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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

arstechnica.com

71–80 of 200 posts

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, a database-backed web app works just fine on a Microsoft stack, there are thousands of them out there and I say that as someone who vastly prefers unix but this is clearly a project management fiasco and architecture design fiasco, not a technology stack fundamentally unable to handle the demands.

I agree the MS stack works fine in the dev lab.

from the down votes apparently it doesn't work in the lab either!

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#72

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, * etc...* This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup t…

This is a great point, and it's one of the more frustrating things to encounter as a developer who knows more than just "the language I'm writing a website in". Security is not optional and security must be managed at every level of the infrastructural stack.

But that's hard, and nobody's going to know anyway, so let's just roll with it.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#73
post #63

1. They should have hired best UX engineers for the design. 2. Hosted the solution in the cloud and called and made sure the host is aware of the upcoming traffic. 3. Rolled out the application in test mode at least a week before so that staff can do trail runs. 4. Worry less about hacking and made it easy to login (just via an ID) ~ me being Captain Hindsight.

I'm not so sure. Intentionally disruptive behavior by the opposition -- or even some motivated kid who wanted to cause trouble for the campaign -- would be one of my biggest concerns if I were designing this thing.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#74
post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

It would give me more pause if Mitt Romney were involved personally in this sort of a project.

What, he didn't have any say in who he hired to make this work?

The POTA doesn't actually personally work on many projects. He relies on people to get them done. If Romney couldn't get something as crucial as this right, then how the heck would he have gone running the country?

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#76

No one should allow a business or non-profit to face a situation like this. Only bad managers put something so important into such difficult circumstances. Why go live the day of the election? Are they insane? Unless the contract (to build this application) had some kind of clause like "This thing must work perfectly or all the money will be refunded" then this is a great contract to get. Let us consider this cynical…

>I wish I could land contracts like this one. Can you imagine building an app that the client will only need for 1 day, and you still get paid even if the thing does not work? The chance for fraud is huge. Who would even allow this? The people pitching this must have been some very talented salespeople...

Anecdotally, this is exactly how large consultancies, particularly those who specialize in serving the public sector, operate.

1) Deploy an army of "talented" salespeople to establish favorable executive-level relationships by exploiting every available loophole to provide trips, gifts, dinners and sporting events. Once the top has been won over, everyone below will fall in line.

2) Write contracts meeting the barest minimum interpretation of the requirements. Design them to specifically exploit uninformed procurement departments which are better equipped to source millions in copier paper or bolts than complex software.

3) Farm out any actual deliverable to the cheapest sub available nationwide. Ideally, you will have hidden travel and per diem for the talent in #2 leaving you free to fly in folks from the cheapest parts of the country.

4) Upon encountering any serious issue once work is underway simply scapegoat the current PM and shuffle in a new one.

5) Go to #1 employing the latest project as a reference that likely won't even be properly checked. In the event that diligence is performed, feed them to one of your friendly executives.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#77
Perhaps Republicans should have spent more time actually displaying the business and organizational acumen and discipline that they claimed as an advantage over the Obama team, and less time suppressing the black vote.

Snark postscriptum: Also, next time, GOP, you might wanna hire some IT guys who make more than $12 an hour.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#78

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, * etc...* This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup t…

If a hacker looks into their web and db infrastructure...I think he would just shake his head and move on.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#79

>"We asked if our laptops needed to be WiFi capable," Dittuobo told Ars. "Dan Centinello went into how the Garden had just finished expansion of its wireless network and that yes, WiFi was required. I was concerned about hacking, jamming the signal, * etc...* This brings up a whole nother can of worms - electoral cyber warfare. What if the Dems, or some sympathizer group, say some local Anonymous, decided to disrup t…

Politico's article on ORCA today claims that one of the major problems was that they deployed the system in their election night HQ just prior to the election, and the surge of legitimate traffic on election day triggered their DDOS defences. They'd never tested it in that location with realistic traffic levels.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#80

>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1... I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.

Someone told me that Accenture build it in India - poetic justice, I'd think, if that was indeed true.
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