  business depends.
>>
>>  But to have no secured backups of their customers' data beggars belief.
>>
>>  I've been tackling the problems of cloud services, both for business
>>  and for consumers, but I'd assumed that standards in the mainstream
>>  outsourcing industry were a great deal higher than this!
>
>
>--
>Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
>0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
>PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
>
>sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
>_______________________________________________
>Link mailing list
>Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
>http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link

-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University



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