Accountability Sinks • Hacker News Board

Re: Accountability Sinks

#301

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #285

SpaceNoodled wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they don't give a shit about you, they just want to hold on to your money.

Well also phone numbers cost money & that kind of "customer excellence" is not incentivized by anyone at the company.

Most importantly though, because it's theoretically possible to address the fraud issue through the number they given, eventually, this ticks some regulatory compliance box about giving your customers recourse, and compliance is all that matters to the company - as lack of it would cost them actual money. Individual customers? On the margin, they're less than pocket change.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#302

Post by stavros » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #131

TeMPOraL wrote: post #66

My go-to example of a whole mesh of "accountability sinks" is... cybersecurity. In the real world, this field is really not about the tech and math and crypto - almost all of it is about distributing and dispersing liability through contractual means. That's why you install endpoint security tools. That's why you're forced to fulfill all kinds of requirements, some of them nonsensical or counterproductive, but necess…

The most unfortunate thing about much of corporate 'cybersecurity' is that it combines expensive and encumbering theatre around compliance and deniability... with ridiculously insecure practices. Imagine, for example, if more companies would hire for software developers and production infrastructure experts who build secure systems. But most don't much care about security: they want their compliances, they may or may…

> Imagine, for example, if more companies would hire for software developers and production infrastructure experts who build secure systems.

I do imagine that, and they get hacked (because you have to get lucky every time, but the hackers only need to get lucky once), and then the press says "were you doing all the things the whole industry says to do?" and they say "no, but we were actually secure!" and the press goes "well no you weren't, you got hacked, and you weren't even doing the bare minimum!" and then the company is never heard of again.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#303

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

palmotea wrote: post #291

amluto wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative. So a valid strategy is to swear at the automated system and then be polite to the real human that you get.

> As an exception to the exception, a lot of automated telephone systems have a tree of options, and they try really hard to avoid giving you a real person, and none of the options are helpful. But some of them are programmed to detect swearing and direct users to a representative. It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given. De…

> It usually just works to hit 0 (maybe more than once) or say "talk to an agent," even if those aren't options you're explicitly given.

Depends on the system and country.

Over here in Poland, I've had or witness several encounters with "artificial intelligence assistants" over the past ~5 years[0], that would ignore you hitting 0, and respond to "talk to an agent" with some variant of "I understand you want to talk to an agent, but before I connect you, perhaps there is something I could help you with?", repeatedly. Swearing, or at least getting recognizably annoyed, tends to eventually cut through that.

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[0] - Also, annoyingly, for the past 2 years we had cheap LLMs that would be better to handle this than whatever shit they still deploy. Even today, hooking up ChatGPT to the phone line would yield infinitely more helpful bot than whatever garbage they're still deploying. Alas, the bots aren't meant to be helpful.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#304

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #229

Ocha wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was patient and calm for 30 minutes trying to get same day flight after Turkish Airlines bumped me off my connecting flight and told me to wait 24h in airport for next one. They kept giving me different excuses why they cannot put me in airport hotel, why they can’t put me on a different airline that had flights and only gave me $12 food voucher. After yelling at them for 5 min I was booked on KLM flight departing…

TK is so heinous I will never ever fly them or go through IST ever again. I’ve been stranded 36 hours in IST, put in the shittiest hotel after queuing 3h for said hôtel and 3h again for a meal voucher that no restaurant accepts. And they just plainly ignored me when I demanded later they compensate us for the cancelations as per the aviation rules. They did the same when our lawyer got involved. I’ll never fly TK aga…

Problem is, if you start looking up reviews online, it might turn out that every single airline is about as garbage as everyone else.

It's the case with telcos. My pet theory is that there's a kind of stable equilibrium there, with competing telcos all doing the same dirty tricks and being bad to customers in the same ways, and they don't care about losing business, because people don't suddenly stop needing mobile phones or Internet, and thus, on average, for every lost customer that switches to a competitor, they gain one that switched from a competitor.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#305

Post by dasil003 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:34 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #215

werrett wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the ultimate nihilistic take on security. Yes, 'cyber' security has devolved to box checking and cargo culting in many orgs. But what's your counter on trying to fix the problems that every tech stack or new SaaS product comes without of the box? For most people when their Netflix (or HN) password gets leaked that means every email they've sent since 2004 is also exposed. It might also mean their 401k is siph…

> For most people when their Netflix (or HN) password gets leaked that means every email they've sent since 2004 is also exposed. It might also mean their 401k is siphoned off. So welcome the annoying and checkbox-y MFA requirements. Not true. For most people, when their Netflix or HN password gets leaked, that means fuck all . Most people don't even realize their password was leaked 20 times over the last 5 years. Y…

This really resonated with me because I'm also working to avoid becoming more cynical as I gain experience and perspective on what problems "matter" and what solutions can gain traction.

I think in this case the cognitive dissonance comes from security-minded software engineers (especially the vocal ones that would chime in on such a topic) misunderstanding how rare their expertise is as well as the raw scope of risks that large corporations are exposed to and what mitigations are sensible. If you are an expert it's easy to point at security compliance implementation at almost any company and poke all kinds of holes in specific details, but that's useless if you can't handle the larger problem of cybersecurity management and the fallout from a mistake.

