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The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

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Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#111

Post by jpmoral »

jfrunyon wrote: post #98
jpmoral wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You don't know that. And there may be emergency situations where you're on the phone with someone other than from the emergency number. 2) How rental cars do it doesn't seem to have anything to do with this. >By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it is on is the person who bought a phone they couldn't afford and then didn't pay for it. Just like if someone died because the car…

> Would you randomly disable somebody's car's engine because they didn't pay? No. Perhaps you meant to reply to the person I was replying to, rather than me, with your "how rental cars do it doesn't seem to have anything to do with it"? Because the person I was replying to said that repossessors wouldn't disable a car, which is not true. > This is some fucked up reasoning. People run into financial difficulty for var…

>Saying "yeah, someone else SHOULD pay for their non-necessity"? I can't imagine thinking like that.

>Just because someone runs into financial difficulty doesn't mean they can just stop paying for things. Nor does it mean that anyone else has an obligation to provide them with something for free. Particularly when that something is a luxury. Heck, if they're so short on money they could've sold their expensive Samsung phone and replaced it with a cheap one.

That wasn't remotely what I was saying. I wasn't advocating for anyone to get non-necessities for free nor that difficulties automatically absolves people of responsibility.

I was saying that to dismiss any consideration of life and death situations because any deaths would be on the people not paying is fucked up.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#113

Post by Arn_Thor »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #76
shantnutiwari wrote: post #45

Author here. I shared this yesterday, didnt get much upvotes and quickly vanished. Thanks to /u/nixcraft for sharing it again! Looks like 2nd time lucky. Im seeing the same type of comments here and on Reddit, I'll try to answer a few common ones. 1. Yes, I know it was stupid testing on production. But we'd been told we needed to release the product on Monday (this was Friday), no objections. A previous project manag…

> If you get a phone on contract, you don't actually own it till you pay it off, and the company is entitled to lock it. No. You don't turn off somebody's phone while they're using it. You have no idea what they could be doing. Someone could be literally dying in front of your locked out consumer who is now unable to call for help. This is vital infrastructure and you're denying them access. If somebody dies because…

You're confusing ethics and legality

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#114

Post by miyuru »

distantaidenn wrote: post #109

As others have pointed out, I wouldn't even have created this article, but to each their own. I'm assuming this client company was Samsung, due to scale and the author calling it the "K-Pop" company. They are known for using idols in their marketing. Still a little cringe to call it that. My take away from this article: 1. This act was extreme, bordering on criminal, negligence. Some peoples' livelihoods depend on ac…

I think its LG, this a blog post from the said company.

https://www.trustonic.com/news/lg-mobile-smartphones-to-impl...

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#116

Post by vadfa »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #76
shantnutiwari wrote: post #45

Author here. I shared this yesterday, didnt get much upvotes and quickly vanished. Thanks to /u/nixcraft for sharing it again! Looks like 2nd time lucky. Im seeing the same type of comments here and on Reddit, I'll try to answer a few common ones. 1. Yes, I know it was stupid testing on production. But we'd been told we needed to release the product on Monday (this was Friday), no objections. A previous project manag…

> If you get a phone on contract, you don't actually own it till you pay it off, and the company is entitled to lock it. No. You don't turn off somebody's phone while they're using it. You have no idea what they could be doing. Someone could be literally dying in front of your locked out consumer who is now unable to call for help. This is vital infrastructure and you're denying them access. If somebody dies because…

You know there is literally a 0% chance of the company that owns the phone getting it back after having it stolen from them. Having a system like this is the only reliable way of making sure people in low trust countries will pay what they bought.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#117

Post by lostlogin »

jaywalk wrote: post #48
inquist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the plus side, why are they storing gender info in the first place?

Why would you jump to the assumption that they don't need to store gender?

Having worked in a healthcare setting and having had a patient come through who had undergone gender reassignment surgery, it turns out to be easier get the surgery than to get their gender and name changed in the healthcare database.

I said I’d help them get it fixed, but I couldn’t get this done.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#118

Post by musiccog »

innodb1 wrote: post #110

Importance of testing has been told multiple times,even though we all ignore it largely. I vividly remember an incident ( this was in the early 2000's ) we had a couple of Linux machines both remote and local. The testing and development happens in Local and the code is pushed in a short time over dialup connection. One of my team member had a instance of remote open. He was deleting some cache files in his local , h…

> It taught very valuable lessons, Especially not to type rm -rf without checking multiple times.

"Measure twice, cut once."

One of the many uses I have for a mindmap in my daily use (Freemind 0.9.0!), is as a place to write out sysadmin/sql commands in a structured way before executing them.

If I can test it on dev before production - great. If I have to run it directly on production, following this method (religiously!) has saved me from any catastrophic (read unrecoverable) issues.

When you are under pressure it can be easy to say 'I don't have time to write out the commands'.

When touching production servers, you need to spend the extra minute or so to write it out.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#119

Post by EdwardDiego »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #45

Author here. I shared this yesterday, didnt get much upvotes and quickly vanished. Thanks to /u/nixcraft for sharing it again! Looks like 2nd time lucky. Im seeing the same type of comments here and on Reddit, I'll try to answer a few common ones. 1. Yes, I know it was stupid testing on production. But we'd been told we needed to release the product on Monday (this was Friday), no objections. A previous project manag…

> Vice president level executives were asking for updates in daily standups.

The worst kind corporatised Scrum™ in action, apart from when the VP comes to your retro and talks for two hours about why you suck.

I can definitely understand why you were so pressured, sounds toxic as all hell.

Re: The day my script killed 10k phones in South America

#120

Post by EdwardDiego »

systemvoltage wrote: post #108
macintux wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Including my boss, who was fired when he was attending his mother's funeral. And people wonder why big companies are generally loathed.

This is a false generalization. It’s simply not true that this happens everywhere in big companies. Seems like a rare case.

I think it can happen in every big company, you always have pockets of great culture and absolutely terrible culture once you reach a certain size.

But I agree, it's a definite overgeneralisation to say that all big companies are terrible everywhere.

Having worked for very small companies, and very big companies, there's very much pros and cons to both.

In a small company, culture is far easier to nurture and guide consistently across the entire company.

But then, in a small company, you're also far more likely to meet nepotism based hiring - "my wife's friend who has worked nothing but retail needs a job, and we need an HR manager" .

And also far more likely to work for CEOs who make decisions that adversely impact employees lives dramatically, because they were in a mood, with few, if any, checks and balances.

After all, the new HR manager is a close friend of their wife, their families have been holidaying together for years, and they don't want to jeopardise that friendship by going against the CEO.

I'm not saying that these don't exist in big companies, but generally they have more people in the mix who can say "hmm, let's hold up a second on this".

And to be fair to small companies, they're great for moving into new positions.

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