They Should Have Bought A Hard Drive - WAN Show August 14, 2026

**Linus Sebastian** (0:01)
Hey, what's up, everyone? And welcome to The WAN Show. I got myself a birthday present today.
And I'm going to talk about it.

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:11)
What does a guy with a fire truck get himself for his birthday?

**Linus Sebastian** (0:14)
A robot. In other news.

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:18)
That makes sense.

**Linus Sebastian** (0:22)
Luke was right again.

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:24)
Oh, no.

**Linus Sebastian** (0:25)
A PBS station in St. Louis has lost 70 years of archives after a cloud storage reseller shuts down. Luke warned you, and we'll be talking about that later as well. What else we got?

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:40)
Did I?

**Linus Sebastian** (0:41)
Yeah, you did. Many times.

**Luke Lafreniere** (0:43)
Oh, nice. Hell yeah.
I don't know. Where's the other one that was good? You took the PBS one that I wanted to use. New Mexico judge orders Metta to pay nearly a billion dollars. Do we finally have fees for companies that will actually impact them that aren't coming from the EU? Maybe. Possibly.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:05)
I'm not getting my hopes up.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:07)
Me neither. Which other thing do we want to talk about?

**Linus Sebastian** (1:12)
You know, you have the entire time before the show starts to pick one.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:15)
I didn't think you were going to take the PBS one. I don't know why I thought that, but I didn't think you were going to.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:19)
I always try to pick the one you're going to pick.

**Luke Lafreniere** (1:22)
Yeah, but I didn't think you'd think I would pick that one. Man, we're getting into some mind games on these now.
This one's kind of funny. Whatever. GeForce Now Exploit lets you access full Windows desktop through a simple file swap, and a modder runs local AI models on the ultimate tier with 48 gigs of VRAM and no restrictions, which is actually just kind of funny, in my opinion.

**Linus Sebastian** (1:44)
Baste.
The show is brought to you today by Vessi, along with Wispr Flow, Xsquare, and Ahrefs. With, of course, a wrap, courtesy of our wrap partner Dbrand, a chair, courtesy of our chair partner, oh goodness, I have a t-shirt in front of it, Razer, and our laptops, also courtesy of Razer. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic of today, which is that Luke warned all of you when the cloud was happening, Luke said, he came down from on high and he spake it such that on-prem will always have a place, and a St. Louis public broadcaster learned this the hard way. They lost access to 50 terabytes of archival material after their cloud storage provider OSS shut down without notice. After losing access to their data, 9PBS discovered that the OSS website was offline, and the company was listed as delinquent by the Colorado Secretary of State. 9PBS learned that the defunct storage provider was reselling Iron Mountain services, and 9PBS has sent a demand letter to preserve its data and to pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand. But as 9PBS wasn't Iron Mountain's customer, they actually, it turns out, can't just hand over the data.

**Luke Lafreniere** (3:36)
That makes sense. That's so annoying, but that makes sense.

**Linus Sebastian** (3:39)
The full story is a convoluted mess. Dan, can we put in the link to Gizmodo in the chat? Because you guys can read all about it there. It's a fascinating rabbit hole. But really, I'm only bringing this up because what I want to talk about was how much Luke, and actually I also, but it's just, you know, it's nicer to point out your co-host's role in it.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:00)
I think that's why I was confused. I was like, what do you mean?

**Linus Sebastian** (4:03)
How both of us were talking about this for so many years.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:08)
Like from the beginning.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:09)
That while there are good things about the cloud, there are also massive problems because the second you don't own your infrastructure, you can lose it. It can be just gone.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:23)
The cloud is just someone else's computer.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:26)
The craziest part of this that kills me the most is it was just 50 terabytes.
They could back up 50 terabytes these days with literally like four drives in a consumer little QNAP NAS or something. Like, actually though.

**Luke Lafreniere** (4:49)
It's actually depressing how solvable that is.

**Linus Sebastian** (4:53)
You don't need an IT department. But you know what the funny thing is?
I had dinner with Pankratz a couple of weeks ago, just because I feel like he's worked here like a year and I had never actually had a meal with him.