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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

#141

Post by FDSGSG »

jpmoral wrote: post #94
jfrunyon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I highly doubt that the app disables emergency calling. 2) Some (rental, probably also lease) vehicles actually do have disablers. They prevent the vehicle from being started, not stop them in the middle of the road. 3) The police don't repo a thing. That's a civil matter and generally outsourced to the lowest bidder with a tow truck. By the way, if someone dies because of it, the only person whose conscience it i…

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…

Is not donating malaria nets to poor africans more or less defensible than choosing to sell them phones which deactivate when unpaid?

You seem to be suggesting that it would be fucked up to not donate these phones to the poor people who aren't paying their bills. Does that mean that it's also fucked up to not donate them other things?

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

#142

Post by FDSGSG »

jpmoral wrote: post #111
jfrunyon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Samsun…

>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.

Do you not think that it is possible to twist almost anything into a life or death situation?

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

#143

Post by yokoprime »

macintux wrote: post #59
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…

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

Please let me know which company this is so i can avoid giving them any money.

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

#144

Post by donohoe »

Igelau wrote: post #67
donohoe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but this one is particularly bad with a lot of real world consequences. If I were that developer I would have never have blogged about it publicly. It is admitting to gross negligence IMHO.

This case study had a lot of valuable insights cooked into it, so I'm glad this developer blogged about it. The myth of the developer who knows everything and never makes huge mistakes is a lie that needs to perish. I'd much rather work with someone who is upfront about their mistakes, the gaps in their knowledge, and can speak directly on serious issues of overwork, managerial incompetence, bad clients, and systemic…

Very true and in general I agree, but there are levels of mistakes and/or unprofessional decisions.

This is in the higher end of that.

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

#145

Post by stuff4ben »

tintor wrote: post #93
stuff4ben wrote: post #7

If you haven't killed some production environment in your career, can you really call yourself a programmer? I kid of course, but I've been there, done that. It's lessons learned the hard way and I became a better developer because of it.

How much damage did you cause to become a better developer because of it?

That's a fair question. Loss of a couple hundred thousand US dollars during an 8 hour window where a poorly performing SQL query during the payment pipeline caused purchases to hang. Indexes are great things... if you use them.

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

#146

Post by trutannus »

Arnavion wrote: post #130
trutannus wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely negligent look at the issue Yes, the part about them overwriting the data from each cycle struck me as odd. I don't think that's good practice even if testing.

It doesn't seem unusual to me. You write a test script that generates random numbers and saves them to foo.txt, then reads them back from foo.txt for the purpose of running one kind of test. Then you wrap that in a loop for every kind of test. You end up testing everything, but foo.txt only has the numbers from the last test. To be clear, I'm not saying it's not a bad practice to do that. But the context is that it w…

True, I think I have something like that in multiple places for tests that are used to validate prod code. But our code won't lock people's devices down with no recourse.

I think what made me scratch my head is that they didn't consider that generating random phone numbers might lead to collisions. I've been hesitant to publish fake datasets that have randomly generated and validly formatted SIN/SSN numbers in it for that exact reason.

Even if the risk is low, I'd still think keeping indefinite logs of that would be a good idea.

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

#147

Post by felipelemos »

FDSGSG wrote: post #140
felipelemos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 got repo'd and they couldn't drive to a hospital. Sure. What they were thinking trying to buy something without having money, right? And even worse, what they were thinking being poor. They should have bought…

If everyone saw things like you, there would probably not be nearly as many poor people with phones. It is these very consequences (repo, deactivation) that make it possible for these phones to be offered at affordable prices. Sadly we don't live in a utopia, especially the poor people of this world don't. I'm sure they'd rather have the phone that stops working and possibly indirectly kills their family when unpaid…

Curious, as I am from a poor country where:

1. Lots of poor people have phones, sometimes very expensive ones (as these are sought as a symbol status)

2. There is no such thing as repossession. And living abroad makes me believe that it is an phenomenon in United States only. It is illegal in many parts of the world.

*edit: word

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

#148

Post by Dudeman112 »

Igelau wrote: post #67
donohoe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but this one is particularly bad with a lot of real world consequences. If I were that developer I would have never have blogged about it publicly. It is admitting to gross negligence IMHO.

This case study had a lot of valuable insights cooked into it, so I'm glad this developer blogged about it. The myth of the developer who knows everything and never makes huge mistakes is a lie that needs to perish. I'd much rather work with someone who is upfront about their mistakes, the gaps in their knowledge, and can speak directly on serious issues of overwork, managerial incompetence, bad clients, and systemic…

While I agree with the overall point of your reply, it would also be nice if we stopped normalizing some of these fuck ups.

Some errors actually happen due to professional negligence, and we should hold ourselves to better standards than "oopsie, updated a whole column in a table".

Assuming no exceptional circumstances, of course.

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

#149

Post by FDSGSG »

oolonthegreat wrote: post #41

kinda unrelated but can someone explain to me how this one korean company has access to infrastructure to lock any phone anywhere in the the world? am I misreading something?

Samsung can remotely deactivate Samsung phones? Wow, shocking.

Wait, this actually has been normal since Apple introduced the Activation Lock in 2013.

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

#150

Post by bellyfullofbac »

zarzavat wrote: post #97
kingcharles wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once ran a query on a live production web site thinking I was doing a SELECT but somehow ran an UPDATE which set all the millions of users' gender to 'M', regardless of their selection. Restoring from backups would have been a nightmare. And telling my supervisor would have been a nightmare. So I used everyone's selected title (Mr, Ms, Mrs etc) to reset their gender setting, and then put the keyboard down and went…

What did you do about 'Dr's?

I wonder if the few Dr's could be fixed manually by checking their names, e.g. if they're Steven or Maria, the gender should be clear enough.

At least that was the case when I was young, but don't tell anyone I said this, the rage machine might knock on my door.

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