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Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

arstechnica.com

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Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#361

Post by volkadav »

joe_mamba wrote: post #217
Twirrim wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week. I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in…

>I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff Someone on HN once wrote that after the dot.com bust, Yahoo! HR had 1-1 meetings with every single employee that was part of the mass layoffs back then, and they did this for hundreds of workers. Boy what I wouldn't give to go back to such state of affairs, even though I wasn't yet part of the workforce back then. An older family friend of mine who…

I mean, not to snarkpoast on main, but all of this has happened before re:

> The massive sudden shift in the commoditization of human workers and turning them into faceless labor resources that can be inhumanely disposed of with a keystroke

Look up the treatment of labor during the industrial revolution. Similarly then large competitive advantages in automation lead to concentration of power in the hands of those that (not to spill the beans on where I'm going with this) controlled the machinery and means of production by way of access to capital. Collective bargaining of some form by labor was (and I would maintain, still is) a reasonable response, as is state regulation. Not to literally use the M-word* here but ... these problems aren't new, and solutions have been explored in the past (not that they were or are perfect!). As is typical in tech, we could stand to learn a bit from history when considering paths forward from the present. History may not repeat verbatim but it sure as hell rhymes.

idk, just my two cents as someone in the technical trenches who happened to fall in love with an historian. :)

* Marxist/ism. The communists certainly had/have their problems, as did Marx's analysis itself, but he wasn't wrong about there being some society-scale Problems with unfettered capitalism.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#362

Post by latexr »

game_the0ry wrote: post #59
lostlogin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ready access to AI tools sure makes vandalism easy.

Ai is just a tool. You can kill with hammer, doesn't mean you ban hammers. And they could have used stack overflow instead of ai.

That’s a non-sequitur. You don’t need to defend AI, your parent comment isn’t attacking it, simply making an observation.

> doesn't mean you ban hammers

They didn’t suggest banning anything.

> You can kill with hammer

Not if you don’t have a hammer available. Which is the point. Ready access to a tool makes misusing the tool easy. And some tools are more conductive to misuse than others. You can kill maybe a couple of people in a crowd with a hammer, a few more with a handgun, a ton more with a machine gun or a bomb. The tool itself matters, and you should regulate each accordingly to their capacity and likelihood of harm. For example, plenty of countries restrict gun use significantly more than the US. Those countries have much fewer gun-related deaths and violence. This isn’t (shouldn’t be, in an honest discussion) hard to understand.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#363

Post by panflute »

lazide wrote: post #358
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like he's getting paid to work on the same thing by a slightly different stakeholder. This honestly sounds like the sort of thing I'd sit down with the employee, their new employer, and various "Compliance Team" members, and firm up a bit. Sounds good for everyone. We get our bugs fixed, $vendor gets to say "Well we have this thing that was developed in-house for BoshNet, that might solve your problem too, i…

No company with a legal rep is going to be happy with that situation - ever. Who even owns the code the person is working on? Who is responsible when it goes wrong?

Never happy is a bit of an exaggeration. SYSV UNIX had all of these risks and various legal departments went through them as they do regularly for more typical types of research.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#364

Post by weberer »

ninalanyon wrote: post #332
gcr wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google powerwashes your corp Chromebook when they let you go. A friend was composing an email on the train when their screen went black and the device reset itself to factory settings. They even send the “you’re being fired” email to their personal email they have on file. Didn’t even schedule a meeting.

Most of the employer behaviour described in such gleeful terms here would be outright illegal in most of Europe and open up the employer to risk of being sued for wrongful dismissal, etc.

Eh, there are ways around that. I've worked for multiple Finnish companies that do layoffs via "lomautus" whereby they put the laid-off employees on a forced, unpaid, indefinite leave. After multiple months of not receiving a paycheck, the employees inevitably "resign".

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#365

Post by latexr »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #153
xethos wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tools we use are not neutral. A sword can be made to work like an axe, but we use axes for chopping wood because a sword makes a shitty axe. A sword is designed to kill people. The handle, the mass, the weight distribution, and every other aspect I am not qualified to get in to, means swords are designed to kill. They are a tool, and their use is not neutral. This is a clear example, but I don't believe any tools…

Murder by computer keyboard: https://www.deseret.com/1997/7/6/19322063/mother-charged-wit... Murder by ethernet cable: https://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/dead-woman-found-in-pa... Murder by laptop: https://www.riverfronttimes.com/william-lynn-gunter-sentence... Murder by cellphone charger: https://lawandcrime.com/crime/pennsylvania-man-admits-to-str... Murder by desk lamp: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2009/01/08/…

The fact that you had to find an article from three decades ago for an instance of killing with a keyboard is telling. All the others aren’t exactly that recent and are mostly isolated cases. Meanwhile, on gun related deaths, there are entire Wikipedia pages for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_mass_shootings_in_the...

There are more mass shootings in the US per year than there are days in a year. It’s so bad they need pages for each individual year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Meanwhile, pages of deaths perpetrated with household items are curiosities. You parent comment stands: tools are designed for specific purposes and are used for those purposes.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#366

Post by lazide »

panflute wrote: post #363
lazide wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company with a legal rep is going to be happy with that situation - ever. Who even owns the code the person is working on? Who is responsible when it goes wrong?

Never happy is a bit of an exaggeration. SYSV UNIX had all of these risks and various legal departments went through them as they do regularly for more typical types of research.

When it was explicit, and part of the relationship, sure. Because those questions aren’t questions.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#367

Post by joe_mamba »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #264
joe_mamba wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's part of the reason why Europe is falling behind on everything. I read a news article that Orange Telecom in France was being sued by a woman they had on payroll for the last 20 years doing nothing, because due to a medical condition she suffered, she became unable to do her job, and since they couldn't fire her due to France unions and labor laws, nor did they have any available job that could fit her current…

That lawsuit sounds legitimate enough to me. They couldn't find anything for her to do? Hard to believe, but if there's a reason not to fire her then then pay her the money she's owed and stop demanding she show up. Making someone come in with no tasks assigned is fun for a week and quickly turns into punishment detail. Putting someone on punishment detail because you're not allowed to fire them is Bad. Unless she wa…

>They couldn't find anything for her to do? Hard to believe,

If a person's now disabled, what can a company give them to do profitably, that isn't already optimized, automated or offshored?

There's plenty of civil servants whose jobs are just moving one paper from one room to the next, just to keep more useless people employed that nobody would hire in the private sector. But this doesn't really exist as much in the private sector.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#368

Post by matsemann »

yaur wrote: post #156
scottlamb wrote: post #39

> [Opexus] said that “the individuals responsible for hiring the twins are no longer employed by Opexus.” Getting close to the classic Monty Python line: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked." Jokes aside, stuff like this sucks because I suspect many employers will take from it the most extreme, dehumanizing lessons, e.g.: (a) make firings [edit: including lay-offs] as…

Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years

Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk?

Where people are laid off here (Norway), they're still employed by law for 3 months. Most companies don't force you to work all that time, but it's pretty common to finish up your tasks, do offboarding etc for a few weeks. Never considered it an issue. Maybe it's a high trust society thing?

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#369

Post by ErroneousBosh »

lazide wrote: post #366
panflute wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never happy is a bit of an exaggeration. SYSV UNIX had all of these risks and various legal departments went through them as they do regularly for more typical types of research.

When it was explicit, and part of the relationship, sure. Because those questions aren’t questions.

Which is why I said you'd sit everyone down and thrash it out.
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