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Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#421

Post by jasonhansel »

052c7028e wrote: post #290
xwowsersx wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you regret it. Not trying to rub it in as I don't think anything productive will come from self-flagellation, but this is truly awful and I think the US should have laws that make it a crime for any US corporation to participate in this sort of thing.

I was powerless to stop it. I was just a junior engineer, and it was decided by the CEO to do the project. So, actually, I feel I made the right choice -- I participated in the project but worked hard on making sure it was as limited as possible. I successfully advocated for several categories of logs to not be sent because they were not required by law. So, yes, I regret I couldn't do more, but I don't regret the ch…

> I was powerless to stop it.

You couldn't have stopped someone from building it. But you could have refused to work on it on principle, or even have become a whistleblower.

Yes, doing so might have been infeasible for you, particularly if you couldn't risk a temporary loss of income. But your involvement was, nevertheless, a choice, and it's important to acknowledge that.

edit: If it was exactly 5 years ago, you may recall that, when you were working on this, China was starting to round up Uighurs to send them to concentration camps. Nobody should take working on this sort of thing lightly.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#422

Post by Zak »

_8j50 wrote: post #104
zinodaur wrote: post #69

I worked for a company that made deep packet inspection based network equipment. Western customers mostly used it for "security" and media streaming man in the middle attacks (actually a useful feature saving lots of bandwidth). The boxes were also sold to Syria and Burma, and were used to facilitate censorship and human right abuses

Ultimately you are like a kitchen knive maker whose knive was used in a stabbing. It was entirely the stabbers fault and does not diminish the utility of your product. In a corporate setting, mitm'ing TLS and blocking sites by category is routine practice (better ways to stop bad stuff but expensive firewals are a waste when most traffic is TLS).

The difference is that most people have kitchen knives, and use them for cooking, not assault. Identifying buyers with ill intent in a retail setting would be impossible, and I suspect most kitchen knives used in crimes were purchased for cooking.

Selling deep packet inspection technology to the government of Syria is different as there is ample reason to believe that government would use it for human rights abuse.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#423

Post by SamSkjord »

foepys wrote: post #338
baxtr wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Teams so so much. It’s by far the worst piece of software on my Mac.

Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs. It's the worst software in my PC by far. The only reason it is used by my company is because it's free with Office 365. Even ICQ was a better chat client in 2002. I wonder if the Teams guys feel…

> Teams started hogging my keyboard media keys last week just to play the ring tone twice when pressing play/pause. The media player won't react to these inputs anymore and I have to click with my mouse. Nice going, Teams devs.

Have also been experiencing this, call finishes so I press play to turn music back on, hear teams dialling tone. Annoyingly triggering

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#424

Post by amelius »

SoftTalker wrote: post #35
AlotOfReading wrote: post #32

I built a lighting system for to save energy by turning off hallway lights when not in use. The environmental aspect was great and saved hundreds of thousands in electricity. Someone eventually realized that the mesh network I built to connect all the lights together and report usage statistics could also be used to track employees moving throughout the building and catch them taking unauthorized breaks in the stairw…

Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. It's one of the reasons I've grown more disillusioned with computer tech over the years.

It's not just computer tech. Obviously, advances in say molecular biology can cause much more trouble down the line.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#425

Post by amelius »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
SoftTalker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. It's one of the reasons I've grown more disillusioned with computer tech over the years.

I had this realization in stages. 1. Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. 2. Some software comes already designed for surveillance purposes up front . 2a. This includes plenty of well-known mass appeal software; importantly, the customer-facing marketing copy and the investor pitch can present a completely different value proposition. 3. Software doesn't become used for surveillanc…

It's also why employers prefer to hire young people over more experienced people, because the latter actually understand what's going on and might object.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#426

Post by derangedHorse »

jasonhansel wrote: post #421
052c7028e wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was powerless to stop it. I was just a junior engineer, and it was decided by the CEO to do the project. So, actually, I feel I made the right choice -- I participated in the project but worked hard on making sure it was as limited as possible. I successfully advocated for several categories of logs to not be sent because they were not required by law. So, yes, I regret I couldn't do more, but I don't regret the ch…

> I was powerless to stop it. You couldn't have stopped someone from building it. But you could have refused to work on it on principle, or even have become a whistleblower. Yes, doing so might have been infeasible for you, particularly if you couldn't risk a temporary loss of income. But your involvement was, nevertheless, a choice, and it's important to acknowledge that. edit: If it was exactly 5 years ago, you may…

If they refused the work and let someone else who cared less about limiting the amount of data, things would be worse.

Also what would whistleblowing do? A lot of companies were operating in China and followed similarly privacy-hostile regulation.

Also to bring up Uighurs in this is ridiculous. Logging ips and urls has no direct correlation with being able to round people up in concentration camps. It has nothing to do with what the Uighurs ideologies were, it has something to do with who they are and the cultural differences they had with mainland China.

To try and look down your nose at an engineer who did the best they could with the position they were in with the belief that there was more that could be done is just naive.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#427

Post by nasmorn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
SoftTalker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. It's one of the reasons I've grown more disillusioned with computer tech over the years.

I had this realization in stages. 1. Almost all software can be abused or co-opted for surveillance purposes. 2. Some software comes already designed for surveillance purposes up front . 2a. This includes plenty of well-known mass appeal software; importantly, the customer-facing marketing copy and the investor pitch can present a completely different value proposition. 3. Software doesn't become used for surveillanc…

I think to combat this you need to have laws like in Germany where this is pretty much explicitly illegal. We cannot put the technology back in the bottle

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#428

Post by pototo666 »

052c7028e wrote: post #253

When I was at Akamai about 5 years ago, I was involved in building the system for making their CDN compliant in China. There were two main features, and they were activated on all servers running inside mainland china (not HK, macau or Taiwan) 1. Logs of the CDN were sent in real time to the ministry of technology -- there was about a 15 minute delay if I remember correctly, and they could impose fines if they were d…

If I use a VPN like v2ray and write some crazy shit about Dictator Xi, is your system able to know what I write and who I am?

I'm very curious because many Chinese people including me are doing that daily.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#429

Post by derangedHorse »

anigbrowl wrote: post #322
froggychairs wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of China vs US narrative where existential stakes are implied is just dumb. The technological Cold War we’re in is not going to result in the collapse of either nation.

I think you may have misinterpreted the parent comment, (or perhaps I did). China doesn't have a deep libertarian tradition, so overbearing state surveillance, while odious, isn't a strange concept in Chinese culture. Western governments are/will be unable to resits the urge to deploy such measures because they clearly work so well for authoritarian states, but will fatally undermine their own cultural foundation by…

That’s the thing though, it doesn’t work that well. China is a huge place that seemingly has many challenges that are underreported in the global landscape. The trade offs the Chinese government makes to better control the people limits their ability to draw from the global talent pool and restricts free thinkers and innovation.

Re: Ask HN: What is the thing you've built that you regret the most?

#430

Post by haxiomic »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #349

I worked in an Ad-tech start-up in Berlin run by two of the most evil f*kers I've ever encountered. I built out their principal ad auction algorithm and a lot of the back-end to support it, and all they did with it was target vulnerable groups of people at particular times of the week when they thought they were at their lowest ebb. One meeting in particular really stands out still, a social media giant that everyone…

Thank you for sharing

I hope this is a message that gets through to young devs. If someone is hiring you, you'll be making them more money than you cost. When you interview with someone, you're interviewing them too. You get a choice in who you make rich the more we make cruel people wealthy the more power they have to damage our society

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