I used to work for a popular wrestling company, billionaire owner, very profitable, would write off any OSHA penalties as the ‘cost of doing business’ just as they did in 1998, when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer’s table
Health insurance company I worked for would automatically reject claims over a certain amount without reviewing them. Just to be dicks and make people have to resubmit. This was over 25 years ago, but it’s my understanding many health insurers still pull this shit. They don’t care if it’s legal or not. Enforcement is lazy and fines are cheaper than medical claims.
Obviously this is in the USA.
Our business-critical internal software suite was written in Pascal as a temporary solution and has been unmaintained for almost 20 years. It transmits cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests. They also use a single decade-old Excel file to store vital statistics. A key part of the workflow involves an Excel file with a macro that processes an HTML document from the clipboard.
I offered them a better solution, which was rejected because the downtime and the minimal training would be more costly than working around the current issues.
The library I worked for as a teen used to process off-site reservations by writing them to a text file, which was automatically e-faxed to all locations every odd day.
If you worked at not-the-main-location, you couldn’t do an off-site reservation, so on even days, you would print your list and fax it to the main site, who would re-enter it into the system.
This was 2005. And yes, it broke every month with an odd number of days.
downtime
minimal retraining
I feel your pain. Many good ideas that cause this are rejected. I have had ideas requiring one big downtime chunk rejected even though it reduces short but constant downtimes and mathematically the fix will pay for itself in a month easily.
Then the minimal retraining is frustrating when work environments and coworkers still pretend computers are some crazy device they’ve never seen before.
Places like that never learn their lesson until The Event™ happens. At my last place, The Event™ was a derecho that knocked out power for a few days, and then when it came back on, the SAN was all kinds of fucked. On top of that, we didn’t have backups for everything because they didn’t want to pay for more storage. They were losing like $100K+ every hour they were down.
The speed at which they approved all-new hardware inside a colocation facility after The Event™ was absolutely hilarious, I’d never seen anything approved that quickly.
Trust me, they’re going to keep putting it off until you have your own version of The Event™, and they’ll deny that they ever disregarded the risk of it happening in the first place, even though you have years’ worth of emails saying “If we don’t do X, Y will occur.” And when when Y occurs, they’ll scream “Oh my God, Y has occurred, no one could have ever foreseen this!”
It’ll happen. Wait and watch.
Sounds like a universal experience for pretty much all fields of work.
Government and policy? Climate change? A fucking pandemic?!
We’ve seen it all happen time and time again. People in positions of authority get overconfident that if things are working right now, they’ll keep working indefinitely. And then despite being warned for decades, when things finally break, they’ll claim no one could have foreseen the consequences of their lack of responsibility. Some people will even chime in and begin theorising that surely, those that warned them, had to be responsible for all the chaos. It was an act of sabotage, and not of foresight.
Places I’m at usually end up bricking robots and causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to them because they insist on running the robot without allowing small fixes.
Usually a big robot crash will be The Event that teaches people to respect early warning signs…for about 3 months. Then the old attitude slides back.
Good thing we aren’t building something that requires precision, like semi-conductor wafers. Oh wait.
That’s just be on them losing tons and tons of money from bad usable platter space lol they’re machine gunning themselves in the legs
cleartext usernames and passwords as the URI components of GET requests
I’m not an infrastructure person. If the receiving web server doesn’t log the URI, and supposing the communication is encrypted with TLS, which removes the credentials from the URI, are there security concerns?
Anyone who has access to any involved network infrastructure can trace the cleartext communication and extract the credentials.
What do you mean by any involved network infrastructure? The URI is encrypted by TLS, you would only see the host address/domain unless you had access to it after decryption on the server.
Nope, it’s bare-ass HTTP. The server software also connected to an LDAP server.
I don’t even let things communicate on /30 networks via HTTP/cleartext…this whole thing is horrifying.
Browser history
Even if the destination doesn’t log GET components, there could be corporate proxies that MITM that might log the URL. Corporate proxies usually present an internally trusted certificate to the client.
I would still not sleep well; other things might log URI’s to different unprotected places. Depending on how the software works, this might be client, but also middleware or proxy…
As weird as it may seem, this might be a good argument in favor of Pascal. I despised learning it at uni, as it seems worthless, but is seems that it can still handle business-critical software for 20 years.
What OP didn’t tell you is that, due to its age, it’s running on an unpatched WinXP SP2 install and patching, upgrading to SP3, or to any newer Windows OS will break the software calls that version of Pascal relies upon.
You’re literally describing the system that controlled employee keyscan badges a couple of jobs ago…
That thing was fun to try and tie into the user disable/termination script that I wrote. I ended up having to just manipulate its DB tables manually in the script instead of going through an API that the software exposed, because it didn’t do that. Figuring out their fucked-up DB schema was an adventure on its own too.
