NCIX

» see ncix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In the frmtr years the bottom of every post I wrote carried a signature block listing the parts in my machine. Motherboard, processor, how much memory, which graphics card. Everyone did it. It was a status line and a support request at the same time, and it is the closest thing my generation of Turkish forum users had to a personality.

Those parts were bought by going somewhere and carrying them home. There was no website you trusted with that kind of money in 2004, and if there had been, the delivery would have taken a week and arrived with a story. Canada had NCIX for exactly this, and the fact that a country of thirty million could support a dedicated parts retailer with its own warehouses says more about Canada than about NCIX.

Steve Wu registered Netlink Computer Inc on 28 April 1996 in Richmond, British Columbia. It started as mail order and became the place Canadian builders bought from, because the alternative was waiting on a package that had to cross the American border first. At its largest it ran ten stores across two provinces and shipped out of warehouses on both sides of the country.

~ the case file ~

~ the camera in the warehouse ~

Sometime in the late 2000s NCIX did the thing that outlasted everything else it did. It put a product manager named Linus Sebastian in front of a camera to talk about the hardware it was selling. The company channel worked well enough that in November 2008 a cheaper spinoff was started so the low-budget videos would not damage the NCIX brand. That spinoff was called Linus Tech Tips.

Sebastian left in 2013 after falling out with management, and the terms he got are worth writing down: he bought the channel for one dollar, signed a two year non-compete, and agreed to keep making NCIX videos at a reduced rate for the duration. A retailer sold its own YouTube channel for a dollar. Today that channel has an audience larger than any computer store has ever had customers, and the store it came from is a court filing.

~ how it fell over ~

The end took five months and happened store by store. In July 2017 the Ontario locations closed along with the Markham head office. In November the remaining British Columbia leases were taken over by Canada Computers, which is a polite way of saying a competitor bought the addresses. The last store, in Richmond, closed on 30 November.

The bankruptcy filing landed at the Supreme Court of British Columbia the next day, 1 December 2017, listing more than 35 million dollars owed. Suppliers were not paid, gift cards stopped being worth anything, and open RMAs became somebody else's problem. This part is ordinary. Retailers die like this constantly and there is nothing about it worth a grave.

~ the part that was not ordinary ~

On 1 August 2018 a Craigslist ad appeared offering NCIX database servers for 8,500 dollars. A researcher named Travis Doering went to look. What was for sale was the contents of a warehouse the company had stopped paying for: three hundred office and store desktops plus eighteen Dell PowerEdge servers. The landlord was owed 150,000 dollars in rent and was selling the hardware to recover it. Nothing had been wiped.

On the drives were fifteen years of customer records. Names and addresses and phone numbers, payment details, photographs of customer ID documents, unsalted MD5 password hashes, and employee social insurance numbers. Doering reported one database holding information on 3.8 million Canadians. The RCMP and the provincial privacy commissioner opened investigations and the police eventually seized the machines, by which point the data had been copied and resold more than once. A class action filed afterward was blocked by the court, which found the evidence of the breach unreliable.

~ what it leaves ~

A company that dies still holds everything its customers gave it, and nobody's bankruptcy checklist has a line for the hard drives. NCIX is the cleanest demonstration of that on record: not a hack, just a landlord with unpaid rent and a pile of machines nobody had authority or budget to erase.

The other half of the estate is stranger. A regional retailer in British Columbia accidentally started the largest consumer technology channel in the world and sold it for a dollar on the way out. Whichever way you count, the video outlived the inventory.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »