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The story
Digital comic site “Comic Cmoa” has been suspended since the 15th after a third party’s unauthorized access leaked some members’ account information, and as of the 18th there is still no sign of when the service will resume. On the forum, users voiced surprise that the service belongs to the NTT DoCoMo group, expressed distrust over whether credit card data was also leaked, and discussed the risk unique to e-books — that purchased comics vanish entirely once a service shuts down. The same day, e-book rental service “Renta!” also announced emergency maintenance, adding to anxiety about the industry as a whole.
Sun, Oct 18, 21:07 JST
Oricon
Digital comic site “Comic Cmoa,” currently suspended, reported on the 18th that there is still no timeline for resuming service. The site has been temporarily halted since the 15th after a third party’s unauthorized access leaked some members’ account information.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
This one isn't tied to a publisher, so my impression was it broadly collected and streamed popular titles across the board.
There are way too many manga distributors like this, making it hard to tell them apart, but this one didn't have any particularly good points or particularly bad ones.
It's not a publisher-affiliated service, just a plain e-book shop.
If even their security can get breached, there's nothing anyone can do.
Ah, so that's why it was a reward in the point service for Flets broadband subscribers.
NTT-related breaches have already happened so many times… lol
That "almighty" (tenka) you mean is actually "amakudari" — retired bureaucrats parachuting into cushy corporate jobs.
For us reading addicts, losing our e-books would be unbearable.
Here, try "the library."
Being a reading addict is, in a way, going to be the most sustainable habit going forward.
I was about to get rid of a huge pile of books recently, but decided to keep them for the coming dystopia.
Relying too much on digital might screw you over.
And yet, myself included, people seem way too unconcerned about it.
We're at the point where you'd almost want to cancel every credit card you own, but that's just not realistic.
It's past the point of alarm — we've reached a state of resignation.
There have apparently also been cases of migrating your library to another company's service.
Sukima was brutal.
Shut down completely after just six months.
If you didn't migrate in that window, all your data got wiped.
I never bought a single volume there myself,
but I saw victims posting about it online.
E-books are way too expensive given how weak your rights actually are.
You'd get it if you'd ever been through a service shutdown even once.
E-books are basically just rental books.
I had stuff on Mibon or something, left it sitting there, and it all went poof.
I was only in it for the points anyway, so whatever.
Splitting a single chapter into tiny pieces to hook you into logging in every day for your dopamine fix is apparently the manga site industry's biggest success formula.
These days the main users in Japan are basically people living with a slave-like mindset — though the user base is said to range from teens to fifty-somethings.
Is that scheme of splitting chapter 1 into ep. 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, each just a few pages, actually popular with people?
Seriously?
I'm both an e-book guy and a full-volume guy — is it actually fun reading it chopped up into fragments like that?
I feel like they should just let us download the data.
I think some services do let you download it.
Paying into this kind of service is nothing but risk.
For anything you genuinely want to read or keep on hand, buy the physical paperback.
That's the iron rule.
Maybe just think of it as buying a memory, not an object.
It's already been a full day since the notice went up.
↓
Thank you very much for your continued use of Renta!.
Due to emergency server maintenance, the service is currently temporarily suspended.
For rental titles you were unable to view during the maintenance period, we will consider separate arrangements.
We are currently working toward restoring the service, so we ask for your patience before using it again.
We sincerely apologize for the significant inconvenience and trouble this has caused our customers.
I've been using Renta for a long time and log in every day, but this is the first time I've ever seen it go into maintenance.
Renta's probably been hit by a server attack too.
That's rough. I'd hate it if, when picking a story back up, you had to start over from the beginning or several volumes back — a full service shutdown is the one thing I really want them to avoid.
Oh no.
If you can't read on the e-book service you were using, you're not going to just hop to a different e-book service — you end up thinking "guess I'll buy the physical book" instead.
Though I guess a lot of people already buy the physical copy and just use the e-book version for reading on the go?
If so, maybe it won't hurt physical sales all that much.
They never said it wasn't leaked.
They only said it hasn't been confirmed as of now.
Some travel booking site had everything leaked — personal info, credit card numbers, even the security codes.
At this point there's no option left but for each person to cancel their own card.
It seems like the trend now is to hand payment processing off to major services and avoid holding that data yourself as much as possible, so that's a small silver lining in all this.
Background and key points of this discussion
E-books are often sold as a license to use rather than an outright “purchase,” which creates a structural risk: when a service shuts down or stays offline for a long stretch, your entire library can simply vanish. The “Sukima” case mentioned in the thread is one such example — it closed just six months after launch, and anyone who didn’t migrate their library in time had their data wiped, a concern that keeps resurfacing in cases like this. This latest statement said that “no leak of credit card information has been confirmed as of now” — worth noting that this is not the same as a flat denial that a leak occurred, a distinction that’s easy to miss. The same day, e-book rental service “Renta!” also announced emergency maintenance; while the cause hasn’t been disclosed, it added to growing unease about the security posture of the e-book industry as a whole.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “[Unauthorized Access] ‘Comic Cmoa’ Service Resumption Still Unclear: ‘It Is Difficult to Provide an Exact Restart Date’“.
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