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Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

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Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#41

Post by Adachi91 »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #18
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 configura…

System.Xml has been around for a very long time. I use it in one of my tools as a MSN deserialization class to make all my old MSN history "readable" by traversing the nodes and picking out sending/receiving user, timestamp, and message.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#42

Post by Cthulhu_ »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #35
larodi wrote: post #33

Are there any laws in any country governing how such equipment is supposed to be decommissioned in case if bankruptcy? This does not seem to be an isolated case, it just happening more and more with advance of technology.

What are they going to do? Sue the bankrupted company?

When a company goes bankrupt, a curator comes in who oversees the decomissioning of the company and its assets; I don't know if a curator is a government agent or a private company (probably either), but they become responsible for the company and in this case the customer data.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#43

Post by nextlevelwizard »

michaelt wrote: post #39
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they going to do? Sue the bankrupted company?

If instead of a load of old computers the bankrupt company had a pile of old tyres, I'd expect the receivers winding up the bankrupt company would dispose of the old tyres properly, paid for with the company's assets before anything is distributed to creditors.

If someone creates this fucked up compute stack and handles the customer data this poorly, what makes you think they would be any better at disposal even if there was some laws around it? It is not like law makers have any idea either what is going on.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#44

Post by theshrike79 »

michaelt wrote: post #40
raffraffraff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know an employee in an IT company. He told me that they have hundreds of decommissioned laptops and no time to wipe them. And they won't pay someone else to do it because it's too expensive. So right now they are in storage. If they go bust, the storage company will likely dump them. I've seen a lot of stuff in e-waste. There are several facilities within 5 miles of my home, and you can walk right in and drop off y…

> I've seen a lot of stuff in e-waste. [...] if you have a quiet word with the attendant you can usually walk off with stuff that someone else dropped off. In my country, there are specialist e-waste disposal companies large IT organisations can hire, which guarantee to remove and shred the hard drives before recycling the rest.

"they won't pay someone else to do it because it's too expensive"

This is the relevant bit. It's cheaper just to pile the old computers in storage vs doing something about it.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#45

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

michaelt wrote: post #40
raffraffraff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know an employee in an IT company. He told me that they have hundreds of decommissioned laptops and no time to wipe them. And they won't pay someone else to do it because it's too expensive. So right now they are in storage. If they go bust, the storage company will likely dump them. I've seen a lot of stuff in e-waste. There are several facilities within 5 miles of my home, and you can walk right in and drop off y…

> I've seen a lot of stuff in e-waste. [...] if you have a quiet word with the attendant you can usually walk off with stuff that someone else dropped off. In my country, there are specialist e-waste disposal companies large IT organisations can hire, which guarantee to remove and shred the hard drives before recycling the rest.

>> And they won't pay someone else to do it because it's too expensive.

Its not that such entities that will correctly handle the e-waste don't exist, its that the company doesn't want to pay to have it donem esp when storage is cheap, let those containers of old laptops and towers be someone else's (budgetary) problem.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#46

Post by xnorswap »

> Redbox.HAL.Configuration

> .ConfigurationFileService implements IConfigurationFileService

> STOP MAKING SERVICES AND FACTORIES AND INTERFACES AND JUST READ THE FUCKING

> JSON FILE YOU ENTERPRISE FUCKERS

I know it's cool to "hate" on OO, but "just read the fucking file" doesn't work if you want to run your unit tests without reading a fucking file.

It makes sense to abstract configuration behind an interface so you can easily mock it our or implement it differently for unit testing.

Perhaps you also want to have some services configured through a database instead.

This isn't a ConfigurationFileServiceFactoryFactory.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#47

Post by cpach »

raffraffraff wrote: post #37
jordigh wrote: post #5

Where does Foone keep finding this stuff? Earlier, Foone finds a NUC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41294585

I know an employee in an IT company. He told me that they have hundreds of decommissioned laptops and no time to wipe them. And they won't pay someone else to do it because it's too expensive. So right now they are in storage. If they go bust, the storage company will likely dump them. I've seen a lot of stuff in e-waste. There are several facilities within 5 miles of my home, and you can walk right in and drop off y…

Hopefully that company had enabled FDE on those laptops. (It still would be prudent to wipe them before recycling, of course.)

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#48

Post by iancmceachern »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #23
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…

When a developer says “this is a temporary solution” they mean “this is a temporary solution forever”.

They mean temporary for them

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#49

Post by rkachowski »

xnorswap wrote: post #46

> Redbox.HAL.Configuration > .ConfigurationFileService implements IConfigurationFileService > STOP MAKING SERVICES AND FACTORIES AND INTERFACES AND JUST READ THE FUCKING > JSON FILE YOU ENTERPRISE FUCKERS I know it's cool to "hate" on OO, but "just read the fucking file" doesn't work if you want to run your unit tests without reading a fucking file. It makes sense to abstract configuration behind an interface so you…

most of these issues disappear with the introduction of first class functions. There's nothing noble about the thick indirection inherent in old school enterprise programming.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#50

Post by xnorswap »

xnorswap wrote: post #46

> Redbox.HAL.Configuration > .ConfigurationFileService implements IConfigurationFileService > STOP MAKING SERVICES AND FACTORIES AND INTERFACES AND JUST READ THE FUCKING > JSON FILE YOU ENTERPRISE FUCKERS I know it's cool to "hate" on OO, but "just read the fucking file" doesn't work if you want to run your unit tests without reading a fucking file. It makes sense to abstract configuration behind an interface so you…

Could or should there just be a `IConfigurationService` instead of a separate IConfigurationFileService? Yes, probably.

"Interface all the things" is a bit lazy, but it's easy, especially if you have Moq as a way to auto-mock interfaces and a DI framework to setup factory methods.

But spinning into rage just because you see an interface or abstract factory isn't healthy.

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