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Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

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Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#11

Post by appendix-rock »

Apocryphon wrote: post #4
dylan604 wrote: post #2

Take this as a lesson. If you've been a dev long enough, you've worked on a project knowing that how the project is being done isn't the best method with every intention of going back to make it better later, but not at the expense of getting the MVP up and running. You'll also have seen that never actually happening and all of those bad decisions from the beginning still living all the way to the bitter end. I'm gue…

One just wonders if the cooperative-multitasking BASIC implemented in this machine really was necessary for an MVP. Other than if that just happened to be the sort of programming that the developer at the time was familiar with. Also, this really is the 'engineering' discipline with the lowest level of craftsmanship and regard for rigor, isn't it? Because the failures are usually intangible, not directly life-threate…

[dead]

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#12

Post by JKCalhoun »

excalibur wrote: post #6

I just watched a video earlier today about how if you find a working redbox, you can get movies out of it without getting charged, although you still have to enter your payment info. This prospect suddenly sounds even less appealing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucsYziSl7xk

Seen what the rentals are on a Redbox?

Every time I would go browse their movie collection I always walked away uninterested in anything. Most of it was what I call direct-to-inflight-video.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#13

Post by shiroiushi »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #12
excalibur wrote: post #6

I just watched a video earlier today about how if you find a working redbox, you can get movies out of it without getting charged, although you still have to enter your payment info. This prospect suddenly sounds even less appealing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucsYziSl7xk

Seen what the rentals are on a Redbox? Every time I would go browse their movie collection I always walked away uninterested in anything. Most of it was what I call direct-to-inflight-video.

Judging by the movies I've seen on international flights in the past few years, I think this is really unfair to inflight video. (i.e., the available movies were all highly-rated theater movies, not direct-to-video garbage.)

Perhaps a better description would be "even worse than Netflix originals"...

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#14

Post by Spivak »

Any C# devs wanna explain the XML thing? To me having a separate class to deserialize each kind of XML document to its respective object seems nice and the "right" way to use XML. The class just becomes the config file. Generic loaders but poking at the tree is super brittle. Does C# come with magic to do this better?

Because if you have to invent the config file then isn't that creating a DSL and we're back to over engineering?

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#15

Post by eichin »

misiek08 wrote: post #9

I would to see people start engineering instead of overengineering, being scared of such exposure happening to them. The only thing I can’t disagree more - it’s not the graduates who write ServiceFactoryBuilder where I work at. Those are guys after 12-15 years, started with bad PHP, now being "Senior Java", but they didn’t learn much since beginning. This is how corporate software looks like.

"1 year of experience, 15 times"

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#16

Post by Larrikin »

shiroiushi wrote: post #13
JKCalhoun wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seen what the rentals are on a Redbox? Every time I would go browse their movie collection I always walked away uninterested in anything. Most of it was what I call direct-to-inflight-video.

Judging by the movies I've seen on international flights in the past few years, I think this is really unfair to inflight video. (i.e., the available movies were all highly-rated theater movies, not direct-to-video garbage.) Perhaps a better description would be "even worse than Netflix originals"...

I question if this has ever been true outside of old timey planes of decades back where everyone had to watch the same movie. If you were on a decent international flight you could sometimes even see a movie still in theaters.

The only real regression I've seen in my life time in in-flight entertainment is ANA removing their partnership with Nintendo to run SNES emulators to all the seats. A 14 hour flight to Narita used to involve Super Mario All Stars

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#17

Post by paranoidrobot »

Spivak wrote: post #14

Any C# devs wanna explain the XML thing? To me having a separate class to deserialize each kind of XML document to its respective object seems nice and the "right" way to use XML. The class just becomes the config file. Generic loaders but poking at the tree is super brittle. Does C# come with magic to do this better? Because if you have to invent the config file then isn't that creating a DSL and we're back to over…

I stopped reading when it got all shouty, and a quick scan doesn't show whether it's got actual sample code.

It's also been a long while since I wrote any C# for real, and even longer since I had to deal with .NET's XmlSerializer.

It used to be a pain in the backside to deal with XML in .NET if you wanted to just deserialise a file to an object. You'd need to mark up the class with attributes and stuff.

I remember being very happy when JSON.NET came out and we could just point at just about any standard object and JSON.NET would figure it out without any extra attributes.

I'm not sure if XmlSerializer ever caught up in that regard.

e: Also, without seeing the code and where else it might be deployed it's not easy to know whether this is a case of over-engineering.

This same code might be deployed to a phone, webserver, lambda, whatever - so having an IConfigFileLoader might make 100% sense if you need to have another implementation that'll load from some other source.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#18

Post by jonathanlydall »

Spivak wrote: post #14

Any C# devs wanna explain the XML thing? To me having a separate class to deserialize each kind of XML document to its respective object seems nice and the "right" way to use XML. The class just becomes the config file. Generic loaders but poking at the tree is super brittle. Does C# come with magic to do this better? Because if you have to invent the config file then isn't that creating a DSL and we're back to over…

Active C# dev here, but I haven’t read the article.

For configuration these days XML is generally not used, they have a configuration system which can use a variety of underlying sources (like environment variables and JSON files) and you can either access these settings by key from a dictionary or trivially hydrate a plain old C# classes, including with collections.

People may still manually read their own configuration independent of this system or perhaps they’re just generally deserialising XML.

There are (I think) at least a few ways to work with XML in .NET.

For well known schemas I definitely generally recommend the C# class approach where you somewhat simply deserialize a file into well typed C# classes.

From your question it sounds like the XML API which allows you to arbitrarily query or manipulate XML directly was used here. I have on occasion used this when I don’t have the full schema for the XML available and need to tweak a single element or search for something with XQuery. It’s a useful tool for some scenarios, but a poor choice for others.

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