I'm all for preventing another false alarm. But while we're at it, let's also prevent Trump from provoking a real attack, please.
Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
381–390 of 409 posts
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm always a bit shocked at the number of people here calling for someone's head in this sort of situation. I imagine the same people would downvote to oblivion anyone who came on here and wrote something like: "The only way we're going to get better software is by firing people who write bugs and make sure they never work in the industry again."
I would argue that someone probably deserves to be fired for this. It's obviously not the guy that pushed the button nor the guy that wrote the software. However, there was, probably, a guy that several years ago didn't do his job well - his job was to make sure that this kind of errors cannot happen, unless there is an intentional malicious action of course. We see it all the time in IT - people totally misjudge the…
What does firing that person achieve?
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
gangs have an hierarchy, experience with violence and disregard of ethics. if you and your "brothers in arms" are veterans you have pretty good odds otherwise not so much.
I think you missed the whole point of this threat, that there are no ethics when there is no policing or government oversight.
Are you saying the only reason you're not already looting others' homes is because the government tells you not to?
If so, you're the problem, not everybody else.
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a couple of good stories about massive outages and good incident response. Mine is just one of them (and at some level, I was very lucky). There's also the one where all the frontend servers worldwide went into a crash loop from a bad configuration push. The SRE doing the push noticed some "weirdness" and rolled back even before the full scope of the issue was known. That one's in the SRE book.
GFE? SRE?
SRE is Site Reliability Engineer; GFE is the "Google Front End"
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
Also, if he was able to do something in error, that means the system is designed wrong. It's a process problem. You cannot fire this one guy and expect this to not happen again.
> Also, if he was able to do something in error, that means the system is designed wrong. It's a process problem.
This doesn't work in all contexts, and I suspect it fails for a large majority of contexts. If the system always prevents you from doing the wrong thing, it will also often prevent you from doing the right thing.
For example, I submit that the philosophy "ability to make a mistake means that the system is designed wrong" completely falls down in the case of going to a new restaurant for lunch and finding out you hate the food there.
I wish this claim, which is very common in discussions like these, came with some analysis of why this odd philosophy which is a terrible idea in so many contexts is instead a good idea in the context at issue.
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people are calling for the person who did this to be instantly fired, but I've always been of the opinion that the guy that pushed that button would be an outstanding hire - because he'll never, ever do something like that again and he's learned an important lesson.
Just to play devil's advocate, in some cases the point of firing an employee in a situation like this isn't about that one employee but more pour encourager les autres . So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously and they need to be diligent about following procedures. In this particular case no real harm was done and firing would probably be excessive.
So the remaining employees will see that management takes the issue seriously
Why not fire the manager of the person who made the blunder? That would work better on every level.
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what those procedural changes could be Could they do it so say, two people have to input a code or something from different machines, or something more physical like turning two keys, hitting a button etc
A big fat "Are you really sure?" confirmation box would seem to be the absolute minimum requirement here...
A previous employer had an “are you sure?” dialogue on Outlook’s reply-all button, you can script it up in VBA.
Didn’t stop people from doing it.
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
gangs have an hierarchy, experience with violence and disregard of ethics. if you and your "brothers in arms" are veterans you have pretty good odds otherwise not so much.
It's actually an interesting point. How many of these preppers have received military training, and when shit hits the fan, do they have plans to organize, communicate with each other, and defend themselves?
Here in Idaho at least, a lot & yes. No scary militia type stuff, just folks getting together and sharing knowledge. Still a lot of wild wide open spaces in this country. If you're into winter sports come visit McCall, beautiful mountain lake town, excellent restaurants, and always fresh powder to shred on Brundage Mtn. Just as great to visit in the Summer, way more crowded but it's a good size lake, plenty of room for everybody
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just recently I spoke to my friends that literally are living in LaLa land. They are making fun of me prepping and saving dry food, water, stacking up on legal guns and munition. I took upon challenge last xmas to meetup with them and they brought my prepardness as one of laughing subjects. It really saddens me when they believe that when gloves of society are off, we all gonna be happy singing kumbaya and respecting…
if you want to come up on top after civilizational collapse you'd better join a gang or have a cabin in an extremely remote and secluded location, otherwise sorry but your stash will be seized by aforementioned gangs regardless of your prepping and shooting skills
"What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background."
(I can't seem to find the original source--some internet forum.)
Re: Alert About Missile Bound for Hawaii Was Sent in Error, Officials Say
#390Just watched an interview on CNN with the Governor of Hawaii and their director of emergency management. Pretty impressed that the director didn't throw anybody under the bus. He basically said "An employee pushed the wrong button. It's my responsibility, so this is my fault. We're going to make procedure and technical changes to make sure this doesn't happen again."
I wonder what those procedural changes could be Could they do it so say, two people have to input a code or something from different machines, or something more physical like turning two keys, hitting a button etc
People are used to say Yes in a standard confirmation dialog. It would be helpful to implement something more complicated like pressing two buttons, typing "yes" to a clear question or solving a simple puzzle (ideally visualizing the outcome while solving it).