I’m also describing the machine in my office that runs my $20,000 laser plotter/large format scanner. The software in the machine uses (Java?) over a web interface which was deprecated and removed from all browsers around 2012-14, iirc. The machine isn’t supported anymore and the only way to clear an error or update where it sends scans is using that interface. I have a XPSP2 machine running the internal IE6 browser which will still display the interface. Since I’m now a one-person office, and I use the scanner about 6 times a year, I keep that machine around in case I need to turn it on to update the scanner or clear a print error. Buying a new plotter isn’t worth the time/money - when it dies I’ll just farm out the work to a 3rd party vendor; but while it does work it’s convenient to have in-house.
If it’s that old, I’m betting it doesn’t use HTTPS for its connections. You could do a network packet capture on the XP machine (or if you can find one, hook it up to a network hub with another computer attached and capture there) while performing the “clear error” action and find out how it works/what you need to send to it to clear the error. You could also set up a SPAN port on a switch and mirror the traffic on the port going to the printer to capture the traffic, if you have a switch capable of doing that. If not, you can get one off Amazon for about $100.
It’d be pretty simple to put together a script that sends the “clear error” action to the printer after seeing how it’s done in the packet capture. I’ve done this numerous times, the latest of which was for a network-connected temperature sensor that I wanted to tie into but didn’t (publicly) expose an API of any kind.
It’s more than that, though - it’s used to setup custom sheet widths as well as enter new server and login details for sending scans via FTP to a server. If I’m doing billable work, I’m charging $225/hr. If I’m snooping the network, which isn’t my field and I do almost never so it takes me several times longer than an expert, I’m making nothing. With an annual value on the machine’s services at less than $500 (more than half of which would become reimbursable if I didn’t have it), there’s no actual value in “fixing” it by creating a different work around. 🤷♂️
Anything can if you don’t update it.
i worked for a hybrid hosting and cloud provider that was partnered with Electronic Arts for the SimCity reboot.
well half way through they decided our cloud wasn’t worth it, and moved providers. but no one bothered to tell all the outsourced foreign developers that they were on a new provider architecture.
all the shit storm fail launch of SimCity was because of extremely shitty code that was meant to work on one cloud and didn’t really work on another. but they assumed hurr hurr all server same.
so you guys got that shit launch and i knew exactly why and couldn’t say a damn thing for YEARS
Not to put the blame on the devs, but the problems might have been attenuated by defining a proper interface layer against the server.
It’s a damn single player game 💀
The multiplayer stuff was neat in theory, but any multiplayer thing you did took like 20+ minutes to actually propagate to other players games
I wonder if that’s related to “the wrong cloud”. Imagine if someone wrote some super slick code that worked really really well in the original cloud, and just couldn’t figure out how to make it work in the new cloud, so everything is just an awful workaround.
Unless you’re really deep into a particular provider’s unique-esque products (Lambda, Azure AD, Fargate, etc), this is exactly why things like Terraform exist.
Oh for sure, but the games industry is one of the few that still does some weird stuff because a lot of the software is only expected to last 5 years or so at most, and needs to get every drop of performance.
I could definitely see some hyper optimized cloud API looking really great and then not having an equivalent in another ecosystem (or at least not one that could be quickly swapped out just before release).
That’s cool to know! I had been wondering what happened with that historically bad launch.
Kevin Fang - The Worst Website Launch of All Time <on Youtube> <on Piped’s frontend (thanks bot!)>
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=Ui5op0N700A
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I knew that’s gonna be gold after I read that first sentence
Big german TV production company with succesful primetime action series used rented cars for their stunts. Different people from the team rented them with full insurance, returned them crashed. They did this until every car rent in the city stopped offering insurance without retention.
deleted by creator
Geek Squad, We were flying under the radar upgrading Macbook RAM, until one day we became officially Apple Authorized to fix iPhones, which means we were no longer allowed to upgrade Macbook RAM since the Macbooks were older and considered “obsolete” by apple, meaning we were unable to repair or upgrade the hardware the customer paid for, simply because apple said it was “too old”. it was at this point in my customer interaction, that we recommend a repair shop down the road that isn’t held at gunpoint by apple ;)
I worked at a 3rd party Apple retailer (they had a legacy contract from the 90s that only expired about 5-10 years ago) and they bought the cheapest RAM they could find to upgrade the Macs. They made hand over fist on RAM upgrades and still came in under what Apple charged for the same upgrade.
deleted by creator
Isn’t the ram soldered? Is it too hard to upgrade?
Not for some models at the time, we also did SSD upgrades which we werent allowed to do. Even more ridiculous
if you have a hot air desoldering station it shouldn’t be too hard. but it’s a tool that most people aren’t going to have on hand.
You used to be able to just pop it out and swap. Those were the days
The majority of tech startups are super chaotic and barely keeping things running. More than you would ever imagine.
It’s pretty depressing, but the fact that soil and groundwater are almost certainly contaminated anywhere that humans have touched. I’ve seen all kinds of places from gas stations, to dry cleaners, to mines, to fire stations, to military bases, to schools, to hydroelectric plants, the list could go on, and every last one of them had poison in the ground.
Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years. Now there are ground water pumps installed there which need to run 24/7 so that the chemicals don’t contaminate nearby rivers and hence the rest of the country.
When taking samples from the pumped up water you can smell gasoline.The largest lake in the UK by area got massively polluted and turned into a swamp of toxic green algae. It’s crazy how people just let stuff like that happen.