And if you zoom out you realize the scope of risk introduced by the internet, smart phones and everything doing everything online all the time is unfathomably huge. It's not something that an engineering mentality of understanding intricate details and mechanics can really get ones head around. From this perspective, liability and insurance is a very rational way to handle it.

As far as the checklists go, if you are an expert you can peel back the layers and realize the rationales for these things and adjust accordingly. If you have competent and reasonable management and decision makers then things tend to go smoothly, and ultimately auditors are paid by the company, so there is typically a path to doing the right thing. If you don't have competent and reasonable management then you're probably fucked in unnumerable ways, such that security theater is the least of your worries.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#306

Post by whstl » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:38 PM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #276

hkon wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are helping, why would they be assholes?

You've clearly never worked customer support. A very disproportionate number of people who call in to customer support are totally and utterly unreasonable. That's why it's such a pain to interact with customer support as a reasonable human: The systems aren't designed for you, they're designed for the abusers who represent something like 20% of the phone calls and 80% of the work.

From my side it feels like customer support systems are designed purely to trap customers in the system so they are unable to cancel.

In my last day in South America I spent about two hours cancelling my cable and even though I was very soft spoken and super patient (I was playing Mario Kart on mute so not really uncomfortable), but the customer support person actually CRIED to me because she would “miss her quota” if I cancelled.

I had no means of paying anymore (I cancelled my bank account the day before and was about to move to another country) so there was nothing I couldn’t really help her, so I fail to see how I deserve the treatment from the company.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#307

Post by mschuster91 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:39 PM UTC

> The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself.

Welcome to modern day customer support. Phone or email agents have zero agency and their jobs are more often than not outsourced to some ultra low wage country... the only ones with actual authority tend to be C-level executive assistants and social media teams because a bad experience gone viral can actually threaten a massive financial impact.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#308

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, May 03, 2025, 8:51 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #206

xg15 wrote: post #49

One example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing…

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, an organisation which regularly acted in the way you describe the characters from 24. They operated outside official channels and used questionable methods to do whatever was necessary “for the good of the Federation”. The character of Odo criticised it well: > Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty wor…

DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero[0]? Not sure that one led anywhere, beyond being a very disturbing way to do character development.

Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide. The Dominion was known to systematically subjugate and ultimately eradicate solid life, and other than the Federation Alliance bloc (that prevailed only because of Section 31's bioweapon short-circuiting the war[2]), the only power left in the known galaxy strong enough to resist the Dominion would be... the Borg Collective, which wasn't really that much better[3].

So, as much as I love DS9, I feel the show (and the larger franchise) has so much unintentional depth, that most obvious takes don't work with fans, because they don't survive scrutiny :).

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[0] - The simple tailor was anything but.

[1] - At least as far as I recall, Section 31 were written to be the rotten apples that got revealed and removed by the heroes, in a pretty straightforward way - but IMO, they failed at this, and instead created something more of Deus Ex Realpolitik.

[2] - And a little bit of actual fleet-eating Deus Ex Machina, on the account of having a demi-god in their midst.

[3] - And nobody in or out of universe really wants to talk about what happened to the latter, except the last season of PIC that tacitly acknowledged it in a "blink and you'll miss it" way.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#309

Post by cruffle_duffle » Sat, May 03, 2025, 9:21 PM UTC

lelandbatey wrote: post #279

ethbr1 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Possibly including phrasing like "what do we need to do to resolve this issue". "We" phrasing is an empathy hack for CS, because it lets you continue to be nice to the person you're talking to AND be persistent about "our" issue being solved. It's kind of like judo, especially when faced with an apathetic, resistant, or adversarial rep: "This isn't just my problem. This is our problem. So how can we fix it?" PS: In…

Alternatively, just lie about the cancellation reason. *"Why are you cancelling your Comcast internet service?" Answer: "I am moving to the Solomon islands, where there is no Comcast service or business for 1000 miles in any direction (at least)."

“I’m going to prison and getting my affairs in order” is a good one too.

Re: Accountability Sinks

#310

Post by xg15 » Sat, May 03, 2025, 9:27 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #308

latexr wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, an organisation which regularly acted in the way you describe the characters from 24. They operated outside official channels and used questionable methods to do whatever was necessary “for the good of the Federation”. The character of Odo criticised it well: > Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty wor…

DS9 had an actual instance of torture too, but it was a hero being tortured by... half-hero, half anti-hero[0]? Not sure that one led anywhere, beyond being a very disturbing way to do character development. Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide . The Dominion was known to…

> Section 31 angle is tricky, because the writers unintentionally[1] made them literally save the entire alpha and beta quadrants, and possibly the entire galaxy, from slow-burn genocide.

I mean, Jack Bauer, too, saved America from all kinds of unspeakable evil by his clever use of torture. I'd say it's not tricky at all. The morally gray "it's bad but we'd be even worse off without it" justification is kind of the point of those narratives.