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Did anyone see the movie Brazil? This is exactly what that movie is about. The bureaucratic-technological engine being prone to tiny errors, which have cascadi

by 317070 6y ago

Did anyone see the movie Brazil? This is exactly what that movie is about. The bureaucratic-technological engine being prone to tiny errors, which have cascading effects on the people affected. And despite putting in some effort and telling that engine that what it is doing is ridiculous, fixing it is very much non-trivial. Luckily, this time the consequences are minor. A beautiful illustration of "La technique", the runaway engine of rationality and efficiency, as philosopher Jacques Ellul referred to it. This is a beautiful illustration of that concept!

ryan29 6y ago
This is something that freaks me out about modern tech. Failure rates might be low, but a failure could be catastrophic for the person impacted. I remember seeing something similar in Ubiquiti's UniFi forum a few years back. Their WAPs and switches connect to a management portal you can self host and, after treating both http and https interchangeably forever, they decide https should be actual https. Before that, you could type https:// https://..., but the communication would not use TLS. They had customers with misconfigurations because they were consistently typing their inform (aka server) URL as https:// https:// instead of http:// http:// during device configuration. As soon those devices were updated, the new firmware would expect a proper TLS connection for https:// https:// URLs, so it would fail. I remember one person in the forum thread saying they bulk updated 600 devices spread across 300 sites and they all disappeared. That person made mistakes, but the configuration they were using was working, so why would they expect that to change? I tried to make the case that it should be considered a serious bug and part of the response was: > We discussed this internally and decided to move forward because 1) we didn't feel that there would be many affected That was a real eye opener for me and now I operate under the assumption that most tech companies won't have an issue completely ruining your life as long as it's only you or a small enough group of users that it won't have an impact on their bottom line.
- trthomps 6y ago
  Having worked for several tech companies in the valley, this is absolutely the case, calls are made all the time that screw a small number of users to unblock progress.
nickysielicki 6y ago
Jacques Ellul is extremely relevant to runaway technology problems we have today. For those unfamiliar, think Unabomber Manifesto without the crazy murderous stuff. Glad to see him referenced. The Technological Society is a must read for anyone who claims to think about the ethics of technology.

by 317070 6y ago

ryan29 6y ago

This is something that freaks me out about modern tech. Failure rates might be low, but a failure could be catastrophic for the person impacted. I remember seeing something similar in Ubiquiti's UniFi forum a few years back. Their WAPs and switches connect to a management portal you can self host and, after treating both http and https interchangeably forever, they decide https should be actual https. Before that, you could type https:// https://..., but the communication would not use TLS. They had customers with misconfigurations because they were consistently typing their inform (aka server) URL as https:// https:// instead of http:// http:// during device configuration. As soon those devices were updated, the new firmware would expect a proper TLS connection for https:// https:// URLs, so it would fail. I remember one person in the forum thread saying they bulk updated 600 devices spread across 300 sites and they all disappeared. That person made mistakes, but the configuration they were using was working, so why would they expect that to change? I tried to make the case that it should be considered a serious bug and part of the response was: > We discussed this internally and decided to move forward because 1) we didn't feel that there would be many affected That was a real eye opener for me and now I operate under the assumption that most tech companies won't have an issue completely ruining your life as long as it's only you or a small enough group of users that it won't have an impact on their bottom line.

trthomps 6y ago
Having worked for several tech companies in the valley, this is absolutely the case, calls are made all the time that screw a small number of users to unblock progress.

nickysielicki 6y ago

Jacques Ellul is extremely relevant to runaway technology problems we have today. For those unfamiliar, think Unabomber Manifesto without the crazy murderous stuff. Glad to see him referenced. The Technological Society is a must read for anyone who claims to think about the ethics of technology.