We’re house shopping and there has been a house on a lake sitting on the market forever. I got curious and researched the lake and… It’s a literal superfund site. The company that was on the other side of the lake just dumped their waste chemicals right on the shore and it has polluted both the lake and ground water forever essentially because they don’t break down. I looked up the previous owner… Died of cancer. The shit that companies are and were allowed to get away with is just insane. Meanwhile right wing nut jobs want to get rid of the EPA (which was ironically created by Richard Nixon).
Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
“That’s the future guy’s problem, my problem is making money.”
No need to wonder. That’s how.
A place not far from where I live had a chemical plant which just dumped loads of chemicals on a meadow for years.
Sounds cheap.
I work in air quality and it’s a similar story. It’s crazy to me seeing how much is unregulated, grandfathered in, or simply not enforced.
It’s just as depressing when something counts as “clean”. My saddest example was a former sand pit, they spent 30 years digging out 15 meters of sand, then another 30 years filling it with anything from industrial to veterinary waste, “capped” it with rubble in the late 40s and called it clean enough.
Had a bigass job digging out the top 3 meters of random waste, including several thousand of barrels of whatever the fuck. And definitely no unexploded ordnance (spoiler, after finding several ww2 rifle stocks and helmets, the first mortarshells were dug up too). After makimg room, it was covered in sand, clay, bentonite and a protective grid.
So naturally, 3 months after that finished, some cockhead decided to throw an anchor and hit go all ahead flank on his assholes boat and tore the whole thing up. No need to fix anything though, just shovel some more sand it, that’ll stop the anthrax!
This was all in open connection with a major river, of course. One people swim in.
@Tar_alcaran @thrawn21 fucking yikes. Was the public notified in any way? Did it make it to the news? Or just kind of brushed under the rug?
What are they poisoned with and how does it happen?
Varies depending on the site, sometimes it’s gasoline, or solvents, or heavy metals or PFAS. As for how it happens, accidental or deliberate releases. I’ve found military documents from the 50s that say the official place to dispose of used motor oil was a pit they’d dug in the ground.
Yep, the regulation is now a 5ft cubed hole dug around the soil in any spill. It’s resulted in folks being more careful but also hiding where things are spilled. I’ve not once seen a hole dug. Corporations are roughly similar. Small organizations don’t care at all.
Heavy metals and PCBs are most common in my area, various VOCs aren’t far behind. Prior to the EPA and associated legislation companies would commonly use waste process waters for dust control, dump wastes in to pits or on the ground, spills would be left to soak away, and general processes were dirtier and uncontrolled.
One terrible example from western NY that bugs me even more than Love Canal is the involvement with the Manhattan Project. Local steel workers rolled Uranium and they were never told what is was, given any protections, or cared for when the inevitable happened. Radioactive waste was later used as fill for residential and commercial properties in the area. These Hotspot still exist and it is a slow process to get any cleanup done.
Here’s a recent article about PFAS in drinking water. Very unfortunate.
What do you want? They moved it out of the environment. . .
A national (not US) cake company uses expired ingredients because it’s cheaper. Yes, I did report them to the authorities.
There is a million times more counterfeit/fake items at amazon than you think, and they dont care one bit to fix the problem
The programming team that is working hard on your project is just one dude and he smells funny. The programming team you’ve met in your introductory meeting are just the two unpaid interns that will be fired or will quit within the next two months and don’t know what’s happening. We don’t do agile despite advertising it. Also your project being a priority means it’ll be slapped together from start to finish 24 hours prior to the deadline. Oh and there will be extra charges to fix anything that doesn’t work as it should.
DoorDash and food apps are willingly scamming restaurants, and users.
They are perpetually in debt as they aren’t actually making money and they will likely only make very little.
Ubers only profitable line of business was UberFrieght, then they decided to outsource it or shutter it.
Both of these companies broke laws early on in order to operate.
Most of you support that came from Uber in before 2019 were coming from drunk 20 something’s.
The first steel mill I worked for, the test requirements were more of a suggestion than a rigid specification. I, a trained and skilled engineer with the capacity to make informed decisions, had to run all rejections by my boss who would tell me “it’s close enough” even if it wasn’t. Sometimes it bit us in the ass with warranty failures, but the warranties were probably cheaper than internal rejections (and what is brand perception worth?).
My second steel mill job, I was the one making the rejection decisions. I did the hard thing and rejected our failures but I also troubleshot them to prevent recurrence, making our product and capability better over time.
It very much matters who you buy your steel from; two mills can have vastly different performance for the same products based on how they handle these situations.
I worked as a pastor and professor for a global, evangelical television ministry/college. They knowingly conceal scholarship on the Bible and punish their pastors for asking any questions that undermine their most closely held traditions (including anti-evolution, mental illness is supernatural, etc.). They tell their US viewers that they can’t call themselves Christians if they don’t vote Republican, while still enjoying tax-exempt status. They use pseudohistorians to inspire Christian Nationalism over their network, and are one of the largest propaganda networks for the Religious Right. A U.S. Capitol police commander told me his men were fighting people who were wearing the network’s brand.
