February's downtime

First, a bit of context.

On 17th February 09:55 UTC, we received 4 emails, 2 from a brand protection service provider reporting two links on hastebin.skyra.pw, and 2 from Cloudflare, Inc. on behalf of the former.

Both links were taken down at 10:19 UTC in the same day, and we replied all four emails at 10:26 UTC. Basically 24 and 31 minutes respectively, as fast as we could at that moment.

However, unlike other takedown and DMCA requests we received, this was a Trademark Infringement DMCA. Even though we resolved the situation swiftly, we received an abuse notice from our hosting provider, netcup GmbH, the day after at 13:55 UTC. We replied quickly, but the message didn't go through (I did not get an alert saying it went through or failed), so they defaulted to disabling our server. We replied afterward, but they soon closed the office, and we had to wait for the next day. Service was restored on 19th February 06:05 UTC.

The two documents that were flagged were two scripts that called an endpoint in one of their business partners, and were submitted by an anonymous user (as are all of hastebin.skyra.pw's users). Regardless of whether that's really eligible for a Trademark Infringement DMCA is another topic for another day.

And to be clear. Yes, netcup GmbH could have checked if the reported content was still there, but that's not their job, and opening arbitrary links can be a security risk. They were following protocol and defending themselves from the law, and that is in the very contract we have with them. They were in the right to do that.

The problems

hastebin.skyra.pw is an old fork of now Toptal's Hastebin, however, it failed to include any legal content such as Terms of Service or a link to how to request a document takedown, without them, we had no legal safeguards, and any content uploaded by external anonymous users were indistinguishable from content uploaded by anyone from Skyra Project.

It also completely lacked moderation, if we took down a document, users could re-upload it again. We did not have any measure to block reported documents from being uploaded.

On the other hand, we had the resources at the moment to restart the services quickly after, but we lacked off-site database backups. Because of that, we were stuck until netcup GmbH would restore our server.

The solutions

hastebin.skyra.pw has been taken down and will not be turned on until we resolve its legal problems.

We also have started doing off-site database backups, and will continue working towards adding redundancy so were this to happen again in the future, we will be better prepared to restart the services. We hope that day never comes, but we value the community we built and should not suffer the consequences of our mistakes.