The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’ • Hacker News Board

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#141

Post by TheHappyOddish » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 6:17 AM UTC

rrdharan wrote: post #134

bravetraveler wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managed services, managed access

Unsolicited direct inspection of customer content is what’s surprising. I know we don’t have homeomorphic encryption, but typically policies (requiring explicit user request / Consent) would be in place even if they can’t be sufficiently enforced with current technology. The whole thing reminds me of that Azure LinkedIn thing (where someone was contacted on LinkedIn by a Microsoft PM based on their azure activity).

It was pretty normal in that space. Good MSPs proactively monitored their customers servers for issues. I certainly would have sent a wall message if I saw the customer was on the machine.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#142

Post by kaashif » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 12:52 PM UTC

seabird wrote: post #101

kaashif wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company actually goes bankrupt and their stock is delisted from exchanges, covering your position becomes much harder since liquidity is greatly reduced. I think the ideal scenario for a short seller is if the stock loses 99%, stays listed, they cover, then it gets delisted. I might have that wrong though.

You have that wrong; bankruptcy is the ideal scenario for somebody with a short position. The brokerage writes it off. The shares are worthless, so why go after somebody for owing you $0?

I did some research and found that I was right.

No-one's going to go after you. The problem is that you have to keep paying the fee to borrow shares, and you can never repay that loan because there are no shares available anywhere.

See this article for an example: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-11/-go-to...

> He shorted some stocks that he thought were frauds, and the SEC agreed that they were frauds and halted them, and then ... things got worse for him. The shares were worthless, but they didn't trade at zero or $0.01 or whatever: They didn't trade at all, so he couldn't buy them back to deliver to his stock lenders.

Usually short sellers do manage to cover at some point before the stock completely stops trading though.

Re: The death of Rackspace’s ‘fanatical support’

#143

Post by bravetraveler » Wed, Dec 14, 2022, 6:07 PM UTC

rrdharan wrote: post #134

bravetraveler wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managed services, managed access

Unsolicited direct inspection of customer content is what’s surprising. I know we don’t have homeomorphic encryption, but typically policies (requiring explicit user request / Consent) would be in place even if they can’t be sufficiently enforced with current technology. The whole thing reminds me of that Azure LinkedIn thing (where someone was contacted on LinkedIn by a Microsoft PM based on their azure activity).

Understandably so! There is a relationship that I find difficult to explain here.

For a managed service provider, we were there mainly for the operating system. If told about particular services, those too.

To tend to that, we had to maintain more access than what common convention today tells us should be comfortable.

It's really sold as "an extension (or replacement) for your IT department"

We would do everything we could to avoid going even remotely near the data, but it does depend on a bit of 'trust us'

There were varying degrees to it, too. Some customers would get notified if we even pulled their IP addresses, others only if we logged in, some if we escalated privileges at all.

Like the peer comment from TheHappyOddish mentions, sending a wall message to folks logged in was a sort of common courtesy; chances are we're both in here for the same reason.