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Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

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Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#71
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?

If a company dealing in toxic chemicals goes bankrupt, is it functionally legal to just dump them in the nearby river? I’d be amazed if countries don’t have legal processes in place to deal with situations like this and maybe the courts haven’t caught up to this use case?

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#72

> 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…

Kind of off topic, but can someone explain why else C# has factories and interfaces? Is it just mocking? I really don't understand the pattern at all. FWIW I am no dev.

EDIT: Found xnorswap's comment below about configuration, which makes sense I get - but as they mentioned, it does feel like "turtles all the way down".

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#73
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If a company dealing in toxic chemicals goes bankrupt, is it functionally legal to just dump them in the nearby river? I’d be amazed if countries don’t have legal processes in place to deal with situations like this and maybe the courts haven’t caught up to this use case?

We need a Superfund for data spills.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#74

> 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…

But why is it so hard to read a file during a unit test? Files are pretty easy to mock in many different ways, all of which are pretty fast. You don't need a special-purpose interface to be able to test the code that uses a config file.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#75
post #74

> 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…

But why is it so hard to read a file during a unit test? Files are pretty easy to mock in many different ways, all of which are pretty fast. You don't need a special-purpose interface to be able to test the code that uses a config file.

It's not, but maybe I don't want to create a file for the tests. The point theyre trying to make is that it's a personal preference and not an obvious "this way is better"

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#76
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.

I feel like if we stopped trying to reinvent the wheel, and senior devs had 12-15 to master one version of the wheel, things would be much better.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#77
post #31
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…

They might have had the most perfectly developed decommissioning process. And nobody is going to care when their paychecks stop showing up, and everything suddenly gets trucked-off into receivership. Given the era and constraints, I don't see how it was irresponsible or 'sloppy' to have a local database on these things. This most likely is not on development.

I think you're right in general -- that is, regardless of the original company's practices, the entity selling off the assets should be required to do that responsibly -- but then:

> the unit I've got an image for has records going back to at least 2015.

Whether or not it's "on development" -- that's sloppy. Like how it would be a problem if your preferred grocery store kept your details on the cash register you checked out through almost ten years ago. It's a point-of-sale terminal holding on to high risk data for no reason.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#78

> 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…

Kind of off topic, but can someone explain why else C# has factories and interfaces? Is it just mocking? I really don't understand the pattern at all. FWIW I am no dev. EDIT: Found xnorswap's comment below about configuration, which makes sense I get - but as they mentioned, it does feel like "turtles all the way down".

A non-mocking use of mine: I have a factory with a method that returns instances of a particular interface for publishing typed events to a pub/sub service. The caller of the factory doesn't have to be updated with new concrete types as new events are added, because it's the factory's responsibility to create the events. The event types themselves just implement the interface that's required to serialize them for the pub/sub service.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#79
post #74

> 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…

But why is it so hard to read a file during a unit test? Files are pretty easy to mock in many different ways, all of which are pretty fast. You don't need a special-purpose interface to be able to test the code that uses a config file.

Let's say you want to test bootstrapping your system with various configurations.

You could make a few dozen different configuration files. Or maybe it's more than that because you want to test permutations. Now you're maintaining a bestiary.

So instead you think "I'll write code that generates the config file for each test". And that's reasonable sometimes.

On the other hand, the single-responsibility principle can be reasonably applied here and "reading the config data" is a good single responsibility. You don't want to have to write code to muck with json or xml every time some component needs a configuration value. So there should already be a clean boundary here and it often makes sense to test the components separately.

There's not one rule. The article author sounds like an excitable jr engineer that's never written software at scale.

Re: Redbox left PII on decommissioned machines

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have good approach. I also tend to go with the flow and follow the common practice. If I tried to do "Java in C#", it would make it more difficult to follow my code and decrease maintainability. I sometimes work on legacy C# code that we inherited from another team and I try to follow the style as close as possible. I just haven't invested enough time to make any informed decisions about how things should…

You are both over thinking it. GIT? unit tests? and i thought debuggers spoiled us? although cavemen-esque in comparison to 'modernity'; it wasn't a nightmare to Pause/resume program flow and carefully distill every suspected-erroneous call to Console.Log(e)/stdout/IO/alert(e)/WriteLine(e); `everything to find the fun/troublesome bits of one's program - instead of a tedious labyrinth of stack traces obfuscating out a…

I love the idea of syntactic engagement gone too far as "burnt sugar"
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